1910 forest fires sparked Pulaski’s fame
The epic 1910 forest fire “blow-up” was the proverbial worst-case scenario.
Hundreds, perhaps thousands of lightning- and human-caused blazes were burning with relatively modest impacts in a tinder-dry year before they came together on Aug. 20 and exploded into an inferno whipped by hurricane-force winds.
When it was over two days later, 78 firefighters and at least seven civilians were documented as dead. The Idaho towns of Wallace, Kellogg, Osburn, Burke and Murray were ravaged. The Montana towns of Taft, DeBorgia, Saltese, Haugan and Tuscor were consumed.
Much of a 3-million-acre path 260 miles long and 200 miles wide from the Salmon River north to Canada was charred.
And most of that destruction had occurred in just six hours.
At its peak, the firestorm was unleashing as much energy every two minutes as the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
Edward Pulaski, among the first Forest Service rangers in an agency that was only four years old, was leading his firefighters toward safety in Wallace when the blow-up surrounded them with flames. Some accounts suggest he was headed toward the War Eagle Mine when he realized even that goal was unattainable.
He herded his 45 firefighters and two horses into the Nicholson adit, which has been known almost since that day as the Pulaski Tunnel.
In his 1923 account of the incident, Pulaski said the men were frantic as the heat intensified and seared their lungs. One panicked firefighter tried to flee the tunnel, prompting Pulaski to pull his government-issued revolver and say, “The next man who tries to leave this tunnel I will shoot.”
Apparently all of the men passed out during the ordeal. Those who woke found a devastated landscape, rocks too hot to touch, the West Fork of Placer Creek undrinkable because it was so full of ash and dead fish.
The two horses were lifeless, and, as the men came to consciousness, one firefighter said, “Come on outside boys, the boss is dead.”
Pulaski famously replied, “Like hell he is.”
Pulaski was considered a hero after making the decisions that saved 39 of the 45 men. Years later, he invented a firefighting tool featuring an ax-blade head that swept back into a hoe that could be used to build fire line.
Even today, the Pulaski goes into the hands of every new forest firefighter, along with the story of the 1910 fires.
The event became the 9/11 of forest firefighting, prompting the young U.S. Forest Service to declare total war on wildfires for the better part of the next century.
Ironically, that preoccupation with total fire suppression has led to an unnatural buildup of forest fuels that left the nation’s forests once again susceptible to catastrophic fires. Only in recent decades has the Forest Service revamped fire management policies, allowing fire to once again play a role.
(Staff writer James Hagengruber contributed to this story.)