The Big Burn Read online

  The Big Burn

  Jeanette Ingold

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  ...

  Dedication

  Copyright

  Map

  Introduction

  Part One

  Washington State

  Homestead off Placer Creek

  Avery

  Homestead off Placer Creek

  Cool Spring Ranger Station

  Avery

  Washington State

  Cool Spring Ranger Station

  Homestead off Placer Creek

  Cool Spring Ranger Station

  Homestead off Placer Creek

  Washington State

  Cool Spring Ranger Station

  Placer Creek

  Homestead off Placer Creek

  Placer Creek

  Part Two

  Wallace

  Graham Creek

  Homestead off Placer Creek

  Graham Creek

  Cool Spring Ranger Station

  Wallace

  Washington State

  Homestead off Placer Creek

  Graham Creek

  Wallace

  Wallace

  Wallace

  Wallace

  Wallace

  Wallace

  Wallace

  Homestead off Placer Creek

  Wallace

  Wallace

  Cool Spring Ranger Station

  Homestead off Placer Creek

  North of the St. Joe River

  Avery

  Homestead off Placer Creek

  North of the St. Joe River

  Part Three

  Wallace

  North of the St. Joe River

  Avery

  Wallace

  Wallace

  North of the St. Joe River

  West of Wallace

  North of the St. Joe River

  Wallace

  North of the St. Joe River

  Wallace

  Avery

  Wallace

  North of the St. Joe River

  Wallace

  Avery

  West of Wallace

  Avery

  Avery

  Avery

  Avery

  Avery

  Avery

  West of Wallace

  Wallace

  Avery

  Avery

  Avery

  Wallace

  Wallace

  Avery

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  Sources and Suggestions for Further Reading

  READER CHAT PAGE

  CHATTING WITH JEANETTE INGOLD

  Look for Jeanette Ingold's

  OTHER BOOKS BY JEANETTE INGOLD

  Pictures, 1918

  Airfield

  Harcourt, Inc.

  Oriando

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  For my son, Kurt,

  and for all the men and women

  who fight wildland fire

  Copyright © 2002 by Jeanette Ingold

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

  transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

  including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval

  system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work

  should be mailed to the following address: Permissions Department,

  Harcourt, Inc., 6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.

  www.HarcourtBooks.com

  First Harcourt paperback edition 2003

  Although the events and some of the people mentioned

  in this book are drawn from the real-life fire of 1910,

  this is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of the characters

  to actual people, living or dead, is coincidental.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

  Ingold, Jeanette.

  The Big Bum/by Jeanette Ingold.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Three teenagers battle the flames of the

  Big Burn of 1910, one of the century's biggest wildfires.

  1. Forest fires—Idaho—History—Juvenile fiction. 2. Forest fires—

  Montana—History—Juvenile fiction. [1. Forest fires—Fiction.

  2. Wildfires—Fiction. 3. Idaho—History—Fiction. 4. Montana—

  History—Fiction. 5. Frontier and pioneer life—West (U.S.)—Fiction.

  6. United States—History—1909–1913—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.I533Bi 2002

  [Fic]—dc21 2001005667

  ISBN 0-15-216470-7

  ISBN 0-15-204924-X (pb)

  Text set in Caslon 540

  Designed by Kaelin Chappell

  DOM G H F

  Printed in the United States of America

  The wildfires had been burning for weeks.

  They'd been born of sparks thrown from steam-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 beaming to shroud mountaintops and drift like dirty fog through the forests of the Idaho panhandle. Thought 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, thought 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.

  Part One

  FIELD NOTES

  A fair day followed a night brightened by dry lightning streaking to earth. Ranger William Morris set out from Coeur d'Alene Forest headquarters in Wallace, Idaho, to accompany a university professor on an expedition to look at mountain vegetation. They headed south along Placer Creek and then angled off to climb Striped Peak. A stiff wind kept them comfortable as the day heated up.

  The Coeur d'Alene National Forest stretched out around them, a million and a half acres of pine and Douglas fir, of larch and hemlock and cedar. Needled treetops locked together to line canyon bottoms and cover furrowed slopes in unbroken sheets of green. In the distance, when jagged, bare peaks rose from layered tiers of rough mountains, the green turned to hazy blue.

  They were eating lunch atop the sixty-three-hundred-foot summit when Morris noticed smoke in the southwest. He took a compass bearing and went back to his meal. But then a second, quickly ballooning smoke appeared in the southeast and was soon followed by the wispy track of a third fire.

  He plotted their locations on his map, and then he and the professor returned to Wallace to report them.

  The next time Morris climbed Striped Peak, he would find that all the land's greenness was gone, replaced by a blackened tangle of burned trees. He would write that they reminded him of j
ackstraws more than anything else.

  Washington State

  July 13, Morning

  Private Seth Brown, seventeen, of the all-black Twenty-fifth Infantry (except for the white officers) slid the bayonet blade onto his rifle and jammed its keyhole fitting into place. Everyone else in the squad was long done cleaning up from the morning's training and preparing for the afternoon's, but Seth—his fingers fumbling through still unfamiliar tasks—was keeping them all from going to lunch.

  "Hey, Junior!" one of the men said. "You break that U.S.A. government property, and you'll be buying it out of your pay."

  "Shut up," another said. "You want to slow him down more?"

  Seth bent over his last task, which was to fit the required gear onto his belt for the afternoon march. He hurried as best he could, but trying to remember how to attach it all.... And his canteen! How could he have forgotten to fill it? Even if he didn't need the water, Sarge would notice the canteen swinging empty and get on him about that.

  A hand held out a filled one, and Seth looked up to see the new guy on the squad.Abel that was his name.

  "I got here with an extra," Abel said, shrugging to make light of his help.

  "Thanks," Seth told him. "I owe you."

  "I'll collect," the other said with a smile.

  Seth had seen how fast Abel had got all his own gear squared away, arriving less than an hour earlier and already fitting in. He was the kind of soldier Seth wanted to be, only the harder Seth tried, the more he seemed to mess up. Seth had thought that maybe when his company left its garrison outside of Spokane, he'd get a chance to show how he could at least stick to a hard job longer than anybody, but it hadn't happened. So far, bivouac was proving as much a disaster as anything else in the months Seth had been in the army.

  Sometimes he wondered why he'd signed up—even lied about his age so he could—and then he remembered how he'd believed he could do his father proud. Join his father's old outfit and pick up where his father had left off, fighting wars and stopping riots. Those had been his father's favorite stories, told over and over those last days before sickness made his leg gangrene and then killed him.

  Anger surged through Seth. It wasn't right for his father not to have told him the whole of it, how the army also meant learning a hundred new jobs and a hundred right ways to do them.

  The army had a right and a wrong even for campfires, it seemed. Just that morning Seth had got up before reveille to make one, thinking the other men might welcome a way to ward off the early morning chill. Only, Sarge had yanked him to his feet and loudly demanded to know what Seth thought he was doing. "You want to burn this whole place down?"

  Like I didn't have sense to handle a simple fire! Seth thought. He smarted all over again, remembering the disgusted voices of his awakened tent mates. "Brown, of course. No one else dumb enough to find trouble even before wake-up."

  Now, finally, Seth attached the last item to his belt, tightened the gaiters that wrapped around his trouser legs from foot to knee, and made sure he'd buttoned the four pockets of his uniform jacket. Cut for a man, it was too full for Seth's slender body, but he couldn't do anything about that. He reached for his wide-brimmed felt hat.

  "Hey, looks like you got it," the new guy, Abel, said. "Come on. Let's get some chow, and then you can tell me what's what around here."

  Homestead off Placer Creek

  July 13, Afternoon

  "Don't start," Lizbeth's aunt told her.

  "You didn't buyany"Lizbeth unlatched the wagon's backboard and pushed aside sacks of flour and beans in hopes they hid a roll of fencing. "Celia, you promised. Youpromised?

  "I did not. I said I would think about it on my way to town, and I did. I found nothing to change my opinion that it would be a waste of our money."

  "Keeping sheep might actuallymake us some."

  Lizbeth got no answer from her aunt, who was unhitching Trenton and Philly. Ridiculous names, in Lizbeth's opinion, for two hardworking horses that deserved to be called something that matched their lives. Just more of Celia's denying the realities of her and Lizbeth's wilderness homestead several miles south of Wallace, Idaho.

  Lizbeth wanted to shove herself in front of Celia and make her listen, so that next spring they could put a few lambs out to forage in the forest undergrowth. Bum lambs cost practically nothing, and fattened up for a few months they'd bring in six, maybe even eight cents a pound.

  But Lizbeth could tell from the way her aunt's thin face was set that explaining it all again wouldn't be any use. Celia shut her ears against any idea for making their place go.

  The truth was, Lizbeth thought, Celia was scared of hearing one that might work.

  Hang on. Just hang on one more year. Celia had said it so often that the words themselves hung in the air even on the days she didn't voice them. Just hang on one more year, until they got full title to their homestead and could do with it what they wanted. Once their claim was proved up, they could sell off every scrap of wood, and that was Celia's plan.

  ***

  Leaving Celia to clean up from supper, Lizbeth went out to do her chores, still seething with frustration. There were just ten years between them, Celia's twenty-six to her own sixteen. Enough of a difference for Celia to be her legal guardian, which had been Lizbeth's choice as much as Celia's, but not enough difference to keep them from arguing more like warring sisters. At least like Lizbeth imagined sisters might argue.

  She chopped wood for the next day's cooking fire, hauled fresh water from the creek, and shut their rooster and five hens into the chicken house. She secured the door latch with an iron clip, something she'd been doing since the night a weasel got in and killed several chicks.

  Then determined to end the evening peacefully, she returned to the log cabin where she and Celia lived. It wasn't all that much bigger than where the chickens roosted, and, except for a horse shelter and the outhouse, it was the only other structure in the small clearing.

  She found her aunt sketching guidelines for a new watercolor, squinting because it was late enough that there wasn't much light coming down the lantern skylight cut in the roof. Just skylight, Celia called it. The way people out West talked seemed like one more thing that made Celia uneasy, their terms meaning different things from what she thought they should.

  Lizbeth watched her carefully copy a magazine picture. It showed an orderly New England town where neatly dressed women visited on street corners. Lizbeth thought how different their tailored suits and large decorated hats were from her own plain gingham dress and long rough apron. Although it wasn't their clothes that set these women's lives apart from hers and Celia's as much as the way they appeared not to have things they needed to be doing. Lizbeth tucked a strand of light brown hair into the braid she wore in a loose coil above her neck.

  "You know that going back, we wouldn't find it nice like that," Lizbeth said. "You married Tom Whitcomb so he'd take us away!"

  "We'll find it better," Celia answered, not bothering to deny Lizbeth's accusation. They both knew the charge was true, and Tom Whitcomb hadn't deserved more. "Our timber money will see to that"

  "Cel, I wouldn't want to go back if we had all the money in the world.This is my home, and I love it here. You would, too, if you weren't so set on closing your eyes to everything good."

  "You're blocking my light," her aunt said.

  "I don't want to go," Lizbeth repeated.

  "You don't have a choice."

  "I'll find one."

  FIELD NOTES

  Moisture through the winter of 1909–1910 had been close to normal, and on the Coeur d'Alene Forest, it had appeared for a while that avalanches might be 1910's worst problem.

  Then, in the northern Rockies, mountain grasses barely greened up in the warmest April on record. They turned brown as a dry May gave way to a drier June and then to a July in which many weather stations reported no rain at all. The fire season roared in early. New fires began springing up daily, and the U.S. Forest Servic
e, five years old and thinly staffed, began taking on extra fireguards and crew.

  Owners of private woodland took steps to protect their interests, too. Mining and logging companies shifted their employees to fire duty when needed, and railroads hired spotters to walk the rights-of-way, where many fires started. All it took to ignite one was a lightning strike or a glowing cinder from a train's stack landing in slash left from clearing and construction.

  Sometimes all it took to put one out was a man wielding a shovel—as long as he got to the fire before it grew.

  Avery

  July 13, Afternoon

  Less than fifteen miles south-southeast of the Whitcomb homestead, though a mountain divide away, Jarrett Logan was finishing the first day on his new job. At sixteen, he was younger than the railroad generally hired, but Pop had fixed it with Mr. Blakeney in the front office.

  So far Jarrett had walked his assigned section of track without seeing so much as a hot cinder or glowing cigar butt to stomp out. He figured he had it easy because of how near his section was to Avery. Approaching engines were already slowing for the last bend before town, and engines leaving the rail yards hadn't gotten up to full, spark-throwing speed. Crews were careful, too, so close to where blame could be assigned and positions lost.

  So when Jarrett finally smelled smoke, he was surprised. He moved quickly, anxious to find its source.

  And then the wind shifted and blew stronger, and he realized the pungent odor wasn't coming from along the tracks but instead from the steep hills nearby. They weren't his to patrol, but a fire could blow down to the rail line. And if one did, by the time it got to him, it might be too big to handle. He wished he'd asked what he should do if fire threatened from off railroad land, but he hadn't. Come right down to it, he hadn't gotten any instructions at all, except to see the right-of-way didn't catch.

  With no one in shouting distance and no way to signal for help, the decision was his: go or stay.

  Shouldering his shovel, he set off toward the smoke.

  ***

  Twenty minutes of hard hiking and a frightening jump across a rock-filled gully took him to a low ground fire wedging up from a lightning-struck snag. A long black wound marked where the snag had been hit, and now the dead tree seemed to be burning on the inside. Smoke seeped out from jagged cracks in the wood and puffed from woodpecker holes.