THE BIG BURN
Shopkeepers, miners and housewives in Wallace, Idaho, had been complaining about the smoke for most of the summer of 1910. It had rained little since spring, and the tinder-dry forest on the surrounding slopes had spawned numerous small blazes. The smoke, at times verging on a fog, enveloped town. The fledgling U.S. Forest Service was struggling to keep up with the fires. In mid-August ranger Ed Pulaski, one of the service’s few experienced men, ventured out with a crew to fight fires near the west fork of Placer Creek, about 5 miles south of town, while fellow ranger Henry Kottkey and his men battled a blaze on Loop Creek.
“The fire’s blowing up,” Kottkey soon reported to supervisors. “I’m worried.” He was also concerned about wife Bertha, who had entered Providence Hospital in Wallace to give birth to the couple’s third child. Others were growing anxious, too. In Taft, Mont., which the Chicago Tribune had recently labeled “the wickedest city in America,” and in other rough settlements in the northern Rocky Mountains—Saltese in Montana, and Mullan, Avery and Grand Forks in Idaho—saloonkeepers, railroad workers and prostitutes kept an eye on the burning hills.
On Little Beaver Creek, north of Thompson Falls, Mont., 3-year-old Lily Cunningham had watched in fascination as glowing plumes of orange smoke drifted across the night sky. She could tell her mother was frightened, as she’d been crying. But Lily found the orange clouds beautiful.
Other residents of the northern Rockies, especially those with memories of earlier fires, began plotting their
