The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America

by Timothy Egan

  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.

  The men in the root cellar "were cooked alive," said David Bailey, who had thrown himself into the creek nearby. "All of them tried to get at the very end of the small hole and they were piled up in an awful heap. It was impossible to take out their bodies, for they would fall to pieces."

  Later, the Forest Service summarized their deaths this way: "Killed by falling trees and burned beyond recognition in Beauchamp's clearing." The newspapers did not name the two men from Rivara Canavese. A story headlined "Seven Victims Buried in Hole" mentioned by name each of the other men who died, and said something about them — their hometowns, their backgrounds, a good word from a friend or family member. Domenico Bruno and Giacomo Viettone, who had traveled more than six thousand miles to find work to help their peasant families in the Italian Piemonte, who had bounced from mining towns in Wyoming and Arizona only
to find themselves as foot soldiers trying to save the dream of Teddy Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, ended their journey in anonymity.

  "Two unidentified Italians," the papers said, and thereafter in news stories and some memorials, they remained as such.

  But in one record the immigrants had names and notations: a crew chief's time book, with hours logged on behalf of the Forest Service. It showed that Bruno and Viettone had worked seventeen days without a break since being hired on August 4.

  The Italians were killed on the east fork of a creek well up in the mountains. One mile away, on the west fork of the same creek, another crew made a sprint to save their lives. These men were working under one of the youngest Forest Service employees in the region, Lee Hollingshead. He was twenty-two, and listed as a mere forest guard, not yet a ranger. In the rush to find men to lead into the flaming woods, Hollingshead had been elevated above his lowly status and given nearly half as many men as Pulaski. When the big firestorm hit his crew, they were surrounded, the flames heaving over them with no escape plan in place.

  Hollingshead knew at least one thing about a wildfire, a retreat strategy the Indians had used: it will never burn the same ground twice. So the young forest guard led forty men at a run back through the fire to get to a clearing that had just been overrun by flame. The dash cost them—burns on hands, face, and feet, hair afire—but they made it.

  Nineteen other men in his crew took another route. They ran for a tiny cabin, owned by a man named Dittman, a place where they had tied up their horses and stocked some provisions. As the Italians had done, these men crammed into a tiny space in a group shove, pushed up against one another, a clump on the floor. Fire followed them into the one-room cabin. The walls curled, the roof was ablaze, humans caught fire. As the ceiling fell in on them, a load of fast-burning shingles and dried crossbeams, the men tried to run outside, but made it only a few feet. The next day, when Hollingshead arrived after spending the night in the clearing, he found eighteen bodies burned beyond recognition and the charred corpses of five horses and a black bear. One man was unaccounted for, a firefighter named Peter Kinsley. While wandering in the flaming woods toward Wallace, Kinsley twisted his ankle and fell to the ground. That close to the earth, he found a tier of breathable air. It was enough to save his life.

  While no one was sure whether it was heart attack, flames, or suffocation by smoke that killed Patrick Grogan, his time of death was reasonably certain. Grogan's watch stopped at 7:27 P.M., Saturday. Since being hired as a cook in the first week of August, Grogan had become a favorite of fellow Irishmen from Butte — copper miners, most of them, down on their luck or too old to work the pits of feudal Montana. He and his dog were a cheerful sight, Paddy full of stories and song, with a union-tough sense of loyalty and justice, always insisting on extra helpings of food for those who had been without. A picture shows Grogan with his greasy chef's apron, his cap pulled over his forehead, looking well fed for a man of 1910. He is making breakfast in Avery—flapjacks, bacon, and fried potatoes on outdoor stoves—in the photograph. On August 20, Grogan was dispatched to the steep mountains about six miles outside town, on Storm Creek. He was part of a crew of seventy men sent to dig a fire line around a blaze threatening Avery. His boss was the regional forester, Ralph Debitt, a quirky thirty-five-year-old with the requisite swagger and repertoire of ready bullshit needed to live among the railroad toughs of Avery.

  On Saturday, Debitt left his firefighters to go into town for supplies. Avery was abuzz with troops and trains, homesteaders and merchants, and hundreds of firefighters awaiting instructions. As the ranger of the St. Joe district, Debitt was supposed to be in charge, and he seemed to be in this place or that, but never at the right time, and never when he was needed to make a decision. Debitt had no sooner arrived in town that evening than the wind came roaring up the St. Joe River. It was strong enough — it seemed to some — to lift the swift river from its ancient stone bed and toss it to the forest. At the same time, word reached town by telegraph downriver that the fire was sprinting toward them and would soon overtake Avery. Debitt sent a messenger back to his crew in the mountains with instructions for them to retreat immediately to town and evacuate. The messenger ran the distance uphill, and found the seventy men in panicky debate about what to do. A few miles away, another crew was having a similar argument, as flames rained from the sky and spit from the woods.

  "I can't take it!" said a firefighter, Oscar Weigert, a twenty-three-year-old bricklayer from Montana. He looked possessed, saying he wasn't going to roast to death, wasn't going to die like a sausage on a grill, wasn't going down without a fight. He said this over and over, at times fingering his .32-caliber pistol, as he stuffed so much tobacco in his mouth it made it difficult to understand him. He carried the gun, he explained, because he wasn't going to take any crap from people. His gun was his insurance. The flames shot thousands of feet beyond their launches from the top of the burning forest, a sight that made Weigert all the more jittery. Again he swore this fire would not kill him. He would not stand by and burn. This was not the Army. The Forest Service could not force him to fight and die.

  "They'll never catch me in this fire," he said. Just then, complete darkness fell over the forest, though it was hours before sunset. Weigert snapped. He ran for the woods. Seconds later came the sound of gunfire — two quick shots, heard by dozens of members of the crew. Weigert had killed himself.

  The men in Grogan's camp thought they too would be killed in the most painful, horrific of ways. When the messenger arrived with the order from Debitt to make a run for Avery, Grogan would have none of it. He gave a short, passionate speech in the wind. He was not afraid of fire, he said. And at the age of fifty-nine, a grandfather of six—one of the oldest men fighting in the Bitterroots—he was not afraid to die. He thought the plan to flee would surely kill them. Who knew the way down? Look—it was nothing but columns of shooting flame and black smoke. Why not stay put on the fire line they had dug? At least they had a strip of ground to stand on that was free of fuel. Odds are, the fire will sniff the earth and move on, looking for something else to burn.

  "I can't see no less danger here," Grogan said in his thick brogue.

  His plea made sense to nearly half the crew, twenty-eight men in all. They stayed with Grogan and his dog, ready to face the fire in their clearing near Storm Creek. The other half fled for Avery around 6:30 P.M., a stumbling dash downhill, tripping often in the brush and snags. There was no proper trail back to town, just a bushwhack tread through the smoke. The fire caught up with them on the way, though it moved much slower going downhill than uphill. The ground burned, and trees overhead snapped and buzzed. Some of the men lost the soles of their shoes to hot ground and continued to run barefoot. But all of them made it the six miles to Avery—a remarkable retreat considering what they ran through. Avery now was an uncertain refuge, people fighting over whether to board an evacuation train or stay, just as had been done in Wallace. Two hours—at most—was all they had.

  Back at Storm Creek, thousands of five-ton pines and centuries-old firs came crashing down. Great swaths fell all at once, entire flanks of flaming forest blown to the ground. Grogan and his dog were incinerated on the spot where they decided to stand their ground. Everyone else scattered. Some tried to run uphill, toward a canyon wall, and found themselves clawing and trapped. Others ran toward Avery, where the fleeing crew had gone. None of them had a chance; they had waited behind too long, and now they were a small part of what kept the Big Burn alive.

  The fire was at its peak when it washed over Storm Creek, devouring hair, flesh, bone, skin, and cloth as one, killing all twenty-eight men who had stayed behind. While Grogan's silver timepiece showed 7:27, another watch was stopped at 7:34. It belonged to a man who had run the farthest distance from the clearing, buying himself seven minutes. The glass had melted in the watches, and coins found near blackened bodies were warped from the heat.

  "Through a mistaken sense of bravery," the
sheriff wrote in his report, "they refused to leave."

  Grogan had worked 206 hours since his hiring on August 6, mostly twelve-to-sixteen-hour days, the logbook showed. On August 16, five days before his death, he had worked a twenty-four-hour day. His body was found next to that of his dog.

  "A common laborer," the Forest Service noted in its record, just before dispersing Grogan's earnings to his children. Because he was Irish, it added this about him: "Mr. Grogan was a man that drank but not to excess."

  The British Empire, at its height in 1910, lost not just Irishmen in American forests, but Englishmen as well. Louis Holmes was from Birmingham, and was well known and well liked in the Coeur d'Alene Valley, where he worked as a restaurant cook. He stood out because of his accent, which made everything he muttered sound slightly more intelligent than the talk of other cooks, and because he was brimming with grand plans. In 1909, he went home to England and opened an American-style restaurant — his big dream being to bring a taste of the American West to Edwardian Britain. But it proved to be a failure. Steak, beans, and other trail fare just didn't taste the same in damp old England. Destitute, his hopes shattered, Holmes returned to the northern Rockies in 1910 and resumed work as a chef.