Early Days in the Forest Service Volume 3

By K. Wolfe
(Retired)

It was 1919. World War I was over and many of us had just gotten back to our Forest Service jobs at the beginning of a fire season long to be remembered. On the Flathead, to which I was assigned, fires in the Upper Swan were running cut of control early in June. By the time they were headed, lightning was working on the South Fork and on Big River. As a result we were trying to fight dozens of Class C fires scattered over 2-million acres of about as inaccessible country as the Forest Service had anywhere. The battle continued throughout July and August with practically no letup. Finally in early September the rains we had been praying for came.

In 1919 there was no road up the South Fork of the Flathead. It was 90 miles from Coram to Big Prairie Ranger Station - a five day trip for pack strings. Firefighters going to the White River fire took five to six days to make the hike and most of them were completely worn out when they got there.

As I remember it, the Flathead spent about a quarter of a million dollars fighting fire - and that was real money in 1919. The acreage burned I don't remember, but it too was a regrettably large figure. Smoke was so thick at times that it was impossible to see any distance at all. In fact, it took Ranger Henry Thol and me two days to locate a newly reported fire which quite evidently had been burning for days and was over a thousand acres in size when we finally found it.

J.D. Warner was Supervisor and Lloyd Hornby Assistant. Others whose names are familiar to many in the Region were Clyde Webb, Charlie Hash, Jim Ready, Jim Bosworth, Harold Redlingshafer, Henry Thol, Tom Wiles, Ed Adams, and Eldon Myrick.

Experiences long to be remembered were more or less common and if the gang mentioned in the foregoing could be gotten together the stories they would tell would be something. The one I remember most clearly didn't happen until all the fires were out and we were about ready to close up the South Fork for the winter.

There was snow not only in the high country, but in some that wasn't so high. Hunting season was about over, but one party had been delayed because of the sickness of a past-middle-age member. They finally succeeded in getting him to the Spotted Bear Ranger Station where they left him while the other members of the party went for help. It soon became evident that we had a very sick man on our hands and plans were started to get him out as soon as possible. He, too, realized the seriousness of his condition and asked us to write out a will for him. (I never heard that the will was challenged so presume we produced a legally acceptable instrument.)

There were about a half-dozen of us in the party which Ranger Thol led down the trail that late October morning. We had rigged up a travois on which to carry the sick man. Where the going was good we used packhorses on both front and back, and where it was extremely poor we had to use manpower on both ends. Most of the time, however, we could use a horse in front. That is what we were doing when in passing through a freshly burned area the trail over a burned-out root gave way and the horse rolled down the hill. It was not too steep a slope so we were able to stop our patient after he had tumbled about thirty or forty feet. He didn't appear to be much worse off than he had been so we went on our way. However, we had learned that extreme care was essential so we proceeded even slower than before.

We had planned to make the cabin at Elk Park Guard Station for the night, but darkness caught us long before we reached it so we stopped at Dry Park. There was no cabin there and we had nothing but bedrolls with us, so we really camped out - with nothing to eat and only water to drink. It goes without saying that we headed on down the trail at daybreak. That day we made Elk Park where we were met by a doctor who had been sent in to meet us.

Unfortunately, this isn't a story with a happy ending - which perhaps is the reason I remember it. Our patient died that night, and the next day we discarded the travois and let the lead packhorse carry the load all by itself to the road at Coram.

The field part of the 1919 fire season was over!