Mann Gulch fire a mystery still
For a long time, Robert Sallee never talked about the afternoon when 13 of his firefighting colleagues burned to death on a steep Montana hillside. His children were aware that something terrible had happened long ago, but that’s about all they knew.
Although the 1949 tragedy became the equivalent of Pearl Harbor for the U.S. Forest Service’s elite smokejumpers, Sallee had no desire to look back. He didn’t begin to share his tale until more than 40 years later, after a famous author’s book had revived the story.
Sallee, 72, still seems a bit bewildered by all the fuss, but he patiently answers questions for the two or three people who call his Spokane Valley home each week probing for more details. He also agrees to speak at a variety of U.S. Forest Service gatherings and training sessions for rookie firefighters.
“Basically, what I tell them is: Look how fast this happened,” he said.
Fifty-five years ago this Thursday, a column of smoke was spotted rising above a gulch along the Missouri River 20 miles north of Helena. It was classic fire-season weather: sunny, windy and 97 degrees.
Sallee was two weeks shy of 18 – he’d lied about his birthday on his smokejumper application – and this would be his first parachute jump on a fire. He had made earlier practice jumps and knew he had the guts to fall from a plane. The Sandpoint native also had confidence in his skills as a firefighter.
Turbulence forced the DC-3 airplane to climb higher than the normal jump altitude, but the 15 smokejumpers made it to the ground safely. Gear was scattered, and the crew’s radio had shattered after its parachute failed. The fire was about 60 acres, and the smokejumpers thought it would be a routine evening on the fireline.
Sallee and another rookie, Walter Rumsey, each carried a crosscut saw. They walked at the back of the line as the smokejumpers began hiking to a spot upwind of the flames. Powerful winds, however, had carried embers from the main fire and ignited a patchwork of spot fires directly in the path of the men. The small fires grew quickly and soon advanced on the smokejumpers.
About 5:45 p.m., the crew boss ordered the men to retreat. Within minutes, the firefighters would be overrun by a wall of flames, but anxiety levels were not running particularly high, Sallee said. One of the firefighters even stopped to take a photograph. Most of the men continued to haul their heavy tools.
What happened in the next 15 minutes would eventually become the focus of intense scrutiny and debate. The Forest Service dissected the blowup second-by-second. Norman Maclean, author of “A River Runs Through It,” was consumed by the story. He convinced Sallee to return with him to Mann Gulch in 1978 in an attempt to make sense of what had happened.
Maclean died in 1990 at the age of 88 before he was able to finish his work. Fourteen years of research and a narrative account of the fire were organized into the book “Young Men and Fire” by his son, John N. Maclean. After being published in 1992, the book became a best seller and renewed interest in the fire.
“Although the Mann Gulch fire occurred early in the history of the smokejumpers, it is still their special tragedy,” Norman Maclean wrote.
Shortly after the smokejumpers began their retreat, they emerged from the timber onto a grassy slope. The fire picked up speed in the paper-dry grass, racing after the firefighters at 15 feet per second, with flame lengths taller than a three-story house and the heat reaching 1,500 degrees, according to a report written in 1993 by Forest Service Fire Scientist Richard Rothermel.
Crew boss Wag Dodge yelled at the men to drop their tools. “Throw those damn things away before you hurt somebody!” Sallee recalled him saying. Some of the men continued to carry their shovels, Pulaski tools and 20-pound packs. Most of the smokejumpers continued running up the canyon. Dodge stopped and lit a backfire.
Sallee and the other rookie, Rumsey, were cut off by the backfire. The pair turned and headed straight up the slope, quickly reaching a wall of rimrock at the top. The smoke cleared enough to allow Sallee to spot a narrow crevice, which offered passage to safety on the other side of the ridge. Before squeezing through the crack, Sallee looked back and saw Dodge jump the 3-foot flames of his backfire to get into the burned area. Sallee also saw the other smokejumpers outlined by the wall of advancing flames.
The main fire had almost reached Dodge. It was loud, like a jet plane or a freight train. Dodge yelled and waved his arms at the other smokejumpers to join him in the safety of the ashes. The men kept running and were overtaken seconds later. Sallee and Rumsey lay flat on a rockslide. Sallee poured water from his canteen onto his felt hat, holding it over his mouth. Embers landed in his hair, but soon the danger had passed.
The two eventually returned to the main canyon, lured there by the shout of a badly burned smokejumper. Trees continued to burn in the hot afternoon heat. They spotted Dodge. He was unharmed. But 11 firefighters were dead and two others burned. A rescue party arrived shortly after midnight. The survivors and rescuers stayed with the burned smokejumpers through the night – it was too steep to attempt a descent, Sallee said. The two died the next day at a Helena hospital.
Sallee, Rumsey and Dodge were later questioned by Forest Service investigators. The agency was eager to put the tragedy in the past, but it was being sued by the father of one of the victims. The man blamed Dodge’s backfire for the death of his son. Sallee eventually signed a statement that helped exonerate Dodge, and the lawsuit was dismissed.
“As far as Mann Gulch was concerned, that was the end of it,” Sallee said.
Wooden crosses were placed where the bodies were found.
Sallee made four more fire jumps before finding an easier way to pay for college by working at a paper mill. Dodge was sent out on three more fires, but he failed to make the jumps all three times. He died in 1955 from Hodgkin’s disease. Rumsey went airborne two more times on fires, but he also never left the plane. He died in 1980 in a commuter plane crash.
Sallee moved on with his life and built a career in the pulp and paper industry. He eventually served in a top management position at the Inland Empire Paper Co. He’s never had nightmares or flashbacks, he said.
But Mann Gulch would hang heavy in the minds of future smokejumpers. The event was the first and biggest fire tragedy for the group, said Doug Houston, president of the National Smokejumper Association
“It’s still brought up every year at rookie training,” said Houston, who retired in 2001 after making 213 fire jumps.
Thanks in part to widespread changes made after Mann Gulch, wildland firefighting is a much safer business, said John N. Maclean, who has followed in his father’s footsteps as a writer. Maclean’s book, “Fire on the Mountain,” explores the 1994 Storm King Mountain fire, which claimed the lives of 14 firefighters in Colorado. His 2003 book, “Fire and Ashes,” looks into a variety of wildland firefighting tragedies and includes an interview with Sallee.
“They’ve learned an enormous amount” since Mann Gulch, Maclean said. “Severe incompetence is what it takes to kill people like that anymore.”
Maclean points to the Storm King fire and Idaho’s Cramer fire of 2003 as examples of “colossal blunders” made by firefighting commanders: Changing weather conditions were ignored, basic command structures broken, and carelessness was rampant.
The Mann Gulch firefighters made the best decisions they could, Maclean said. They were simply overwhelmed by the extreme conditions. “Dodge wasn’t stupid to light the fire. The Indians used to do that thing all the time on the plains.”
Coming on the 55th anniversary of the fire, firefighters and history buffs continue to explore the central mysteries of the Mann Gulch fire, Maclean said. How did the fire jump from one end of the canyon to the other so quickly? Were some of the deaths caused by the backfire? Why didn’t the crew take refuge in the ashes of Dodge’s fire?
“It’s a very deep human impulse when you have a tragedy and there’s almost nobody around to talk about it afterwards,” Maclean said, speaking recently from his home in Washington, D.C. “They’re still doing it with the Custer battle. We’re trying to do it with the World Trade Center. … Just reconstructing the event becomes an exercise in joining the event.”
Sallee said he long ago made peace with the question that haunts every survivor: Why did he survive?
“That answer is unknowable,” Sallee said. “That’s one of life’s mysteries.”