"Public support and public attention was galvanized on the threat of fire, the evilness of forest fires..."
Well, the 1910 fires were a tremendously significant event historically in this country. The U.S. Forest Service had been chartered a few years prior. They lacked a real clear mission, a real clear public buy-in to what the agency was about. The 1910 fires, the Great Northern Rocky Mountain Fires of 1910, occurred in August of 1910 and they burned roughly 3 million acres, which was three times the size of Yellowstone. They burned throughout the month of August, but primarily the acreage loss occurred on August 20 and 21. And it was really the first time that the Forest Service, that public support and public attention was galvanized on the threat of fire, the evilness of forest fires. That's how it was portrayed. There's a great story, a ranger who had a fire crew—and at that point they picked people up off the streets, miners and loggers and everybody else. You were recruited and drafted right at the time of the fire. [This ranger] held a crew at gunpoint in the War Eagle Mine in Idaho, because the crew wanted to flee. The fire was so bad that they wanted to run. Well, a lot of people, somewhere in the vicinity of seventy-eight or eighty people died in that fire, primarily trying to run away from the fire. This ranger held the crew at gunpoint until he passed out, and the crew passed out in the mine. And when they came to later, they thought the ranger was dead, and many of their crew members were dead, so a couple of them stumbled out of the mine, found some people that came back. The crew was becoming revived by that time, and they all lived. And his name was Ed Pulaski. And he developed a tool, a pulaski, which is a part ax, part (unclear) type, hoe-type tool, that we still use in fire service today, and it's called a pulaski.
But as a result of that fire, the next three chief rangers of the Forest Service were all veterans of that fire company. And it was very—they had been forged, so to speak, in that fire, during those fires that occurred. When the policy was articulated finally in the early thirties by the last of those three chief rangers, that fires were bad, they were going to be suppressed, and they were going to be suppressed by 10a.m. the following day. That became known as the "10 a.m." policy. And it stayed in effect until not too many years ago. And it worked very well for a number of years, because the fuels had not yet built to the point that it became very dangerous.