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

by Timothy Egan

  In the high reaches of the Bitterroots, a homesteader heard a bang on her door. This was a few days before the blowup, when the woods were a tangle of hungry and disorganized firefighters. Ione "Pinkie" Adair was twenty-six years old, with a shock of red hair that stood out, making it hard for anyone who had met her to for get her. You could see Pinkie in a fog, it was said, because of that highlight of hair. She had been trying like other speculators to get full legal title to her patch of ground so she could sell it to one of the shadow companies buying timber homesteads. It was getting late to make her fortune, and now the fire threatened to end it all. Smoke had thickened over the days of August, like a swarm of insects. She was as isolated as any person living in the United States of 1910; the nearest town, Avery, was twenty-eight miles away by unmaintained path, basically a deer trail to the west. When she came to the door that morning, a forest ranger named Ashley Roche, his face smeared in ashen sweat, had some questions.

  "Are there trails out of here—to the east?"

  Though she lived alone in this forested hideaway, Pinkie was used to strangers showing up in the summer with questions. She gave the ranger the lay of the land. He then made a request that sounded like an order.

  "We have a crew of fourteen men and they haven't eaten," Roche said. "Will you get something for these men to eat?"

  "Fourteen men?"

  "We can pay you for your time."

  "How much?"

  "Dollar a day."

  "For how long?"

  "Couple of days. Couple of weeks. Nobody knows for sure."

  "Dollar a day?"

  "Yep."

  On the forester's word, she agreed. Before leaving, she went inside and strapped her pistol around her waist, a .38 revolver. Pinkie never left home without the gun, though her father had advised her not to walk with the cartridge full, to prevent an accident. She was the son that her father, a doctor who'd moved to the mountainous wilds of Idaho from the level ground of Iowa, never had, learning at an early age to shoot, ride horses, fish, and tame wild animals. On horseback, Pinkie was a bit of a showoff. It was shocking then for a young woman to ride a horse as a man did, full straddle, but her father was insistent. "If you're going to ride horses with me and go to the places I go," he told her, "you're going to ride horses like men." She did, but with her own flourish—Pinkie rode a white horse.

  Following the ranger, pistol on her hip, she walked a few miles to the camp. She rustled up a couple of pots, and went to work on a mountain of potatoes, to be seasoned by a few onions. She made bread in a makeshift oven. The next day, Pinkie and the fourteen men walked three miles down a trail and across a creek to a larger camp, and were introduced to another woman, her fellow cook. To see a woman in these woods, at peak fire season, was rare. To see two was an even more unlikely sight.

  "Can you cook for these men?" Roche asked, motioning to the crowd.

  "Who are they?"

  She looked around at dozens of hard-faced and hollow-eyed men. There were sixty of them, prisoners released from Missoula's jails on Koch's insistence.

  "You want me to cook for seventy-four people?"

  "Yes, ma'am."

  She boiled buckets of potatoes, fired up pans of gravy and bacon grease, and slopped it all together. The eyes of the men were on Pinkie, watching her every move. She felt uncomfortable, to say the least, but had a certain confidence from her years in the woods. A prisoner, staring at Pinkie's piece, asked if she carried the gun all the time.

  "It's with me night and day," she said.

  "That a fact."

  She told the prisoner to set an empty can on a stump, some distance from where she stood. She took aim and fired, hitting the can squarely with a single shot.

  "What do you think of that?" Pinkie said.

  The men were in terrible shape—dehydrated, hungry, many with diarrhea. They seemed to be defeated, waiting for something to happen rather than taking on the fires. That first night in the camp, Pinkie told Roche she didn't want to sleep near the prisoners.

  "They'll be all right. Nobody's gonna touch you."

  Pinkie resisted. Roche rounded up two Englishmen who had drifted into the Coeur d'Alenes after seeing a sign in Spokane: FIREFIGHTERS WANTED. IMMEDIATE WORK. What if the limeys were to keep her company? She grew to like them. What's more, they could sing, and one of them, named Eustas Collins, had a good voice; songs took the edge off the fire camp.

  Pinkie cooked kettles of vegetables, tomatoes and potatoes, occasionally spiced with rations of bacon or ham, and in the morning she made sourdough hotcakes. After a while, as food ran low, it was just potatoes, and Pinkie could not stand the sight of them. One day as she labored over a brew of boiled spuds, hoping to coax something edible from them, she saw a deer off in the meadow, its ears twitching. Deer—all Pinkie could think of was fresh venison and how good that meat would taste in the pot. She walked slowly toward the animal, withdrew her pistol, and took aim. The deer stared back at her, not far away, unblinking. It would take just one good shot; Pinkie knew she had it in her. But she could not pull the trigger. As she held both arms out clutching the gun, her hands began to tremble—not from strain but from something inside her, she said later. It was a well-known condition among some shooters—the yips, the shakes, it went by various names. No matter how badly she wanted deer for firefighter food, she could not kill the animal. Back to the potatoes.

  She slept on a bed of dried grass and wore the same clothes day in and day out. Smoke settled on the land like giant spider webs, and followed her to sleep, at its heaviest at day's end. She longed for clean underwear, a clear sky, and her little house in the mountains—alone, without potatoes. By the third week of August, even the tubers were just about gone. As the wind gathered speed in the upper reaches of the St. Joe, Pinkie noticed an awful look of dread in the faces of the men. The most hardened prisoners, who had teased and flirted with her, looked like little boys. It was in their eyes: she could see that they were afraid of dying. Friday night, she bedded down on her grass mattress next to horses tied to logs. The animals never calmed, never slept, and neither did Pinkie. Like a lot of people who grew up close to nature, she thought horses knew something she didn't know, that they could sense a larger disaster before she could.

  On Saturday, August 20, nobody wanted to move, to fight fire, to take orders. They were paralyzed by collective fear, wondering where to go, what to do as the windborne smoke circled in on them, ready for the kill. Ranger Roche gave instructions: "Take your blankets and go down to the stream, and if the fire comes close, get in the water and cover your head with a blanket, leaving an air space."

  Pinkie grabbed a blanket and went to the river with the sixty prisoners from Missoula, her two English escorts, and a dozen other men. The wind hollered something terrible, showing its heft as it fanned through the opening in the forest. This is it, the prisoners muttered. We're going to die here! Everyone moved to the river and waited. They could see only ten feet or so, but they could hear the fire all around—those deafening claps, explosions, trees falling on the ground. Pinkie could not lie still, nothing but a wet blanket to save her life. She had been raised to be stubborn and strong-willed, character traits that only hardened the longer she lived alone in the woods. She crawled up out of the river on her own, clothes drenched.

  "Where you going?"

  "I can't stay here," she said, arranging the wet blanket as a protective cover for her shoulders and neck.

  Everyone else remained in the creek, half covered with water, waiting for the wave of flame to crest over them. The homesteader gal with the pistol on her hip was staggering away.

  "What's that? You're crazy, lady."

  "I won't die here in this creek."

  "What're you doing?" "Getting outta here."

  She took off on foot through the smoke, wind, and flame, lurching into uncertainty. She planned to hoof it to Avery—almost thirty miles from the shallow stream.

  "I won't die here."

  14
. To Save a Town

  TO AVERY THEY CAME, rushing in from homesteads and ranches and flame-ravaged villages, to Avery for the last train out of the northern Rockies, to Avery which stood untouched after Wallace had burned, after Grand Forks and Taft had been wiped off the map, after millions of trees were uprooted or charred in place, to Avery the town named for a Rockefeller at the height of the family's reach into the Far West. In all, about a thousand people remained in the path of the Big Burn. And once in Avery, in the stew of smoke and misdirection, they looked for the two faces of the American government, the Forest Service and the Army.

  The rangers were in disarray, most of them up in the mountains with their dying crews. One exception was Ralph Debitt, who was in Avery after returning for supplies. The retreat saved his life, for the twenty-eight men who had not come to town fell to the flames, barely three miles away. Debitt looked stricken by the accelerating calamity, his authority weakened by loss of life and misinformation, by a chain of events he was helpless to stop. He mumbled. He ordered one thing, then reversed himself. He sent repeated messages to Koch and Weigle, contradicting earlier messages, looking for guidance. With Debitt paralyzed by doubt, it was up to the soldiers of the 25 th Infantry, Company G, to take charge—a platoon of fifty-three enlisted men, all black, nearly all from the South, commanded by a single white officer, Second Lieutenant Edson E. Lewis. They had been in Avery since August 17, split from other soldiers still camped on the baseball field in Wallace.

  "The papers said these men were a bad lot," recalled one prospector who was working with the fire crews. They were said to be "dope fiends," in his words, said to be gamblers and drunks, not to be trusted. The uniformed members of the 25th—pants tucked neatly into ankle-high gaiters, brass buttons polished on their heavy, four-pocketed jackets, rifles at the ready—may have been the first blacks the prospector had ever seen, just as they were for some of the immigrants. Not far from town, a black man known as Brown-Gravy Sam had operated a roadhouse restaurant, and did well by some accounts. But east of Wallace was a place called "Nigger Prairie," named for a man who had staked a claim with his Indian wife. He was found dead in the cabin. The murder was never investigated, though a slab was placed near the cabin with the words "Here lies a coon."

  In Avery, the soldiers had set up their tents in a clearing just above the St. Joe River within shouting distance of the biggest house in the valley, the mansion of Spike Kelley and his bride. The steep slope behind their camp was denuded of trees, logged during the town's transition from Forest Service outpost to Milwaukee Road company town. By Saturday evening, the troops had lost contact with the others in Wallace. As refugees streamed into town, Ranger Debitt got on a train and disappeared; he said he was going to get a look at how close the fires were to charging up the length of the St. Joe. "Twenty miles of solid fire line was approaching Avery," Lieutenant Lewis wrote in his report to his commanders. Debitt may have disappeared out of fear, simply losing his nerve; the timing certainly was odd. "Keep order" were his last instructions. Vague as those words were, they were backed now by the same authority as was instituted in Wallace a few hours earlier; Avery was put under martial law. Early Sunday morning, Debitt sent another message back to the troops from a train stop:

  "Get all the women and children out and notify all the rest of the people to be ready to get out at a minute's notice."

  The soldiers went door-to-door. The Japanese, the Montenegrins, and other recent arrivals had little trouble understanding them; even with their weak grasp of English, they got the message. One boy wanted to take his teddy bear but was told by his father to leave it—just get on the train! The soldiers loaded water cans on the cars and secured seats for every woman and child in town. They went from coach to coach, shutting the windows so that the heat and fire would be kept outside. If the twenty-mile-wide wall of flame were to come upon them before the trains left, the orders were to lead everyone to the river and cover them with wet blankets, just as Ranger Roche had directed his crew with Pinkie Adair to do.

  Less than an hour after receiving Debitt's instructions, the men of the 25th had the women and children on the train and ready to go. The Avery exodus was much more orderly than the evacuation in Wallace. In Avery, soldiers emptied the town of its most vulnerable citizens while keeping defiant men from nudging them out. In at least one instance, they had to decide whether a boy was man enough to stay behind. Harry Theriault, who was thirteen, had come racing out of the burning mountains, where he was working as a messenger and timekeeper. He had spent part of the night in a creek. When he reached Avery and skip-stepped to catch the train, a soldier stopped him.

  "Women and children only!"

  After Harry explained that he was only thirteen and should be allowed to board with the other children, the soldier consented. The doors were closed, the last of the windows shut, and the engine with its hundred or so refugees prepared to pull out of Avery.

  Pinkie Adair hiked through the Bitterroots with just a damp blanket, following the thin, barely visible trail toward Avery, walking in her hobnailed boots, the spikes worn down. It was a long march even by Pinkie's standards, and her stomach growled, and she sweated in the hot air. She stopped to drink from the dirty creek and wipe her hair. On a good day, she could make three miles an hour with little rest. The farther along she got, the better she felt about her decision to leave the creek with the sixty prisoners, the two Englishmen, and the dozen firefighters. If she lost the trail, she would use the code practiced by homesteaders in a fire: four shots from a gun, one minute apart. Now such a signal would be worthless, of course, as no one would hear the sound; a gunshot was a whisper against this roar of the mountains.

  In the predawn dark of early Sunday, Pinkie found herself walking on level ground, close to the St. Joe River, and heard voices. She also thought she heard a train whistle. And then the questions: What if everyone was just now leaving? What if she had missed the train? As she approached the outskirts of Avery, she was dizzy and faint with dehydration, her face smeared black, her hair a knot of greasy strands. She knew she was near town because she recognized a couple of the cabins. Also she saw the log palace, the two-story manse of Skip Kelley and his bride. She had only to cross the bridge over the St. Joe and she would be in town. At river's edge, she was stopped by a ranger.

  "You can't go into town," he said. "Everyone's getting out. Train's full and leaving."

  "I just walked ... twenty-eight, thirty miles!"

  "Sorry."

  Pinkie pushed past the ranger, sensing that he wouldn't stop her, and if he did, she would fight him. She crossed the bridge, her hobnails clicking on the planks, and rushed toward the slow-moving train; it was packed, not a spare square foot of space available on the few cars. She shouted to the engineer, begging to be let on. The engineer looked at Pinkie.

  "What's your name?"

  "Adair. Ione Adair." She was a sight—eyebrows burned, revolver on her side, clothes ripped and dirtied.

  "Where you from?"

  "Forty-nine Meadows country."

  "I know your folks."

  "Yeah?"

  "I think we can do you pretty well."

  "How so?"

  "On the caboose. We'll put you on top of the caboose here, on the back of the train. Hop on. Quickly now."

  Pinkie jumped aboard, crawled up on top of the caboose, and found a handhold as the train chugged out of Avery to the west.

  Only black soldiers and men forced to fight for their homes remained in town. The residents were machinists and boilermakers, laborers and track fixers, barkeeps and icemen who hauled loads into cars, the way to keep cargo cold on a transcontinental ride. On the surface, they were hard-edged men, known for brawn and quick fists; they had to be in the Bitterroots of 1910. But in the face of this fire they were lost. Though martial law had been declared, a democracy of sorts prevailed in the depot at Avery. Word came that a final train would be coming through the town, and that gave the men a choice: to battle the
windborne flames for their town or leave.

  With Ralph Debitt in tow, the train pulled into the depot. The ranger's report was bleak: to the west, trestles were aflame, burning trees were thrown over tracks, no part of the mountains was not burning. As the fire approached Avery in two waves, the soldiers and townsfolk got into a tense exchange. Lieutenant Lewis said he didn't know anything of the country or of forest fires. His men were soldiers; they were trained in warfare, trained to fight, and that was their initial impulse—stay, dig in, do battle.

  "What about the tunnel?" a rail worker asked. "We could hide in there."

  Less than half a mile from Avery, to the east, was one of the shafts dug into the mountains for the Milwaukee Road. It had been stocked with supplies—water, some food, blankets—in anticipation of the retreat. One faction wanted to retreat to the tunnel. Ranger Debitt disagreed. People died in those manmade caves during fires, the small, tight space filled with lethal gas. Debitt suggested a walk just upriver, to a bend in the stream, open enough that it might be safe from falling trees. A gun was drawn at one point in the debate. But despite this threat, no consensus was reached.