Text from THE BIG BURN, copyright © 2002 by Jeanette Ingold, used by
permission of Harcourt, Inc.
The fires had been burning for weeks.
They'd been born of sparks thrown form stream-driven
trains and from the machinery of backcountry logging. They'd started in
the working fires of homesteaders and miners and in the campfires of hoboes and
in the trash-burning fires of construction camps and saloon towns. They'd
begun when lightning had coursed down from an uneasy summer sky to ignite the
towering snags of dry forests.
The wildfires lay behind a brown haze that was beginning
to shroud mountaintops and drift like dirty fog through the forests of the Idaho
panhandle. Though no one then knew it, they were fires that would join
ranks and run in a vast wall of flame.
When they did, it would be called the big blowup, the
great burn, the Big Burn. . .
Once the dead had been counted, and once the awfulness was
far enough behind that people could put pretty words to what had happened,
August 20, 1910, would be remembered as the day the mountains roared.
But in mid-July that year, though fire conditions were
worrisome, that orange hell was still mostly unimagined as folks went about
their lives.
A ranger guided a botany professor on a field trip.
A peacetime soldier assembled his rifle for a training exercise. An aunt
and her niece on a wilderness homestead argued about the money its timber might
bring in.
And a young man went after a fire, believing fire was
something he could stop.
