Ed Pulaski and the Fire That Changed Everything

On the night of August twentieth, nineteen ten, a forest ranger named Edward Pulaski led forty-five men into a mine shaft and probably saved their lives. The mine is a short distance from this stretch of road, and what happened there shaped the way Americans fight wildfires to this day.

The summer of nineteen ten had been brutally dry across the Northern Rockies. By August, hundreds of separate fires were burning across Idaho, Montana, and Washington. Then, on the evening of August twentieth, a series of fierce windstorms swept the region, merging fires into walls of flame that moved with terrifying speed. In what firefighters would call the Big Blowup, roughly three million acres burned in less than two days, the largest and deadliest wildfire event in American history. About eighty-seven people died, most of them firefighters.

Forest Ranger Pulaski was leading a crew near Wallace, Idaho, when the firestorm overtook them. With visibility almost zero and the fire closing fast, he guided his men along Placer Creek to an abandoned prospector's mine called the Nicholson adit, an eighty-foot horizontal shaft cut into the mountainside. He ordered the men inside and hung wet blankets across the entrance to block the flames. When some of the terrified crew tried to flee, Pulaski, coughing and nearly blinded by smoke, held them at gunpoint and forced them to stay. He lost consciousness before the fire passed. Five of his men died, but forty survived. Pulaski himself recovered, though he was partially blinded for life.

The story did not end in that tunnel. In the years after nineteen ten, Pulaski began experimenting in his blacksmith shop with a new firefighting tool that combined an axe blade with an adze for digging. He finished the design around nineteen eleven. The Forest Service began manufacturing it commercially in nineteen twenty, and it became a national standard in the nineteen thirties. Today every wildland firefighter in the United States carries a Pulaski. The tunnel and the escape route are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.