How We Talked of Wildfires And How We Do Now

On July 11th, 1910, J.E. Kirkwood, a thirty-eight-year-old, Ivy League-trained botanist left the budding Northern city of Missoula, Montana by train, bound for the pine-choked peaks around the tiny outpost of Haugan. “The object in undertaking this trip was to gain a knowledge of the natural features of this country,” he would later report. “In the second place the operations of the Forest Service as carried out on the National Forests was made the object of special study,” he added, “with reference to planting, cutting, protection against fire.”

Laden with photography equipment, a fishing rod, rifle, and what he referred to as “rough clothes and heavy boots,” Kirkwood made his way through the rugged landscape, an area thick with white pine and tumbling brooks where the Forest Service was working to replant saplings in old burn scars in the midst of a years-long drought.  

“While the drought is probably the main cause of the failure in the planting operations, mice and squirrels are also responsible to a large degree,” Kirkwood noted. 

He was just twenty-five miles from Wallace, Idaho, and less than ten from Taft, Montana. In a month, Wallace would partially burn in the largest wildfire ever recorded in the United States. And Taft would be completely destroyed.

Six weeks later, from Denver, Colorado, to the ocean swells beyond Washington and Oregon, even thousands of miles east to Watertown, New York, and Boston, Massachusetts, a strange omen was cast upon the sky. Thick black smoke brought midday darkness to millions of Americans, brought forth by mysterious circumstances most had little idea of. 

But something was stirring in the then seldom-traveled Northwest wilderness.

“For days the air had been laden with smoke, flying embers, ashes, singed twigs and moss — some pieces as large as a hand or foot falling promiscuously about,” a Mr. Swaine of the Coeur d’Alene Mountains would later share of the fire that would come to be known as The Big Burn. “It was evident that fires were raging in almost every direction and that day by day they were drawing nearer to us. Our constant prayer was for rain.”

Drought-stricken and pocked with small blazes set by railroad engines, lighting, and arsonists, the endless woods around Idaho’s panhandle, an area then known as The Great Lone Land, smoldered with perhaps three thousand fires. Then a terrible gale whipped them into one conflagration, burning unfathomable swaths in the span of mere days.

“On Saturday afternoon, August 20, all hell broke loose,” Jim Peterson wrote in Evergreen Magazine’s 1994-1995 winter edition commemorating The Big Burn. “Hurricane-force winds, unlike anything seen since, roared across the rolling Palouse country of eastern Washington and on into Idaho and Montana forests so dry they crackled underfoot. In a matter of hours, fires became firestorms, and trees by the millions became exploding candles.”

Three million acres would burn. 87 people, including some 78 firefighters, lost their lives. A half dozen towns were burned to the ground. It was such a momentous disaster that the then-fledgling US Forest Service, molded by the aloof and legendary but recently ousted Gifford Pinchot, would, for generations, prioritize extinguishing all forest fires as soon as possible.

But at the time, to most, a disaster had struck far away, and all they had seen of it was the smoke.

News of the catastrophe traveled by the means of the time. “Wallace has been burning for two hours from forest fires,” a Western Union telegraph sent by Stanley Easton of the Bunker Hill Mining Company to a superior in San Francisco on August 22nd read. “Everything here OK. But situation has been grave.”

Closer to the blaze, local papers reported almost in real time. “At 3 o’clock this morning, the fire situation west and north of Missoula is in the most serious phase that it has assumed since the forest fires became threatening,” The Daily Missoulian reported on Sunday morning, August 21st. “Wallace (Idaho) is believed to be destroyed; there has been no communication directly with the city since 11 o’clock.”

The fire soon garnered the attention of the national news. The New York Times reported that much of the telephone infrastructure in the national forest had been destroyed by the fire. Still, reports from Forest Service supervisors in St. Regis, Montana, and Wallace, Idaho, were dispatched via wire from reporters in Spokane, Washington, carrying word of the blaze thousands of miles to the East, just as the smoke had traveled.

“The burned district…extends east to Missoula, north to the headwaters of the St. Joe, and in other directions nobody knows how far,” The Times reported on the 24th, days after the worst of the fire. “From the top of the hills everything as far as the eye can see is swept bare.”

As the fires at last abated, those reports were buttressed by stories of horrors and heroism. The Times detailed how the small community of Elk City, Idaho, had been spared in large part due to the work of the town’s women, who had stayed behind—many overnight on the roofs of buildings—to protect their homes and businesses while the men were recruited to fight the fire elsewhere. 

And over time, broader narratives came to the fore, like that of the fledgling Forest Service, then just a few years old and little more than a sprawling series of isolated fire lookouts and newly trained rangers. 

“There was an attitude that if there’s something wrong in the forest, we can go in there and fix it. It was almost like wildfire was this beast we could hunt down and eradicate,” writer Michael Kodas noted in Steven Ives’ American Experience episode “The Big Burn.” The Forest Service would press that philosophy into service after the fire, an ethos that would prevail for over a hundred years, with its own story and consequences, much of it realized generations later.

116 years after the Big Burn, I’m bumping along in the passenger seat of my friend’s Dodge Ram on the winding road home. We had camped the night before above an idyllic tarn at ten thousand feet under a Milky Way so bright it seemed to cast shadows.

Town opens up before us as we come around the last big bend, out of the wooded highway and into the big skies and long views. My head bobs with fatigue from the seven-mile hike out. 

But then I see it. Rising just beyond the mountains against the pale blue of midday is a single plume of dark smoke. It’s so fresh we can see the top of the column. 

My friend drops me off and says a heartfelt goodbye, but my mind is already elsewhere. Tossing my pack into the open garage, my mind races. Where are the kids’ birth certificates? Social security cards? And my anxiety finds its next focus: an app on my smartphone.

I go to WatchDuty, a site created to track natural disasters like floods and wildfires, often breaking news on blazes before official channels do. I zoom into the app’s map, close to where I think the fire might be, but there is no posted fire. Five minutes pass, and I refresh. 

Nothing. But the smoke still builds.

Where once the nature of a three-million-acre fire could only be known to most days later, and whose larger takeaways rendered much after, modern blazes can now fill any of our waking hours. Satellites sense potential fires as they spark, revealed as bright orange dots on a digital map. Websites like WatchDuty unveil unfolding calamities often before government agencies do, bringing fires to life on monitors and smartphones with jagged boundary lines and a constantly updated newsfeed. Detailed smoke maps are even available, telling us where our obscured skies came from.

In many ways, it’s a boon to the average person, especially those living in the again drought-stricken woodlands of the West. Local newspapers often reference WatchDuty when reporting on new wildfires.  And thousands have subscribed to the service in the wake of disasters like the Palisades Fire that swept through Santa Monica and Pacific Palisades, California, in 2025.

Social media also plays its role in how wildfires are communicated, where posts often show what is happening as it occurs, giving a resource like no other. But the short-form snippets—awesome in their drama—saturate feeds while reaching for likes and reshares. 

WatchDuty itself has a large following, with tens of millions of users eager to know what’s happening in forests near and far in real time.

Including me.

I pack our go-bags with headlamps, changes of clothes, and toys for the kids. For days I anxiously scan the southern horizon.

More than a month later that bag still sits in my bedroom.

Smoke again stains the skies of The West and far beyond, like it did in the late summer of 1910. But instead of newspapers carrying the story days later, the cycle of instant information brings images of daunting walls of fire and smoke-choked towns to countless fingertips, even those far from the flames, at once granting information and an onslaught of frightening images and words. Many recounted the Big Burn using the word doom. Just as many now use that word to refer to the way we voyeuristically scroll the internet.

Those threats—whether immediate or simply presented that way on the endless grid of Instagram—shroud a story whose takeaways will only be seen in retrospect. In response to The Big Burn and the destruction it caused, the Forest Service took to fighting as many blazes as possible, in turn loading much of the West with fuels that would have burned in natural cycles. 

But while that policy and a warming climate may have added to the power of our current wildfires, the unintended consequences of an overzealous Forest Service may have had a certain silver lining, one that could only be seen later, one that might evade us now, ever attached to the immediacy of information.

“By putting out every fire for a hundred years, they created, indirectly, what are now some of the greatest wildfires,” Timothy Egan, author of The Big Burn, said in Steve Ives’ documentary of the same name. “But imagine now if this fire had not happened. It 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 five hundred million acres that is all of ours.”

More than a century ago, as the Forest Service was finding its footing, and just days before the Big Burn would whip forth, forcing its future, the botanist J.E. Kirkwood was near Warland, Montana, not studying the replanted white pine saplings, but aiding in one of many firefights that have taken place in the West and beyond for more than a century. 

“Backfiring seems always a risky business,” Kirkwood wrote in his report. “One can never tell when the wind is going to turn, and if it does the chances are very thin that the fire can be controlled.”

About The Brave New World of Skiing Column

This article was written by POWDER writer Jack O’Brien for his ‘Brave New World of Skiing’ column. Click below to read the previous column, ‘Adventures In Underskiing‘.

Related: Adventures In Underskiing