On the morning of August 20, 1910, fire supervisors across Northern Idaho and Western Montana were releasing crews. They believed they had the season's blazes under control. By afternoon, Palouse winds hit the Bitterroot Range at hurricane force, and everything they believed stopped being true.
Edward Pulaski, a Forest Service ranger on the West Fork of Placer Creek south of Wallace, Idaho, rode the ridgeline gathering scattered firefighters as the wind unified hundreds of small fires into one. He collected forty-five men and drove them downhill toward town with the fire behind them, a black bear running alongside. Trees exploded and toppled under sixty-mile-per-hour winds. They never made Wallace. Pulaski forced his crew into an abandoned mine tunnel, the Nicholson adit, and ordered them face-down in the mud. "The canyons seemed to act as chimneys," he later wrote, "through which the wind and fires swept with the roar of a thousand freight trains." When a man tried to bolt, Pulaski drew his revolver. He hung wet blankets over the entrance and threw water on them until he passed out from the smoke. At five the next morning someone said the boss was dead. Pulaski answered from the floor: "Like hell he is." Thirty-nine of his men survived. They came out blind, burned, their shoes gone.
Across the St. Joe drainage, Ranger Joe Halm and seventy men took refuge on a sand bar in the St. Joe River near the mouth of Bean Creek while fire swept the entire upper St. Joe drainage. They hiked out a week later through dead elk and grouse hopping on burned feet. Deputy Forest Supervisor Edward Stahl described flames "fanned by a tornadic wind so violent that the flames flattened out ahead, swooping to earth in great darting curves, truly a veritable red demon from hell."
In forty-eight hours, roughly three million acres burned across Idaho, Montana, and Washington. An area the size of Connecticut. At least eighty-five people killed, seventy-eight of them firefighters. A third of Wallace burned to the ground. The mining towns of Grand Forks and Taft were leveled. The Forest Service, five years old and facing opponents who wanted it abolished or absorbed back into the Interior Department, had spent a million dollars over budget and watched twenty-five million in timber go up.
What the Survivors Decided
The agency faced Congress with a deficit and a body count. Chief Forester Henry Graves staked the Forest Service's continued existence on the claim that it could actually defeat fire. The Weeks Act was the agency's survival document. Passed in 1911, it tied federal funding to state fire suppression and made the Forest Service the architect of national fire policy. Three men who had fought the 1910 fires served consecutively as chief from 1920 to 1938: William Greeley, Robert Stuart, Ferdinand Silcox. Greeley had personally presided over the burial of more than eighty firefighters. Each fire fought justified the next appropriation. Each appropriation demanded the next fire fought.
Greeley published "'Piute Forestry' or the Fallacy of Light Burning" in 1920, dismissing planned low-intensity burns as primitive and uncontrollable. The label was designed to belittle Indigenous burning practices and cast any alternative to total suppression as savagery rather than science. Fifteen years later, Silcox issued the 10 a.m. policy: every fire detected was to be controlled by ten o'clock the following morning.
Their reasoning was not stupid. They had watched friends burn. They had nearly lost their agency. The logic was self-reinforcing, underwritten by genuine grief. What came next was a catastrophe, and it is too easy to pretend the men who built it were fools.
They were not fools. Other men in the same agency had survived the same fires and drawn opposite conclusions.
Herman Chapman at Yale had been documenting how periodic burning in Southern longleaf pine forests controlled understory fuels and disease. Roy Headley, the Forest Service's own assistant district forester for California, ran a program between 1916 and 1919 allowing low-intensity fires to spread in remote areas. It was shut down. Elers Koch, who had fought the 1910 fires as Lolo National Forest supervisor, wrote in 1935 that the firefighting effort had been a "complete failure" and that the Forest Service's expenditures since 1900 had made no appreciable difference in area burned. Then he wrote the sentence that names the century:
"It is even possible that, by extinguishing fires in favorable seasons which would have run over a few hundred or a few thousand acres, the stage was only set for the greater conflagrations which went completely beyond fireline control."
His essay was published in the Journal of Forestry the same year Silcox issued the 10 a.m. policy. A rebuttal ran alongside it. The right answer sat in the record next to the order that buried it.
The Fuel
During the suppression era from 1935 into the 1970s, maximum annual area burned in the Northern Rockies dropped to roughly 168,000 acres. This looked like victory. In dry forests adapted to burn every few years or few decades, a century without fire produced something those forests had never contained: dense understory, deep surface fuels, ladder fuels connecting ground to canopy. Fires that once crept along the surface now exploded into the crowns. The protection manufactured the conditions for its own failure.
The Forest Service began reversing course in the early 1970s, allowing natural fires in designated wilderness. The 10 a.m. policy was formally abandoned in 1971. Then the 1988 Yellowstone fires triggered public outrage, and the reversal stalled for years. The institution responded to the last dramatic event. Again.
By 2022 the agency had launched a ten-year Wildfire Crisis Strategy targeting treatment on fifty million acres. Suppression costs alone now exceed two billion dollars annually. More than ten million acres burned nationwide in 2015, again in 2017, again in 2020. The forests are burning on terms nobody chose, through fuel loads a century of defensible decisions piled up. Koch said the stage was being set for greater conflagrations. He was right in 1935, in the public record, in the professional literature, and it did not matter at all.
Things to follow up on...
- Koch's full 1935 essay: "The Passing of the Lolo Trail," Koch's challenge to suppression doctrine in the Selway and Clearwater drainages, was reprinted in 2016 in Fire Ecology with an introduction by Andrew J. Larson placing it in the context of a century of vindication.
- The suppression policy's origins: The Forest History Society maintains a detailed institutional history of fire suppression policy, including the Loveridge rebuttal to Koch and the text of Silcox's 10 a.m. circular letter.
- Fuel accumulation science: A 2021 peer-reviewed study by Hagmann et al. in Ecological Applications documents widespread structural changes in western forests using repeat photography from 1900–1910, 1985, and 2016, showing dramatic densification under fire exclusion.
- The "light burning" debate: The California Fire Science Consortium hosts primary documents from the early twentieth-century argument over planned burns, including Greeley's "Piute Forestry" article and the counterarguments he worked to suppress.