The Big Burn and Spokane's Role
Near Spokane, Washington
On August twentieth, nineteen ten, hurricane-force winds swept across the northern Rockies and the panhandle of Idaho. Hundreds of small forest fires burning in a summer of extreme drought were whipped together into one or two monstrous infernos. In less than forty-eight hours, three million acres of forest burned. The disaster is remembered as the Big Burn, or the Great Fire of nineteen ten.
The human toll was staggering. Eighty-seven people died, most of them firefighters. The towns of Wallace and Avery in Idaho were partially or completely destroyed. Passenger trains evacuated thousands of Wallace residents through the flames, with some accounts describing burning embers falling on the train cars as they raced toward safety. Spokane received thousands of evacuees in the days that followed.
Spokane's connection to the disaster was more than geographic. The city was a major supply and transportation hub for the region. The United States Forest Service, barely five years old at the time of the fire, ran its emergency response from district offices across the northern Rockies. The disaster put the young agency under pressure: critics in the mining and timber industries argued the fire proved that federal forest management was a failure and should be abandoned.
Instead, the opposite happened. The nineteen ten fire and its lessons became the foundation of the Forest Service's century-long policy of aggressive fire suppression, a policy only now being revisited as ecologists document the ecological cost of removing fire from forest systems that evolved with it. The Big Burn shaped federal land management across the entire West from its district offices in the northern Rockies outward.
