American Experience (1988–…): Season 27, Episode 5 - The Big Burn - full transcript

Someone needs to stop Clearway Law.
Public shouldn't leave reviews for lawyers.

♪♪

On August 19, 1910,

an assistant forest ranger
named Ed Pulaski

rode out of the smoke-filled
Bitterroot Mountains

that loomed over the town
of Wallace, Idaho.

For months, he and his crew
had been fighting wildfires

in the Bitterroots, but despite
all of their efforts,

he was afraid the town
was going to burn.

Ed Pulaski comes down
and sees his wife

and sees his adopted daughter,
Elsie, and says, "Leave.



"You've got to get out.

You've got to leave
to save your life."

She says, "No, I'm going
to stay here."

And so he tells her to go up
and hide in this reservoir.

If it really gets bad,
they can go in the water.

So, the next day they go out
to the edge of the trail there,

kiss and say goodbye
and thinking it'll be

the last time
they'll see each other.

That afternoon, without warning,
the wind began to blow,

and flaming embers shot down
from the sky,

igniting buildings.

Within minutes,
Wallace was ablaze.

Desperate residents tried
to salvage their belongings.

Women and children were loaded
onto the last train out of town.



The roar of the wind and flames
was overwhelming,

the air so hot
it was hard to breathe.

The biggest wildfire to ever hit
the Northern Rockies had begun.

The Big Burn destroys an area
the size of Connecticut

in 36 hours.

We've never had anything
close to it.

It was an inferno that not only

transformed the landscape
of the West,

but forever changed
the nation's attitudes

about its public lands.

The Great Fires
in the Northern Rockies

hit the U.S. Forest Service
in ways that rippled

through society.

The Army call-out, the political
fights over strategy...

It's all slammed together
in one giant package.

That made them great.

It was a story of arrogance
and pride,

a belief that nature
could be managed

and fire brought under control.

There was an attitude

that if there's something wrong
in the forest,

we can go in there and fix it.

It was almost as if wildfire
was this beast

that we can actually hunt down
and eradicate.

The selfless courage
of a small group of men

would inspire the nation,

but questions would linger
about whether their sacrifice

had all been in vain.

We can celebrate them as people
of their time and era

who played out fully

the roles that the culture
ascribed to them

and yet admit that
it would have been better

if we'd done something else.

It's a time of catastrophe,
a time of change,

a time of coming up
with a new vision.

If you look at the landscape,

the scars of 1910
are still there.

♪♪

In the flea-bitten collection
of ramshackle buildings

known as Taft, Montana,

college graduates were about
as rare as an honest poker game.

So the locals took notice when,
in the early spring of 1907,

a group of fresh-faced rangers

from the United States Forest
Service stepped off the train.

The recent arrivals
had come to manage

some of the newly created
national reserves in the West,

but nothing had prepared them
for a place like Taft...

A boisterous, brawling row
of gambling parlors,

whorehouses and saloons.

One reporter called it
"the wickedest city in America."

You've got these temporary
communities,

particularly along the railroad.

Lots of loose women,
lots of loose men,

lots of bums,
people under assumed names.

There's just this whole throng
out there.

How do you impose some
kind of order on this process,

which had been characterized
by almost complete chaos?

Taft had a higher murder rate
than Chicago

and five prostitutes
for every man, they said,

and when the rangers showed up,
they were horrified.

They cabled back
to Forest Service headquarters,

saying, "Two undesirable
prostitutes setting up business

"on Forest Service land.

What should we do?"

And someone cabled back,
"Get two desirable ones."

The newly minted rangers
had been sent west

by the founder
of the Forest Service,

an aloof, hard-driving
bureaucrat

with an almost missionary zeal
for the management

of America's public domain.

In less than a decade,
Gifford Pinchot had parlayed

his family's wealth
and social connections,

a passionate love of trees
and a deft hand at politics

to become America's
preeminent forester.

Pinchot is one of the most
fascinating characters,

not just in American
conservation,

but in American history.

He was a patrician.

He was a very odd duck.

He preferred to sleep on rocks
than a soft bed.

He was an ascetic.

But he had a vision.

Even though he was the product
of a family

that made their money
in clear-cutting forests,

he became, you know,
one of the founding figures

of saving forests.

For Pinchot, nature was really
a place of respite.

It's where you went
to just forget other things

and become whole and become safe

and in that process
come to know yourself.

Pinchot had forged friendships
with some influential men

in the growing conservation
movement,

in particular the famous
naturalist John Muir.

"You are choosing the right way
into the woods,"

Muir told the young man.

"You will never regret
a single day spent thus."

Pinchot also developed a rapport

with the young governor
of New York, Theodore Roosevelt,

a bond strengthened by their
love of the wildness of nature

and a boyish thrill at testing
themselves against it.

When Roosevelt ascended
to the White House in 1901,

he brought Pinchot
into the inner circle

of his administration.

The two men were determined
to seize the mantle

of conservation
and radically rethink

how the nation managed
its estate.

Up until the late 19th century,
the country had done its best

to develop its open spaces...

Encouraging the wholesale
harvesting of timber,

industrial mining
on a vast scale,

the blasting of railroads
through the mountains

and across the continent.

For over a century, their
country has given its land away

and Theodore Roosevelt
and Gifford Pinchot

are calling a halt to that.

They're basically saying,
"We're going to change the way

we look at the future."

Roosevelt and Pinchot
were worried

that unless
they acted quickly to protect

America's last great stands
of white pine, spruce and fir,

the forces of unbridled
capitalism would devour them

once and for all.

Timber was really
a critical industrial product

and we were going to run out,

much like an oil crisis
in present times.

So the solution was to regulate
this unsettled land

as a public domain that would
then be governed

by scientific informed bureaus,
and this would allow us

to conserve it, not lock it up,
but to use it in some kind

of rational regulated way.

Their progressive vision
imagined a new kind

of commonwealth...

National forests, controlled by
an enlightened corps of rangers,

overseeing not just the timber,
but also the minerals, the water

and the wildlife for the benefit
of all Americans.

A national forest
is not a pristine sanctuary,

it is a utilized landscape.

So, it's a different model
than a national park.

You can hunt on it, you can
graze on it, you can mine on it.

Its purpose is to be managed.

Previous presidents
had already set aside

large swaths of public land,
but Roosevelt went much further,

radically expanding
America's national forests.

Then, in 1905, he placed them
under the control

of the Bureau of Forestry, now
called the U.S. Forest Service,

with Pinchot in charge.

At one point, Roosevelt
and Pinchot are on the floor

of the White House,
maps spread out all over,

and they are mapping out
future United States forests,

and Roosevelt says,

"Oh, God, have you ever been
up in the Flathead Valley?

I had a bully time there once."

He goes,
"We've got to include that."

In Roosevelt and Pinchot's time,
they tripled the acreage

of the national forests.

So you have 200 million acres
under the range

of the Forest Service, bigger
than most European countries.

Now, the idealistic group
of young men that constituted

Pinchot's Forest Service
were given the task

of bringing their
new conservationist vision

to some of the wildest parts
of the American West.

One of Pinchot's first hires
was William Greeley,

the hard-working son
of a Congregational minister

from Upstate New York,
who had spent a summer

in the saddle alongside Pinchot,

marking some
of the first surveys

of the new national forests.

"We were privileged to become
Pinchot's rangers,"

Greeley remembered.

"We had the thrill
of building Utopia

and were a bit starry-eyed
over it."

Pinchot returned the sentiment.

He asked the 29-year-old Greeley
to oversee

nearly 30 million acres,
covering most of Montana, Idaho

and parts of South Dakota.

Each of the 160 rangers
under Greeley

would be responsible
for almost 300 square miles

of national forest.

Pinchot gave them a mission.

He gave them a sense of calling,

a sense that the world
could be changed

through their own work
and then let them go out

to the West and work on these
extraordinary landscapes.

They called what they were doing
"The Great Crusade."

In some ways, it was
a religious crusade to them.

They were doing God's work
to preserve the earth.

Pinchot was known
as "The Chief," or "GP,"

and the rangers so admired
his leadership

that they welcomed
the nickname "Little GPs."

"He made us feel like soldiers
in a patriotic cause,"

one of his first students
remembered.

Pinchot expected the GPs
to go out and practice forestry

the way they'd been taught,
full of innovation, energy,

and they were up for the job.

But what made their job
difficult were the people

that they encountered
in these towns...

The roustabouts,
workers in the timber industry,

in the mines and railroads.

It was a great, great
culture clash.

Forest rangers
were not popular at all.

They were considered outsiders.

Even though this was
public land, people still felt

they could do
as they wanted to with it.

The rangers are in charge
of people who do not want

the Forest Service to be there.

Because the ranger is indeed
standing between

the frontier mentality
and the resource,

standing between what the
frontier wants for the moment

and what Gifford Pinchot
believes the country needs

for the future.

As they squared off to do battle
over national forests,

both sides would be humbled
by one implacable foe...

Nature itself.

Fire is the last wild element
of the West

that hasn't been controlled.

Every wolf is gone.

They've exterminated
the grizzly bear.

They're all gone.

So what's left is fire.

And it's important to understand
how fire is perceived

at the time.

The public, they fear it
because these are wooden towns

going up at every railroad stop
all over the West.

They really fear it.

There were a lot of steam
locomotives in the West

and they were passing through
these timbered areas

causing forest fires.

When they come through,
sparks go off.

And the railroads aren't putting
out these fires.

They go to the Forest Service
and say,

"Well it's your land,
we're only coming through.

You've got to put
these things out."

You don't have roads,
you don't have trails.

It may take you a couple days
to even find a fire.

I mean the thought
that these rangers

could even begin to cope
with this,

it just staggers
the imagination.

What were they thinking of?

Firefighting was a very,
very primitive science.

They were learning
as they went along.

The only way to fight fires
in 1910 was with hand tools.

You basically were in there
with an axe or a hoe

or a rake or, you know,

whatever you could get
your hands on.

You were building what we would
call a fire line now.

You're cutting a path,
clearing it of all debris.

Some parts, say three or four
feet would be completely down

to mineral soil so no fire
could cross.

This is just brutal grunt labor.

You're just digging, chopping,
scraping and moving on.

As primitive as fire fighting
was at the turn of the century,

Gifford Pinchot believed
it was an essential part

of his new department's mission.

Fire threatened
the nation's timber,

the very resource he and his
rangers existed to protect,

and they had to extinguish it
at all costs.

But Pinchot had another reason
to embrace a war against fire.

He saw in it the key
to his organization's survival.

Ever since the creation
of the Forest Service,

timber and mining barons...

Many of whom also had seats
in Congress...

Had attempted to slash
the agency's staff and budget

at every turn, determined
to starve it out of existence.

Pinchot needed a weapon
to fight back.

Gifford Pinchot understands
how dramatic fire is.

If you have something dramatic,
then you can find a reason

for the U.S. Forest Service
to exist.

Pinchot argues, well,

"Who's going to protect
these lands if we don't?

"The railroads aren't
protecting them.

We have to protect them."

Pinchot is very smart,
perceptive, well educated,

but he was also deeply political
and he knew that fire

was the most graphic
and simplest way to convey

the message about
forest destruction

and the need for some kind
of organized protection.

In speeches, articles and
testimony in front of Congress,

Pinchot made his case in starkly
moral terms.

"The question of forest fires,
like the question of slavery,

"may be shelved for a time,
at enormous cost in the end,

but sooner or later,
it must be faced."

He stakes everything on the idea
that we can control fire.

Though they'd never fought
a fire before.

That's what's so interesting.

The Forest Service is only
five years old in 1910.

They have never fought
a big fire.

And it's almost
like he's asking for it.

It's almost like hubris...
"Nature, bring it on."

By the early summer of 1910,

Bill Greeley was sleepless
with worry.

From his headquarters
in Missoula, he was monitoring

the millions of acres
under his control,

and everywhere the news was bad.

1908 had been a very dry year,
and 1909, worse still,

but nothing could have prepared
the Forest Service

for the drought that befell
the Northern Rockies in 1910.

It's a dry summer.

It had been a wet, snowy spring,

but then, a switch went off
in May and it did not rain.

All of May, no rain.

All of June, no rain.

All of July, no rain.

The forest is tinder dry.

You walk over the thing,
it's like potato chips crinkling

walking on the ground.

In a cable to his men,
Greeley implored them

to "strengthen the patrol
and retain a strong guard."

The humidity, he warned,
"had dropped to the level

of the Mojave Desert."

For many of the new rangers,

fresh from their elite
universities,

the drought-stricken terrain
of Montana and Idaho

felt like an alien world.

Not so for Ed Pulaski.

He was two decades older
than most of the others,

having roamed the West
since he was 16,

working as a master carpenter
and blacksmith, a plumber,

millworker and steamfitter,
mining for copper in Montana

and silver in Idaho.

He'd kicked around all over,
he's middle aged,

he's sort of washed up,
but he's a man of all trades.

He's a man of the people, too.

He, you know,
really relates to folks.

He's done everything a Western
man will do at that time.

Although he lacked a formal
education from back east,

Pulaski had mastered
the curriculum of the forest.

He knew the mountains
in his bones,

and he knew how to survive
in the wilderness.

He was a man of few words,
but when he spoke,

the locals learned to listen.

In 1908, Pulaski joined
the Forest Service

and became the ranger
at Wallace.

He was on his second marriage
with Emma.

They adopted a daughter
named Elsie,

who was seven or eight
at the time.

So, he's a settled guy,
he's got a house in town

and he's responsible
for what happens in the field.

Late in the evening
of July 26, 1910,

Ed Pulaski awoke to hear
the heavens unleash a deafening,

almost continuous volley
of thunder.

It was what he had feared most,
a violent electrical storm,

bolt after bolt of lightning
and no rain.

By the next morning,
nearly 1,000 fires were burning

across 22 national forests
in the Northern Rockies.

The blazes threatened
the string of railroad towns

that extended westward
from Missoula,

ending with the miserable
collection of tents

and tarpaper shacks
that constituted Taft.

On the Idaho side
of the Bitterroots,

along the southern spur
of the railroad,

the hardscrabble hamlet of Avery
looked vulnerable,

as did Wallace, the biggest town
in the region, to the north.

With only 160 rangers
in the field, the biggest test

of the new Forest Service
was at hand,

but as the Little GPs rushed
to marshal their forces,

they did so without the help
of their founder and leader.

Gifford Pinchot had been fired.

The Forest Service chief
had clashed repeatedly

with Theodore Roosevelt's
successor, William Howard Taft,

convinced that the new president

lacked the appropriate
commitment

to the conservationist crusade.

Finally, their quarrels became
so contentious and so public

that Taft had no choice but
to force Pinchot to step aside.

The day after his dismissal,
Pinchot had arrived

at the agency's office
in Washington

to find his organization
in shock.

Trying to rally the faithful,
he proclaimed,

"You are engaged in a piece
of work that lies

"at the foundation of the new
patriotism of conservation.

"Don't let the spirit of the
service decline one-half inch.

Stay in the service,
stick to the work."

He was greeted
with a thunderous ovation.

Back in the Northern Rockies,
however, the rangers

urgently needed men
on the ground.

But men willing to fight fires
were in short supply.

MacLEAN:
In the summer of 1910,

you had a Forest Service

that only had fewer than
500 rangers nationwide,

but they knew that they
were going to get

in a lot of trouble that summer,
and so they opened the coffers

and they said, "Go out and hire
everybody you can find."

The forest rangers assembled
an army of men,

most of them immigrants.

They paid them 25 cents an hour,

and the immigrants came
from all over.

They are putting out the call.

"We're going to fight
this thing.

We are going to attack
these hundreds of fires."

It's 100 degrees, it's dry,
it's dusty.

It's on really tough
vertical terrain.

A lot of people
suffered injuries, they quit,

they mutinied.

At one point they literally
said, "Men, men, men."

They opened the jails
of Missoula, Montana.

They let felons out,
convicted murderers,

some guys who had
their handcuffs on

when they were sent out
to the front lines.

So, any male with a pulse
was thrown against this fire.

By early August, Bill Greeley
had managed to assemble

as many as 4,000 men
on the fire lines,

but with new blazes breaking out
all the time,

the local labor pool
was quickly exhausted,

and a call went out
to Washington for help.

President Taft at first resisted
the idea of committing

federal resources to the West,
but the situation in the Rockies

became so dire

and the press criticism
of his dithering so unrelenting,

that on August 7
he finally decided to act.

Taft realized

that if he didn't do something,

he was going to get blamed
for a huge loss of life,

not to mention property.

So he authorized the secretary
of war to put the Army in.

Taft sent a total
of 4,000 troops to the Rockies,

including seven companies
from the 25th Infantry,

known as the Buffalo Soldiers.

The town of Wallace, Idaho, had
never seen anything like them.

The Buffalo soldiers were
the first African-American men

to serve as peacetime soldiers
in the professional Army.

They served all over
the American Southwest.

They protected railroad workers
and fought Indians.

You name it, they did it.

This is the first time they
were ever sent to fight a fire.

And they're sent
to a very white area,

almost doubling
the black population

of the state of Idaho.

And so when this all-black
platoon comes and sets up camp,

people scoff at them, people say
racist things about them.

The newspapers say they play
cards and drink all night.

They say, "What can a black man
possibly know

about fighting a fire?"

But it turns out, what happened
with the Buffalo Soldiers

is a tale that should go down
in American military history.

By the second week of August,
another electrical storm

had more than doubled the number
of fires, to 2,500.

But with thousands
of fire fighters and soldiers

now assembled to fight them,
the Little GPs had reason

to hope they might prevail,

if only the fall rains
would arrive in time.

The forest rangers,
they're feeling pretty good.

They're feeling like, "We've
tackled most of these fires.

"We've contained most of them.

"No towns have been destroyed.

No lives have been lost."

They still feel like,
as Pinchot said,

"Man himself can control fire."

They still feel like they're
going to win this thing.

For weeks, Ed Pulaski had been
riding up and down a ridgeline

in the Coeur d'Alene forest
of Northern Idaho,

trying to keep his men
under control

as they hacked fire lines
through the brush.

Pulaski is with some men
up on this ridge.

One side of it is this bustling
mining town of Wallace.

The other side of it is
this railroad town of Avery.

Their job is to keep the thing
from destroying the towns.

Pulaski had 150 men
under his command,

and they were a ragtag group,
with only a handful

of experienced woodsmen
among them.

After days of backbreaking labor
in the intense heat,

his crew was exhausted.

Smoke comes and settles in
the valleys where the towns are.

It's all around you.

The air is still, but you can't
see more than 20 feet

ahead of yourself.

As night began to fall and
in pressing need of supplies,

Pulaski headed back to Wallace.

Despite everything he had done,
he was still worried

the town was going to burn.

On the morning of August 20,

after spending a few precious
hours with Emma and Elsie,

Pulaski reminded them of their
escape plan to the reservoir,

then led a mule team
with supplies

back up the West Fork of Placer
Creek, past hillsides pockmarked

with old mineshafts
and abandoned tunnels,

now barely visible
in the thick smoke.

By late afternoon,
a soft breeze began to sway

the tops of the white pine
and spruce.

By 5:00 p.m., it had freshened
to 20 miles per hour,

then 30,

and suddenly hurricane force
winds of 70 miles per hour

were hurtling out of the west,
fanning the flames

of thousands of fires
like an enormous bellows,

merging everything
into one gigantic blaze.

The Big Burn had begun.

The number one goal
when the thing blows up

is to save the towns.

Biggest of those is Wallace.

Wallace is a town set at
the bottom of a narrow valley.

So as this fusillade
of giant embers comes down,

one of them hits
one of the newspapers there,

the press solvents that are used
to put out the newspaper.

And the thing goes up in a boom.

It then hits a brewery.

The brewery goes up in a ball.

The mayor declares martial law.

It's utter panic.

There's one train left
that's going to get out.

It's going to go west
to Spokane, 109 miles away.

The idea was to take
the elderly, women and children

and put them on the train
and have the men remain

and fight the fire.

But a lot
of these upstanding men

tried to nudge their way
onto the train.

But in most cases they were met
with a soldier

with a bayonet who said,

"No, sir, you're going
to have to stay

and help fight this fire."

"Words cannot depict
the horror of that night,"

recalled one witness.

"The train whistles
were screaming,

"the heavy boom
of falling trees,

the buildings swaying
and steaming from the heat."

As glowing cinders had begun
to cascade around their house,

Emma Pulaski had taken
her daughter Elsie

and fled to the rock pile
by the edge of the reservoir,

just as Ed had instructed.

The flames were leaping
from one mountain to the other,

encircling Wallace
in a ring of fire.

Somewhere in that terrifying
whirlwind was her husband.

"Ask God to save Daddy and his
men," she told her daughter.

The Big Burn swept eastward
across the Rocky Mountains,

picking up speed, consuming
everything in its path.

When this thing blew up
and moved its way

up into the Bitterroots and
bounced around in these peaks,

it became a weather system
of its own.

It is a beast in search
of oxygen,

it is a beast in search of fuel.

The fire is drafting in
on its own winds,

sucking it in
like a kind of hurricane.

Trees are just tossed down,
jack-strawed in circles.

Moving as fast as a horse
could run,

the fire was a cauldron of gases
and explosive heat,

a convection engine,
pulling air into its vortex

and shooting it skyward,

a relentless wall
of incendiary mayhem.

MacLEAN:
With only a handful
of experienced leaders

and a handful
of experienced woodsmen,

you're in a catastrophe.

Up in the forests above Wallace,
Pulaski and his men

were suddenly face-to-face
with a firestorm.

Ed Pulaski comes out of Wallace

with his pack string
of supplies,

finds people scattered
all over the hillside

up in the ridge top
where he left them,

and realizes that they're
in deep trouble.

Confronting a wall of flame
racing towards them

in the gathering darkness,

all thought of opposition
evaporated,

and the men began to panic.

Firebrands whistled
through the forest.

The wind staggered them.

Huge trees came crashing down
on all sides.

Then, one fire fighter
remembered,

"out of the smoke came Pulaski,
waving his arms,

"hollering, 'Come on! Come on!

Follow me.'"

This thing is coming toward them
really quickly.

People fall behind,
people get injured,

people get burned,
people get stepped on.

Embers, giant embers
are coming down.

It's like artillery coming down.

Pulaski led his 44 men through
the inferno, until at last,

he came to one of the old mining
shafts along the creek.

"In here," he ordered,
his hand on his sidearm,

"everyone inside the tunnel."

They're in this tunnel
and they see this wall of flames

creeping toward them
while they're cowering.

This fire is consuming oxygen,

but to leave the cave
is certain death.

They think this is the end.

In desperation, Pulaski soaked
some blankets in water

from the floor of the cave and
hung them across the entrance,

but the flames seared his hands

and the superheated air
scorched his lungs.

Behind him, the men crammed
together in the intense heat

and darkness, struggling
to find enough air.

One guy says, "To hell with
this, I'm getting out of here,"

and starts to leave.

And Pulaski pulls his pistol

and threatens to shoot anybody
who leaves.

Pulaski has done everything
he can to save this crew.

Burned all over his face.

His hands, skin's peeled off
on his hands.

And he passes out at the head
of this cave.

MacLEAN:
Once the fire had passed
the mine, some of the men

started to get up and they
looked at the figure of Pulaski

lying at the mouth

and they said, "My God,
the boss is dead."

Turns out Pulaski's not dead,
he's alive.

He was temporarily blinded.

His lungs were trashed,
but he was able to get himself

to his feet.

They inspected the cave.

Five had died

and they had lost one man
on the run to the cave.

Barely able to see,

Ed Pulaski managed to gather
his men together,

and they staggered through
the still smoldering landscape,

down the mountain trail
to Wallace.

As the fiery tempest moved past
Pulaski's cave

and bore down on the railroad
towns to the east,

Bill Greeley was desperate
for information

about the men under his command.

As reports trickled in
across telegraph wires,

the magnitude of the catastrophe
began to become clear.

18 men were incinerated
when they took refuge

in a settler's cabin.

A crew of 28 were battling
the blaze near the St. Joe River

when firebrands jumped ahead
of them and cut them off.

They were never seen again.

The gamblers and prostitutes of
Taft refused to fight the fire,

preferring instead to open up
their best kegs of whiskey

for one last round
of debauchery.

When the eternal flames
finally arrived,

rangers evacuated
the drunken revelers

and Taft was consumed
in minutes.

By the afternoon of August 20,
almost 24 hours

into the Big Burn,
the railroad town of Avery

had been successfully evacuated
by the Buffalo Soldiers.

Now, the troops
and the few men left in town

found themselves facing a wall
of steadily advancing flames.

Boarding one last train
to the east,

they raced across trestles
already ablaze,

through a furnace so hot
the paint melted off

the outside of the railcars.

Then the fire jumped ahead
and blocked their way.

With nowhere else to go, they
were forced back to Avery.

They realized,

"If we can't turn this fire,

"it's going to burn up
not only the city,

it's going to burn us up, too."

At 11:00 that night,

with the conflagration
only half a mile away,

the Buffalo Soldiers lit a
backfire and held their breath.

If you time a fire correctly
and you light it

in front of the main fire,

then those flames from the
smaller fire will be sucked in.

MacLEAN:
If there's no fuel left to burn,

then there's no place
for this fire to go.

The forward motion of it
will be stopped.

"Plunging at each other
like two living animals,

"the flames met with a roar

that must have been heard miles
away," remembered one ranger.

"The tongues of fire seemed
to leap up to heaven itself

and after an instant's seething
sank to nothingness."

Miraculously,
Avery was still standing.

After the town was saved,
newspapers were busy

interviewing everybody

and one account in Avery
made the comment

that, "My whole attitude
about the black race has changed

"as a result of
what I've seen and witnessed

from these fellows."

Emma and Elsie Pulaski
spent the terrifying night

on the rock pile,
watching Wallace burn.

As the flames receded
and a feeble morning sun tried

to burn through
the smoke and haze,

they trudged back towards town.

The entire eastern side
of Wallace was a smoking ruin,

but their house, to their
amazement, was still standing.

Then Emma heard that a man had
staggered out of the mountains

with the news that Ed Pulaski
and all his men had perished.

A few hours later came another
report that Ed was alive,

but horribly disfigured
and near death.

Finally, around 10:00
in the morning,

Emma looked down the road
and saw a man leading someone

with bandages on his head
and hands.

As he walked unsteadily
towards her, she recognized

the burned and battered face
of her husband.

Ed Pulaski had come home.

What finally muffles
what's left of the Big Burn

is an early season snowstorm.

Snow can happen anytime
in the Rocky Mountains,

but you don't expect it
in the end of August,

early September.

The crews, the townsfolk,
everybody just went out

and just sat in the rain
and the snow

and let it wash them over
and wash away all the grime

and the fear, the horror
of the days.

As the atmosphere finally
cleared in the Northern Rockies,

the true nature of the
devastation became apparent.

More than three million acres
of forest had burned,

and Greeley estimated
that a billion dollars

worth of timber had been lost.

The winds were so strong,

entire sections of the forest
had been flattened,

huge trees spread out
like kindling.

Soot from the fires darkened
sunsets as far away as Boston,

and a layer of ash blackened
the ice in Greenland.

The human toll
was equally appalling.

One of the startling things
that happened in 1910

were all the dead fire fighters.

There were 78 during
the Big Blowup

and this had never
happened before.

They had no idea what to do.

There's no worker's comp.

There's nothing to pay
for their expenses.

There's no burial money.

They simply don't know
what to do.

The survivors go
to these hospitals

and they patch them up.

But what happens afterwards
is horrible.

One of them commits suicide.

Others die months
or a few years later

and they weren't even credited

as part of the official
casualty toll

because their lungs
were so badly compromised

by how much smoke
they breathed in.

They die at 28, 29 years old
from the smoke of the Big Burn,

which kills them six months
after the fact.

Before the smoke had even
cleared from the mountains,

the debate over the lessons
of the Big Burn began.

Gifford Pinchot
has two reactions to it.

The first thing is horror,
because remember,

he said this hubristic thing

saying man himself
can control fire.

Nature has proved him
utterly wrong.

So he's horrified by this thing.

He's horrified
by the loss of life.

But he also has
a second reaction.

And this is indicative
of all great political figures.

Pinchot uses the fire
as part of a narrative

about American heroes,

that these forest rangers
gave their lives,

risked everything for public
land, for national forests.

And all the newspapers
write these stories.

It's one of the first times in
our history that fire fighters

join the pantheon
of American heroes.

The critics of
the Forest Service say,

"Look, you guys had everything
you wanted.

"It didn't work.

We knew it wouldn't work,
so you lost."

But Pinchot argued that,
"No, we just didn't have enough

"to really give it a full test.

"And we need to honor
those who died

by seeing their vision
completed."

But what should have been
their lowest ebb

turns out to be
their creation myth.

So much public support arises
for the Forest Service

and the national forests

that it has the effect
of pushing public policy.

What had been
a reluctant Congress

now gives the Forest Service
the resources it needs,

doubling the budget,

and eventually creates
national forests in the East...

In Pennsylvania, Mississippi,
Virginia.

As the agency grew

under the stewardship of men
like William Greeley,

putting out fires became

almost an institutional
obsession.

Nothing affects the culture
of the Forest Service more

than this fire.

They become sort of
a municipal fire service

of national forests.

Only you can prevent
forest fires.

In the decades
after the Big Burn,

the agency's uncompromising
stand on fire would serve

the Forest Service well,

but its impact
on the national forests

would be fraught
with unintended consequences.

I think the fundamental dilemma

with the fire suppression policy
that Pinchot advocated

was in the end, it was the wrong
policy for the land.

It may have been the right
policy for the agency,

but it's the wrong policy
for the environment.

Fighting fires in the wilderness
was not only futile,

but it was really not healthy
for the forest.

If you have a landscape

that normally would burn
every 20 years

and you put out every fire
in that forest for 100 years,

you now have five times
more fuel in that forest

than you normally would.

The medicine that we were giving
was worse than the disease.

By putting out every fire
for 100 years,

they created, indirectly,

what are now some
of the greatest wildfires.

But imagine now
if this fire had not happened.

They might have killed
the Forest Service.

And with it would have gone
the idea that's so embraced

by a majority
of Americans today,

that we have more
than 500 million acres

that is all of ours,
that belongs to each of us.

By saving the fledgling idea
of conservation,

then only a few years old,

this fire did save
a larger part of America.

In the end, Ed Pulaski
could never escape the Big Burn.

He lived on with Emma
in Wallace,

remaining what he had
always been,

a quiet man who loved
the mountains of the West.

Crippled by the flames that had
seared his eyes and lungs,

he kept on working for the
Forest Service until 1929,

stubbornly petitioning
the government for compensation

for his wounds

and for money to care
for the simple graves

of those who had fallen.

He also never stopped using
his hands and crafted a tool

with a hoe on one end
and an ax on the other.

It was so perfectly designed

that fire fighters around
the world never again did battle

without what came to be known
as a Pulaski by their side.

Someone needs to stop Clearway Law.
Public shouldn't leave reviews for lawyers.