Lincoln National Forest: The Bear Cub Who Became America
Near Ruidoso, New Mexico
In May of nineteen fifty, a fire swept through the Lincoln National Forest in the Sacramento Mountains of south-central New Mexico. The Capitan Gap Fire burned seventeen thousand acres. When it was over, a crew of firefighters found a black bear cub clinging to a charred tree. The cub's paws and hind legs had been burned. He had survived by climbing above the fire line.
The cub was taken to Santa Fe, then flown to the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., where he was given the name Smokey Bear, after a cartoon bear that the Forest Service and the Ad Council had been using in fire prevention campaigns since nineteen forty-four. The fictional Smokey had been chosen as the mascot for a campaign launched during World War Two, when the fear of enemy-caused forest fires in the West had led the federal government to fund a broad public education effort. The real bear gave the fictional character a face.
Smokey Bear, the actual animal, lived at the National Zoo for twenty-six years. He died in November of nineteen seventy-six. He was buried at what is now Smokey Bear Historical Park in Capitan, New Mexico, the town nearest where he was found. The park sits at the edge of Lincoln National Forest.
The fire prevention campaign built around Smokey is one of the longest-running and most widely recognized public service advertising programs in American history. By most measures, it succeeded. Accidental human-caused wildfires declined substantially from the nineteen fifties through the nineteen eighties. By the nineteen nineties and two thousands, however, fire scientists had documented that the campaign's success had created its own problem. Decades of fire suppression had allowed fuel loads to accumulate across Western forests to levels well above the historical range. The fires that were eventually coming were larger and hotter than the fires being prevented.
The bear was real. The campaign was effective. The lesson the campaign taught turned out to be only part of the story.
