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

In August of 1910, millions of acres — an area perhaps two to three times the size of the entire state of New Jersey — burned across the heart of traditional Salish and Pend d’Oreille territory. The story of the Great Fires and their relation to tribal burning is fascinating and contains important lessons for how we manage lands today.


My Image

Mouth of the Nicholson adit near Wallace, ID, just after 1910 fire. USFS photo.

My Image

Agnes Vanderburg, circa 1984

View a Map of the 1910 Fires

Salish elder Agnes Vanderburg, who was born in 1900, told of a time when day suddenly turned into night. She recalled that when she was a girl of about ten, the skies turned black one day. Smoke and soot filled the skies. Ash fell heavily, like black snow. Agnes remembered how frightened she was as the people huddled inside and used kerosene lamps in the middle of the day.

That apocalyptic scene was one elder’s account of what became known as the Great Fire of 1910. It was the fire that shaped modern fire and forest history in the West — not only because of the direct effects of the flames on the trees, but also — as we will see in the next segment — because of the way this fire ended up reshaping federal policy.

The most immediate causes of the Great Fires were clear. Late winter had brought unusually heavy snows, followed by an unprecedentedly warm, dry spring, and then the driest, hottest summer on record. In July, lightning storms ignited fires across northern Idaho and western Montana.

Other fires erupted along the railroads that now crossed the mountains of the region. Still others were set by trappers, hunters, hobos, settlers — and, doubtless, Indian people. On the Flathead Reservation itself, Superintendent Frederick Morgan asked on August 10 for two companies of troops to help fight the fires. i

Out of those ignition points, the fires flared up repeatedly, and then finally exploded in the epic “Big Blowup” of August 20-21, 1910. As fire historian Stephen Pyne has written, the blowup “shattered vast patches of Washington, Oregon, and especially Idaho and Montana. It flung smoke to New England; its soot sank into Greenland ice….Towering flames burned conifer stands like prairie grass and came over the ridges, as one survivor recalled, with the sound of a thousand trains rushing over a thousand steel trestles. One ranger said simply, the mountains roared….Farms, mining camps, trestles, hobo camps, and whole towns cracked and burned. Smoke billowed up in columns dense as volcanic blasts, while the fire’s convection sucked in air from all sides, snapping mature cedar and white pine like toothpicks, spawning firewhirls like miniature tornadoes, flinging sparks like broadcast seed. Those on the lines heard savage thunder and felt a heat that could melt iron and buffeted in winds that could scatter whole trees like leaves and stared, senseless, into smoke too dense to see their own hands before them. Crews dropped their saws and mattocks and fled. That day seventy-eight firefighters died.” ii

Mercifully, rain and snow began to fall just a few days after the Big Blowup. As Salish elder Eneas Vanderburg (Agnes’s eldest son) recalls, “1910, I think it was….that fire went right on over…to Seeley Lake, and…the only way they put that out, was the snow. When the season changed, that's what put the fire out.”

By that time, millions of acres — an area perhaps two to three times the size of the entire state of New Jersey — had burned across the heart of traditional Salish and Pend d’Oreille territory. On National Forest lands alone in the Northern Rockies, over 2.5 million acres burned; that does not even include lands within Indian reservations. Neither does it count the burned acreages of private lands, or in national parks, or on other public domain lands. iii And scores of people died. The scars from the fires remained for decades. An area on the Idaho-Montana border is still known as the “Great Burn.” And as Eneas recalls, the fires also left their mark on the Flathead Reservation landscape:

“Later on when I was grown up, you could look from Evaro up there, it was just bare; you could see where the fire went through all the way over through Placid Lake and up that area.”

The fires of 1910, in fact, burned most intensely over an area that was the overlapping territory of the Salish, Pend d’Oreille, Coeur d’Alene, and Nez Perce. Stephen Pyne has noted that “The winds riled old burns all over the region. But their main force smashed with particular power along the Bitterroots between [Lake] Pend [d’]Oreille in the north and the Selway River in the south. Four great blotches of fire scoured out the landscape in roughly east-west swaths.” iv

But beyond the dry winter, beyond the wet spring, beyond the hot dry summer, were there other causes of the fires of 1910? Why did they burn across the very area that had so long been managed with fire by the tribes of western Montana and northern Idaho? In our next segment, we explore some answers to those questions.
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iHistorical 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), 43.
ii Stephen Pyne, Year of the Fires: The Story of the Great Fires of 1910 (New York: Viking, 2001), 2-3.
iii Ibid, 201.
iv Ibid, 129

In August of 1910, millions of acres — an area perhaps two to three times the size of the entire state of New Jersey — burned across the heart of traditional Salish and Pend d’Oreille territory. The story of the Great Fires and their relation to tribal burning is fascinating and contains important lessons for how we manage lands today.

My Image

Mouth of the Nicholson adit near Wallace, ID, just after 1910 fire. USFS photo.

View a Map of the 1910 Fires


My Image

Agnes Vanderburg, circa 1984

Salish elder Agnes Vanderburg, who was born in 1900, told of a time when day suddenly turned into night. She recalled that when she was a girl of about ten, the skies turned black one day. Smoke and soot filled the skies. Ash fell heavily, like black snow. Agnes remembered how frightened she was as the people huddled inside and used kerosene lamps in the middle of the day.

That apocalyptic scene was one elder’s account of what became known as the Great Fire of 1910. It was the fire that shaped modern fire and forest history in the West — not only because of the direct effects of the flames on the trees, but also — as we will see in the next segment — because of the way this fire ended up reshaping federal policy.

The most immediate causes of the Great Fires were clear. Late winter had brought unusually heavy snows, followed by an unprecedentedly warm, dry spring, and then the driest, hottest summer on record. In July, lightning storms ignited fires across northern Idaho and western Montana.

Other fires erupted along the railroads that now crossed the mountains of the region. Still others were set by trappers, hunters, hobos, settlers — and, doubtless, Indian people. On the Flathead Reservation itself, Superintendent Frederick Morgan asked on August 10 for two companies of troops to help fight the fires. i

Out of those ignition points, the fires flared up repeatedly, and then finally exploded in the epic “Big Blowup” of August 20-21, 1910. As fire historian Stephen Pyne has written, the blowup “shattered vast patches of Washington, Oregon, and especially Idaho and Montana. It flung smoke to New England; its soot sank into Greenland ice….Towering flames burned conifer stands like prairie grass and came over the ridges, as one survivor recalled, with the sound of a thousand trains rushing over a thousand steel trestles. One ranger said simply, the mountains roared….Farms, mining camps, trestles, hobo camps, and whole towns cracked and burned. Smoke billowed up in columns dense as volcanic blasts, while the fire’s convection sucked in air from all sides, snapping mature cedar and white pine like toothpicks, spawning firewhirls like miniature tornadoes, flinging sparks like broadcast seed. Those on the lines heard savage thunder and felt a heat that could melt iron and buffeted in winds that could scatter whole trees like leaves and stared, senseless, into smoke too dense to see their own hands before them. Crews dropped their saws and mattocks and fled. That day seventy-eight firefighters died.” ii

Mercifully, rain and snow began to fall just a few days after the Big Blowup. As Salish elder Eneas Vanderburg (Agnes’s eldest son) recalls, “1910, I think it was….that fire went right on over…to Seeley Lake, and…the only way they put that out, was the snow. When the season changed, that's what put the fire out.”

By that time, millions of acres — an area perhaps two to three times the size of the entire state of New Jersey — had burned across the heart of traditional Salish and Pend d’Oreille territory. On National Forest lands alone in the Northern Rockies, over 2.5 million acres burned; that does not even include lands within Indian reservations. Neither does it count the burned acreages of private lands, or in national parks, or on other public domain lands. iii And scores of people died. The scars from the fires remained for decades. An area on the Idaho-Montana border is still known as the “Great Burn.” And as Eneas recalls, the fires also left their mark on the Flathead Reservation landscape:

“Later on when I was grown up, you could look from Evaro up there, it was just bare; you could see where the fire went through all the way over through Placid Lake and up that area.”

The fires of 1910, in fact, burned most intensely over an area that was the overlapping territory of the Salish, Pend d’Oreille, Coeur d’Alene, and Nez Perce. Stephen Pyne has noted that “The winds riled old burns all over the region. But their main force smashed with particular power along the Bitterroots between [Lake] Pend [d’]Oreille in the north and the Selway River in the south. Four great blotches of fire scoured out the landscape in roughly east-west swaths.” iv

But beyond the dry winter, beyond the wet spring, beyond the hot dry summer, were there other causes of the fires of 1910? Why did they burn across the very area that had so long been managed with fire by the tribes of western Montana and northern Idaho? In our next segment, we explore some answers to those questions.

________________
iHistorical 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), 43.
ii Stephen Pyne, Year of the Fires: The Story of the Great Fires of 1910 (New York: Viking, 2001), 2-3.
iii Ibid, 201.
iv Ibid, 129