The Big Burn (25 page)

"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 troopers' 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.

A few doors away from Heyburn's office, the evacuation trains were packed, one ready to go east, one west. Each direction was uncertain, for there was fire up and down the valley. It seemed that the best gamble was to move. The coaches had no room for another dog or child or suitcase. Even the coal and supply cars had been put to use. Away the trains went at last, away from Wallace, screaming into the night. People wept at the thought that they would never see their homes again, never see husbands or sons, those men holding hoses, dashing from one flareup to another. Goodbye, Wallace.

The biggest concern now was Providence Hospital, the pride of Wallace, looking like a European spa set against the Alps. It was cut off from the rest of town by the river. Earlier, the nuns had summoned carriages to evacuate. But when the bridge went down, livery stables said they had no way to get to the hospital. Crews went to work placing I-beams across the South Fork of the Coeur d'Alene, trying to fashion a rickety span. Inside the hospital were patients, nuns, nurses, doctors, and assorted workers. Also, as the night wore
on, people who said they were homeless, and feared death by fire, had asked for refuge in the hospital. The nuns could not turn them away. Trees close to the hospital went up like rockets as the nuns moved to evacuate the sick. There was still a train on the hospital's side of the river, a small branch line with coal cars and a caboose. This would have to be their rescue.

But the train engineer had a problem: the tracks nearest to the hospital went only one way, east, toward Montana. The latest word from other stations was that the big wooden trestles that held track on this route had caught fire. So, a choice: flee into the heart of the burning forest at night, on a line that might well plunge into ravines of flame, or stay and cook inside the hospital. The nuns decided to make a run for it on the train. They gathered their sick—those just a day or so removed from primitive operations and the chronically ill whom they cared for as part of their service—hauled them onto coal cars and caboose, and fled. Space was at a premium, as it had been on the evacuation trains, forcing several nuns to straddle a pile of ore.

"Wait!" came a cry as the train pulled out. "The basement. There are three patients still behind."

The tiniest of the nuns at Providence, Sister Antioch, ran from the train toward the hospital. She found her way to a basement thick with smoke. Three elderly patients were moaning in the dark. The nun helped them up one by one and led them outside. But by the time Sister Antioch had rescued them, the train had gone. The nun and her wards were left to fend for themselves.

Emma Pulaski and her daughter held tight to each other in the berm of crushed silt at the edge of a reservoir as the air around them heated. Neighbors had pleaded with her to get on one of the trains; if she didn't go, surely she would never live to see Sunday morning. But Emma had made her plan, a pact with her husband. In the stifling air of Saturday night and into Sunday morning, she watched from her refuge as fire transformed all that she knew as
home. "Wallace was a mass of flames," she wrote, and above her, "the flames leaped from one mountain to another until it seemed as though the whole world was afire." That world included her husband, of course, who was somewhere in the middle of the firestorm. From the relative safety of her redoubt, she tried to suppress thoughts of his horrid death.

"Ask God to save daddy and his men," Emma told her daughter.

After five hours inside the tunnel, the men who had followed Ed Pulaski started to stir. The air was thick with smoke and carbon monoxide; men gasped for breath, fearing suffocation or poisoning. Their bodies convulsed in darkness, flopping inside the tight corridor of the mine. An hour or so before dawn, a couple of the men moved toward the entrance, crawling over Pulaski's lifeless body.

"Come on outside, boys—the boss is dead."

"Like hell he is."

The last words spoken came from Pulaski himself, snapped to life perhaps by a small stream of noticeably cooler air. Pulaski tried to stand, but his legs were numb; he wobbled, bracing himself, struggling to get his footing. He could see out of one eye, and what he saw was a greyish white thicket of smoke, but no flaming orange. He dragged himself to the entrance, stepped outside. His body buckled in the first step, a drop, for the tunnel was dug into the side of a steep ravine with no level ground. His lips, throat, and mouth were parched, but when he bent over to drink from the creek, he gagged and spit it back. The water was warm, full of ashes.

A barely discernible light allowed the fire crew to look around and assess the damage. What had been all-encompassing green a day before was a horizontal forest of smoldering trees in grey, brown, and black. The woods had been leveled, trees atop trees, their roots facing up. Pulaski could not see a standing fir, a live fern, a huckleberry bush, a flower, or a blade of grass. The earth had been transformed, all living things changed by fire.

They took a head count and came up with five men dead.
Are
you sure?
Pulaski asked. They touched the bodies—one, two, three, four, five—slapped the faces, poured water over them. No pulse. No life. Yes, five men were gone, as were two horses inside the shaft. But forty-one men had made it alive, including the old Texas Ranger, Stockton, the man who had been given Pulaski's horse. When the horse fell, it backed up the water in the mine, creating a puddle about a foot deep. Stockton thought that two men had drowned in that puddle while they were unconscious. He stayed alive by planting his face in a pocket of air between the bodies.

"We have to move," Pulaski said. "We don't have any choice. We have to get down."

But how? Men pointed to their bare, blistered feet—the soles of their shoes had burned off. Some sat dazed, staring at a snag that crackled above them. Awake for some time, Pulaski still could not see at all out of one eye, and thought that the other eye would go as well. His boots were burned through at the bottom. His clothes were rags. The fire had seared his face, his hands, parts of his body.

"We have to move."

Domenico Bruno and Giacomo Viettone were huddled with five others in the little half-built root cellar on Joe Beauchamp's homestead when the wind knocked down nearly every tree in the surrounding area, carrying the fire with it. One big timber fell atop the hole, trapping the men and burning them at the same time. The firefighters who had chosen to stay put in the creek heard the screams of the men as flames roasted them in the pit. Just as sickening were the last cries of the man under the dead-weight clamp of a fallen tree. The big fir held him by his foot while the rest of his body burned. He clawed with his fingers, squirmed and kicked with his free leg, but could not break loose. About half a mile away, a lone timber worker, Arthur Hogue, watched the forest fall.

"Looking down the valley, one could see the fire coming on with a rush and roar," he wrote in a letter to his mother. "Flames would leap across from one summit to the other in one continuous stream
of fire ... It would have been a most beautiful sight had one not realized that in the next moment you might be caught in its fiery folds."

Precisely what killed the Italians is unknown — smoke inhalation, carbon monoxide poisoning, or trauma from flames. Their bodies were so burned and blackened they could not be identified, and their hands, with the skin gone, were clenched into fists.