THERE WAS a moment when northern Idaho stood at the center of fire-planet Earth, a summer when American society and American nature collided with almost tectonic force.  Spark, fuel, and wind merged violently and overran several million acres of dense and variously disturbed forest from the Selways to the Canadian border.  The sparks came from locomotives, settlers, hobo "floaters," backfiring crews, and lightning.  The fuel lay in heaps alongside the newly-hewn Milwaukee Railway over the Bitterroots and down the St. Joe valley, and across hillsides ripped by mines and logging, and untouched woods primed by drought.  The Rockies had experienced a wet winter but a dry spring that ratcheted, day by day, into a droughty summer, the worst in memory.  Duff and canopies that normally wouldn't burn now could.  The winds came with the passage of shallow cold fronts, acting like an enormous bellows that turned valleys into furnaces and sidecanyons into chimneys.  Southwesterly winds rose throughout the day to gale force by early evening, and then shifted to the northwest.  Perhaps 75% of the total burn occurred during a single 36-hour period, what became known as the Big Blowup.

That summer witnessed the first great firefight by the U.S. Forest Service.  As the weeks wore on, the fires had crept and swept, thickening during calms into smoke as dense as pea-fog, then flaring into wild rushes through the crowns.  The fledgling Forest Service, barely five years old, tried to match them.  It rounded up whatever men it could beg, borrow, or buy and shipped them into the backcountry.  The regular Army contributed another 33 companies.  The crews established camps, cut firelines along ridgetops, and backfired.  Over and again, one refrain after another, the saga continued of fires contained, of fires escaping, of new fronts laid down.  Then the Big Blowup shredded it all.  Smoke billowed up in columns dense as volcanic blasts, the fire's convection sucked in air from all sides, snapping off mature larch and white pine like matchsticks, spawning firewhirls like miniature tornadoes, flinging sparks like a sandstorm.  Crews dropped their saws and mattocks and fled.  That day 78 firefighters died.  One crew on the Cabinet National Forest lost four men; one on the Pend Oreille lost two; the rest of the dead fell on the Coeur d'Alene.

The Coeur d'Alene was ground zero.  In the St. Joe Mountains between Wallace and Avery, some 1,800 firefighters and two companies of the 25th Infantry manned the lines when the Blowup struck.  A crew north of Avery survived when Ranger William Rock led them to a previously burned area, except for one man who, panicking, shot himself twice rather than face the flames.  A crew on Stevens Peak lit an escape fire in bear grass, then lost it when the winds veered, and one man died when he stood up and breathed the searing air.  A crew at the Bullion Mine split, the larger party finding its way into a side adit, the rest, eight in all, dying in the main shaft.  On Setzer Creek some 28 men, four never identified even as to name, perished as they fled and fought their way uphill and fell in a collapsing ring of death.  A gaggle of 19 spilled off the ridge overlooking Big Creek and sought refuge in the Dittman cabin.  When the roof caught fire, they ran out.  The first 18 died where they fell, in a heap along with five horses and two bears; the 19th twisted his ankle in crossing the threshold and collapsed to the ground, where he found a sheath of fresh air.  Two days later Peter Kinsley crawled, alive, out of a creek.  Another group dashed to the Beauchamp cabin, where they met a party of homesteaders.  A white pine thundered to the ground and crushed two men immediately, while trapping a third by his ankle; he died, screaming, in the flames.  Another seven squirmed into a root cellar where they roasted alive.

And then there was the crew cobbled together by Ranger Ed Pulaski.  He had gone to Wallace for supplies and was returning on the morning of August 20th when the winds picked up their tempo and cast flame before them.  He began to meet stragglers and then a large gang spalled off from the main ridge camp.  All in all he gathered 45 men, and with the smoke thickening in stygian darkness turned to race down the ravine of the West Fork toward Wallace.  One man lagged and died in the flames.  Pulaski hustled the rest over the trail before tucking them into a mine shaft.  Then he hurried down canyon with a wet gunny sack over his head before returning and herding the group into a larger shaft, the Nicholson adit, which had a seep running through it.  Pulaski tried to hold the flames out of the entry timbers and the smoke out of the mine with hatfuls of water and blankets.  But by now the men were senseless.  They heard nothing but the din, felt nothing but heat, saw nothing but flame and darkness, smelled only smoke and sweat.  As the firestorm swirled by the entrance, someone yelled that he, at least, was getting out.  At the entry, rudely silhouetted by flames, he met Ed Pulaski, pistol drawn, threatening to shoot the first man who tried to flee.

 MOST OF YOU know this story.  You may even know it in these very words.  You know the man, the moment, and the meaning they share.  You know how it ends.  You know Big Ed survived, although injured, along with all but five of his crew.  You know the episode became a defining moment of the Big Blowup, and the Big Blowup, a scarring trauma in American conservation history, one of those critical mutations that get spliced into institutional DNA and cultural memory.  You know that the Great Fires brought together, wholly and for the first time, the entire apparatus of American fire control.  You know that, after the trauma, the U.S. Forest Service got serious about fire, and carried the rest of the public land agencies along in its train.  From the lonely smokechaser to Smokey the Bear, the narrative of American fire comes from the rifled bore of the Big Blowup.  All that is grand about the American way of fire - and in more recent years, perhaps all that is lamentable - traces its pedigree back to that moment when the mountains roared, the sun turned red and the sky black, and a folk westerner-turned-ranger stood against the flames.

OF COURSE it was not quite that simple.  Fire is not simple.  Alone among the ancient elements it is not a substance.  Earth, water, air - all exist independently of their circumstances.  Fire does not.  It is a creature of context, a reaction that synthesizes its surroundings.  Describe that context, and you describe fire.  Control that context, and you control fire.  As a natural phenomenon, fire morphs with terrain, wind, humidity, and the ecological arrangement - what Darwin called a "tangled bank" - of hydrocarbons whose oxidation powers combustion.  These change from place to place, and from minute to minute.

But even trickier, for thousands of years fire has had to interact with humanity.  We hold a species monopoly over its manipulation; we affect it directly by applying and withholding ignition and indirectly by rearranging the fuels on which it feeds.  Fire's context, that is, is cultural as well as natural.  This means that fire also synthesizes its social setting, which is every bit as mutable as nature.  Big fires require the convergence of many factors; great fires require, as well, the massing of cultural events.  This means that the frame of our understanding is never fixed.  It means that even the Big Blowup signifies not one thing but many.

What might it mean for us today?

BEGIN WITH Ed Pulaski.

In the fury of the holocaust, there were crews saved and crews savaged.  There were bosses who chose coolly and others who went blank; crews that held their ground while others fled; men who knew extraordinary luck and men ill-starred and doomed.  Some men on the lines experienced and recorded startling stories; others perished or slipped away with hardly af Big Ed's flight down the West Fork of Placer Creek contains elements of all these themes.  It was not obvious that it, among the scores of dramatic tales that emerged like the bears and birds driven by the flames, would triumph.  Perhaps because it had bits of everything it captured more of the event than any other incident.  For whatever reasons, it has come to stand as synecdoche for the Big Blowup overall.  Ed Pulaski gave fire suppression its epic, the story that would define what it did and why it mattered.  He gave American fire a face, and bequeathed to it a wordless saga of action over idea.

Nothing underscores better the ineffable timing of his gesture than the simultaneous publication of William James' last essay, "The Moral Equivalent of War."  James - one of the founders of pragmatism as a formal philosophy - was returning from Europe, where he had become alarmed at Western civilization's growing militarism, a harsh enthusiasm that would end a few years later in the trenches of the Great War.  He admitted that war was "the romance of history," that "the war-party is assuredly right in affirming and reaffirming that the martial virtues, although originally gained by the race through war, are absolute and permanent human goods."  Yet, as a pacifist, he recoiled at the specter of war itself, and sought to redirect those energies to more constructive purposes.  Why, he asked, could there not exist a "moral equivalent of war" as there was a mechanical equivalent of heat?  After all, "the martial type of character can be bred without war.  Strenuous honor and disinterestedness abound elsewhere."  His response was to urge a war-equivalent against collective humanity's common enemy, the forces of nature.

It was an activist age, the Progressive Era, and Teddy Roosevelt would soon exhort his countrymen to pursue a "life of strenuous endeavor."  William James shared these sentiments no less than Ed Pulaski.  Pragmatism, after all, was a philosophy of doing.  Even intellectuals celebrated the act over the idea.  William James, dying at his country house in New Hampshire, likely knew little of the Big Blowup, but even as his essay got into print its smoke was passing overhead and turning the New England sun copper.  While they published in very different venues, philosopher and ranger spoke to a common culture.

SO, TOO, did the U.S. Forest Service.

Institutions matter: they influence fire regimes as full as seasons and mountains.  But fire can shape those institutions as well.  It was not simply that the Forest Service promoted firefighting but that a perceived need for fire control helped promote the Forest Service.  The Forest Service eagerly accepted that fire was the most visible public test of its success or failure.  From the beginning it saw fire as a propaganda tool, and it recognized that fire on public lands was inextinguishably political.  Neither conflagration nor conservation could thereafter disengage from the other.  The Great Fires shaped how their intertwined futures would evolve.

The effect was catalytic.  The American way of fire had all come together, for the first time, and yet fully, and violently, in the Big Blowup and its aftermath: the conflagrations like a force of nature, the set-piece of the Firefight, the levee en masse of temporaries, the call-out of the military, the bottomless expenditures, the emergency salvage and postfire rehabilitation, the export of rangers from other regions for fire duty, the media blitz and political squabbles; the whole apparatus that would, with minor mutations, dominate the story for most of the century.

The resolution of that layered crisis pushed the Forest Service, our dominant fire institution, down a path it could not later retake.  The conflagrations came amidst the traumatic turmoil that surrounded Gifford Pinchot's firing.  They were the first serious crisis faced by Henry Graves as new chief forester; the next three chiefs, until 1939, were all personally on the firelines in the Northern Rockies and carried the memory of the Big Blowup with them.  Not least, amidst the horror of the Big Blowup, there had occurred the public of the light-burning controversy, with its bold challenge to fire suppression as the ruling mode of fire protection, to foresters as competent administrators of the public domain, and to state-sponsored conservation as a means of stewardship over the national estate.

So fire - big blowups and light burns both - obsessed the agency.  Writing in 1910, Graves had declared that fire protection was 90% of American forestry.  Years of hard labor allowed William Greeley to downgrade that status to 75%, but, after his ordeal during the Great Fires, "smoke in the woods" remained his yardstick for forestry's success in America.  The fires continued.  The firefight tried to match them.

Even Great Fires must burn themselves out eventually.  The astonishing thing about the Big Blowup was how long it persisted, through personal and institutional memory.  Whatever the lessons learned, whatever the wishes of its survivors to control fire, the means at hand had always limited their implementation.  That changed with the New Deal, which saw the mammoth backcountry smoke clouds from the Tillamook, Matilija, and Selway burns as equivalent to the dirty palls of the Dust Bowl and was willing to invest heavily in conservation.  So even as critics argued against aggressive fire control as ecologically unwise in certain forests and as culturally destructive of some values that fire-control claimed to protect, the means at hand had so expanded that they encouraged an expansion of ends.

The arguments landed on the desk of Chief Forester Gus Silcox.  A veteran of the Great Fire, Silcox had written in November, 1910 that the lesson of the fires was that they were preventable.  Foresters had simply lacked the trails, crews, and telephone lines to act on them sufficiently.  With the Civilian Conservation Corps, that infrastructure now existed.  Silcox then promulgated what became known as "the Forester's policy" or "10 AM policy," that stipulated a universal standard of control for every fire regardless of cause, location, or values at risk.  The policy remained in force until 1978.  Its legacy was not fully overthrown until the adoption of a common federal fire policy in December, 1995.

 THAT ONE generation could span the Great Fires and the Forester's Policy tells us something vital about what had happened.  They had grown up together.  They - the foresters and the Forest Service - had, at the time of the Big Blowup both been young.

In recent years this theme has dominated the language of fire and its meaning.  It dates clearly to Norman Maclean's 1992 bestselling meditation Young Men and Fire, but behind the events that inspired Maclean lay deep precedents that trace at least back to the Great Fires.  Maclean himself had, as a youth, fought fire with a trail crew, during a coming-of-age summer.  Certainly one can imagine the blowup in Mann Gulch as a sequel to the archetypal Big Blowup, and the gripping tale of firefighters felled and spared by a seemingly inscrutable act of nature as yet another verse in a story so hoary it seems almost Homeric.

In writing about his early years in the Forest Service, Elers Koch, another veteran of 1910, marveled what a wonderful thing it was to belong to an institution composed almost wholly of young men.  They belonged to a similar caste; they shared common enthusiasms, unchecked by bureaucratic elders; the Firefight was, for them, a rite of passage, through them, a coming of age for the agency.  Those who left records of the Great Fires nicely fit this profile - Koch, Joe Halm, William Morris.  They are of a piece with the young smokejumpers blasted 39 years later at the Gates of the Mountains, or for all those who have endured a trial by fire.  Those who survived moved on, and often up, during that era of youthful institution-building.

By the 50th anniversary of the Great Fires, that original energy had spent itself.  Momentum had replaced mission, with fire control now allied to national security, yet another agent in a cold war on fire.  Ten years later the Forest Service had its last hurrah as a fire hegemon, wrestling with monster fires in the Northwest and Southern California.  Over the previous decade, fire protection had commenced its version of the culture wars.  Steadily, the Forest Service lost control over the agenda, the instruments, and the purposes of fire management.  Critics questioned the science and rationale behind fire exclusion, the universality of fire control as a policy, the legitimacy of the Forest Service to lead a new generation of rechartered federal land agencies; they blasted the whole apparatus that descended from the Great Fires.  Fire was deemed natural, and its suppression, unwarranted.  For critics, the crusade to abolish fire had been a ghastly mistake, not unlike the quagmire emerging in Vietnam.  Battered by a stubborn resistance to public enthusiasm for wilderness and its pig-headedness over clearcutting, the Forest Service found itself disconnected from American culture and demonized by environmentalists as an Evil Empire.

The saga of the Big Blowup had become ambivalent, even the agency uncertain whether to regard it as a founding epic or an embarrassing, barbaric holdover.  With the recission of the 10 AM policy, it seemed an anomaly, a disruption in the Force, like a sudden plague or an asteroidal impact that had blown away a normal, rational evolution of events.  The urgent task seemed the reintroduction of fire, not its mindless suppression.  Meanwhile, blowup fires remained inscrutable, still threatening the "young men" sent against them, still defying cultural meaning.  When, in 1984, after several soggy years in which fire receded further from public consciousness, the West Fork achieved listing on the National Register, a new plaque announced the reason for its selection in language all but meaningless in its politically correct abstractions.

YET FIRE would not go quietly away.  As a Long Drought began in the early 1990s, flames returned.  Today fire management consumes some 40% of the Forest Service budget.  It could well command 50% and not be excessive in its demands.  This fact would likely have stunned the founders.  Creating forest reserves had been part of a global project, everywhere following the European imperium.  One its justifications, as in the U.S., was to control free-burning fire.  Paradoxically, flame survives precisely because those reserved lands preserved a habitat for it.  We have extensive wildland fires because we have extensive wildlands.

A century ago, academic forestry, rooted in Europe, had dismissed fire control from its purview.  Fire protection was something that had to happen before forestry could flourish: it was a precondition to true forestry, not one of its core practices.  Before forestry could complete its rationalization of wild landscapes, it had to eliminate fire, or dampen it from an epidemic to a mere fever.  Critics saw waste, extravagance, violence, the Manichaean opposite to conservation.  "Bad habits and loose morals" was how Bernhard Fernow dismissed the American fire scene.  Aggressive fire control was a phase raw nations passed through before they matured, an expression of frontier violence, as though big fires and light burns were a childhood disease.  The Forest Service boldly argued that fire protection was one of its contributions to international forestry, but implicit in its braggadacio was the belief that the heroic age of Great Fires and Grand Firefights would fade away once the land had been pacified.

Of course nothing of the sort happened.  Instead of domesticating the wild, the national forests often became less stable and more fire-prone, and the cycle of violence intensified.  Tame fire became feral fire.  A bold campaign sank into a bottomless insurgency.  Tending to fire was not, for the Service, a one-off event, but a relationship; relentless, insistent, indispensable.  One could argue that fire management was then, and remains today, the most fundamental practice of the agency in fire-prone environments; that getting fire right is the core task and index of success, for fire is the synthesizer of everything else.
 

THE NARRATIVE - or paradigm, if you will - that says that fire is metaphorically about young men badly needs revision.  The Forest Service is no longer young.  The imperial era of state-sponsored forestry has, around the world, imploded during the past half century of decolonization.  The questions regarding fire have proved too complicated for youthful zeal to overwhelm.  The assumption that prescribed fire could stand suppression on its head and invert the narrative into a useful form has stalled, if not failed outright.  Even friendly fire has proved hostile.  We need a different kind of narrative.

For this, we would do well to reconsider the Pulaski saga, for Ed Pulaski was not a young man.  In August, 1910 he was in his mid-40s; he was married (the second marriage for both him and his wife); he had a child, adopted; he had become an urban homesteader, having left his youthful adventuring behind.  He worried not about his remembered gallantry but his injured eyes.  He declined to promote his story, and hence himself, and, disgracefully, found his deeds denied even legitimate compensation.  His story, he surely knew, was more complicated than what the audience wanted to hear.

Instead, he stayed and he worked.  For the next 20 years he oversaw the Wallace District.  He reopened the trails, replanted the hillsides, erected fire lookouts, dispatched smokechasers, tended the graves of the fallen, and of course devised and promoted his eponymous fire tool.  In this version his real legacy is not his pistol in the minshaft but his hybrid tool plunked into log and hillside.  It symbolized, as his persistence did, the long slog of steady labor, year after year, that translated political dicta and policy proposals into facts on the ground.  His greatest legacy did not come from the flaming front before the Nicolson adit but the long bureaucratic mopup that followed - the grimy, in-the-duff tedium that mixed daily chores and office paperwork, that translated rhetoric into trails, smokechasers, Osborne firefinders, and forged-iron tools on hickory handles.

For this narrative text, too, William James offers a commentary, an essay published in 1897, the year of the national forests organic act.  "What Makes a Life Significant," James argued, was the fusion of "inner joy, courage, and endurance"  with "an ideal."  It had an obvious expression - "the element that gives to the wicked outer world all its moral style, expressiveness and picturesqueness, - the element of precipitousness, so to call it, of strength and strenuousness, intensity and danger."  What "the romances and the statues celebrate and the grim civic monuments remind us of, is the everlasting battle of the powers of light with those of darkness; with heroism, reduced to its bare chance, yet ever and anon snatching victory from the jaws of death."  What our "human emotions seem to require," he concluded, is "the sight of the struggle going on."  When the crisis passed, the excitement - the meaning - drained away.

Yet James, for all his wish to see "heroism and the spectacle of human nature on the rack," came to imagine it differently.  He confessed that he had failed to notice "the great fields of heroism lying round" about him, the "unidealized" world of everyday life.  "There, every day of the year somewhere, is human nature in extremis for you.  And wherever a scythe, an axe, a pick, or a shovel is wielded, you have it sweating and aching and with its powers of patient endurance racked to the utmost under the length of hours of the strain."

The story of Ed Pulaski captures both heroisms.  The first well suited a young institution at a desperate moment.  The second describes the deserving quest of a mature one, where the choices are confused, the understanding ambiguous, the setting ambivalent.  This is our circumstance today; not to continue to confront apocalyptic flames, although that may well happen, but to get fire right on the land, a far more subtle and profound endeavor, one that does not readily yield to simple enthusiasms.  The job is to match our ideals with the courage and stoicism of everyday life.  This is a task not of young men, or of young institutions, but of older ones.

WHAT DO the Great Fires mean today?

They mean many things.  They flourish as a rattling good story of courage amidst confusion; they endure as synecdoche and symbol for the collision of American society with American nature; they survive as a creation myth for one of the founding practices of one of America's major instruments of government; they remain one of those privileged events that change history.  But what that historic change means itself changes as the institutional legacy evolves.  The Great Fires will mean what each generation needs them to mean.

Today, they remind us of the power of Nature, and that fire, while a force of nature, is ultimately a biological phenomenon, propagated through a biotic medium for which the firefight should be the last and least strategy.  We need instead to consider ecological controls.  They remind us that wildfire remains a problem.  While the expression of that problem changes, the fires endure, resistant to adolescent zeal.  They remind us that our stewardship of the public lands requires us to be active fire managers, that fire is not simply a tool or means to other ends but an end in itself, the index of all that we do, and don't do.  They remind us that our hominid heritage bequeathed to us, uniquely, a role as keepers of the planetary flame.  Fire is who we are, even if today's Big Burn does not rise in convective columns over the Rockies but from the oft-invisible spumes of industrial combustion, from our powerplants and lawnmowers, automobiles and leafblowers.  The Big Burn is all around us, so vast it has begun to perturb the Earth's atmosphere.  The climatic rhythms that set the tempo of free-burning conflagrations is now under the fumbling control of people.

Some elements of meaning refuse to transmute, however.  The saga of the Great Fires has always hinged on the Big Blowup; the Big Blowup, on the furious fight and flight of trapped crews; and among those crews, that particular band of men, terrified and panicky, in the Nicolson adit.  Time and again, the search for meaning returns to Ed Pulaski.  The West Fork remains hallowed ground, the particular place where ideal and reality fused, not just during the Big Blowup but during its strenuous rehabilitation.

Our needs might thus look less to the Pulaski who stood his ground during a moment of terror than the Pulaski who tenaciously worked and reworked that ground for decades afterward, and devised tools to fit policy to practice.  Not the Pulaski who defied, but the Pulaski who endured.  Not a young man and fire, but an older one who met fire, as best he could, on his own terms, with persistence, patience, and practical ingenuity.  Not the hero of a desperate moment who faced an apocalyptic fire, but the hero of everyday life who confronted the vernacular flames that came year after year.  That is a model that a pluralistic program of fire management craves, and the institutions that must administer it demand.  That is a legacy we can long be proud of.

Copyright 2004, Stephen J. Pyne