History
The History of Fire and the Human Use of Fire in the Northern Rockies
History
The History of Fire and the Human Use of Fire in the Northern Rockies
History
The History of Fire in the Northern Rockies
Along with the Great Fires of 1910, the opening of the Flathead Reservation to non-Indian settlement led to the near total elimination of tribal traditions of burning the land. It also helped usher in a non-Indian approach to forestry.
The Photos Below
With the exception of the first photo, Logs on Lake Pend Oreille, all of the photographs in this series are from: "Report on Logged-Over Ponderosa Pine Lands on the Flathead Indian Reservation, Montana", by Harold Weaver. At the time of the report (1937), it had long been "a matter of common knowledge that large areas of what was originally excellent forest lands on the Flathead Reservation had been denuded" of all trees by aggressive logging and subsequent fires that consumed any regeneration. The report was done to document the need for replanting. Use the navigation bubbles at the bottom of the photo to move through the photos.
Sam Resurrection, who along with other tribal leaders fought the Flathead Allotment Act and opening of the Reservation to white settlement as a violation of the Hellgate Treaty. Photo circa 1915. Photo courtesy of Salish Pend d'Oreille Culture Committee.
Joseph Dixon (R-MT), author of the Flathead Allotment Act. Photo circa 1905.
Polley Lumber Company loading logs on a train, circa 1930. Photo by R.J. McKay Collection, K Ross Toole Archives, Mansfield Library, U of M.
Smokey the Bear and Chief Charlo, l to r back row: Susette Charlo, Chief Paul Charlo, Clarence Sonny Whitworth, Smokey, M.L. "Ozzie" Osborn (BIA forest manager); front row: Alexander "Sam" Clairmont, Walter McDonald (CSKT tribal chairman), Forrest Stone (BIA Superintendent)
Fire prevention poster circulated on the reservation circa 1950.
Flathead Reservation CCC personnel erecting the Ever Fire Lookout in May 1939. Photo courtesy CSKT Forestry Dept. with thanks to Roiann Matt.
Agnes Woodcock Indashola (1883-1978). Photo courtesy Tony Incashola, personal collection. All rights reserved.
The same expression of dissent—and overruling of dissent—was happening at the same time at the national level. At the 1935 convention of the Society of American Foresters, Professor H.H. Chapman of the Yale School of Forestry held a session that—for the first time in a high-level, public setting in nearly three decades—invited open challenging of the conventional wisdom on fire. Critiques and doubts erupted during the session. Among those most forcefully advocating for a radical revision of fire policy was Eelers Koch, a ranger on the Flathead National Forest who had served in the thick of the 1910 fires and had then worked for decades on making sure it didn’t happen again. As historian Stephen Pyne has written, Koch “now regarded ‘the whole history of the Forest Service’s attempt to control fire in the backcountry of the Selway and Clearwater’ as ‘one of the saddest chapters in the history of a high-minded and efficient public service.’ Despite ‘heroic effort,’ the country remained ‘swept again and again by the most uncontrollable conflagrations.’ In 1934, despite thousands of firefighters and unlimited dollars, crews had made no better progress than in 1910.” Koch had the courage to face the obvious truth—“the unquestionable fact that the country is in worse shape now than when we took charge of it.”xiii
Chapman’s revolutionary session at the SAF convention would bear fruit—but not for a very, very long time. Just as Lee Muck’s appeal for sustainable practices was shunted aside at Flathead, so the calls of Eelers Koch and others for a new fire policy were ignored in the US Forest Service. Indeed, beginning that same year, federal fire suppression efforts became far more ambitious. In April 1935, Chief Forester Ferdinand Augustus Silcox announced the 10 AM policy, which set the goal in every forest in the country that fires of any size and in any location were to be controlled by 10 AM the following day. This directive would govern national fire policy for decades.xiv
No agency would develop any differing policy until 1968, when the National Park Service began allowing some limited burning of lightning caused fires. Ten years later, the Forest Service began doing the same thing in some designated wilderness areas. By 1995, the agency’s policy had evolved to a position of suppressing bad fires and promoting good ones.
The emphasis on fire-fighting was always tied to the commodification of the forests, and in the middle decades of the twentieth century, the Forest Service became an agency less dedicated to safeguarding the nation’s resources than to protecting and delivering raw materials to the timber industry. As environmental historian Paul Hirt has pointed out, before World War II, 95% of the nation’s lumber came from private land. It was only after the war that the Forest Service began opening huge tracts of forest to industrial harvest. Between 1945 and 1960, over 65,000 miles of logging roads were built in the National Forests. Agency employment jumped from 4,000 in 1938 to 18,000 by 1955. During the 1950s, production soared from 3.5 billion board feet to 9.3 billion board feet per year.xv On the Flathead Reservation, despite years of appeals by tribal elders to put a stop to clearcutting, this remained the predominant method for many years.
During the same post-war period, the pace of tribal cultural loss was quickening. The IRA stopped but did not reverse the effects of the allotment act; most of the best land on the reservation remained in white ownership, most of the population was white, and now tribal children were attending public schools where they were a minority. The tribal way of life was further buffeted by industrial development, and then the enormous social dislocations of World War II. The result was a rapid loss of the cultural identity of the tribes, perhaps most tellingly reflected in the dramatic changes in native language retention. Almost all tribal members born before the opening of the reservation in 1910 were fluent in at least one of the native languages; perhaps fewer than 10% of tribal members born after World War II could speak either Salish or Kootenai.
Yet even as traditional Salish-Pend d’Oreille culture was in steep decline, and even as the great trees of the Flathead Reservation were being felled by chainsaws, the seeds of rebirth and recovery were being planted -- in some sense the delayed result of the movement toward tribal sovereignty begun by the IRA in 1934. Now, the idea of political self-rule was being gradually reconnected to the revitalization of traditional culture. During the 1970s, Congress passed a number of bills such as the American Indian Self- Determination and Education Assistance Act that the tribes used to expand their governmental operations, particularly in the area of natural resource management. At the same time, a number of elders and interested younger people, alarmed by the loss of cultural knowledge, organized to form Salish-Pend d’Oreille and Kootenai culture committees, dedicated to recording and teaching the language and traditional knowledge. The natural resource department developed at the same time, reflecting a renewed respect for traditional cultural perspectives, particularly in the area of environmental understanding.
Yet through the 1980s and much of the 1990s, the Forestry Department remained somewhat insulated from these changes. Part of the reason was certainly that logging continued to be one of the few steady sources of hard dollars for the tribes, bringing in millions in income and generating many high-paying jobs. And part of the reason was that it was one of the last tribal departments to be taken over directly by the tribal government. Until 1995, Forestry remained under the control of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
The takeover of the forestry program by the Tribal government impelled a comprehensive reassessment of forestry—and the use of fire—on the Flathead Reservation. In May 2000, after many months of study and meetings involving a wide range of tribal members, from professional foresters to traditional elders, the governing tribal council unanimously adopted a new management plan that in many ways stood as a revolutionary departure from previous policies. No longer would commodity lumber production be the primary driving force. The new plan put a premium on “the restoration of pre-European forest conditions,” with that goal being balanced “with the needs of sensitive species and human uses of the forest.” Where logging continued, it would now “mimic natural disturbances as much as possible.”
And once again, fire would be returned to the landscape in a widespread, systematic fashion: “Silvicultural treatments would be designed to reverse the effects of fire exclusion and undesirable forest practices of the past. Prescribed fire would be a major tool.” The new CSKT forest plan was informed by a new awareness of the environmental history of the region—a realization that while the state of the forests of the Northern Rockies had changed dramatically in the twentieth century, their basic ecology had not. The woods of Salish and Pend d’Oreille territory had evolved with fire, and they would always need fire. No matter how large and sophisticated the fire-fighting operations became, these forests would burn, sooner or later. The only question was when, and in what manner. The aggressive fire suppression measures implemented by both federal and tribal agencies, as it turned out, had only ensured that the trees would become crowded and diseased. Now, when the flames did come, the fire would be far more destructive and far less beneficial.
All of these lessons were an implicit part of the new forest plan. Once again, the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes were offering a model for the careful and wise stewardship of western forests that necessarily involved an expanded use of fire. In coming years, we will see how this plays out on the ground -- and in the woods. If the goals of the new forest plan are thoroughly implemented, the story of native people, fires, and forests in the northern Rockies will have come full circle. As Tony Incashola, the Director of the Salish-Pend d’Oreille Culture Committee, puts it, “we need to keep in mind as we go forward here to reintroduce fire, the reason we're doing it…to retain a culture, is to retain a way of life…look back to the mountains…Our religion is up there, our prayers. Everything that is as important to traditional people is there.”
__________________
i United States Court of Claims, The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the FlatheadReservation, Montana, v. The United States, No. 50233, Jan. 22, 1971, as amended April 23, 1971. 437 F.2d 458, 193 Ct.Cl. 801. Cowen, Chief Judge; Laramore, Durfee, Davis, Collins, Skelton, and Nichols, Judges; Harry E. Wood, Trial Commissioner. Quote is from Opinion of Harry E. Wood, Trial Commissioner, IV (d) p 9. In the Per Curiam, the judges state, “The court agrees with the trial commissioner’s recommended opinion of law and with his findings of fact which are adopted.”
ii Historical Research Associates (Missoula, Montana), Timber, Tribes, and Trust: A
History of BIA Forest Management on the Flathead Indian Reservation (1855-1975) (Dixon, MT: Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, 1977), 69 and 71. The book alternately states the 1920 figure as 53 or 598 million board feet.
iii Annual Reports of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office), 1906: 90-91, 1907: 71-72, 1908: 57.
iv Timber, Tribes, and Trust, 50-51. The book erroneously states that this was the first substantial commercial sale authorized by the government on the reservation. See above, FN 3.
v Timber, Tribes, and Trust, 50-51, 61, 76.
vi For years, this area had been known to government officials and logging interests. In 1891, for example, US Indian Agent Peter Ronan wrote, “on Crow Creek....excellent timber of white pine Tamerac and fir grow in the surrounding country and extends far back into the mountains in almost inexhaustible quantities.” Ronan to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1891. National Archives, Washington, D.C., Record Group 75 (Bureau of Indian Affairs), Letter Received by the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1881-1907, document number 1891-25090.
viiTimber, Tribes, and Trust, 62-64. Other major timber sales during the period included the Heron Lumber Co (Edward Donlan), 24 million board feet logged in the Camas Creek Unit in 1919; Henry Matt, 46 million board feet logged in the Lower Frog area near Schley in 1921; and the Dewey Lumber Co., 49 million board feet logged in the Big Arm area in 1923. Ibid, pp. 69, 76-77.
viii Supt. Charles Coe to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Sept. 9, 1924, National Archives and Records Administration, Rocky Mountain Regional Branch, Denver, Record Group 75 (Bureau of Indian Affairs), Flathead Agency Files, 8NS-075-96-320, Box 10, Misc Letters 1910-1925, folder 5x - FRC 26641. Forest Guard to Supt. Theodore Sharp, 1917, quoted in Timber, Tribes, and Trust, 63.
ix Timber, Tribes, and Trust, 91.
x “Report on Logged Over Ponderosa Pine Lands,” National Archives and Records Administration, Rocky Mountain Regional Branch, Denver. Record Group 75 (Bureau of Indian Affairs), Flathead Agency Files, Box 299 -- “Correspondence & Reports -- Fire, Weather, Training, 1920-1950.”
xi Timber, Tribes, and Trust, 97.
xii Acting Director of Forestry J.D. Lamont to Supt. Coulsen C. Wright, June 21, 1944, National Archives and Records Administration, Rocky Mountain Regional Branch, Denver, Record Group 75 (Bureau of Indian Affairs), Flathead Agency Files, Box 64, “Special Indian Office Letters.”
xiii Stephen Pyne, Year of the Fires: The Story of the Great Fires of 1910 ( New York: Viking, 2001), 265-
266. Pyne notes that Koch felt the building of roads was not only tied to an impractical, ultimately futile
attempt to suppress fire, but was also destroying the backcountry. See his essay “The Passing of the Lolo
Trail,” in his book, Forty Years a Forester (Missoula, Mountain Press, 1998).
xiv Pyne, 267-268.
xv Paul Hirt, A Conspiracy of Optimism: Management of the National Forests Since
World War II (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994).
Along with the Great Fires of 1910, the opening of the Flathead Reservation to non-Indian settlement led to the near total elimination of tribal traditions of burning the land. It also helped usher in a non-Indian approach to forestry.
The Photos Below
With the exception of the first photo, Logs on Lake Pend Oreille, all of the photographs in this series are from: "Report on Logged-Over Ponderosa Pine Lands on the Flathead Indian Reservation, Montana", by Harold Weaver. At the time of the report (1937), it had long been "a matter of common knowledge that large areas of what was originally excellent forest lands on the Flathead Reservation had been denuded" of all trees by aggressive logging and subsequent fires that consumed any regeneration. The report was done to document the need for replanting. Use the navigation bubbles at the bottom of the photo to move through the photos.
The Photos Below
With the exception of the first photo, Logs on Lake Pend Oreille, all of the photographs in this series are from: "Report on Logged-Over Ponderosa Pine Lands on the Flathead Indian Reservation, Montana", by Harold Weaver. At the time of the report (1937), it had long been "a matter of common knowledge that large areas of what was originally excellent forest lands on the Flathead Reservation had been denuded" of all trees by aggressive logging and subsequent fires that consumed any regeneration. The report was done to document the need for replanting. Use the navigation bubbles at the bottom of the photo to move through the photos.
In 1910, two cataclysmic events forever transformed the economy and ecology of the Flathead Indian Reservation. One was the Great Fires of August, which swept across the heart of Salish-Pend d’Oreille territory, and subsequently led to the dramatic expansion of fire suppression efforts across the American West. The other was the Congressionally mandated opening of the Flathead Reservation to non-Indian settlement—an abrogation of the Hellgate Treaty of 1855, which had “reserved” the area for the “exclusive use and benefit” of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. Both of these events led to the further marginalization of tribal ways of life, and the near total elimination of tribal traditions of burning the land. And both helped bring the prevailing non-Indian approach to forestry—a combination of fire suppression and heavy logging of old-growth timber—onto the reservation itself.
The opening of the reservation to non-Indian settlement was accomplished through the Flathead Allotment Act, a legislative spin-off of the General Allotment Act or Dawes Severalty Act passed by Congress in 1887. The Dawes Act set up the basic policy of allotment—a scheme that broke up communally-held tribal lands into tracts assigned to individual Indians, and then declared any remaining lands within the reservation to be “surplus” and threw them open to non-Indian homesteaders. Because each reservation was established by a specific treaty with specific language regarding lands and tribal sovereignty, Congress had to pass separate bills applying the General Allotment Act to the various reservations in the years after 1887.
Sam Resurrection
Joseph Dixon
Polley Lumber Co. loading logs
Smokey the Bear and Chief Charlo
Fire prevention poster circa 1950
Erecting Evaro fire lookout in 1939.
Agnes Woodcock Incashola
The same expression of dissent—and overruling of dissent—was happening at the same time at the national level. At the 1935 convention of the Society of American Foresters, Professor H.H. Chapman of the Yale School of Forestry held a session that—for the first time in a high-level, public setting in nearly three decades—invited open challenging of the conventional wisdom on fire. Critiques and doubts erupted during the session. Among those most forcefully advocating for a radical revision of fire policy was Eelers Koch, a ranger on the Flathead National Forest who had served in the thick of the 1910 fires and had then worked for decades on making sure it didn’t happen again. As historian Stephen Pyne has written, Koch “now regarded ‘the whole history of the Forest Service’s attempt to control fire in the backcountry of the Selway and Clearwater’ as ‘one of the saddest chapters in the history of a high-minded and efficient public service.’ Despite ‘heroic effort,’ the country remained ‘swept again and again by the most uncontrollable conflagrations.’ In 1934, despite thousands of firefighters and unlimited dollars, crews had made no better progress than in 1910.” Koch had the courage to face the obvious truth—“the unquestionable fact that the country is in worse shape now than when we took charge of it.”xiii
Chapman’s revolutionary session at the SAF convention would bear fruit—but not for a very, very long time. Just as Lee Muck’s appeal for sustainable practices was shunted aside at Flathead, so the calls of Eelers Koch and others for a new fire policy were ignored in the US Forest Service. Indeed, beginning that same year, federal fire suppression efforts became far more ambitious. In April 1935, Chief Forester Ferdinand Augustus Silcox announced the 10 AM policy, which set the goal in every forest in the country that fires of any size and in any location were to be controlled by 10 AM the following day. This directive would govern national fire policy for decades.xiv
No agency would develop any differing policy until 1968, when the National Park Service began allowing some limited burning of lightning caused fires. Ten years later, the Forest Service began doing the same thing in some designated wilderness areas. By 1995, the agency’s policy had evolved to a position of suppressing bad fires and promoting good ones.
The emphasis on fire-fighting was always tied to the commodification of the forests, and in the middle decades of the twentieth century, the Forest Service became an agency less dedicated to safeguarding the nation’s resources than to protecting and delivering raw materials to the timber industry. As environmental historian Paul Hirt has pointed out, before World War II, 95% of the nation’s lumber came from private land. It was only after the war that the Forest Service began opening huge tracts of forest to industrial harvest. Between 1945 and 1960, over 65,000 miles of logging roads were built in the National Forests. Agency employment jumped from 4,000 in 1938 to 18,000 by 1955. During the 1950s, production soared from 3.5 billion board feet to 9.3 billion board feet per year.xv On the Flathead Reservation, despite years of appeals by tribal elders to put a stop to clearcutting, this remained the predominant method for many years.
During the same post-war period, the pace of tribal cultural loss was quickening. The IRA stopped but did not reverse the effects of the allotment act; most of the best land on the reservation remained in white ownership, most of the population was white, and now tribal children were attending public schools where they were a minority. The tribal way of life was further buffeted by industrial development, and then the enormous social dislocations of World War II. The result was a rapid loss of the cultural identity of the tribes, perhaps most tellingly reflected in the dramatic changes in native language retention. Almost all tribal members born before the opening of the reservation in 1910 were fluent in at least one of the native languages; perhaps fewer than 10% of tribal members born after World War II could speak either Salish or Kootenai.
Yet even as traditional Salish-Pend d’Oreille culture was in steep decline, and even as the great trees of the Flathead Reservation were being felled by chainsaws, the seeds of rebirth and recovery were being planted -- in some sense the delayed result of the movement toward tribal sovereignty begun by the IRA in 1934. Now, the idea of political self-rule was being gradually reconnected to the revitalization of traditional culture. During the 1970s, Congress passed a number of bills such as the American Indian Self- Determination and Education Assistance Act that the tribes used to expand their governmental operations, particularly in the area of natural resource management. At the same time, a number of elders and interested younger people, alarmed by the loss of cultural knowledge, organized to form Salish-Pend d’Oreille and Kootenai culture committees, dedicated to recording and teaching the language and traditional knowledge. The natural resource department developed at the same time, reflecting a renewed respect for traditional cultural perspectives, particularly in the area of environmental understanding.
Yet through the 1980s and much of the 1990s, the Forestry Department remained somewhat insulated from these changes. Part of the reason was certainly that logging continued to be one of the few steady sources of hard dollars for the tribes, bringing in millions in income and generating many high-paying jobs. And part of the reason was that it was one of the last tribal departments to be taken over directly by the tribal government. Until 1995, Forestry remained under the control of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
The takeover of the forestry program by the Tribal government impelled a comprehensive reassessment of forestry—and the use of fire—on the Flathead Reservation. In May 2000, after many months of study and meetings involving a wide range of tribal members, from professional foresters to traditional elders, the governing tribal council unanimously adopted a new management plan that in many ways stood as a revolutionary departure from previous policies. No longer would commodity lumber production be the primary driving force. The new plan put a premium on “the restoration of pre-European forest conditions,” with that goal being balanced “with the needs of sensitive species and human uses of the forest.” Where logging continued, it would now “mimic natural disturbances as much as possible.”
And once again, fire would be returned to the landscape in a widespread, systematic fashion: “Silvicultural treatments would be designed to reverse the effects of fire exclusion and undesirable forest practices of the past. Prescribed fire would be a major tool.” The new CSKT forest plan was informed by a new awareness of the environmental history of the region—a realization that while the state of the forests of the Northern Rockies had changed dramatically in the twentieth century, their basic ecology had not. The woods of Salish and Pend d’Oreille territory had evolved with fire, and they would always need fire. No matter how large and sophisticated the fire-fighting operations became, these forests would burn, sooner or later. The only question was when, and in what manner. The aggressive fire suppression measures implemented by both federal and tribal agencies, as it turned out, had only ensured that the trees would become crowded and diseased. Now, when the flames did come, the fire would be far more destructive and far less beneficial.
All of these lessons were an implicit part of the new forest plan. Once again, the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes were offering a model for the careful and wise stewardship of western forests that necessarily involved an expanded use of fire. In coming years, we will see how this plays out on the ground -- and in the woods. If the goals of the new forest plan are thoroughly implemented, the story of native people, fires, and forests in the northern Rockies will have come full circle. As Tony Incashola, the Director of the Salish-Pend d’Oreille Culture Committee, puts it, “we need to keep in mind as we go forward here to reintroduce fire, the reason we're doing it…to retain a culture, is to retain a way of life…look back to the mountains…Our religion is up there, our prayers. Everything that is as important to traditional people is there.”
__________________
i United States Court of Claims, The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the FlatheadReservation, Montana, v. The United States, No. 50233, Jan. 22, 1971, as amended April 23, 1971. 437 F.2d 458, 193 Ct.Cl. 801. Cowen, Chief Judge; Laramore, Durfee, Davis, Collins, Skelton, and Nichols, Judges; Harry E. Wood, Trial Commissioner. Quote is from Opinion of Harry E. Wood, Trial Commissioner, IV (d) p 9. In the Per Curiam, the judges state, “The court agrees with the trial commissioner’s recommended opinion of law and with his findings of fact which are adopted.”
ii Historical Research Associates (Missoula, Montana), Timber, Tribes, and Trust: A
History of BIA Forest Management on the Flathead Indian Reservation (1855-1975) (Dixon, MT: Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, 1977), 69 and 71. The book alternately states the 1920 figure as 53 or 598 million board feet.
iii Annual Reports of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office), 1906: 90-91, 1907: 71-72, 1908: 57.
iv Timber, Tribes, and Trust, 50-51. The book erroneously states that this was the first substantial commercial sale authorized by the government on the reservation. See above, FN 3.
v Timber, Tribes, and Trust, 50-51, 61, 76.
vi For years, this area had been known to government officials and logging interests. In 1891, for example, US Indian Agent Peter Ronan wrote, “on Crow Creek....excellent timber of white pine Tamerac and fir grow in the surrounding country and extends far back into the mountains in almost inexhaustible quantities.” Ronan to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1891. National Archives, Washington, D.C., Record Group 75 (Bureau of Indian Affairs), Letter Received by the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1881-1907, document number 1891-25090.
viiTimber, Tribes, and Trust, 62-64. Other major timber sales during the period included the Heron Lumber Co (Edward Donlan), 24 million board feet logged in the Camas Creek Unit in 1919; Henry Matt, 46 million board feet logged in the Lower Frog area near Schley in 1921; and the Dewey Lumber Co., 49 million board feet logged in the Big Arm area in 1923. Ibid, pp. 69, 76-77.
viii Supt. Charles Coe to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Sept. 9, 1924, National Archives and Records Administration, Rocky Mountain Regional Branch, Denver, Record Group 75 (Bureau of Indian Affairs), Flathead Agency Files, 8NS-075-96-320, Box 10, Misc Letters 1910-1925, folder 5x - FRC 26641. Forest Guard to Supt. Theodore Sharp, 1917, quoted in Timber, Tribes, and Trust, 63.
ix Timber, Tribes, and Trust, 91.
x “Report on Logged Over Ponderosa Pine Lands,” National Archives and Records Administration, Rocky Mountain Regional Branch, Denver. Record Group 75 (Bureau of Indian Affairs), Flathead Agency Files, Box 299 -- “Correspondence & Reports -- Fire, Weather, Training, 1920-1950.”
xi Timber, Tribes, and Trust, 97.
xii Acting Director of Forestry J.D. Lamont to Supt. Coulsen C. Wright, June 21, 1944, National Archives and Records Administration, Rocky Mountain Regional Branch, Denver, Record Group 75 (Bureau of Indian Affairs), Flathead Agency Files, Box 64, “Special Indian Office Letters.”
xiii Stephen Pyne, Year of the Fires: The Story of the Great Fires of 1910 ( New York: Viking, 2001), 265-
266. Pyne notes that Koch felt the building of roads was not only tied to an impractical, ultimately futile
attempt to suppress fire, but was also destroying the backcountry. See his essay “The Passing of the Lolo
Trail,” in his book, Forty Years a Forester (Missoula, Mountain Press, 1998).
xiv Pyne, 267-268.
xv Paul Hirt, A Conspiracy of Optimism: Management of the National Forests Since
World War II (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994).