Hi list Because I have a son who lives in the Missoula, MT area and I live in OR, I am w/a map in hand reading his local on-line Missoula newspaper every day. This AM The Missoulian Newspaper told about the terrible 1910 Forest fire and about unidentified firemen buried in ID. It also gives names of those firemen and citizens that died. I thought this post would be of interest for those searching for lost family members. Thus, I took the following info from that article and am posting it on the lists I am on. Please feel free to fwd it if you so wish, but be sure The Missouilan is given credit. Jeannie :) Publisher of the Jericho Wall Genealogy Newsletter w/the focus on the missing women in our trees [email protected] Taken from an article in The Montana Missoulian Newspaper (8/20/2000) TAMING THE DRAGON Fifty-seven firefighters killed in the 1910 fire are buried in the Woodlawn Cemetery in St. Maries, Idaho. Among the headstones are eight marked simply "Unknown." Firefighters had been gathered so quickly that crew bosses did not know all their names. Photo by KURT WILSON/Missoulian MOON PASS, Idaho - When the survivors came crawling from the creeks and mine tunnels, the monster cedars atop Moon Pass were still burning - like candles, one young firefighter imagined, glowing for the dead. Some of the snags burned into the winter, stubbornly bearing witness to the greatest firestorm ever recorded in the northern Rocky Mountains. Some yet stand sentinel, reminders not only of the calamity, but of the debate that followed, changing the course of national forest management by convincing Americans that fire was bad and the forests should be rid of it. The comparisons began a month or more ago, unnerving even the hardest-edged old warhorses. In 1910, the fires began early. There were lightning storms in June, mass ignitions in July and a national call for help in August. Hundreds - more likely, thousands - of fires burned along a north-south line from the Salmon River to the Canadian border. Smoke obscured every horizon. Settlers and firefighters prayed for rains that would not come. Still in its infancy, the U.S. Forest Service was nonetheless determined to protect the great forest reserves of the Northern Region. "I was confronted with the problem of either putting out the fires or being directly responsible for what would have been one of the worst fire disasters in the history of the country," Secretary of Agriculture James Wilson wrote later. "Without hesitation, I called upon the forest officers to stop the fires and to make such expenditures as seemed absolutely necessary to accomplish this result. Every source of help was called in." But the thousands of men - 4,000 was the estimate - dispatched to the fire lines could defend neither themselves nor the national forests when a dry cold front brought hurricane-force winds to the Bitterroot Crest on the afternoon of Aug. 20. Hundreds of fires merged into one maniacal blaze that marched up the mountainous backbone separating Montana from Idaho. Towns and homesteads burned as frantic citizens buried their belongings and boarded rescue trains. Firefighters had time only to cover their heads with blankets and take refuge in creeks and mine shafts; 78 of them died during the firestorm's passing. "All resistance crumpled," said Pyne, who earlier this summer finished work on a book about the 1910 fire. "Crews fled from the hills, camps disintegrated into ash, pack trains vanished." "Maybe they didn't have enough trails or enough telephone lines or enough people, but they were confident that they could handle the fire problem. The 1910 season just blew them away." "The first settlers really accepted fire as part of the Western frontier," Arno said. "It was like the wind and the rain, who could ever do anything about it?" Forty years later, Betty Goodwin Spencer - a north Idaho author - gave this account of Aug. 20, 1910: "The forests staggered, rocked, exploded and then shriveled under the holocaust. Great red balls of fire rolled up the mountainsides. Crown fires, from one to 10 miles wide, streaked with yellow and purple and scarlet, raced through treetops 150 feet from the ground. Bloated bubbles of gas burst murderously into forked and greedy flames. "The heat of the fire and the masses of flaming gas created whirlwinds that mowed down mile-wide swaths of pine and fir and cedar in advance of the flames. And behind all this, advancing ominously and steadily, destroying everything in its path - the ground fire. "Fire brands the size of a man's arm were blasted down in the streets of towns 50 miles from the nearest fire line. The sun was completely obscured in Billings, 500 miles away from the main path of the fire. Remarkable atmospheric disturbances were felt all over the country. While United States Weather Forecaster Brandenburg in Denver watched his thermometer, the temperature dropped 19 degrees in 10 minutes, and at 5 o'clock, a 42 mile-an-hour gale swept Denver, enveloping it in a pall of smoke from the Idaho-Montana fires, 800 miles distant. At Cheyenne, Wyoming, the thermometer registered 38, the lowest reported on the weather map. "You can't outrun wind and fire that are traveling 70 miles an hour. You can't hide when you are entirely surrounded by red-hot color. You can't see when it's pitch black in the afternoon. There were men who went stark raving crazy, men who flung themselves into the on-rushing flames, men who shot themselves. "It was the Big Blowup!" Fifty years after the fire, the men who Edward Pulaski lead to safety were still writing Forest Service offices, telling of his heroism. The last of the letters came in June 1961, when William Chance wrote the ranger in Wallace, Idaho, wondering if he were the only surviving member of Pulaski's crew. Chance was a newly recruited firefighter, bound for the fires in the Bitterroot Mountains, when he met Pulaski on the train from Butte. When they arrived in Wallace, Pulaski issued shovels and bed rolls to each recruit, and escorted them up Placer Creek - "back of town." He taught them how to build "a road" around a fire, Chance said, then how to patrol the road and keep the fire within its bounds. Chance had barely been in the mountains a day when "fire came at us rapidly." And with a ferocity neither Pulaski nor his crew imagined possible. Pulaski, at 40 older by twice than most of his men, insisted they would be safe if they followed him back down the creek to town. He did not know that the people of Wallace had ignited a backfire, hoping to stall the flames, unintentionally trapping Pulaski and his men between two converging walls of flame. Now the crew's only chance was an old prospecting hole, 75 feet deep in the hillside. The firefighters were doubtful when the ranger ordered them into the tunnel, Chance recalled. But Pulaski "emphasized his point with his six-shooters," and the men obeyed. "Inside, the tunnel was a mad house," Chance wrote. "Some men went berserk, clamoring over the prostrate bodies, choking, gasping. Others praying. Others laughing. I'll never forget one man lustily singing, 'The Pride of the House is Mama's Baby.' " Chance said goodbye to a buddy from Butte, and fell unconscious. When he woke, he saw daylight and crawled toward it on hands and knees, finding Pulaski at the tunnel's entrance. The ranger was badly burned, Chance said, as he had tried to extinguish burning mine timbers with his hands. At Pulaski's urging, Chance helped the ranger and others crawl out of the tunnel - and, eventually, down the mountainside to Wallace. Those who were hungry, Pulaski took to the one restaurant not destroyed by the fire. The rest, he took to the hospital. Then he went home, to his wife and 7-year-old daughter. Of all the stories from the night of Aug. 20, 1910, the account of Pulaski saving his crew in the mine shaft is the most enduring, said Pyne. "Out of 35 men and himself, he got 30 out of there alive. One man lagged behind and died in the fire. Five others died in the cave, probably from drowning in a seep while they were unconscious." "He managed to hold them all in there together," the historian said. "They couldn't hear anything. They couldn't see anything. It was so hot they couldn't feel anything. And he saved them by standing at the mine shaft entrance until he also collapsed." And of all the rangers trapped in the woods that night, Pulaski was the only one who served out his career on the Wallace Ranger District. He helped to rebuild the town and replant the forest. He continued fighting fire, and in fact invented the tool - a combination grubhoe and ax - still used by wildland firefighters. "In a way, the story of 1910 is embedded in the Pulaski," Pyne said. "It is still very much a part of the whole culture of fire protection. It's a great story. We've never found another one quite like it." Because they were so young, because they were so traumatized by the fire and the politics and the failed first attempt at wildfire suppression, the forester-firefighters who survived the big blowup simply would not concede any benefit to keeping fire in the national forests. There are still, along the Bitterroot Divide, reminders of the big burn of August 1910. The silent cedar snags at Moon Pass. The mostly abandoned mine tunnels in the thicket along Placer Creek. The crumpled photographs in the old Milwaukee Road Depot in Avery. Of wind-thrown pines and weary firestorm refugees. The double circle of 57 firefighters' graves in the cemetery at St. Maries. Forty granite markers on the outside row, 17 on the inside. The inner circle facing the outer. Chris Christensen. O. Ellefsen. Frank Sanders. K. Anderson. Anton Bugar. J. Stevens. Unknown. Jack Hill. Unknown. Oscar Berg. Harry Jackson. L. Schwartz. Frank Masterson. "In memory of the men who lost their lives fighting forest fires August 20, 1910." The injured and dead among the victims of the 1910 fires In 1910, fire suppression went on the offensive and firefighters, for the first time, dominated the list of casualties. For days after the blowup, newspapers in Spokane carried lists of injured firefighters. To wit: A.E. Sullivan: totally blind, right arm broken and may lose right hand. Tony Varish: totally blind, body badly burned. John Blitten: right arm burned, will have to be amputated. T. Gayers: face terribly burned. Wm. Christianson: mass of burns around the face and neck, will probably die. J. Rickey: hands, face and feet badly burned. Jack Flinn: blind. George Carrigan: feet burned; will be crippled for life. Edmond Hickman: face terribly burned and nose completely burned off. Mike Darrick: totally blind, burned about face and neck, will probably die. For weeks, the dead were buried (where they fell), then disinterred and reburied (in memorial plots at Wallace and St. Maries). The U.S. Forest Service recorded each man's name, the amount due him for firefighting and the means by which his body was identified. >From those records come these accounts of the men found dead on Setzer Creek: Ed Murphy. $21.50. Address unknown. Buried on Setzer Creek. No clue as to his identity. Henry Jackson. $5.50. Tacoma, Wash. Buried on Setzer Creek. Wrote the mayor of Tacoma to look up this man. Identified by Ed Bassett by heel plate worn on shoe. G.A. Blodgett. $50.75. Supposed to have lived at Hotel Reilley, Butte, Mont. Had card of Butte Workingman's Union No. 5. Wrote to father and mother. Oscar Weigert. $15. Missoula, Mont. Supposed to have committed suicide, thinking that he would be burned to death. Had hat, clothes, cartridges, gun, tobacco, cigarette papers. Effects sent to Missoula. L. Ustlo. $41.75. Address unknown. Effects: pocket knife, gold watch. Buried on Setzer Creek. This man was a tall and well-dressed Finlander. Wore lace belt. Scar on right knee. Unable so far to get a clue to this man's identity.