by Timothy Egan
The warmer air on the eastern side of the Montana Rockies, where temperatures near 100 degrees were common in August, pulled the Big Burn to the high plains and lightly timbered brush country — an arid land, baked brown and red in this drought. Blackfeet Indians, who'd lived in this area for centuries, described smoke coming over the mountains like waterfalls, cascading to new ground. From there, flames moved east in the stampeding fashion of a prairie fire, taking dry grass and occasional pines before finding islands of fresh timber, cottonwood, aspen, and fir in the subranges of the eastern Rockies. The biggest cities in Montana — Bozeman, Billings, and Great Falls — now saw flames not far from their towns and tasted the smoke that had choked settlements to the west for nearly a month. The ashen layer crept into the Dakotas, Wyoming, Colorado, and as far as parts of Minnesota. In Yellowstone, nearly five hundred miles from the St. Joe River, tourists complained about the coarse blanket of fine-particled fog that settled over the world's first national park. They wondered: Was the park on fire? It was not. The smoke in Yellowstone, even smoke in Denver, was from the two-day storm in the Bitterroots. The airborne fallout of the Big Burn rode the brisk winds of the Midwest, north of Chicago, dropped soot over parts of New England, finally dissipating above Greenland.
Left behind in the northern Rockies were logs piled on other logs; millions of trees fire-stripped of bark and branches, stacked and tossed in the gullies and valleys; and hot spots, hundreds of them, burning coals and hard timber. The Spokane paper quoted a ranger as saying there were "no forests left to burn—the country has been wiped clean." The St. Joe country that Pulaski had found so restorative; the Bitterroot glens that Halm had found so enticing; the high alpine meadows where young Elers Koch and his Danish bride had pitched their tent; the ancient river-bottom cedars that Pinchot himself had touched and catalogued as he rushed to find suitable land for Roosevelt's pen to protect—all looked as if they had been mowed down by a reaper's swipe of fire.
Debitt sent a dispatch on August 23 to Weigle, an indication of how confused and dazed he remained. "The entire country has been burned over," he reported from Avery. "An indefinite number of men reported lost in the fire. Arrangements will be made to bury unidentified bodies ... Food supply is short..."
And, to the press, Debitt added this conclusion, summarized by a headline:
HEAD RANGER DEBITT CONCEDES THE DEATH OF
RANGER HALM AND HIS PARTY OF 70
Joe Halm was twenty-five, well liked, one of the most celebrated athletes in the Pacific Northwest, the son of German immigrants who settled in the orchard country of the Yakima Valley. Halm's nickname was Joe Bunch, and in his college yearbook there were references to how Joe Bunch was always there in a pinch. His service for Gifford Pinchot had been brief: hired just before the Chief was fired, Halm had learned all about him from the mythology passed on by other rangers. Halm had put in barely a year in the service, but he loved it. "Strong, active, full of enthusiasm, broke but happy" was how he described himself after being hired by Weigle. The other rangers laughed at him for the silk shirt he wore the first day on the job, but he soon became a favorite. He joked at his own expense, never turned down a task, and his energy was boundless. Halm's loss was mentioned in a dispatch in the New York Times, in which he was lauded as "the best football and baseball player at Washington State College at Pullman" for four years. In fact, Halm was an average baseball player, but he had the shot put record, and his football skills were legendary, especially the drop kick that beat the University of Washington in Seattle.
He had entered the woods with seventy men. It had taken them the better part of a week to slash and hack their way up the wilderness to a fire in timber against the big western flank of the Bitterroots on the Montana line. They had their fire contained by August 18, and Halm assembled the men and gear for the march out. Job well done, Halm told them; they could be proud. Paychecks and a big meal awaited them in Avery, a three-to-four-day hike if they really hoofed it. Halm led his packers down to a supply camp, then returned to his core group of eighteen late Saturday.
The crew he had left and the wild-eyed men who greeted him now were not the same people. Fire, they said, was everywhere, encircling them. Yes, the smoke was much thicker, Halm said, the air was stifling and grey, but flames were not evident. No, no, they protested, the fire was closing in, they could smell it, feel it. In the time Halm tried to persuade them otherwise, the smoke turned a darker pitch, like resin; it was thick and gooey and free-floating. Then sparks began coasting into camp. The crew foreman, waving his big steel ax overhead, tried to calm the men, helping the younger Joe Halm. But it was like talking to horses intent on a dash.
To run would mean suicide, Halm insisted. They had to stay put, stay low, and hope the storm would skip over them. The cook was ordered to make dinner. Supper? Now? Yes, he was ordered, get started on a meal. And before the potatoes began to boil, the sky turned another color and the sound invaded camp. Some thought it was like falling water, though it had little resemblance to the sweet music of nature. Others described it simply as a roar, the advance notice of something beyond their darkest fears. What rode the wind took on another form, from fractured flashes of light to flame, and then jumped into the trees, all in a few heartbeats' time. The great front wall of the firestorm had reached them. Men dropped their shovels before Halm had finished his pleas, ignoring the foreman with his ax, and ran—downhill, uphill, scattering through the brush.
"We're not going to stay here and be roasted alive," one man shouted.
Like his mentor Pulaski, Halm had one fallback, something rangers trained in the chaos of the open West were not afraid to do. He hoisted aloft his gun and let the remaining firefighters know that he would shoot them if he had to.
"She's jumped a mile across the canyon," said the foreman. There was an order, a pattern, to afternoon thunder boomers, even to wildfires, even to freak events. But the speed of this fire was beyond the comprehension of any wrangler, miner, timberman, or ranger who thought he knew how nature worked. Halm tried to sound tough, though some men sensed that what followed was a hollow threat from a college kid.
"Not a man leaves this camp," he said again. "We'll stay by this creek and live to tell about it." The doubt was as thick as the smoke, judging by what a few men said later. But Halm had seen them through this week in the high alpine fire; he had been steady. "Every man hold out some grub, a blanket and a tool. Chuck the rest in that tent, drop the poles and bury it."
It seemed a futile idea, but the men followed Halm's order, shoving food and bedrolls into the tent, then collapsing it, placing poles atop it, and burying the cache with dirt. Not everyone followed his instructions. Several men grabbed canned goods and made a run for the creek. It seemed a logical place to hunker down, and Halm did not object. To the creek they would all go, a shallow trickle, barely a foot deep, just the faintest stirrings of the St. Joe in the driest year in a generation's time.
Brands showered down on them as they retreated toward the water. Trees, aflame and scowling, fell in the near distance. One man screamed and ran. He was a giant of a man, as the crew recalled him, a big Swede. Halm raced after him, losing his gun in the sprint. He caught up with the Swede and tried to coax him back. The big man was crying like a child, crying because he said he could not face death. Halm led him to the creek. They tried to lie calmly in the water, blankets overhead, but trees splashed down onto the little sandbar where they burrowed. One man was hit and went under. He was pulled up and set on the side. Soon all of them rose, because to stay in the water meant being crushed by burning snags weighing five times more than the big weeping Swede. Reaching for buckets, they threw water on other snags closest to the stream, an attempt to create a wet buffer.
***
The rangers in charge of the national forests on either side of the Bitterroot divide would not give up on Halm. After three separate search parties had come back without finding a trace of the men, one last rescue effort was mounted. Ros
coe Haines, a deputy supervisor under Weigle, volunteered to go to the St. Joe headwaters. At a time when newspapers were printing lengthy obituaries of Halm, Haines was confident he could navigate the fire lines to find a fellow ranger. He said he knew the territory better than anyone.
Nearly a full five days after the winds lifted flames throughout the northern Rockies, Haines and his two rangers started hacking their way east. They had traveled by horse along a grey creek, then left their mounts with packers and started up on foot, following the Joe—they vowed—until it ran out of water, until they were up against the wall of the Bitterroots. Along the way, every few miles or so, Haines fired his pistol into the air. His signal shots rang through the still-burning woods, upward along the ash-choked Joe, and with every press of the trigger, he waited for a boomerang of hope.
At night, the fire passed over the sandbar, and trees no longer fell in the clearing. When the flames died down, temperatures plunged. Men shivered in their wet clothes, shaking as they nursed burned skin and coughed on smoke from the backed-up and slow-burning timber just upstream from them. They stumbled from the creek and found little clearings where they tried to sleep under damp blankets. Some slumped in a haunch, chewing on tobacco retrieved from watery pockets. In the morning, Halm did a head count: he had not lost a man. He could not account for others who had broken away the night before. But from his immediate crew, all were alive. The big Swede who had run into the woods presented a gun to Halm.
"It yours. You lost her in the creek last night," he said.
Over the next few days, Halm guided his men through the ruin of the forest, downhill, the only direction he could follow. For a forester, a man trained in the intricacy of arboreal life, it was a walk through a graveyard. "The virgin trees, as far as the eye could see, were broken or down—devoid of a single sprig of green," Halm recalled. "Miles of trees, sturdy, forest giants were laid prone. Only the smaller trees stood stripped and broken." When they reached the supply camp where they had left their packers, they tried to decipher the scene. A mass of cans littered the seared ground. Farther away, they saw what looked like a pack saddle, the leather burned, and then another saddle, melted. Close by, Halm was sickened by a big black carcass—a horse, burned to a crisp. "We hastened on," Halm wrote, finding "more horses and more saddles." And now, of all things, the wind picked up again, just enough to stoke coals that had died down in the hollows of trees. Halm guided his men to a cave in a rock face, an area already burned by the storm of Saturday night.
In the predawn darkness of the following day, with the wind back at ease, Halm's men set out again. "Torn and bleeding we hurried on," he said, "lighted only by the myriads of fires, I picking the way, the foreman watching for falling trees." They passed more evidence of the packers, more horse carcasses. But no humans. While they descended a steep slope, a large tree creaked and moaned as it fell, then rolled toward the men. "We ran for our lives, but the whirling trunk broke and lodged a few feet above." They paused to rest and regain their senses. Parched and hungry, they talked obliquely of the missing packers, wondering what it must have been like for men to die as those horses had died—skin burned off the bones. Still, since they had yet to find a human body, there was hope.
In daylight, Halm's men continued their search for the packers, but the going was slow, walking a few gingerly steps, dodging obstructions. They had to saw and chop through downed timber, much of it still hot to the touch. Halm parked his men and broke away at a level spot, which he recognized as a junction to some homestead claims. He wanted to check on a prospector a mile from the trail, a man he knew as "a cripple," as he said, panning for his one shot at making a buck in the high country. The cripple's cabin was an earth-covered dugout; it had survived the fire. Halm went inside, expecting to find a body. He found no clues of whether the prospector had stayed or fled.
Back with his men, Halm made camp along the creek and tried to put together a meal from the wet remains of their cache. As they sat grim-faced around a campfire, they spotted two more large animal carcasses—one looked to be an elk, the other a deer. A live grouse, its feathers burned off and missing a foot, hopped around their camp, "a pitiful sight," Halm said. Death was everywhere, the smell of it in the air, the look of it on the ground, the feel of it in the surreal mood of the woods. It was hard to be Joe Bunch, upbeat by nature and reputation, hard to see renewal or nature at work in the blown-down, burned-out remains of the Coeur d'Alene National Forest, especially here where the forest was at its greenest and richest. Halm's men were dehydrated, yet they could not drink from the little stream. "The clear, pure water running through miles of ashes had become a strong alkaline solution, polluted by dead fish," Halm said.
The next morning, hungry and exhausted, the fire crew followed Halm's exhortation to continue on rather than sit and wait for help. This was the sixth day of their wanderings, the sixth day since the big storm had flashed through on Saturday night, sending them into the creek in a fight for their lives. Late in the day, they met up with another animal—a white horse, alive. This they recognized by the brand as one of the packers' animals, and it gave them some hope, though the horse had been badly lashed by flame, its snow-white coat grey with smudge and dirt.
Downslope, separated by miles of blowdown and a ridge fire-shorn of all its trees, Ranger Haines shot a grouse for food. It was Friday, and his supplies were low. This shot was heard by a man named Frank Mills, one of the lost packers. He met up with Haines and told him other packers were not far away. They had been wandering all week, lost, scared, hungry, burned. But where, the ranger asked immediately, was Joe Halm? And where was the rest of the crew, the firefighters? This question Frank Mills could not answer. But Haines surmised a rough idea of their whereabouts, based on conversations with the surviving packers, and sent a messenger uphill.
Late in the afternoon, the messenger met Halm and his crew along the creek. Halm's men were overjoyed. Now they needed only to keep going a small way, a zigzag through a graveyard of big trees, to find the ranger who had never given up on them. By early evening, Rangers Haines and Halm met face-to-face, brothers of the woods. Sure, Haines said, he never lost faith that Joe Halm was alive because the kid was something special. Haines let him know that his death notice had been written up in Missoula and Spokane and even in some of the big papers. Joe Halm, star athlete, had died a hero in the Big Burn. Probably President Taft himself had heard about him and Pulaski.
Halm was starved for information. What happened to Grand Forks? Burned to the ground. What about Taft? Gone, also burned to the ground. Avery? Saved by the colored troops. Other fire crews? Terrible, terrible. At least a hundred dead, he was told, and many more still missing. Bill Weigle? Burned on his hands, neck, parts of his head, hair flamed off. Weigle had been trapped above Wallace just as the city caught fire, Halm was told, took refuge in a mine tunnel that collapsed when the supporting timbers caught fire. Weigle had at first kept this detail to himself. He was nearly buried alive. And Ed Pulaski? Perhaps the sorriest of the rangers, Pulaski took a faceful of flame on Saturday night, burned over many parts of his body, the skin so raw and festered, blind in one eye, unable to see very well in the other, now in the hospital in Wallace. Pulaski had saved all but six of his men. They would have died had he not forced them at gunpoint to lie face-down in the mineshaft, the ranger said. And what about Wallace, Halm asked; what happened to the town he now called home? It was evacuated, and after a long night, the trains arrived safely in Missoula and Spokane. Most people in town got out alive. But the city itself had suffered a frightful blow, more than a hundred buildings reduced to ashes, homes gone, streets full of rubble.
From Haines, Joe Halm also heard about the packers they had been looking for all week. Turned out, they bolted on Saturday night, scattered with fourteen horses. Hours later, they panicked, fearing the horses would keep them from ever getting out alive, and so they cut their animals loose. But they held on to one horse, hoping it would lead them out, as if b
y a superior instinct. With one man holding the tail of the mare, the packers followed it uphill. On the ridgetop, the line of the Montana-Idaho border, they ran out of ground, but also found a place that was indeed free of fire. From there, over the next week, they crossed down and back several times—once making forty miles in a single day, they said, until they heard the single shot when Ranger Haines fired at a grouse. Every packer lived, as did the lone horse that guided them.
While the packers' story was encouraging, Joe Halm remembered the prospector who lived in the earthen dugout. Before going home, Halm insisted they make one last effort to find him. For the next three days, Halm looked for the old man, returning to smoking mountains and creeks full of belly-up, rotting trout. On the afternoon of the third day, Halm found a lump of what appeared to be burned flesh—"ghastly remains, burned beyond recognition." He was not sure about the corpse until he found the prospector's glasses and a cane. "In a blanket, we bore the shapeless thing out to the relief crew," Halm said.
While Halm was searching for the prospector, Roscoe Haines led the other men toward Avery, sawing through downed timber to find their way. In town, when he reached a working telephone, with some of the lines restored by rail crews, he placed a call to Weigle in Wallace. Joe Halm was alive, he said. After days of walking, the kid had made it out with his men. Alive. All of them.
