The Big Burn (30 page)

Holding her daughter, Emma Pulaski had spent the night in the bunker of mine waste, the impoundment where she had fled rather than get on a train. Emma and Elsie had watched the flames come down the mountains and burn through Wallace. They saw smoke columns and spires of fire rising from the town, heard whistles as the trains moved women and children away, the not-so-distant cacophony of fleeing residents, and all the while held their position in the crushed rock. Around 5
A.M.
, Sunday, mother and daughter rose and started to walk back to town.

The Pulaski house, to Emma's surprise, was still standing. News of her husband came in a progression of rumors and half-truths, from worst case to better, throughout the morning. First a neighbor greeted her with a hug and sad face: Ed Pulaski had died, she said, killed with all his men. Just after 9
A.M.
, another story: her husband was alive, but horribly disfigured by flame—"his eyes burned out and that he probably would not live," as she recalled. Less than
an hour later, on the road to her house, she saw a tall man, a swirl of smudged cloth around his face, hands wrapped, walking slowly, guided by other men. Ed Pulaski looked crumbled and spent. "He was staggering," she wrote, "his eyes bandaged, he was blind and terribly burned, his hands and hair were burned and he was suffering from the fire gas." Pulaski and his men had been greeted with coffee and whiskey at the trailhead of Placer Creek by a party of women who had volunteered to do what Weigle could not find men to do—walk up the smoke-clouded, tree-cluttered road in search of the men who had tried to keep the fire from town.

"The world was black to my eyes," Pulaski said, but it lightened enough to find the arms of his wife and daughter.

What he could not see of Wallace was this: chimneys, sticks, open-faced basements, roofless buildings, and entire streets devoid of their houses and stores. One of two train depots was completely gutted. The Pacific Hotel was burned to a shell. The main bridge across the river was gone. The Coeur d'Alene Hardware Store was a pile of rubbish. The brewery was destroyed, as was the newspaper office. Trees at street level and on the first couple of terraces above the valley floor were gone, though a few black poles stood against grey carpet.

Hundreds of other men were still missing, and perhaps an equal number dead. Weigle had not heard from several of his crew chiefs, and he doubted that they had survived the blowup. He knew from his own struggle to get out of a collapsing mine tunnel, from his crawl along the hot forest floor, from the way the fire caught his hands and head, that the storm had a power that could take the strongest of rangers.

300 FIRE FIGHTERS DEAD

So read the headline in the
Seattle Times
two days after the weekend blowup. The casualty figure may have been high, the number a rough estimate, at a time when it was difficult for the Forest Service to get reliable information on its crews. The rangers and fire
fighters were, with one exception, only a day or two's hike from towns and roads, but in their isolation they could have been in the far, roadless Alaska wilderness. The paper reported other losses as well, and these they could name, for the most part. Among them were a mother and a year-old baby, said to have drowned in a well where they jumped to avoid the flames; the Wallace fire captain's father, who had gone back to his smoking house to save his parrot; a "well-dressed Finn," found with a gold pocket watch; the suicide, Oscar Weigert; the man whose friend accidentally set him afire in the boxcar; the twenty-eight men who decided, along with the Irish cook Patrick Grogan, to stay put in the creek above Avery rather than retreat; the ten who packed into the small cabin only to have its roof collapse on them; the Italians, Viettone and Bruno, and five others jammed into the cellar in Beauchamp's clearing; the homesteader himself, and another; a boy of seventeen caught in the Bullion Mine along with several Englishmen; a man from Persia; six of Pulaski's men, all but one in the tunnel; a prospector on the St. Joe River; homesteaders in northeastern Washington; assorted firefighters in remote pockets of Montana. Those were the known dead in the count taken just two days after the blowup. Many bodies could not be identified; what was at first taken for a charred log was found to be a firefighter, for example.

"Never in my life have I seen conditions so appalling," Weigle told a few of the reporters who had stayed behind. Since grown men refused to help, he enlisted teenagers, some as young as thirteen, to run up into the smoking woods in search of survivors. With Pulaski in the hospital in Wallace, his main concern was the kid who'd been hired out of Washington State College to learn the ways of the woods under Pulaski—Joe Halm, the ex—football player. Of all the crews fighting fire in Weigle's Coeur d'Alene, none were deeper in the woods than the men under Halm's direction. They were seventy-five miles up the St. Joe River from Avery, near the headwaters and high in subalpine timber. Greeley sent in help from the Montana side to look for Halm's men, but found nothing. News spread quickly.

JOE HALM AND CREW FEARED LOST

ST. JOE FIRE HEMS IN 180 MEN WHO
MAY NEVER ESCAPE

That last headline, from the
Spokane Spokesman-Review,
was accurate in that it conveyed the concern of Weigle, Koch, Greeley, and other Little G.P.s for a missing ranger, but it overstated the number of men in Halm's crew. Weigle sent out his young search party. They made it farther up the St. Joe than the scouts who had gone earlier, but came back with the same report: no hint of Joe Halm and his crew. A day later, this headline appeared in the
Idaho Press:

NO CHANCE FOR HALM AND CREW
IN ST. JOE WILDERNESS

Three days after the firestorm erupted, about three hundred men were missing, including Halm's crew. The fire had gone north to British Columbia and east to the far reaches of the Rockies and then to the plains. In the wilderness of the narrowest part of the Idaho panhandle and some of the most rugged sections of northwestern Montana, the fire chased men to high ground and watery shelters. A crew of twenty-five working in the Cabinet National Forest raced up a creek, trying to outrun the storm. The fire was swifter and caught the men on a hill of loose, sliding rock. Those who stayed in the talus, clutching rock, lived. But four others took off in a downhill sprint and were burned to death. In a neighboring forest, the Pend Oreille, a similar drama came to a similar end. Two members of a crew who'd been told to take shelter under wet blankets threw off their flimsy shields to make an escape attempt. They had gone only a few strides before flames lit them up, killing both men. And over in the northeastern part of Washington State, in the green country defined by the big Pend Oreille River, three homesteaders burned to death, caught in the fire while trying to save all that they had labored on.

The warmer air on the eastern side of the Montana Rockies,
where temperatures near 100 degrees were common in August, pulled the Big Burn to the high plains and lightly timbered brush country — an arid land, baked brown and red in this drought. Blackfeet Indians, who'd lived in this area for centuries, described smoke coming over the mountains like waterfalls, cascading to new ground. From there, flames moved east in the stampeding fashion of a prairie fire, taking dry grass and occasional pines before finding islands of fresh timber, cottonwood, aspen, and fir in the subranges of the eastern Rockies. The biggest cities in Montana — Bozeman, Billings, and Great Falls — now saw flames not far from their towns and tasted the smoke that had choked settlements to the west for nearly a month. The ashen layer crept into the Dakotas, Wyoming, Colorado, and as far as parts of Minnesota. In Yellowstone, nearly five hundred miles from the St. Joe River, tourists complained about the coarse blanket of fine-particled fog that settled over the world's first national park. They wondered: Was the park on fire? It was not. The smoke in Yellowstone, even smoke in Denver, was from the two-day storm in the Bitterroots. The airborne fallout of the Big Burn rode the brisk winds of the Midwest, north of Chicago, dropped soot over parts of New England, finally dissipating above Greenland.

Left behind in the northern Rockies were logs piled on other logs; millions of trees fire-stripped of bark and branches, stacked and tossed in the gullies and valleys; and hot spots, hundreds of them, burning coals and hard timber. The Spokane paper quoted a ranger as saying there were "no forests left to burn—the country has been wiped clean." The St. Joe country that Pulaski had found so restorative; the Bitterroot glens that Halm had found so enticing; the high alpine meadows where young Elers Koch and his Danish bride had pitched their tent; the ancient river-bottom cedars that Pinchot himself had touched and catalogued as he rushed to find suitable land for Roosevelt's pen to protect—all looked as if they had been mowed down by a reaper's swipe of fire.

Debitt sent a dispatch on August 23 to Weigle, an indication
of how confused and dazed he remained. "The entire country has been burned over," he reported from Avery. "An indefinite number of men reported lost in the fire. Arrangements will be made to bury unidentified bodies ... Food supply is short..."

And, to the press, Debitt added this conclusion, summarized by a headline:

HEAD RANGER DEBITT CONCEDES THE DEATH OF
RANGER HALM AND HIS PARTY OF 70

Joe Halm was twenty-five, well liked, one of the most celebrated athletes in the Pacific Northwest, the son of German immigrants who settled in the orchard country of the Yakima Valley. Halm's nickname was Joe Bunch, and in his college yearbook there were references to how Joe Bunch was always there in a pinch. His service for Gifford Pinchot had been brief: hired just before the Chief was fired, Halm had learned all about him from the mythology passed on by other rangers. Halm had put in barely a year in the service, but he loved it. "Strong, active, full of enthusiasm, broke but happy" was how he described himself after being hired by Weigle. The other rangers laughed at him for the silk shirt he wore the first day on the job, but he soon became a favorite. He joked at his own expense, never turned down a task, and his energy was boundless. Halm's loss was mentioned in a dispatch in the
New York Times,
in which he was lauded as "the best football and baseball player at Washington State College at Pullman" for four years. In fact, Halm was an average baseball player, but he had the shot put record, and his football skills were legendary, especially the drop kick that beat the University of Washington in Seattle.

He had entered the woods with seventy men. It had taken them the better part of a week to slash and hack their way up the wilderness to a fire in timber against the big western flank of the Bitterroots on the Montana line. They had their fire contained by August 18, and Halm assembled the men and gear for the march out. Job well done, Halm told them; they could be proud. Paychecks and a
big meal awaited them in Avery, a three-to-four-day hike if they really hoofed it. Halm led his packers down to a supply camp, then returned to his core group of eighteen late Saturday.

The crew he had left and the wild-eyed men who greeted him now were not the same people. Fire, they said, was everywhere, encircling them. Yes, the smoke was much thicker, Halm said, the air was stifling and grey, but flames were not evident. No, no, they protested, the fire was closing in, they could smell it, feel it. In the time Halm tried to persuade them otherwise, the smoke turned a darker pitch, like resin; it was thick and gooey and free-floating. Then sparks began coasting into camp. The crew foreman, waving his big steel ax overhead, tried to calm the men, helping the younger Joe Halm. But it was like talking to horses intent on a dash.

To run would mean suicide, Halm insisted. They had to stay put, stay low, and hope the storm would skip over them. The cook was ordered to make dinner. Supper? Now? Yes, he was ordered, get started on a meal. And before the potatoes began to boil, the sky turned another color and the sound invaded camp. Some thought it was like falling water, though it had little resemblance to the sweet music of nature. Others described it simply as a roar, the advance notice of something beyond their darkest fears. What rode the wind took on another form, from fractured flashes of light to flame, and then jumped into the trees, all in a few heartbeats' time. The great front wall of the firestorm had reached them. Men dropped their shovels before Halm had finished his pleas, ignoring the foreman with his ax, and ran—downhill, uphill, scattering through the brush.

"We're not going to stay here and be roasted alive," one man shouted.

Like his mentor Pulaski, Halm had one fallback, something rangers trained in the chaos of the open West were not afraid to do. He hoisted aloft his gun and let the remaining firefighters know that he would shoot them if he had to.

"She's jumped a mile across the canyon," said the foreman. There was an order, a pattern, to afternoon thunder boomers, even
to wildfires, even to freak events. But the speed of this fire was beyond the comprehension of any wrangler, miner, timberman, or ranger who thought he knew how nature worked. Halm tried to sound tough, though some men sensed that what followed was a hollow threat from a college kid.

"Not a man leaves this camp," he said again. "We'll stay by this creek and live to tell about it." The doubt was as thick as the smoke, judging by what a few men said later. But Halm had seen them through this week in the high alpine fire; he had been steady. "Every man hold out some grub, a blanket and a tool. Chuck the rest in that tent, drop the poles and bury it."

It seemed a futile idea, but the men followed Halm's order, shoving food and bedrolls into the tent, then collapsing it, placing poles atop it, and burying the cache with dirt. Not everyone followed his instructions. Several men grabbed canned goods and made a run for the creek. It seemed a logical place to hunker down, and Halm did not object. To the creek they would all go, a shallow trickle, barely a foot deep, just the faintest stirrings of the St. Joe in the driest year in a generation's time.