The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America

  "In here!" he ordered. "Everyone inside the tunnel." Even then, some men were hesitant to crawl into a darkened hole of a mountain on fire. Pulaski put his hand on his revolver, repeating the order.

  "Everyone inside. Now!"

  Other options were foreclosed by the fire. The path where the men had trod a minute earlier was now covered by flames. With this last nudge of fire, men shoved and leaned to get to the mine. Inside the tunnel, voices clashed, men pushed and struggled, tears poured forth. Two horses made it inside with them. Stockton had dismounted and found a little pocket of darkness near the horse that had carried him, Pulaski's mount. The air had been cold, but it quickly warmed, and then just as quickly went stale and hot. The outside heat was sucking all the cold air from the tunnel. How long till the oxygen was gone?

  At the mine entrance, the timbers caught fire, drawing more air from the tunnel, taking it from the men who needed it to stay alive. Pulaski wetted his shirt in the puddles of water on the ground and tried to smother the flames at the entrance. He also used his hat as a bucket, scooping water and throwing it on the flaming timbers at the mouth of the mine. He thought that by shielding the entrance with wet cloth, he could keep the fire from drawing clean air out. His filter worked at first, before the cloth heated enough to catch fire. Now their porthole to the outside world was open, and what they saw, from the last part of the forest that was not burning, prompted panic.

  Pulaski ordered everyone back, as far into the tunnel as they could press themselves. "Nobody goes anywhere. I want everyone down, face on the ground. If you sit up, you'll suffocate."

  One man fought with another for space. In the fight, he started to strangle the man. Another felt himself next to the second horse, the body warm but no longer moving. The horse was dead, lying in a puddle. Face-down in the muck of the tunnel, men started to choke and gag. The smell of burning flesh was thick in the cave, the air heavy with death. Bodies twitched and convulsed, people spitting back the mud from the ground. One man fainted, falling face-first to the floor of the tunnel, and then another did the same thing. They would die here—it was obvious in the way that one sees death in all its certainty—not in the sea of burning flame outside. This death in the darkest reaches of hell was better, perhaps, than death by suffocation, better than getting engulfed by flame. The realization was too much for one man; he reared up out of a crouch, taking quick steps toward the light, stepping over men lying face-down. He headed for the flaming forest, an outside world where everything appeared to be burning. Pulaski planted himself at the entrance and drew his gun for the first time. Nobody doubted he would kill the man—justifiable homicide by the logic of this moment.

  "The next man who tries to leave the tunnel," said Pulaski, "I will shoot."

  By Pulaski's thinking, the only chance of surviving was to stay put in the mine. The fire was out there, taking everything. The man retreated, cursing Pulaski. He would soon get another chance to flee. Fighting to douse the flames on the timbers supporting the mine, Pulaski wobbled, his head light, his breath labored. He fell to his knees, feeling weak. Fresh wet blankets that he had wrapped around the timbers now caught fire. When Pulaski rose and tried to knock them away, his hands burned. A few seconds later, his face was aflame: the fire was in his eyes. He scooped up a hatful of water and poured it over his head. He replaced the burning blankets with the last available damp cloths. But this effort pushed him over; it was too much. His skin had burned. Same with his eyes, his hair. He could not see, not just to the entrance, but anywhere. He was blind. The flames had taken his sight. Pulaski fell back to the floor of this coffin of crying men and dying horses, fell to the ground, unconscious.

  On the other side of the ridge, the sprint to cover started as soon as the winds fanned through the forest Saturday evening. Unlike Pulaski's crew, the Italians, Greeks, and homesteaders on the terrain that sloped toward the town of Avery and the St. Joe River had agreed on an exit plan, should they be surrounded by flames: flee for Beauchamp's two acres. Their ranger, John Bell, had gone to town earlier in the day to get fresh provisions, just as his boss Pulaski had done. There were fifty people in this crew, broken off from the original two hundred working under Pulaski. When they heard and then felt the hard, violent front of wind, they fled for the homesteader's clearing, but by the time they got there, the fire had caught up with them. The men jumped into the shallow creek and fell to their backs, half submerged, their heads covered with dampened clothes, their noses just above the water line for breathing.

  They could see the fire, smell the fire, and hear the fire, moving over the clearing with a roar and a thump. Now they could feel the fire. Fingers, exposed by holding wet clothes around their heads, were singed, and it felt as if needles pricked their skin. One giant fir crashed atop the creek, crushing to death a man who lay in the water. Another tree landed across the legs of a firefighter, breaking both limbs and pinning him to the ground. For the other men, to stay in the water seemed like certain death, held by falling timbers. But to move could also prove fatal. "There was no damn horse fast enough in the country to keep ahead of that fire," wrote one survivor.

  Beauchamp had dug a little open cellar for storing things, a primitive hole in the ground, about three feet deep, five feet long, a few feet across, and not yet finished. At one end of the cellar he had started to carve a cave of sorts. The pit could hold three men at most; seven rose from the creek and tried to find shelter there. Beauchamp was the first to run for his hole, followed by six others, including Giacomo Viettone and Domenico Bruno. Two weeks earlier, they had left the tight, perilous air of the pits in Arizona Territory for the woods of the northern Rockies, thinking it would be more like Rivara. Now they squeezed themselves into the small hole, their faces pressed down, scrunching man-into-man in hopes of avoiding the flaming tree trunks that crashed to the ground. They pushed forward, squishing each other to get into the cave opening, crammed so tight that some could no longer breathe.

  In his cave outside Wallace, Bill Weigle too struggled for breath. So much air was being sucked out of the dark hole and into the firestorm that soon his oxygen would be gone. Like Pulaski, Weigle went through the same mental calculus. Did he have a better chance of survival outside or inside? The forest supervisor decided to take his chances with the fire rather than suffocate in the mine tunnel. He soaked his clothing in the puddle at the base of the hole, held a wet hat over his face, and took his first steps away from the tunnel. All the world was on fire—flames overhead, flames to the left, flames to the right, the ground alive. Weigle fell to his knees, scratched a depression in the sand, and planted his face down in the dirt. This kept his nose, eyes, and mouth from catching fire, but not the rest of his body. The flames found the back of his neck, his hair, and when he put his hands over his head, his already burned fingers were singed again. The pain was unrelenting.

  By midnight, the flames had passed over him, leaving a smoldering wreck of a forest, smoking and burning at the ends of roots and tree trunks. He walked several miles to the place where he had left his horse and the homesteader Speedy Swift. He called out for Swift, looking around the hot, dead trees for any sign of him. A few feet away, Weigle found his horse—on its side, dead. Whether the horse had been suffocated by smoke or burned to death, Weigle could not tell. By all indications, his horse had broken loose from his lash, then fell to its death not far away. It was a blackened corpse.

  An hour later, Weigle arrived at the outskirts of Wallace. Bridges to town were burned. There were no lights on, nothing to indicate that Wallace had lived through the hurricane of heat and flame. He saw flames coming from the east end of town, smoke over everything else, and still the wind rained fiery flotsam, blowing overhead and at eye level. If anything, the wind speeds had picked up as the air was pulled along to higher, hotter ground. Weigle stumbled over to the city reservoir, at town's edge. Debris burned next to the main water line, and the wood stave pipe was on fire. It looked as if it might break, depriving Wallace of
any remaining water. Using his hat, Weigle scooped water from the reservoir until the wood stave fire was out.

  Weigle reached town at 2 A.M. The city was coming apart, the fire still raging. He heard screams and hysterical voices. He saw people running through the streets, sobbing and shouting. He saw a flurry of suitcases and satchels clutched by people on horseback, fleeing in the dark, west toward Spokane. He saw soldiers trying to get people from one part of town to the other. He found neighbors in their backyards, still digging holes in which to bury their possessions. He looked for the mayor, for some guidance. He looked for the fire captain. His face was badly burned, as was his neck, his hand, his fingers, but Weigle made his way to Forest Service headquarters. There he tried to get updates. A few rangers were working one of the few telegraph lines still open, tapping in frantic code, planning to flee themselves in just a few minutes. Weigle wanted basic information.

  Where was Joe Halm? The rookie ranger had been sent deeper into the forest than anyone, sixty-five miles from the nearest road. He had a big crew with him. Missing was the best answer Weigle could get.

  Where was John Bell and his band of immigrants in the St. Joe drainage? Bell's crew was supposed to keep the fire from dropping down on Avery. Anyone heard from Bell? No reports. Nothing. No messages. Missing.

  What about Avery, over the divide? The town was supposed to evacuate, but the way out may have been cut off by fire that burned the railroad trestles. There were soldiers in place. But for now it looked as if nobody was going to get out of Avery.

  And where was Ed Pulaski, last seen on his horse making his way up Placer Creek with packers and fresh supplies? Pulaski was his best man, the human firewall. Where's Pulaski? He asked again. Not a word had come in. No signal or scrap of information had arrived. Missing.

  Weigle sent one message to headquarters in Missoula and spoke briefly to reporters before leaving the building for the town's fire line, where volunteers were trying to save what was left of Wallace.

  "All crews are hopelessly lost," Weigle said in his dispatch to Greeley. "We are badly in need of more men."

  He was in no shape to help, the burns on his face and hands raw, with blackened, opened skin. The mayor ordered him to the hospital, the one in town. Just then, Weigle met up with a man who had made a long trudge down Placer Creek by himself. The story he told was a nightmare: firefighters crammed into a mining tunnel, lying in the mud with their dying horses as the forest all around burned and collapsed. He had crawled over bodies and found his way down the ravine to town, the man said. Everyone who was left in the tunnel was dead, he reported. And that included Ed Pulaski.

  12. The Lost Night

  THE REPORTS COMING into the Forest Service headquarters in Missoula and passed on to the Army's high command and President Taft defied credulity: about three million acres, an area 50 percent larger than Yellowstone National Park, was burning—"the fiercest forest fire in the history of the country," as Collier's reported later. The numerous smaller blazes that had raged throughout August were now a single all-consuming storm. The Big Burn, some in the press called it, a fire that had run from central Idaho, east into Montana, west into Washington, north into British Columbia, and was still on the move. Smoke drifted hundreds of miles from the blowup, into the Dakotas and Colorado and Alberta and Wyoming. It was as if a volcanic blast had disgorged the airborne remains of the forested northern Rockies into disparate parts of the United States.

  "It was frightening, as what seemed to be great flakes of white snow were swirling to the ground in the heat and darkness of high noon," wrote Norman Maclean, who as a boy of seven was camping with his family in the Bitterroot Valley of Montana, downslope from the firestorm.

  The rangers who had watched the small blazes build all summer, who had assembled a force of firefighters bigger than any group ever put together to face flame in the country, found themselves at a loss for words. Most often, they described the firestorm as a hurricane. Other terms came from all parts of the district. A once-in-a-century event. A catastrophe that might well wipe out the finest white-pine forest standing, half a dozen towns, and a generation of young men who had gone to the woods at the call of conservation.

  "All hell broke loose," Bill Greeley reported. For the minister's son this was as emphatic as he got. His rangers—those still in contact — were sending dispatches that made it sound as though virtually all of the forested domain of the United States government was under attack. They wrote of giant blowtorches flaming from treetop to treetop, of house-size fireballs rolling through canyons, pushed by winds of seventy miles an hour. They told of trees swelling, sweating hot sap, and then exploding; of horses dying in seconds; of small creeks boiling, full of dead trout, their white bellies up; of bear cubs clinging to flaming trees, wailing like children.

  "Never had any of us seen such a sight," wrote Will Morris, a young ranger who had cleared a patch of ground a few miles above Wallace late Saturday afternoon, hoping the storm would hopscotch over him. "In the direction of the city of Wallace great masses of smoke were blowing wildly up the valley of the South Fork. Southward toward the St. Joe stood a great white cloud pillar, apparently still, looking like a great thunderclap or the steam cloud that attends the eruption of volcano." Even taking a breath, he said, was a taste of a boiler room—"as if the very air was afire."

  By late Saturday night, more than five hundred firefighters were missing, many presumed to be dead. There was Weigle's haunting message—"All crews hopelessly lost"—but others were just as grim. It was the "hopelessly" part that sank many hearts. The brightest lights of Gifford Pinchot's agency were somewhere behind an unknowable wall of flames and black smoke. The word in Missoula was that Wallace had fallen. In a dispatch from 3 A.M., The Missoulian reported: "Wallace is believed to be destroyed; there has been no communication directly with the city since 11 o'clock." Then a later report was appended. "Wallace has fallen at last," the front-page story reported. "This morning, unless an act of Providence intervened, only the ashes and smoldering embers mark the place where yesterday morning stood the most beautiful city in the Coeur d'Alenes."

  From the inside, Wallace was a prison of heat and betrayal. "Flames were eating up the residences on the east side, and everywhere was a confusion of women and children rushing to and fro, shouting and screaming, little hope being entertained of saving any of the city," Charles D. Roth told the Seattle Times. What had started in a combustible alley next to the newspaper building, then jumped to the city's biggest furniture store and a planing mill, had fanned out to torch nearly a hundred structures. After the evacuation signal had been sounded, some people refused to leave, afraid to go into the hive of fear and chaos in the streets. Out of habit, some men fled to the Oasis Room, one of five brothels in town. Others crawled inside holes dug in their backyards. The Coeur d'Alene Hotel, a three-story rooming house that stood by the river, was fully enflamed, black smoke pouring from open windows and the roof. As the fire coursed through the hotel, it killed a man who lay frozen on his bed. Within minutes, the walls collapsed. When the Sunset Brewery started to burn, more than two thousand wood barrels of beer broke open, spilling suds into the street. Downtown, people tried to send out messages from the telegraph and telephone switchboards, manned by seven operators.

  Now the mayor declared full martial law. Hanson's concern in taking the extraordinary measure was looting. It was one thing to lose the city to flame, but another to its own residents. There were sights to make a mayor proud: volunteers, young and old, hosing down buildings, working shoulder to shoulder with the fire department to keep Wallace from collapsing. Rail workers for the Northern Pacific used a tank car drawing water from the river to control hot spots all over town. Women with babies and small children, cooling their heads with wet towels, mouthed a mother's primal reassurance as they made their way to the trains under a shower of firebrands. And the soldiers from the 25 th Infantry were performing well while people all around them were losing their heads. The tr
oopers' job was to make sure the evacuation trains were boarded by the elderly, the sick, women, and children. This task the soldiers had done, showing no fear or favor, the mayor said later, even if some had to nudge men with the tips of their bayonets.

  But there were also things to make a mayor lose faith in people — folks he had known since he was a kid now betraying him, going back on their promise to stay and fight for their homes. One man had pushed aside a pregnant woman, taking her seat on the coach. He was pummeled by a fireman. All these prominent men—bankers and business owners, insurance brokers and builders, families who had names on the sides of buildings, and people who had made a fortune draining the mountainsides of their precious metals—they were disgusting, men without honor. They elbowed, shoved, and bullied their way onto the exit trains, ignoring the mayor, almost taunting him to do something. At one point, windows in the train shattered and a door broke down. Under martial law, the mayor could arrest people on the spot. But realistically, there was nowhere to put them. The jail had been emptied of prisoners, and it was likely to burn. Felons were working the fire lines. In the end, Mayor Hanson had taken the advice of his fire chief: "Let the bastards go."

  As winds shoved the fire east, it took buildings, bridges, commercial signs, standing poles, and ornamental trees. It took a cigar factory, a lumberyard, a bank. And it burned property owned by Weldon Heyburn. The Idaho senator had been in town earlier in the month, working to advance his lucrative law trade. He briefly made news when he shut down a visiting small orchestra that tried to play a song during a public performance that was not to his liking, showing the flash of temper that earlier led him to fulminate against a national commission on the arts. He had kept up his law practice long after he was named to the Senate and had become a wealthy man, helping mining syndicates that dealt in public-land speculation. Along the way, he was handed pieces of the action. While other senators spent the summer months working on behalf of constituents, Heyburn serviced his mining clients, using the power of his name on official stationery, his public duties nicely dovetailing with his private interests. Through every vote in the Senate, through hearings in which he belittled rangers of Gifford Pinchot's service and questioned them about expenditures for the smallest of things, through scoldings where he insinuated that rangers were un-American, he had done his best to kill the Forest Service. But some of his penurious pruning now came back to haunt him. As the men who were supposed to protect Wallace were trapped in tunnels and holes, without enough shovels to dig the trenches that might save their lives, a mass of flame washed over Wallace and burned the ledgers and notations, and up higher, one of the mine-processing operations of Weldon Heyburn, senator and speculator.