Does the U.S. Have a Fire Problem?

In the summer of 1910, wildfires raged from Washington to Wisconsin, posing a significant challenge to the nascent United States Forest Service (U.S.F.S.). The pinnacle of this fire season was the “Big Burn,” a two-day inferno that consumed several hundred thousand acres across Montana and Idaho and claimed nearly eighty lives. This catastrophic event marked a turning point for the U.S.F.S., as it was forced to confront the devastating power of fire and reconsider its approach to fire management. 

Fire is naturally bombastic and terrifying, making media coverage of wildfires financially alluring. Regional and national newspapers reported on these fires in 1910, and their coverage set a standard for journalists. The news media grappled with a duality of fire policy: fire inclusion and exclusion. Inclusion focused on letting a fire burn naturally; exclusion was the dedicated elimination of fire.

Media coverage became pivotal in advancing a fire exclusion policy soon after 1910. However, the foresight of historical figures like John Wesley Powell and George L. Hoxie should inspire forest managers to reevaluate fire management approaches today.

Fire Regimes

Before exclusion practices, forest fires often burned unchecked until fuels were exhausted or rain quelled the flames. Although major conflagrations that consume communities have become more common over the past decade, fires of this era were not abnormal. Some burned in remote regions, and once detected, crews would hike to the fire and “fight” them. Tactics focused on creating fire lines or stretches of mineral dirt with no fuels, which slowed or stopped the fire.

Once a fire is on the landscape, it has everything it needs to grow. Oxygen is readily available, and during high winds, it gets funneled into a more explosive, intense fire. As a fire “blows up,” energy accumulation creates unprecedented fire behavior.

When this happens, local acceleration can cause a fire’s intensity to increase up to three or four times, creating a mass fire—which fire historian Stephen Pyne defines as “a synergistic phenomenon of extreme burning.” Deadfall, limbs from trees, shrubs, and other flammable materials can also accumulate over time, worsening a fire’s effects.

Natural fire regimes are patterns of burning in a given area related to both vegetation and fire behavior. In other words, there is a symbiotic and evolutionary relationship between fire and forests—a relationship that we must understand and respect in our approach to contemporary fire management. 

Media and Wildfire

The fires of 1910 were both natural and human-caused. In the spring, the Bonners Ferry Herald warned of a fight against fires which annually “lay waste millions of dollars of timber.” In May, there were reports from Montana that fires raged daily and “did considerable damage to wood [and] timber.” These springtime articles primed fearful public sentiment about fire.

Forest Supervisor William Weigle wrote that it was “the driest season in northern Idaho known to the oldest settlers”—only a few light showers, but “no rainfall in [the] region from April 1 to October 1, 1910.” In late July, a month before the Big Burn, lightning storms moved through the region and ignited several remote fires.

With fire lines established on August 20, 1910, crews hoped for an early winter. But a low-pressure system approached Idaho, and with it, high winds. The wind exploded the smoldering fires, densely fueled by Pacific Northwest logging slash piles and corridors of slash from the railroad. The fierce winds pushed the fire beyond the line of firefighters and engulfed the forest crown, turning a manageable challenge into an event that changed the face of forestry for several decades. 

The Big Burn swallowed the logging town of Wallace, Idaho. Newspapers were flush with deadly reports from the region. When the mayor of Wallace realized the fire was approaching the city, he directed “every able-bodied man . . . to fight the forest fires.” He instructed the police to arrest any naysayers.

Media accounts nationwide began to illustrate that fire was causing more evil, death, and destruction than good, igniting support for all-out exclusion policies. The day after the Big Burn, the LA Times reported a “roar that is indescribable” and that the mining town of Wallace was “showered with blazing embers.”

“Forest fires in merciless sweep destroy towns” was printed in big, bold letters across the front page of the Daily Missoulian.

“Over 50 lives lost; raging forest fires” was printed in the Camas Prairie Chronicle. The article continued with descriptions of the town “covered with smoke and fire” and “reported destroyed.”

The catastrophic stories of mass fire reached the public far removed from the flames, often just ahead of the smoke. On August 26th, the New York Times reported that “the sky has been obscured by smoke, dirt particles, and moisture, and last evening, the combination was so dark that it appeared like storm clouds.”

Thanks to nationwide newspaper coverage of the fires, the fire exclusion policy gained the momentum needed among the public and the government.

Two Fire Pioneers

When Civil War Veteran John Wesley Powell set down the Green River to explore the canyons of the southwest, wildfire was not a research goal. Early in his career, fire exclusion meant healthier watersheds; to the budding conservation movement, this meant more timber to cultivate. For the eventual wildfire, this meant more fuel. After exploring the arid West, Powell believed that the supply of timber would equal the country’s demand without the threat of fire. 

But his beliefs would change. Through his geological and ethnographical water-focused exploration of the arid West, he came to learn the importance of fire on the landscape. In the 1870s, Powell camped on a ridgetop in Colorado, starting a fire to keep warm. Shortly after the flames kindled, they engulfed an entire tree and “on it swept for miles . . . until more timber was destroyed than has been used by the state of Colorado for the last ten years.”

Years later, Powell observed how Paiute bands of Utah utilized fire to clear the forests and attract game. North American Indigenous Peoples used fire for many purposes because it was “both spatially extensive and temporally persistent.” Anthropogenic fire has likely caused most changes to nature throughout near-history.

Through his experience on the Colorado ridgetop and his ethnographic work with Paiute people, Powell gained practical knowledge of using fire and witnessed the ecological benefits the flames provided. He realized that fire belonged with the landscape. In fact, when a natural fire regime of western forests is interrupted, fuel loads dramatically increase, also heightening the risk of ignition by lighting.

George L. Hoxie also saw the forest for the trees. A lumberman from northern California, he understood that fire benefited forest health and increased the value of the timber by allowing mature trees to thrive in an open, clear forest. He let fires burn naturally across his thirty square miles of land, mounting evidence that inclusion reduces fuel loads and keeps insect infestations at bay. As a result, Hoxie’s forests were “free from inflammable matter,” and the live timber was deemed uninjured and perfect.

He divided fire policy into two factions: the practical and the theoretical. The practical included fire as part of a healthy forest. The theorists believed fire destroys timber. Hoxie believed that fire would take the upper hand unless the Federal Government shifted its approach to fire management. To him, it was about the practical use of fire, not the theoretical.

Hoxie’s work was inopportune as conservationists and the media framed fire as a threat. His ideas about fire inclusion were published in Sunset magazine on the same day as the Big Burn, when headlines across the West painted fires as demonic and threatening. This media coverage began to adversely illustrate fire in the public eye and helped spread the U.S.F.S.’s blossoming fire exclusion policy. Forest fires were destructive and to be suppressed at all costs.

Fire Exclusion Rises from the Ashes

The media’s inflated coverage of wildfires continued to sell newspapers and foment a nationwide fire exclusion policy. Before the Big Burn, U.S.F.S. leader Gifford Pinchot, an astute politician, told the New York Times that “the timber supply in the United States . . . at the present rate of outing, will be exhausted,” which he knew was fodder for developing a fire exclusion.

A report written by Frank A. Silcox, district forest supervisor and future chief of the U.S.F.S., claims the fires of 1910 cost over $800,000 to suppress—over $28 million today—and destroyed an estimated $13 million of timber.

Pinchot briefed the media that the fire problem was one of the U.S.F.S.’s most critical issues. He told reporters at the New York Times that fire destroyed “valuable timber” and, going against Powell and Hoxie’s ideas, “[fire] caused an almost incalculable loss to watersheds.” As a result of the fires of 1910, Pinchot believed the secret to fighting fires was early discovery and immediate suppression, all-out fire exclusion—a point he stressed to Congress.

The 1910 forest fires caused congressmen to promote increased fire exclusion legislation. The 61st Congress passed the 1911 Weeks Act, which expanded the National Forest system. The act made “two hundred thousand dollars… available… [for] the protection from fire of the forested watersheds.”

This funding blossomed the U.S.F.S. budget, leading to state and federal government partnerships that blazed the trail for fire suppression infrastructure. Forest districts carved roads into forests to access remote regions.

The 1924 Clarke-McNary Act bolstered the Weeks Act by codifying a fire exclusion policy and providing executive power to establish new national forests. The bill authorized the Secretary of Agriculture to “[devise] such forest protection systems as will adequately protect potential forest lands from the ravages of fire . . . keeping them covered with growing trees for the production of a future timber supply.” These two pieces of legislation helped set in motion nearly a century of fire exclusion policies that land managers are grappling with today as climate change has further complicated fire management.

Instead of sparking dialogue about fire inclusion as a tool, the fires of 1910 and over the following decade ended the long-standing debate between inclusion and exclusion policies. By 1935, the “10 a.m. policy” solidified fire exclusion. The directive dictated the suppression of any fire by the morning after discovery.

What followed was over sixty years of total warfare against wildfire. The quelling of flames allowed the thick understory to grow, accumulating fuel loads that guaranteed a hotter and more destructive fire when an area burned. 

“Fire Problem” or “Exclusion Problem”?

Overloaded fuels, climate change, and the rapid growth of the wildland-urban interface have created a “fire problem.” If the federal agencies had listened to scientific research and adequately funded suggested policies, the United States would not have such a stark fire problem today. The media was also complicit, as over the past hundred years, fire reporting has focused on hard-hitting coverage of large flames and destruction rather than the benefits of fire to the forest.

Removing fire from the landscape was a significant reversal of the progressive era—and one that was arguably impossible to see through. With the “fire problem” in the lane next to climate change, the American West has reached a critical junction. Each road points toward fire inclusion.

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Featured image: An aerial image just southwest of Quincy, California showing the extent of reclamation logging often conducted after a wildfire burns through a forest. New and existing roads can be seen among the clear-cut forest patches. Photo by author, 2021.

Richard Bednarski an award-winning journalist with a master’s in journalism, pursuing a Ph.D. in Geography to explore the intersection of the media and wildfires. He draws from his experience as an archaeologist and a father of two to connect with communities. He regularly contributes to the Sierra Nevada Ally, for which he won Nevada’s Press Association‘s Journalist of Merit and Best Photo Essay Awards. Website. Contact.