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

Today we know that the weather in the summer of 1910 was not the only cause of the Great Fires that raged in the summer of that year. It is likely that a more fundamental and powerful cause was the removal of Indian people and Indian fire regimes in the preceding decades.


My Image
My Image

Large pines at Lick Creek in 1909 (left) and Lick Creek same location in the decades after Tribal burning was suppressed. USFS photo.

View the Leiberg Photos

The Great Fires of 1910 have been widely misunderstood by non-Indians for most of the past century. Today, however, tribal perspectives from elders, along with the work of scholars such as Stephen Pyne, Steve Arno, and Stephen Barrett, are helping reveal that the fires did not simply result from a brief period of drought and heat, followed by summer lightning storms. That was certainly an immediate precipitating factor, as was the completion of the Milwaukee Road railway through the heart of the area that would burn; indeed, the railroad initiated freight service in July 1910, the very month when the fires began, and out of 128 Class-A blazes that had ignited in the Coeur d’Alene district by the middle of August, 102 were located along the Milwaukee line.i

But there were deeper and more powerful causes for the fires. It is difficult to weigh the relative importance of weather and the human history that led up to 1910. But certainly a powerful contributor to the Great Fires of 1910 was the removal of Indian people, and Indian fire regimes, from the land over the preceding decades.

That exclusion of Indian burning quickly resulted in the overgrowth of once open forests and the massive buildup of fine and woody fuels. As we have seen in other segments of this DVD, since the time of the Hellgate Treaty, Salish and Pend d’Oreille people had been gradually prevented from utilizing their “usual and accustomed places,” which the treaty was supposed to guarantee to them. The Bitterroot Salish were finally forced out of their homeland and onto the Flathead Reservation in 1891. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Salish and Pend d’Oreille people, and members of other tribes, were systematically harassed and threatened with violence for exercising their off-reservation rights, as we saw in our examination of the Swan Massacre of 1908. Even in places where tribal people still were allowed to live, to some extent, by their traditional ways — such as on the Flathead Reservation itself — non-Indian authorities used threats and the force of law to prevent their use of fire.

The history of suppression of Salish-Pend d’Oreille burning certainly accords with the broad regional picture of transformation painted by Stephen Pyne in Year of the Fires: “What all this meant in the field was that the removal of Indian burning had further destabilized the old regimes, had, in particular, stirred more fuels into the cauldron. By 1910 routine burning by Indians in the greater Northwest was twenty to forty years in the past. For sites, like grasslands, that had experienced near-annual burning, woody scrub was invading the scene and locally overwhelming it. Spared the purging flame, sagebrush and juniper especially rooted and thrived. For forests like those of ponderosa pine that had known fire on a two- to eight-year rhythm, needles and windfall and clusters of young saplings crowded the land ‘thick as the hair on a dog’s back.’ Forests more infrequently visited by fire absorbed the loss most easily; forty years meant less when fires had come every four hundred years than when they had arrived every five. The former might still be within the prevailing cycle of fire’s return; the latter might have missed eight passes of the flame.” ii

Pyne’s wonderful history notwithstanding, more research needs to be done on some key questions about the history behind the 1910 fires. Can we conclude that in the specific areas where native fire regimes had been eliminated for the longest time, the fires of 1910 burned fiercest? Can we conclude that in areas where frequent burning had continued (either by Indian people themselves or, in some similar form, by non-Indian newcomers), the fires were less intense and less widespread? Is it possible to compare with any precision the impact of the Great Fires on places where different kinds of burning — native burning, settler burning, prospector and transient burning — had been practiced in the preceding decades, and in areas where fire had been more thoroughly suppressed?

Maps of areas burned over in 1910 showed the Priest River area in northern Idaho, a part of Pend d’Oreille aboriginal territory, basically untouched, while the nearby country southwest of Lake Coeur d’Alene was utterly scorched. This could be explained as happenstance -- perhaps lightning simply did not strike the Priest River country, but did ignite areas farther south and west, where the foothills of the northern Bitterroot mountains rose from the Coeur d’Alene basin. But it seems a remarkable coincidence that just ten years earlier, in 1900, the famed forester John B. Leiberg, who was examining the region as part of the U.S. Geological Survey’s historic inventory of the nation’s new public forests, reported still-extensive burning of undergrowth in the Priest River Forest Reserve.

It is worth noting that Leiberg was firmly in line with the majority of foresters in seeing Indian burning as an ignorant custom that generally “devastated” the woods. In the Priest River Forest Reserve, Leiberg reported,
“one meets with burned areas everywhere – in the old growth, in the second growth, in the young growth, and where the seedlings that are beginning to cover the deforested areas have just commenced to obtain a fair hold. The burnt tracts are in large blocks, thousands of acres in extent, and in small patches of 15 to 50 acres which extend in all directions through the forest, which at a distance is apparently green; sometimes they are in broad swaths, sometimes in narrow, tortuous windings just sufficient to open a lane for the destructive high winds to tear the living forest down. The burnt areas are scattered all over the reserve, but the largest amount of damage lies within the zone of the white pine, by reason of its greater extent and peculiar susceptibility to destructive fires.” iii

Yet Leiberg also noted differences between the fires of “ages ago” – obviously, native burning and lightning fires – and the fires of “modern times” which he said began about 30 years before his examination (ie., in the 1860s). Leiberg acknowledged that the landscapes produced by the old fires had younger trees “with very old trees in their midst.” The newer fires, which he attributed mainly to “prospectors, hunters, and trappers,” along with wagon road supervisors, were obviously done for different reasons, and had different effects. All of these factors need to be carefully examined as we unravel the complex history behind the fires of 1910.

Farther south, another puzzle emerges. The western slope of the Bitterroot Range saw some of the most widespread burning during the “Big Blowup.” Yet some of the very areas that burned in 1910 seem to be marked as “burned over” by Leiberg, who examined and mapped the west slope of the Bitterroots in the late 1890s – barely a decade before. What does this tell us? Were Leiberg’s “burned over” areas all completely denuded, or was much of that acreage patchy? How precise were the maps – either Leiberg’s, or those of the areas burned in 1910? And again, how can we determine which areas were burned under native fire regimes, and which by non-Indian newcomers, with doubtless widely carrying effects? As Pyne has remarked, “the whole system was becoming unhinged.”iv

In considering these questions, it is also worth looking closely at Leiberg’s descriptions of the Bitterroot Forest Reserve, in the heart of Salish aboriginal territory. Leiberg stated that the forest also had been “ravaged” by “immense fires…both in the past and in recent times. The only areas containing any considerable quantities of old growth are the ones….existing northeast of the Grave Mountains and the yellow-pine tracts in the Lower Lochsa and Lolo basins.”

But as Pyne notes, Leiberg also observed that in the Bitterroot basin, “grasses carried the fires rapidly through yellow pine [and thus] they did minor lasting damage save, as always, to the thinning of the forest.” He noted enormous ponderosa pines in places that had been managed with fire for centuries by native people, such as the terraces above Grantsdale on the west side of the Bitterroot River. “The fires in the Bitterroot Basin have been as extensive as elsewhere in the West,” Leiberg wrote, “but have done far less damage to the merchantable timber.” He admitted that “probably not more than 5 per cent” of the “pure yellow-pine or the mixed yellow pine and red-fir growths has been destroyed.” He even posed the question of why native people burned the forest, but accepted the statement of “an educated Nez Perce, with whom I conversed regardinig the matter, who] stated that forest fires were never started through design.” As Pyne emphasizes, none of these considerations softened Leiberg’s final judgment of fire as “evil, without a single redeeming feature.” v

Finally, heavy logging began in earnest in the Bitterroot following completion of the Missoula and Bitter Root Valley Railroad in 1888. Elwood E. Hart, an early non-Indian settler, recalled the first mills established near Darby in 1888 and 1890. The West and East Forks of the Bitterroots were heavily logged in the 1890s by the Kendall brothers. “A beautiful stand of pine trees” were felled near Fern Creek and Tin Cup Creek in 1893. Another early settler, Powell Clayton Siria, recalled that “from ’92 to June of ’96 the logging and the river drives were in full blast – the logs were driven down the [Bitterroot] river to the Hamilton Sawmill erected by Marcus Daly.” So by 1910, at least in the Bitterroot Valley, many of the old trees were already long gone. The “fireproof” forests of widely spaced old growth ponderosa pine had already been transformed into a very different ecosystem, more prone to fires of all kinds. vi

The history behind the fires of 1910 is still only partly told, and still deserves more rigorous inquiry. We still don’t know how all the pieces of the puzzle fit together — the complicated factors of long and short term weather cycles, of Indian-white relations, of non-Indian settlement patterns, of railroads and sawmills and the economic history of the region. But it is clear that the displacement of native peoples and native fire regimes is a crucial part of that story, and one that until now has been given too little prominence.

___________________
iStephen Pyne, Year of the Fires: The Story of the Great Fires of 1910 (New York: Viking, 2001), 44-45. Pyne says that “[Rail] also hauled in wholesale people with little ecological understanding of the opened lands. On its tracks floated a vast flotsam of westering folk, some frontiersmen, many immigrants, most with a poor appreciation for how fire and place had accommodated each other. What had thrived for centuries, if not millennia, under one kind of fire regime found itself upended. Old fires were removed, old fuels left to hoard. New fires kindled, and whole landscapes were crunched to stoke whatever spark might spring from machine, torch, or lightning….” See also Steve McCarter, Guide to the Milwaukee Road in Montana (Helena: Montana Historical Society Press, 1992).
iiPyne, 65.
iii John B. Leiberg, “Priest River Forest Reserve” and “Bitterroot Forest Reserve,” in Henry Gannet, ed., Twentieth Annual Report of the United States Geological Survey (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1900)
ivPyne, telephone interview, July 26, 2005. In Year of the Fires, 61, Pyne notes that the settlers “were often more careful than passersby in how they handled fire; they would join fire crews if flame threatened their property. The real, the spreading infection came with the torrent of prospectors, loggers, rail camp workers, shepherds, hunters, vagrants, adventurers, and other wanderers and camp followers, who set fires freely but did note have to live with the aftermath of those burns.”
vJohn B. Leiberg, “Bitterroot Forest Reserve,” (eastern portion) in Henry Gannet, ed., Nineteenth Annual Report of the United States Geological Survey, 1897-98 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1899), 269, 275-276, and Leiberg, “Bitterroot Forest Reserve,” (western portion) in Henry Gannet, ed., Twentieth Annual Report of the United States Geological Survey, 1899(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1900), 387, 388
viBitterroot Valley Historical Society, Bitterroot Trails, Volume 1 (Darby, MT: Bitter Root Valley Historical Society, 1982), 282, 284, 263, 276.

Today we know that the weather in the summer of 1910 was not the only cause of the Great Fires that raged in the summer of that year. It is likely that a more fundamental and powerful cause was the removal of Indian people and Indian fire regimes in the preceding decades.

My Image
My Image

Large pines at Lick Creek in 1909 (left) and Lick Creek same location in the decades after Tribal burning was suppressed. USFS photo.

View the Leiberg Photos


The Great Fires of 1910 have been widely misunderstood by non-Indians for most of the past century. Today, however, tribal perspectives from elders, along with the work of scholars such as Stephen Pyne, Steve Arno, and Stephen Barrett, are helping reveal that the fires did not simply result from a brief period of drought and heat, followed by summer lightning storms. That was certainly an immediate precipitating factor, as was the completion of the Milwaukee Road railway through the heart of the area that would burn; indeed, the railroad initiated freight service in July 1910, the very month when the fires began, and out of 128 Class-A blazes that had ignited in the Coeur d’Alene district by the middle of August, 102 were located along the Milwaukee line.i

But there were deeper and more powerful causes for the fires. It is difficult to weigh the relative importance of weather and the human history that led up to 1910. But certainly a powerful contributor to the Great Fires of 1910 was the removal of Indian people, and Indian fire regimes, from the land over the preceding decades.

That exclusion of Indian burning quickly resulted in the overgrowth of once open forests and the massive buildup of fine and woody fuels. As we have seen in other segments of this DVD, since the time of the Hellgate Treaty, Salish and Pend d’Oreille people had been gradually prevented from utilizing their “usual and accustomed places,” which the treaty was supposed to guarantee to them. The Bitterroot Salish were finally forced out of their homeland and onto the Flathead Reservation in 1891. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Salish and Pend d’Oreille people, and members of other tribes, were systematically harassed and threatened with violence for exercising their off-reservation rights, as we saw in our examination of the Swan Massacre of 1908. Even in places where tribal people still were allowed to live, to some extent, by their traditional ways — such as on the Flathead Reservation itself — non-Indian authorities used threats and the force of law to prevent their use of fire.

The history of suppression of Salish-Pend d’Oreille burning certainly accords with the broad regional picture of transformation painted by Stephen Pyne in Year of the Fires: “What all this meant in the field was that the removal of Indian burning had further destabilized the old regimes, had, in particular, stirred more fuels into the cauldron. By 1910 routine burning by Indians in the greater Northwest was twenty to forty years in the past. For sites, like grasslands, that had experienced near-annual burning, woody scrub was invading the scene and locally overwhelming it. Spared the purging flame, sagebrush and juniper especially rooted and thrived. For forests like those of ponderosa pine that had known fire on a two- to eight-year rhythm, needles and windfall and clusters of young saplings crowded the land ‘thick as the hair on a dog’s back.’ Forests more infrequently visited by fire absorbed the loss most easily; forty years meant less when fires had come every four hundred years than when they had arrived every five. The former might still be within the prevailing cycle of fire’s return; the latter might have missed eight passes of the flame.” ii

Pyne’s wonderful history notwithstanding, more research needs to be done on some key questions about the history behind the 1910 fires. Can we conclude that in the specific areas where native fire regimes had been eliminated for the longest time, the fires of 1910 burned fiercest? Can we conclude that in areas where frequent burning had continued (either by Indian people themselves or, in some similar form, by non-Indian newcomers), the fires were less intense and less widespread? Is it possible to compare with any precision the impact of the Great Fires on places where different kinds of burning — native burning, settler burning, prospector and transient burning — had been practiced in the preceding decades, and in areas where fire had been more thoroughly suppressed?

Maps of areas burned over in 1910 showed the Priest River area in northern Idaho, a part of Pend d’Oreille aboriginal territory, basically untouched, while the nearby country southwest of Lake Coeur d’Alene was utterly scorched. This could be explained as happenstance -- perhaps lightning simply did not strike the Priest River country, but did ignite areas farther south and west, where the foothills of the northern Bitterroot mountains rose from the Coeur d’Alene basin. But it seems a remarkable coincidence that just ten years earlier, in 1900, the famed forester John B. Leiberg, who was examining the region as part of the U.S. Geological Survey’s historic inventory of the nation’s new public forests, reported still-extensive burning of undergrowth in the Priest River Forest Reserve.

It is worth noting that Leiberg was firmly in line with the majority of foresters in seeing Indian burning as an ignorant custom that generally “devastated” the woods. In the Priest River Forest Reserve, Leiberg reported,
“one meets with burned areas everywhere – in the old growth, in the second growth, in the young growth, and where the seedlings that are beginning to cover the deforested areas have just commenced to obtain a fair hold. The burnt tracts are in large blocks, thousands of acres in extent, and in small patches of 15 to 50 acres which extend in all directions through the forest, which at a distance is apparently green; sometimes they are in broad swaths, sometimes in narrow, tortuous windings just sufficient to open a lane for the destructive high winds to tear the living forest down. The burnt areas are scattered all over the reserve, but the largest amount of damage lies within the zone of the white pine, by reason of its greater extent and peculiar susceptibility to destructive fires.” iii

Yet Leiberg also noted differences between the fires of “ages ago” – obviously, native burning and lightning fires – and the fires of “modern times” which he said began about 30 years before his examination (ie., in the 1860s). Leiberg acknowledged that the landscapes produced by the old fires had younger trees “with very old trees in their midst.” The newer fires, which he attributed mainly to “prospectors, hunters, and trappers,” along with wagon road supervisors, were obviously done for different reasons, and had different effects. All of these factors need to be carefully examined as we unravel the complex history behind the fires of 1910.

Farther south, another puzzle emerges. The western slope of the Bitterroot Range saw some of the most widespread burning during the “Big Blowup.” Yet some of the very areas that burned in 1910 seem to be marked as “burned over” by Leiberg, who examined and mapped the west slope of the Bitterroots in the late 1890s – barely a decade before. What does this tell us? Were Leiberg’s “burned over” areas all completely denuded, or was much of that acreage patchy? How precise were the maps – either Leiberg’s, or those of the areas burned in 1910? And again, how can we determine which areas were burned under native fire regimes, and which by non-Indian newcomers, with doubtless widely carrying effects? As Pyne has remarked, “the whole system was becoming unhinged.”iv

In considering these questions, it is also worth looking closely at Leiberg’s descriptions of the Bitterroot Forest Reserve, in the heart of Salish aboriginal territory. Leiberg stated that the forest also had been “ravaged” by “immense fires…both in the past and in recent times. The only areas containing any considerable quantities of old growth are the ones….existing northeast of the Grave Mountains and the yellow-pine tracts in the Lower Lochsa and Lolo basins.”

But as Pyne notes, Leiberg also observed that in the Bitterroot basin, “grasses carried the fires rapidly through yellow pine [and thus] they did minor lasting damage save, as always, to the thinning of the forest.” He noted enormous ponderosa pines in places that had been managed with fire for centuries by native people, such as the terraces above Grantsdale on the west side of the Bitterroot River. “The fires in the Bitterroot Basin have been as extensive as elsewhere in the West,” Leiberg wrote, “but have done far less damage to the merchantable timber.” He admitted that “probably not more than 5 per cent” of the “pure yellow-pine or the mixed yellow pine and red-fir growths has been destroyed.” He even posed the question of why native people burned the forest, but accepted the statement of “an educated Nez Perce, with whom I conversed regardinig the matter, who] stated that forest fires were never started through design.” As Pyne emphasizes, none of these considerations softened Leiberg’s final judgment of fire as “evil, without a single redeeming feature.” v

Finally, heavy logging began in earnest in the Bitterroot following completion of the Missoula and Bitter Root Valley Railroad in 1888. Elwood E. Hart, an early non-Indian settler, recalled the first mills established near Darby in 1888 and 1890. The West and East Forks of the Bitterroots were heavily logged in the 1890s by the Kendall brothers. “A beautiful stand of pine trees” were felled near Fern Creek and Tin Cup Creek in 1893. Another early settler, Powell Clayton Siria, recalled that “from ’92 to June of ’96 the logging and the river drives were in full blast – the logs were driven down the [Bitterroot] river to the Hamilton Sawmill erected by Marcus Daly.” So by 1910, at least in the Bitterroot Valley, many of the old trees were already long gone. The “fireproof” forests of widely spaced old growth ponderosa pine had already been transformed into a very different ecosystem, more prone to fires of all kinds. vi

The history behind the fires of 1910 is still only partly told, and still deserves more rigorous inquiry. We still don’t know how all the pieces of the puzzle fit together — the complicated factors of long and short term weather cycles, of Indian-white relations, of non-Indian settlement patterns, of railroads and sawmills and the economic history of the region. But it is clear that the displacement of native peoples and native fire regimes is a crucial part of that story, and one that until now has been given too little prominence.

___________________
iStephen Pyne, Year of the Fires: The Story of the Great Fires of 1910 (New York: Viking, 2001), 44-45. Pyne says that “[Rail] also hauled in wholesale people with little ecological understanding of the opened lands. On its tracks floated a vast flotsam of westering folk, some frontiersmen, many immigrants, most with a poor appreciation for how fire and place had accommodated each other. What had thrived for centuries, if not millennia, under one kind of fire regime found itself upended. Old fires were removed, old fuels left to hoard. New fires kindled, and whole landscapes were crunched to stoke whatever spark might spring from machine, torch, or lightning….” See also Steve McCarter, Guide to the Milwaukee Road in Montana (Helena: Montana Historical Society Press, 1992).
iiPyne, 65.
iii John B. Leiberg, “Priest River Forest Reserve” and “Bitterroot Forest Reserve,” in Henry Gannet, ed., Twentieth Annual Report of the United States Geological Survey (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1900)
ivPyne, telephone interview, July 26, 2005. In Year of the Fires, 61, Pyne notes that the settlers “were often more careful than passersby in how they handled fire; they would join fire crews if flame threatened their property. The real, the spreading infection came with the torrent of prospectors, loggers, rail camp workers, shepherds, hunters, vagrants, adventurers, and other wanderers and camp followers, who set fires freely but did note have to live with the aftermath of those burns.”
vJohn B. Leiberg, “Bitterroot Forest Reserve,” (eastern portion) in Henry Gannet, ed., Nineteenth Annual Report of the United States Geological Survey, 1897-98 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1899), 269, 275-276, and Leiberg, “Bitterroot Forest Reserve,” (western portion) in Henry Gannet, ed., Twentieth Annual Report of the United States Geological Survey, 1899(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1900), 387, 388
viBitterroot Valley Historical Society, Bitterroot Trails, Volume 1 (Darby, MT: Bitter Root Valley Historical Society, 1982), 282, 284, 263, 276.