The fires had been burning for a month or more, some ignited by passing trains, some apparently set by men hoping for 25-cent-an-hour firefighting jobs.
When, early on the afternoon of Aug. 20, 1910, the wind hit the dozens of backcountry fires, the result was an inferno of almost unimaginable intensity.
Three million acres of forest land burned in two days, reaching from the Nez Perce National Forest of north-central Idaho into the Flathead and Kootenai national forests of northwestern Montana, consuming the towns of Taft, DeBorgia, Henderson and Haugan in Montana, and Wallace in Idaho.
At least 78 firefighters and seven civilians died in the firestorm. Thousands of others survived by diving into creeks, lighting daring, last-second backfires and steering trains across burning trestles as the fire turned day into darkness.
Among the most enduring, and heroic, stories of the blowup came from the mountains just outside of Wallace, where a U.S. Forest Service ranger named Ed Pulaski led 45 firefighters into a mine shaft, then stood guard at the entrance to turn back those who, in their panic, tried to flee.
On Saturday, 95 years after Pulaski led his men to safety, the Forest Service will dedicate a new trail to the old mine site, forever preserving the story of Ranger Pulaski and the fires of 1910.
After the "The Big Blowup," Pulaski told the story to his wife, who took his words down longhand. He was 40 years old, and had prospected throughout the St. Joe and Coeur d'Alene country for 25 years before signing on as a ranger with the fledgling Forest Service in 1908.
In 1910, he was put in charge of 150 firefighters working a series of wildfires in the mountains outside of Wallace. When the firestorm hit, they were scattered all along the divide between Big Creek of the St. Joe River and Big Creek of the Coeur d'Alene.
"On Aug. 20," Pulaski said, "a terrific hurricane broke over the mountains. The wind was so strong it lifted men out of their saddles. The smoke and heat became so intense that it was difficult to breathe. Under such conditions, it would have been worse than foolhardy to attempt to fight the fire.
"I got on my horse and went where I could, gathering my men."
Pulaski's voice was gone by the time he had found 45 of the men, so incredible was the roar of the oncoming fire and the din of crashing trees. Not a tree remained standing in front of the fire.
Because of his many years prospecting the hills, Pulaski knew they were near two old mine tunnels. But it was almost impossible to see through the smoke and just as hard to find a path through the fallen forest. He headed for the longer of the adits; the rag-tag firefighting crew followed.
"We reached the tunnel just in time," Pulaski later told his wife. "I ordered the men to lie face down upon the ground and not dare to sit up, unless they wanted to suffocate, for the tunnel was filling with fire, gas and smoke."
"The men were in a panic of fear, some crying, some praying," he said.
Pulaski stood at the entrance to the adit, assuring all who might try to leave that he would shoot them should they rise, all the while dousing the flaming mine timbers with water scooped into his hat.
The cold air of the mine tunnel rushed out, drawn into the fire outside. Fire, and more smoke, poured inside.
"Many of the men soon became unconscious from the terrible heat, smoke and fire gas," Pulaski said. "I, too, finally sank down unconscious. I do not know how long I was in this condition, but it must have been for hours."
The next thing he remembered was the voice of one of his men.
"Come outside boys," the man said. "The boss is dead."
"Like hell he is," came Pulaski's reply.
The trail was once well-worn, a main line for foot and horse traffic from Wallace to the St. Joe country. Ed Pulaski knew it from his years hunting the hills for silver and gold.
Over the decades after "The Big Blowup," the trail was largely forgotten and considerably overgrown.
Jim See started hiking the hills south of Wallace in the mid-1980s, occasionally picking his way along West Placer Creek to the long-abandoned mine adit where Pulaski and his crew rode out the fire.
"The trail was more or less abandoned, and it crossed private property several times, so it wasn't a true trail even," said See, a guidance counselor at Mullan High School, six miles down the road from Wallace.
But the more See learned about Pulaski's story and the fires of 1910, the more he became convinced that the trail was testimony to a significant event - not only in the history of northern Idaho, but of the nation and its public forests.
Thus was born The Pulaski Project, a private-public effort of See and others in the Silver Valley and the Idaho Panhandle National Forests. They negotiated easements across the private land, secured a congressional appropriation of $300,000 and $147,000 in private money, and went to work interpreting Pulaski's story.
"Ranger Pulaski was a true hero of the 1910 fires," said Dave O'Brien, an information officer for the Idaho Panhandle forests. "He could have stayed in Wallace with his wife and child, but he went up into the woods and saved a lot of lives that day."
For the Forest Service, which marks its centennial this year, the fires of 1910 were pivotal, O'Brien said. "At the time of the fires, there was a big argument going on about what to do with these big tracts of land. The mission of the Forest Service wasn't tremendously clear."
"After 1910, fire suppression became a major goal for the forests in the West," he said. "As a result of 1910, there were fire policies put in place that strongly resemble what happens even today.
"On the Panhandle, Lolo, Bitterroot and Flathead forests, the suppression of fire has shaped the ecology we have today more than any other single thing that has happened. More than bark beetles. More than timber management. More that blister rust. It's the suppression of fire that has shaped the ecology of the Rocky Mountain West."
On the Pulaski Trail, visitors will be able to feel that history underfoot, See said. There's not much evidence left of the great fire itself, but interpretive signs along the two-mile route will tell the story.
Of Edward Pulaski: "Pulaski left school in Green Springs, Ohio, at age 15, seeking fortune and adventure out west. Before becoming a forest ranger, he learned many trades, from mining and ranching to logging."
When, two years before "The Big Blowup," Pulaski signed on with the Forest Service, his supervisor described him as "a man of most excellent judgment, conservative, thoroughly acquainted with the region" and "one of the best and safest men that could have been placed in charge of a crew of men in the hills."
Of the 1910 fires: "How many people died in the Big Blowup? The conservative official tally stands at 85, but the final toll could be as high as 133. Seventy-two firefighters died on the Coeur d'Alene forest, four on the Cabinet National Forest and two on the Pend Oreille National Forest. The other casualties were homesteaders, townspeople and miners trapped in the flames in Idaho and Montana."
Of the aftermath: "The most profound impact of the 1910 fires was political. In 1911, Henry Graves, the chief of the Forest Service, stated that the 1910 fires clearly demonstrated that the first task of the Forest Service had to be fire protection. For him and the next three chiefs of the Forest Service, suppressing wildfire was job one."
Of course, there were unprecedented impacts of the 90 years of aggressive wildland firefighting, as fire was an essential element in western forests - and, without fire, those forests changed in character and composition.
That history, too, will be marked along the Pulaski Trail, and during Saturday afternoon's dedication ceremonies at the trailhead on Moon Pass Road just outside Wallace.
Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey will be there, as will Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, and various Forest Service and Silver Valley dignitaries.
The trail itself is still being rebuilt, so isn't yet ready for the public. (The Forest Service expects the trail to be fully open by October.)
It's a beauty, O'Brien promised, running two miles in and two miles back along the same path, much of which runs through a lush, creek-bottom forest.
"There's a beautiful little bridge right off the trailhead," he said. "It's really a neat trail."
The trail maintains an easy 4 percent grade along the route to the adit, which is blocked off for obvious safety reasons.
Eventually, See hopes for an overlook giving visitors a good view of the tunnel opening.
"One of the beauties of this story is that it's not ancient history," O'Brien said. "You can take the old photographs of the adit and see the same log that's in the photos from the day after the fire lying there on the hillside today."
"Ranger Pulaski was an incredible hero," he said, "and those fires were more than incredible."
It was 4 a.m. on the morning of Aug. 21, 1910, when Pulaski and his men came to consciousness in the burned-over mine tunnel - called the Nicholson Adit.
"We tried to stand up, but our legs refused to hold us," he said later. "So we dragged ourselves outside to the creek to ease our parched throats and lips. Our disappointment was terrible when we found the stream filled with ashes and the water too hot to drink. We counted our number. Five were missing. Some of the men went back and tried to awaken them, but they were dead."
The air cleared, slowly, and the men began to stagger down the mountainside into Wallace.
"When walking failed us, we crawled on our hands and knees," Pulaski said. "We were in a terrible condition, all of us hurt or burned. I was blind, and my hands were burned from trying to keep the fire out of the tunnel. Our shoes were burned off our feet, and our clothes were in parched rags.
"Those who died later were brought in on pack horses."
They returned to find Wallace in ruins, having been overtaken by the flames during the night.
Pulaski led his men to the hospital, where their burns were bandaged. Then he set out in search of his wife and little daughter. They, too, had survived to tell the story of the great fire.
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