![]() “For every fire we put out,” one service member told a Missoula, Mont., newspaper, “a new one is reported.”Īs the blaze intensified, increasingly desperate local officials brought in trainloads of firefighters from every walk of life. A strong lightning storm over the Bitterroots on the night of July 26 exacerbated the situation by igniting a flurry of fires that stretched the Forest Service lines and began to get out of hand. As spring yielded to an unusually dry, hot summer, reports flooded in of hundreds of small blazes, many sparked by lightning, others by cinders thrown off by steam locomotives or through the careless actions of miners and even inexperienced forest rangers. The first report of fire in the northern Rockies that season had come in on April 29, earlier than usual, from the newly declared Blackfeet National Forest of northwestern Montana. “The country has been wiped clean,” one survivor recalled of the stark landscape left in the fire’s wake. ![]() Dubbed the “Big Burn” or “Big Blowup,” the resulting firestorm remains the largest wildfire known to have hit the United States and, as one historian wrote, “possibly the biggest ever in North American history.” It scorched some 3 million acres of virgin forest, mainly in northern Idaho and western Montana, and killed dozens of people, mostly firefighters. Within days winds swept down from the low hills of the Palouse region of southeastern Washington, fanning the flames and merging the thousands of small fires into a single massive blaze. Some buried sewing machines, tools and trunks filled with personal possessions and family keepsakes for later retrieval. Other residents of the northern Rockies, especially those with memories of earlier fires, began plotting their escape and planning what they might take with them on horseback, in wagons or on the train. ‘The country has been wiped clean,’ one survivor recalled of the stark landscape left in the fire’s wake But Lily found the orange clouds beautiful. She could tell her mother was frightened, as she’d been crying. ![]() On Little Beaver Creek, north of Thompson Falls, Mont., 3-year-old Lily Cunningham had watched in fascination as glowing plumes of orange smoke drifted across the night sky. In Taft, Mont., which the Chicago Tribune had recently labeled “the wickedest city in America,” and in other rough settlements in the northern Rocky Mountains-Saltese in Montana, and Mullan, Avery and Grand Forks in Idaho-saloonkeepers, railroad workers and prostitutes kept an eye on the burning hills. He was also concerned about wife Bertha, who had entered Providence Hospital in Wallace to give birth to the couple’s third child. “The fire’s blowing up,” Kottkey soon reported to supervisors. In mid-August ranger Ed Pulaski, one of the service’s few experienced men, ventured out with a crew to fight fires near the west fork of Placer Creek, about 5 miles south of town, while fellow ranger Henry Kottkey and his men battled a blaze on Loop Creek. Forest Service was struggling to keep up with the fires. The smoke, at times verging on a fog, enveloped town. It had rained little since spring, and the tinder-dry forest on the surrounding slopes had spawned numerous small blazes. Shopkeepers, miners and housewives in Wallace, Idaho, had been complaining about the smoke for most of the summer of 1910. The fire swept through some 2.7 million acres of federal woodlands, including this stand of white pines in Idaho’s Couer d’Alene National Forest. America's Worst Wildfire: The Big Burn of 1910 Close ![]()
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