Young Men and Fire

  At the end of the movie, though, there is another fire and the movie foreman again lights an escape fire. This time his crew heeds him, and everybody lives happily ever after.

  Our story about the Mann Gulch fire obviously makes it hard on itself by trying to find its true ending. Here is this movie that lives on to rerun several times a year on TV and so has attained some kind of immortality by easily adding to small broken pieces of truth an old, worn-out literary convention. This added, life-giving plot is the old “disgraced officer’s plot,” the plot in which the military leader has disgraced himself before his men, either because his action has been misunderstood by them or because he displayed actual cowardice, and at the end the officer always meets the same situation again but this time heroically (usually as the result of the intervening influence of a good woman). By the way, this plot has often been attached to movies and stories about Custer Hill. Perhaps this is a reminder to keep open the possibility that there is no real ending in reality to the story of the Mann Gulch fire. If so, then let it be so—there’s a lot of tragedy in the universe that has missing parts and comes to no conclusion, including probably the tragedy that awaits you and me.

  THIS COMING PART OF THE STORY, then, is the quest to find the full story of the Mann Gulch fire, to find what of it was once known and was then scattered and buried, to discover the parts so far missing because fire science had not been able to explain the behavior of the blowup or the “escape fire,” and to imagine the last moments of those who went to their crosses unseen and alone. In this quest we probably should not be altogether guided by the practice of the medieval knight in search of the holy grail who had no clear idea of what he was looking for or where he might find it and so wandered around jousting with other knights who didn’t know what they were looking for until finally he discovered he was home again and not much different from what he had been when he started except for some bruises and a broken lance. I early picked up bruises in my wanderings, but I tried to shorten the length of the search by pursuing several quests concurrently. As early as 1976 I started the serious study of the Mann Gulch fire by trying to recover the official documents bearing on it and at the same time reacquainting myself with the actual ground on which the tragedy had occurred. For an opener I took a bruising boat trip down the Missouri River to Mann Gulch. Even earlier I had started with the archives in Missoula because, both as headquarters of Region One of the Forest Service and as the location of the base of the Smokejumpers sent to the fire, it was the center of the Forest Service’s operations against the Mann Gulch fire. My opening jousts with both the archives and the ground went in favor of my opponents, whoever they were. My brother-in-law, Kenneth Burns, who was brought up within a few miles of Mann Gulch and was then living in Helena, said he would have no trouble borrowing a boat and taking us down the Missouri from Hilger Landing to the mouth of Meriwether Canyon where, as you’ll remember, there is an almost vertical trail to the top of the ridge between Meriwether and Mann Gulch. Charles E. (“Mike”) Hardy, research forester project leader at the Northern Forest Fire Laboratory in Missoula and only recently the author of a fine study of the beginnings of research in the Forest Service (The Gisborne Era of Forest Fire Research: Legacy of a Pioneer, 1983), had this early interested me in a scientific analysis of the fire and had been good enough to make the trip with us to give me a close-up view of his theories at work. Although we did not quite make it to Mann Gulch on this trip, I am grateful to Mike for starting me in the right direction.

  A cloudburst was already waiting to challenge us at the top of the ridge. From the bottom of Meriwether Canyon we could both see and hear it making preparations for a joust with us. As we tried not to fall backwards to where we started in the canyon, we could hear the storm rumble and paw the ground. When we neared the top, it tried to beat us back by splintering shafts of lightning on gigantic rocks. There was a lone tree near the top, only one, and in case we had any foolish ideas of taking refuge under it a bolt of lightning took aim and split it apart; it went down as if it had been hit by a battle-ax. Trying to reach the rocks, we were held motionless and vertical in our tracks by the wind. Only when the wind lessened for a moment could we move—then we fell forward. With the lessening of the wind the rain became cold and even heavier and forced us to retreat from the battlefield on top. The rain fell on us like a fortified wall falling. By the time we reached the bottom of Meriwether, we were shivering and demoralized and my brother-in-law probably already had pneumonia.

  All this was like a demonstration arranged to let us know that Mann Gulch had power over earth, air, and water, as well as fire. As the wind continued to lessen, the rain increased and fell straight down. It was solid now everywhere. It knocked out the motor in our borrowed boat, and we couldn’t get it started again; after a while we didn’t try anymore, and it took several hours to pole and paddle our way back to Hilger Landing. My brother-in-law was seriously sick before we got there; he would never go back to Mann Gulch. So for some time Mann Gulch was mine alone if I wanted it, and for some time I left it to the elements. I turned to the archives because I knew they would be dry and no wind would be there and the air would be the same air the stacks had been built around and nothing but a book or two had been moved since. The signs would demand “Silence” and even the silence would be musty, and for a time anything musty had an appeal.

  The Forest Service archives in Missoula were about as hard to get anything out of as Mann Gulch. Although there wasn’t much trouble gaining access to the Regional Library, there wasn’t much stuff in its files on the Mann Gulch fire, and what was there was the ordinary stuff. Yet surprisingly even some of that was marked “Confidential.”

  I hadn’t thought there would be much in the files, because you can’t dip very far into the Mann Gulch story without becoming suspicious that efforts have been made to scatter and cover the tragedy. Besides, you are not far enough advanced in your thinking to do research on the Forest Service if you don’t know ahead of time that the Forest Service is a fairly unhistorical outfit, sometimes even antihistorical. So when I first looked under “Mann Gulch Fire,” the cupboard was practically bare, but before long I met the great woodsman W. R. (“Bud”) Moore, who was then director of the Division of Aviation and Fire Management for Region One of the Forest Service. He is outspoken and devoted to the Forest Service and expects every American citizen, except the president of the United States, to be likewise. He sent out orders to round up all stray documents bearing on Mann Gulch that could be found in the region and make them available to me. They add up to a small but interesting file and contain most of the documents in my collection marked “Confidential.” But all told, the Mann Gulch fire turned to ashes without depositing much in the offices of Region One of the United States Forest Service, and I had to make three visits to the Forest Service’s Office of Information in Washington, D.C., before I had a good working collection of documents on the Mann Gulch fire.

  It is harder to guess ahead of time how you will be received by those in charge of government documents than to guess what you will find in them. Ahead of time, I had guessed I would be sized up as a suspicious character up to no good: I was alone and peeking into government files and into Mann Gulch itself, which long since had been put out of sight and was better that way. Although Forest Service employees, I figured, would always be watching me with a fishy eye when I was around and even more so when I wasn’t, there were not nearly as many spies as I had expected. They were mostly old-timers, and some of them had worked in the office long enough to know that some funny PR business had gone on at the time of the Mann Gulch fire. Most of the Forest Service employees who had a corner of an eye on me belonged to that element in most PR offices who are never important enough to be trusted with any of the organization’s real secrets—they just know genetically that big organizations have shady secrets (that’s why they are big). Also genetically they like shady secrets and genetically they like to protect shady secrets but have n
one of their own. I gather that government organizations nearly always have this unorganized minority of Keepers of Unkept Secrets, and one of these, I was told, went so far as to write a letter to be read at a meeting of the staff of the regional forester reporting that I was making suspicious visits to Mann Gulch and reportedly and suspiciously arranging to bring back with me to Mann Gulch the two survivors of the fire. According to my source of information, after the letter was read the regional forester went right on with the business at hand as if nothing had interrupted him. And as far as I know, nothing had.

  On the other hand, many of the men in the Forest Service whose main job is fire control are unhistorical for fairly good reasons. There have been millions of forest fires in the past; the Indians even set them in the autumn to improve the pasture next spring. What firefighters want to know is the fire danger rating for today, and as for me, I am not as important to them as the fuel moisture content for that afternoon. They are tough guys and I like them and get along with them, although I am careful about telling them stories of the olden days when at times it took a week or more to assemble a crew in Butte, transfer them to the end of the branch railroad line going up the Bitterroot, and then walk them forty or fifty miles across the Bitterroot divide to get them to a fire on the Selway River in Idaho. I tried to be careful and meek and not end any such stories with a general observation such as “Fires got very big then and were hard to fight.” Firefighters prefer to believe that no one before them has ever been on a big fire.

  Although it took more years than I had expected to get the information I wanted about the Mann Gulch fire, I know of only a very few instances where my difficulties were consciously made more difficult. To reassemble what was left of this fire, I needed the help of many more present members of the Forest Service than I can acknowledge in the course of this story, women as well as men. You must always remember the women, even if you are pursuing a forest fire, especially if you are pursuing it in a big institution. The new age for women had not yet worked its way through the walls of the Forest Service; still maybe it had a little. The women I worked with were in charge of the documents, the maps, and the photographs, and without them there would have been practically no illustrations in this book, or, for that matter, practically nothing to illustrate. Their attitude toward me was possibly a combination of women’s traditional attitude toward men touched by an added breath of confidence in themselves coming from the new. They were certainly good and they knew it. When I entered their offices, whether in Washington or Missoula, they looked up and seemed to say, fusing two worlds, “Here’s a man with a problem. What can we do to help him?”

  Since I started to write this story I have seen women start taking over some of the toughest jobs in the Forest Service. I didn’t believe I would ever see it, but now there are even a few women Smokejumpers. I can bear witness. One of them lives just a few blocks from me in Chicago. Her father is a faculty member of the University of Chicago—he is a distinguished statistician and one of the best amateur actors I have ever seen. She is a remarkable young woman—attractive, brainy, and tough. They tell me at the Missoula base for Smokejumpers where she is stationed that she is up there with the rest of her crew (which means men) in the training races run in full jumping gear or hard-hat equipment.

  Several times in this story of the Mann Gulch fire I have tried to find places where it would be permissible to say that the story of finding the tragedy of the Mann Gulch fire has been different from the tragedy of the Mann Gulch fire. Tragedy is the most demanding of all literary forms. Tragedy never lets you get far away from tragedy, but I do not want you to think I spent ten years in sustained pain writing what I wanted to write about the Mann Gulch fire. A lot of good things happened along the way. Some things got better, and I met a lot of good people, some of them as good as they come.

  It’s hard to say when the pleasures and pains of writing start and end. They certainly start before writing does, and they seem to continue for some time afterwards. I met Bud Moore before I started to write, and he has become one of my closest friends. He and I soon discovered that both of us had worked in the Lochsa when we were boys and when the Lochsa was thought to be accessible only to the best men in the woods. Lewis and Clark had nearly starved there. Running into somebody who has worked in the Lochsa in the early part of the century is something like running into a buddy of yours who served on the battleship Missouri in World War II at the time General MacArthur was on it. Those of us who worked on the Lochsa early in this century regard ourselves as set apart from other woodsmen and our other countrymen in general.

  I had started writing this story before I met Laird Robinson, but was still heavy in research and was wandering around the Smokejumper base looking for any odd items I might have overlooked. Laird had been a foreman in the Smokejumpers and had injured himself landing on a fire and twice had tried a comeback but finally had to accept he was through as a jumper. He had been made a temporary guide at the Smoke-jumper base until they got him placed in a line of work that would lead him toward the top. He was in his early thirties and in the woods could do anything, and among other things he wanted to know more about the Mann Gulch fire. He put a high premium on friendship, and we soon were close friends and doing a lot of our digging into Mann Gulch together, as you will see from the course of this story. It is a great privilege to possess the friendship of a young man who is as good or better than you at what you intended to be when you were his age just before you changed directions—all the way from the woods to the classroom. It is as if old age fortuitously had enriched your life by letting you live two lives, the life you finally chose to live and a working copy of the one you started out to live.

  I tried to be careful that our friendship did not endanger Laird professionally, and there were times when it seemed that it might. We were well along in our investigations when evidence appeared suggesting that Rumsey and Sallee had been persuaded by the Forest Service’s investigator to change their testimony regarding the course of the fire at its critical stage. Persuading a witness to change his testimony to what he did not believe to be true was to me a lot more serious charge than scattering or burying documents that might bear on the threat of a lawsuit. So when I knew that I would have to try to find this investigator if he was still alive, I told Laird, “If you don’t like the way this thing is headed now, just step off it before you get hurt. I can see it might hurt you, but there’s no bravery in it for me because it can’t hurt me.”

  Laird said to me, “Forget it. On my private list, friendship is highest.” He said, “Anyway don’t worry about me. The Forest Service and I can take care of ourselves.”

  So one of the pleasures of writing this story has been listening to the talk of first-class woodsmen, some old and some young.

  9

  FOR A LONG TIME, our story becomes the story of trying to find it, and like most stories of the woods this one must begin with the ground and with some questions to tell in which direction to look (since compasses only tell the directions, not which one to follow). To woodsmen, if you don’t know the ground you are probably wrong about nearly everything else. To woodsmen, the ground often furnishes most of the questions and a good number of the answers, and, if you don’t believe this, you and your story will most of the time be lost. A good woodsman who also was a fairly good storyteller would probably take only one good look at the crosses on the hill before the hill would be asking him, Why didn’t the rest of the crew, after leaving their foreman behind, follow Rumsey and Sallee to the top of the ridge instead of taking off on a sidehill angle that was twice the distance the survivors needed to reach safety? Twice the distance on the ground says it doesn’t make sense, and when something doesn’t make sense to the ground the mind should be left with a question.

  To try to keep up with Rumsey and Sallee is also to hear the ground ask questions all the time, and one in particular on which the story and eight lawsuits depend: Are Rumsey and Sallee going straight for the
top, or is Dodge’s fire driving them upgulch and so could be the fire that prevented the sidehilling crew below from escaping, as Thol Senior was to charge? If Rumsey and Sallee ran alongside Dodge’s fire straight to the top, another question follows: How could this “escape fire” burn straight up the slope and across the path of the main fire, which was being driven upgulch by a strong wind? Finally, the crevice itself through which Rumsey and Sallee crawled to safety forever asks its big question: What did Diettert see in me or the ground beyond that he did not like and so did not crawl through me to safety? Without this question the story of the Mann Gulch fire would lose one of its most moving parts. Diettert was a fine jumper and a young scientist with unusual promise; yet he chose not to go through the crevice and died about 275 yards from where he left Rumsey and Sallee.

  When Laird and I first started investigating these questions, we assumed as almost self-evident that a few moments after the survivors crawled through the crevice, a fire must have pushed upgulch and closed it, and that for a fatal distance beyond there must have been no other opening in the reef. We had been trying to remember the reef directly above the crosses as something like a Wall of China with only one breach in it through which the survivors escaped and, beyond that, an impregnable cliff. We should have known better, but such is the power of theory over rocks that it can make rocks into solid cliffs, which, however, when looked at close at hand, present openings wide enough to drive hay wagons through. On our 1977 trip to Mann Gulch, Laird had discovered that only occasionally was the reef solid enough to keep a fast climber from crawling through or over it.