The West is Burning Up!

STORIES
THE 1910 FIRE
By Jim Petersen
Evergreen Magazine, Winter Edition 1994-1995

It was the largest forest fire in American history. Maybe even the largest forest fire ever. No one knows for sure, but even now, it is hard to put into words what it did.
For two terrifying days and night's - August 20 and 21, 1910 - the fire raged across three million acres of virgin timberland in northern Idaho and western Montana.
Many thought the world would end, and for 86, it did.
Most of what was destroyed fell to hurricane-force winds that turned the fire into a blowtorch. Re-constructing what happened leads to an almost impossible conclusion: Most of the cremation occurred in a six-hour period.
A forester named Edward Stahl wrote of flames shooting hundreds of feet in the air, "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."
Among the 86 who perished were 28 or 29 men - no one knows for sure - who tried to outrun their fate in a straight upstraight down canyon called Storm Creek.
Two men too terrified to face death took their own lives. One jumped from a burning train and the other shot himself when he feared an approaching fire would overtake him. Two fire fighters fled into flames before the very eyes of horrified comrades huddled in a nearby stream.
Hundreds more survived, many by the grace of God. Ranger Edward Pulaski, who became a hero at a place called the War Eagle Mine, led men with prayers on their lips through a pitch-black darkness punctuated by exploding trees and waves of flames that arced across the night sky.
Perhaps, Edward Stahl would later say, "the men thought the small fires flickering dimly in the darkness were candles burning for the dead."
"The fire turned trees and men into weird torches that exploded like Roman candles," one survivor told a newspaper reporter.