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The Big Burn of 1910
Blow Up
Photo: Column of smoke and fire
A sudden increase in fire intensity or rate of spread strong enough to prevent direct control or to upset control plans. Blow-ups are often accompanied by violent convection and may have other characteristics of a fire storm.
Photo: Crown fire in Grand Tetons, Co. 4429, 1940
A specialized knowledge of wildfires is essential to life in the west. Just through simple exposure the following fire terms: backfire, blow-up, burning ban, complex, contain, control, convection, crowning, dry lightning, entrapment, extreme fire behavior, fire line, firestorm, hotspot, incident, peak fire season, prescribed burn, pulaski, red flag warning, retardant, snowpack, spring run-off, uncontrolled fire, and wildland fire, have effortlessly worked their way into countless western lexicons.
Photo: Signs at Bonners Ferry Ranger Station
It is not just the language that is part of the culture. Before heading out into the forest, westerners know to check the fire danger through incident maps, and the ubiquitous Smokey the Bear's fire danger sign ratings. Inhabitants are highly attuned to how dry the forest is at any given moment. Residents know how to gauge the intensity of the fire season and have probably previously lived through at least one summer of fire, smoke, and brimstone.
They know that rain is good, but only if it arrives at the right time, and without lightning. The cycle of fire and rebirth is one of the givens in nature. Strangely enough, the health of a forest depends on the destruction of fire.
Photo: Burned over area [umt019292]
In fact, there are certain seeds (pyrophyte/pyrophile) that can only be released due to the heat of a fire. Fire also clears the undergrowth and helps maintain open old-growth forest.
Although it now seems common knowledge that fire is essential to forest health; it hasn't always been the case. The summer of 1910 was very dry in Montana, Washington, and Idaho. A perfect storm of fire conditions arrived that created one of the most cataclysmic fire events in the history of our nation. The big blowup of 1910 resulted in changes to the way forests were managed.
History Before 1910
Photo: President Theodore Roosevelt on horseback
The Forest Service was created in 1905. President Theodore Roosevelt and a man named, Gifford Pinchot, were instrumental in creation of the Forest Service. Theodore Roosevelt became president in 1901 and around this time Pinchot became the first chief of the Forest Service.
Roosevelt believed that being in nature was good and necessary for the health and well-being of mankind. Pinchot believed that nature was a place of respite, a place to forget other things, become whole, become safe, and get to know yourself. As a result, both men wanted to convert as much federal land to national forests as they could; despite the displeasure of many powerful people who disagreed with their plan.
Photo: Gifford Pinchot on horseback
Their idea of forest conservation and public land belonging to the people were unheard of at the time. Due to budget issues, there were very few forest rangers to do the job of patrolling all of the national forest land that was designated. The first forest rangers were young, inexperienced, college graduates mostly from the East.
They had huge swaths of forest to patrol with very little funds or practical experience. National forests were working forests and were open for logging, mining, and development by railroads. Roosevelt persevered and as a result we have national forest lands today.
Summer of 1910
Photo: Trenching the Graham Creek Fire, 1910
Just like the summers of 1908 and 1909, the summer of 1910 was very hot and dry. Drought-like conditions were prevalent. The spring was wet and snowy and then beginning in May the rain stopped falling, ditto for June, same for July, also for August. The forest was very dry with the same humidity levels as the Mojave Desert.
On July 26th, thunderstorms lit up the night sky. They were the kind of storms that you only see in the west; beautiful, but violent. The kind of storms that fill the entire big sky with their bright forked flashes, booming thunder, but no rain.
Photo: Cedar Creek burn area near Saltese, Montana
The following morning one thousand fires were burning across twenty-two national forests in the Northern Rockies. Railroad towns west of Missoula (St. Regis, Deborgia, Saltese, Taft, Avery, and Wallace) were threatened by the fires. Another electrical storm in the second week of August brought the number of fires to 2,500.
By August 20th, three thousand small fires throughout Montana, Washington, and Idaho (caused by lightning, coal powered trains, and humans) were fanned by the high winds from the Palouse region of eastern Washington. The flames of these smaller fires flared up into one big blow up.
Photo: Spokane newspaper 1910 fire clippings
The fire burned in the crowns of the trees and the winds blew hurricane force at eighty miles/hour. Several towns were lost to the conflagration including part of Wallace Idaho, Taft, Grand Forks, and part of De Borgia, Montana Residents attempted to defend their homes and, in some places, succeeded, but in other places evacuating was the only option.
In Wallace, the fire hit with such force that it skipped completely over the western part of the city and set the eastern part on fire. The young, elderly, and women were evacuated on a rescue train with destinations to either Kellogg, Spokane, or Missoula.
Photo: Burn area in Idaho [umt017859]
In Avery, a railroad town in Idaho, women and children were evacuated to Missoula. Part of the town was saved by a backfire lit by a ranger and seven male inhabitants of Avery. On the Idaho side, Grand Forks was consumed by fire along with the town of Falcon.
On the Montana side, Taft, DeBorgia, Henderson, and Haugan were all destroyed by fire. In total, 3 million acres of forest went up in flames, approximately 85 people lost their lives and roughly one billion dollars of timber was lost.
The fire destroyed forests the size of Connecticut in the span of 36 hours. The fire burned so hot and crazy that scars from the fires can still be seen in the forests even today.
Aftermath
Photo: Smoking and forest fire poster
As a result of the fires of 1910, the Forest Service formed its firefighting response: forest fires were preventable and needed to be put out at all costs. In order to do this, the Forest Service needed more money and resources. To this end, lookouts were built, trails and roads were forged through the forest land and would be connected from the lookouts to the ranger stations.
For these reasons, the big burn helped cement the place of the Forest Service in American history. For more than 80 years, land management agencies fought to eliminate fire from forested land. The trees were protected, but the forest ecosystem was out of balance. From this lack of fire, the forests became overcrowded and added to a backlog of fuel for larger, more severe fires.
Photo: Coram Experimental Forest, prescribed burn [umt019317]
"We developed in the Forest Service a knee-jerk reaction from that 1910 episode that all fires are bad. We mounted a program to put every fire out.
"We got to 1935 and we adopted the 10:00 a.m. policy that very formally said that every fire started should be ... controlled before 10:00 a.m. the next morning.
Finally, it wasn't until around 1995 when all agencies, the Interior and Agriculture, Forest Service, got together and developed a clear policy that's pretty darn resilient. It was for suppressing the fires that are unwanted or have a potential to do damage, using prescribed burning where and when necessary to introduce fire and to allow pre-burning lightning fires to burn in places like Yellowstone and the Selway to further the health of these systems that depend on recurring fire. So, we did well then." -Robert Mutch
Photo: Beaver Ridge fire lookout
The big burn of 1910 formed Forest Service policies for the next fourscore years. The fires gave the Forest Service its mission and defining purpose: to control and prevent wildfire.
Unfortunately, by trying to control all forest fires, the forest service only made the problem worse. The woods became choked with dry fuel resulting in hotter, larger, and far more damaging fires.
Firefighting took up more and more of the Forest Service budget. The warmer climate led to worse fires. People continued moving into the wildland-urban interface making it more difficult to let fires burn naturally.
Eventually, after many years of total suppression, the decision was made to fight some fires to protect lives, property, and resources. This allowed some fires to burn as a renewal for forests and created more diversity for life in the wake of nature's reset: a wildfire.
Author: Kerry Zahn
Photo Credit
University of Montana Mansfield Library
Yellowstone National Park Heritage and Research Center
