Rufus Robinson and Earl Cooley – First Smokejumpers – 1940
Rufus Robinson Will Be First “Smoke-Jumper”
Veteran Woods Firefighter To Take Long Stride From Foot to Air.
First “smoke-jumper” in this region, entering the backwoods fight against fires with the aid of a parachute, will be Rufus Robinson, for 15 years a smoke-chaser on the old Selway forest and the Moose creek district of the Bitter Root.
Robinson walked out of the Moose creek district southwest of Hamilton Saturday, this being the only means of egress except by airplane.
For years this veteran forest guard has been afoot, with backpack, traveling tortuous mountain trails to reach fires.
This summer he hopes to make the hop in minutes where days were required in the past, stepping from a plane to drop parachute-fashion near the smoke of the fire requiring his presence.
He will be the first parachute jumper to be trained in the region, under Merle Lundrigan, project leader, and George Case, administrative officer. The Forest Service is hoping to make a worthwhile tool out of parachute
jumping, to serve in the remote backwoods, where the crews are too short to meet the fire needs, where minutes count most, but days are required to reach flames.
Robinson has fought hundreds of fires alone, and he has been on the fire lines on big blazes where thousands have been employed. He was in the heat and smoke of the great Pete King fire on the old Selway in 1934. Forest Service officials say that he is an experienced foreman, with nerve and ability, able to fight a fire alone or supervise crews. Such are the men that are being assigned to parachute jumping detail in the experiments to be carried on this summer by the Forest Service.
No thrill-seekers are being permitted to edge into this project, only woodsmen who know what to do and have the will, skill and energy to do it. And these woodsmen, experienced in the back country, are most eager to have a chance to fight their old enemy with the most modern weapons, the airplane and its accessories, say Forest Service officers, scanning the applications from parachute jumpers.
Robinson, who is 35, will go to Winthrop, Wash., with Lundrigan, for training.
The above article appeared in The Sunday Missoulian of June 9, 1940.
40 years later, first smokejumper bails out
By John Stromnes
When Rufus P. Robinson jumped out of a one-engine Travelair airplane some 7,100 feet above an Idaho wilderness 46 years ago, he wasn’t thinking about making history.
Neither was Earl Cooley, who bailed out right after him.
“In 1940, people didn’t realize we were setting some kind of record,” said Cooley, a Missoula-area real estate broker. “It just happened we were the first selected to be the first to jump.”
Robinson, an 81-year-old retired roofing worker, died last week in Orofino, Idaho. He and Cooley, now 77, were the nation’s first smokejumper crew to parachute into a forest fire – and put it out.
Robinson, senior in age and more familiar with the terrain, jumped first.
It was a hot, dry summer, much like this one promises to be, Cooley recalled. And it was a new, untested and controversial method of fighting timber wildfires.
But it would pay for itself many times over in the next 40 years, in wildfires snuffed out before they could seriously damage public timber, destroy homes, or spread to grazing lands. For most small wildfires, according to Forest Service estimates made after that first season, it was 14 times cheaper to use smokejumpers than to send crews overland on foot or by pack train.
Here, slightly edited for space reasons, is Robinson’s own account, as recorded in a report he wrote out in longhand for the Forest Service a few days after the historic jump.
“On July 12 at 2 p.m., Merle Lundrigan asked me to go on a fire on the head of Martin Creek (near the Moose Creek Ranger Station in Idaho). I started collecting my jumping suit, fire pack and equipment to take to the fire. (Pilot) Dick Johnson arrived from Missoula at 3:05 p.m. with plane. At 3:21 ½ p.m. we left the ground.
“Spotted fire on east slope of Martin Creek (in Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness). Johnson circled fire at about 7,000 feet elevation. Fire looked to be about 2 ½ acres in green timber fairly open. I bailed out at 3:57 ½ p.m. Wind had changed between time of dropping burlap test chute and when I jumped. I caught a down-draft and heavy ground wind, carrying me over alder patch half-mile north. Landed in small green tree, 25 feet tall. Feet were about two feet above ground.
“Unhooked harness and set up radio. Talked to ship at 4:03 p.m. Lundrigan reported Earl Cooley had landed northwest of me in tree. I misunderstood location of Cooley, and after waiting 15 minutes, Lundrigan dropped fire packs near Cooley.”
That’s where Cooley entered official Forest Service history, and he picked up the story in his Forest Service report.
“Rufus knew the country, so he chose to go out first. Consequently I was the second man out. He made an excellent takeoff from the ship but ran into more drift than expected and was carried beyond the spot a quarter mile or so. He landed on the edge of a small clearing in a small tree.
“As soon as I noticed Rufus standing on the ground, I decided to bail out.
“At 4:01 I bailed out and jerked my rip cord when I was clear of the plane. I didn’t make such a good takeoff because I was beginning to turn over in the air when the chute opened. I received the hardest opening shock of any previous jump.
“A stiff ground current caught me about 500 or 600 feet above the timber. I knew it was impossible to hit the spot under these conditions. I could see that I was going to land in large timber by a small creek. I picked a large spruce about 120 feet high.
“The chute hung on the limbs about 10 feet from the top on the southeast side of the trees. I went through the branches on the side of the tree, breaking many of them. . . Fortunately, the tree was easy to climb down and I did not need my rope to descend. . . I took the (fire) pack, filled my water bag and canteen, and started for the fire. I was about 200 yards from the fire when I met Rufus. . .”
It was one of 17 jumps Cooley and Robinson would make that fire season.
In 1984, the Forest Service honored them for their roles as smokejumpers. After that fire season, Cooley continued with the Forest Service, eventually directing the Aerial Fire Depot in Missoula. He retired in 1975.
Robinson quit the Forest Service that summer, and worked as a roofer until his retirement in the mid-1970s.
“Ironically, the year we jumped in 1940 was the highest fire occurrence in history,” Cooley said. “We’re starting out a season just like that one.”
Indeed, the smokejumper center at the Aerial Fire Depot in Missoula completed training Friday and immediately dispatched 10 smokejumpers to a wildfire near Redding, Calif., continuing the 47-year tradition started by Cooley and Robinson.
The above article appeared in The Missoulian on May 11, 1987.
Cooley was the jumpmaster for the smokejumpers who jumped on the Mann Gulch Fire in 1949. He and foreman, R. Wagner ‘Wag’ Dodge, picked the jump site for the crew that day. Of 16 (15 smokejumpers) men on that fire, only 3 survived. Earl Cooley, age 98, died in Missoula in 2009.
For more information on the Mann Gulch fire see the link below: