Old Missoula

ELERS KOCH
Assistant Regional Forester
Timber Management, R.O.
(Retired 1944)

February 18, 1944

REGION ONE IN THE PRE-REGIONAL OFFICE DAYS
By Elers Koch

When Gifford Pinchot in 1905 took over the Forest Reserves from the Land Offices, he took with them all the personnel, good, bad, and indifferent. The new Reserves, their proclamations fresh from the President’s pen, had to be organized, and at the same time those already under organization inspected and checked up.

To that end, a lot of us young fellows in our twenties, with the vast experience of two years on the boundary job, were pitchforked by Pinchot into jobs as general inspectors and sent West to see what we could find out. Being a native son of Montana, my field of action was in Montana and Wyoming. During the years 1905 and 1906 I made general inspections of the Gallatin, Big Horn, Absaroka, Madison, Lewis & Clark South, Lewis & Clark North, Big Belt, Little Belt, Deerlodge and Highwood Mountains in Montana, and the Big Horn in Wyoming.

I have run across a few of my old inspection reports in the files, and perhaps with due modesty, I am really surprised how good they were. Perhaps our youth made us bold and self-confident, but also the knowledge that, aside from G. P. himself and Overton W. Price, we had about as much experience as anybody else, although under present standards our experience would not qualify us for a job as district ranger.

It was more or less taken for granted that the politically appointed Supervisors of the G.L.O. would be found incompetent unless they could prove otherwise. Most of them were, but some of them proved to be pretty good men.

One of my first jobs was the Gallatin, in my own home country. At that time it, was only a spot on the map – four or five townships. Mike Langohr, the Supervisor, was the sole Forest officer. Mike wasn’t so bad at that, but there wasn’t much to do on this small area, and he shouldn’t be blamed for also running a greenhouse and florist’s shop on the side. However, after my inspection report Mike had to choose between the supervisorship and the greenhouse, and he chose to resign.

My first inspection of the old Lewis & Clark South in 1905 was an interesting job. This included the wilderness of the Blackfoot, Swan River, South Fork of the Flathead and the Sun River – and it was truly a wilderness at that time. Headquarters were at Ovando. The previous Supervisor had been Gus Moser, and many tales are told of his performances. It is alleged that he and his wife used to meet the rangers coming in for their monthly pay checks and mail, and that her wiles and other attractions, together with Gus’ superior skill at poker, usually resulted in separating the rangers from most of their pay. Moser was succeeded by Bliss, who was Supervisor at the time of my inspection.

He was a nice old man, but quite incompetent, and his only excursions to the forest were drives in a buckboard over the only road on the Reserve to Holland Lake in the head of the Swan. Fortunately for him he had an excellent and vigorous head ranger in Page Bunker. Bunker and I outfitted in Ovando with one pack horse and a saddle horse apiece. We rode up through the North Fork of the Blackfoot, across the range to the Dearborn, and north along the east side. Jack Clack (later in the Forest Service) was then buying Government timber and operating a small mill west of Augusta. We went up the Teton and down the North Fork of Sun River. We tried to cross into White River, but a snowstorm drove us out and we went back over the Dearborn. It was interesting that we saw no big game on that month’s trip, though we ate grouse nearly every day, knocking their heads off with our 30-30 rifles.

As a result of my inspection, Bliss was removed and Bunker made Supervisor and headquarters moved to Kalispell.

In 1906, I made another inspection of the Lewis & Clark South. I started from Kalispell with one of the rangers up the South Fork. By that time the rangers had pushed a trail of sorts up river as far as Spotted Bear, and from the head of the river down to Black Bear. Between these two points there was no trail, but we made it through on elk trails as best we could. Again, in a month’s travel in the late fall we saw no big game. Bunker was doing good work opening up the country with trails so far as his limited funds permitted.

On the 1906 trip I again crossed the main range and rode up the east side returning to Kalispell by a rugged trail along the Great Northern. I camped one night near Nyack, and during the night both my horses were run over and killed by a Great Northern train. I put in a claim but through neglect in following it up the case expired by statute of limitation and I never collected a cent from the railway company.

The Lewis & Clark North in 1905 included all of what is now Glacier Park and the country northwest of Kalispell. F. N. Haines was Supervisor. Mr. Haines told me how he came to be appointed. He had been active in Republican politics in his home town in Indiana, and one day one of the Senators from that state called him in and said, “Mr. Haines, I have two positions at my disposal. One is a postmastership, the other a Forest Supervisor in Montana. You can have either one.” Haines said he did not know a spruce tree from a pine, but he wanted to go West so he chose the supervisorship.

Actually, in spite of his background, he made a good Supervisor for the times. There was little or no timber business, and he did not need to be a forester. The main job was opening up a wilderness, and Haines turned out to be a mighty hunter, and did a lot of good work in building trails bridges and ranger stations. He had some mighty good men as rangers. I specially recall “Old Death on the Trail” Reynolds, who afterwards became Acting Supervisor of the Big Belt Reserve, and Fred Herring, one of Theodore Roosevelt’s old ranch hands.

While investigating a complaint case I ran onto an old fellow named Geiffer who lived up on the North Fork. He tole me a story about Gifford Pinchot, who had explored this country in the nineties. Anyone who knows G. P. will appreciate it. It seems that Geiffer met G.P.’s party on the trail and Mr. Pinchot was riding one of Geiffer’s horses. Geiffer said to him, “What are you doing on my horse?” G.P. said, “Is this s.o.b. of a horse yours? Well, you can have him. The blankety-blank-blank bucked me so blank-blank high this morning I thought I never would come down.”

One of my most arduous inspection jobs was in January 1906. For some unknown reason the Washington office wired me to make an inspection of the Highwood Mountains Reserve at once. A field trip in the Highwoods in January is no picnic. I drove out from Fort Benton thirty miles or so to Highwood in an open bob sleigh, with the thermometer thirty or more below zero and the wind right off the North Pole. A man named Thain was Supervisor, and we took saddle horses and rode the Reserve, stopping at ranches. It was a poor time to see the condition of the range, but at any rate I got acquainted with some of the ranchers and got their reaction to the administration, which was generally favorable. I don’t think it got above thirty degrees below on the whole trip, and if the Washington office merely wanted to find how tough I was, I certainly demonstrated.

I spent the spring of 1906 on administrative work in Washington. At that time the western Forests were divided into three administrative districts – the Northern Rockies, the Southern Rockies and the Pacific Coast. A sort of a Chief of Operation was made responsible for each. I had the Northern District, Smith Riley the Southern, and Coert DuBois the Pacific Coast. These positions were later rotated frequently as inspectors came in from the field.

Gifford Pinchot was a hard taskmaster to us young fellows. We had a buzzer system for inter office signals, but G.P. had a special buzzer of his own in our quarters – one buzz for me, two for Riley and three for DuBois – and this buzzer had a tone like a rattlesnake that fairly lifted one out of his chair and across the room when G.P. pressed it. When we wrote a letter for G.P. to sign we always awaited it in fear and trembling. If he signed it without change, it was an occasion of triumph. Often the letter came back with a big blue question mark scrawled across it. Then we had to figure out if it was basically wrong or merely a punctuation point out of place. G.P. was merciless with careless errors. I recall one reply I prepared to a Senator asking for the total area of the National Forests. The stenographer got an extra zero in my figure, which I failed to detect, and G.P. gave me a panning for carelessness which I will never forget. It was a hard school, but good training for us, and the surprising thing is that we never lost, our devotion and high regard for G.P.

I often think what a wonderful thing it was to have a Government bureau with nothing but young men in it. Most of the men, aside from G.P., Price and Potter, were in their twenties, and there was no sign of Departmental inertia or red-tape inhibitions in our cosmos. I believe much of the efficiency for which the Forest Service has been notable among Government bureaus was due to this condition. With the lapse of forty years, our Service has grown old, and the men in it. I sincerely hope that the present retirement policy will help to rejuvenate the Service, and that in filling vacancies seniority will not be given too much weight.

In the spring of 1907 all the general inspectors who had been making headquarters in Washington were moved permanently into the West. Six inspection districts were set up. District One, which coincided approximately with the present Region One, was given to E. A. Sherman. General inspectors under him were Paul Redington, George Cecil, F. A. Silcox and C. H. Adams.

I could have remained on as an inspector, but I had been knocking around the country for four years. I wanted to get married, and I had concluded that being a Forest Supervisor with definite responsibility for a particular tract of forest was the most attractive and soul-satisfying job in the Service. G.P. encouraged me in the idea, since he had promised the West that the Reserves would be placed in charge of western men.

In December 1906, I moved to Missoula with all my lares and penates, including a new bride, and took over administration of the Lolo, Bitterroot and Missoula Forests. These had been previously administered by E. A. Sherman, who now became a Chief Inspector.

The next few years were very satisfying ones. The Bitterroot had already been under administration for some years under the Land Office, and had a full staff of rangers, two or three of whom I had to get rid of promptly, but the Lolo and Missoula were virgin territory, which had to be explored, manned and organized.

John Jones was my chief ranger on the Lolo in 1907, and he was all over the Forest, picking up small trespass cases, and generally gathering information.

I had a light spring wagon with two good horses, which I could either ride, drive or pack, besides a buckskin pony for my wife. There was a big job of exploration to do, and I spent much of the time in the field, driving the spring wagon as far as roads went and then proceeding with saddle and pack horse. Often my wife accompanied me on the easier trips.

Even in the winter we were much more active in the field than the present Forest officers. Every man used snowshoes, as a matter of course, and much of our best exploration and rough timber cruising was done on snowshoes with a back pack. We thought nothing of a three or four-day trip in the winter, lying out by a fire each night.

I recall one such trip in early March 1908, with Inspector R. Y. Stuart and Ranger T. C. Spaulding. We snowshoed up Two Mile Creek in the St. Regis country as far as we could make in a day, stopping overnight at an abandoned prospectors cabin. The next day we crossed a divide and dropped down into the Little Joe. Stuart was awkward on snowshoes, and occasionally Spaulding and I had to pull him out when he went head first into a hole in the snow under a spruce tree.

We camped at night in the bottom of Little Joe Creek. No trail and a terrible jungle. It had started to thaw and a cold rain kept up all night. We had a little two-and-a-half-pound axe, and the first thing Stuart did was to miss his stroke and break the axe handle short in the eye of the axe. Consequently we had to content ourselves with such squaw wood as we could pick up or break off the lower limbs of dead trees, and we spent the night in the rain watching our pitifully small fire sink deeper and deeper into five feet of snow.

Many such trips as this gave us a good knowledge of the country and the timber, and we continually improved the very inadequate maps which were then available.

The years 1907 and 1908 were two busy years. Besides exploration, ranger station sites had to be located and cabins built, there were numerous timber trespasses to ferret out and settle, and timber sale business commenced almost at once.

The first large sale was made to the A.C.M. Company in Lick Creek and Bunkhouse Creek on the Bitterroot. We put the timber up at a minimum price of $4 per M. The A.C.M. Company had a practical monopoly in the Bitterroot and refused to bid, but an Idaho concern, Hitt & Melquist, stepped in and bid $4.02. The A.C.M. Company did not want another outfit in the Bitterroot, and had to buy them out at a profit. Than Wilkerson and a couple of other rangers, W. W. White and I started in to mark the timber. We had little background for the job except theoretical forest school learning, and were glad when Gifford Pinchot himself stepped in and gave us a check-up. It turns out that the early ponderosa pine marking in the Bitterroot was as good or better job than the Forest Service had done since that time. I still hope to live to see this area logged a second time with a very appreciable increment.

Through 1907 and 1908 the C.M.& St. P. & P. Railroad was just building through the Lolo, and that gave us lots of work. There was a constant succession of special use permits, right-of-way problems and timber sales to administer. The town of Taft was then in its palmy days, where they were building the tunnel through the Bitterroot Range, and it was indeed a wild town where the hard-rock miners could spend their money. It was the nearest thing I have seen to the wild western town of the pulp magazines. Gambling, dance halls and prostitution were wide open and the town roared all through the night. We often had to sleep there, but, sleep was nearly impossible in the canvas walled rooms above the dance halls. The winter of 1906 and 1907 was one of extraordinarily deep snow. Taft was buried in it, and it is claimed that six or seven dead men were dug out of the drifts in the spring.

The construction of the railroad gave us a constant fire job through the summer. There was a string of clearing fires on the right-of-way the whole length of the Forest. Fortunately, 1907 was a wet year, but 1903 was a continual fire-fighting job. I got my first real lessons in fire fighting from Ranger Frank Haun in 1908, and the experience we all had then stood the Lolo in good part when we had to face the 1910 fire situation. Actually, we had a surprisingly small loss by fire in 1908 considering the amount of fire we had to contend with.

We got our first real trail money in the fall of 1908. I had two goodsized crews out and built the first trail along the State line all the way from Fish Lake to Ward’s Peak.

I well recall one trip I made in October 1908 with Ranger Watson, who is now a mail carrier in Missoula. We planned to follow the State line from Lolo Pass to Fish Lake to look out the trail possibilities. The line was monumented by the Boundary Commission, but there was no trail except game trails. We got off the divide down into the Idaho side and into some of the worst country I ever took a horse through. My saddle horse lost three of his shoes in the rocks and jungle. When we finally made it through to Fish Lake we ate the last of our grub that night. Here we picked up the new trail and expected to find the trail crew at Goose Lake, but found their camp empty, and they had gone out. We had no food for two days, while we were making it back to Fish Lake and down Fish Creek to the settlements. This was a sample of the pioneering work we were all doing through those years – and how we enjoyed it.

We had relatively little real opposition to the National Forests from the local people. There were some die-hards who did a good deal of talking, particularly in the neighborhood of Darby, which E. A. Sherman, in a famous letter defending himself against an attack, described as a town “conceived in iniquity and born in crime.” However, we just didn’t pay much attention to such individual attacks, and tended strictly to business, without much publicity. I have often thought the best public relations work is doing your job well, and maybe worth more than a staff of news writers and lecturers. In all my experience as a Supervisor, I never had a serious complaint case which had to go to higher authorities.

In December 1908, the present Regional Office organization was put in effect, which marked the beginning of a new era of administration and the end of the primary pioneering period of the National Forests.

THE 1903 AND 1904 BOUNDARY EXAMINATIONS
By Elers Koch

There may be some historical interest in the early boundary examinations which laid out many of the Region One National Forests. Even before the Department of Agriculture took over the Forest Reserves from the Department of Interior, Gifford Pinchot realized that without further loss of time the remaining forest land in the West which was still public domain should be reserved. With Theodore Roosevelt as President, it was only necessary to get the necessary data as to general suitability of the land as Forest Reserves and the location of the boundaries on the map.

To this end a rush job was put over, principally in 1903 and 1904, to make the necessary field examinations. F. E. Olmsted was put in charge of the work. The personnel were all young men, mostly just out of forest school, and, considering their lack of experience, they did a mighty good job. The men engaged in that work in those years, as I remember them, were Smith Riley, Coert DuBois, Frank Reed, R. E. Benedict, W. H. B. Kent, John Hatton, R. B. Wilson, R. V. R. Reynolds, a man named Hereford, and myself. There were probably one or two others I have forgotten.

It was probably the best and most interesting job there ever was in the Forest Service. A man was given a State map of California, or Montana or Idaho, with a green-colored block indicating the general area he was to cover. The first job was to go to the local Land Office and take off on township plats the status of the land. At the same time rough copies were made of the drainage and topography from the township plats of such of the area as was surveyed. Sometimes a U.S.G.S. map was available, or some sort of a county map. Then the examiner proceeded to ride the country and see it for himself. The area was covered usually at the rate of about two days to a township, and we really saw and made every township. A rough type map was made showing the general classification of the cover. If there was no map, the examiner made a map as he went along.

Each man worked alone on a separate unit. He was allowed complete latitude as to how he covered the job. He might engage a packer with pack horse and saddle horses, or he might ride the country on a saddle horse, stopping at ranches, sheep camps, mines, or whatever offered when night overtook him. It was surely enjoyable work, each man his own boss, and seeing new country every day. The mapping was expected to be only approximate and there was no great amount of burdensome detail to worry about.

Considering the rapidity with which the work was done, it is surprising how well the original work has stood up. Most of the boundaries so established have had little modification in subsequent years.

We spent the summer and fall in the field, and in late fall all repaired to Washington with our notes and maps and spent the winter getting the data on paper. As fast as a unit was completed a proclamation was drawn and sent to President Roosevelt for approval. It was a quick and efficient job, and before Congress got around to repeal the authority of the President to proclaim Forest Reserves nearly all the remaining forested public land in the West had been safely covered into the Reserves.

My own first job in 1903 was the Shasta in California. I spent most of the summer on it, and in the fall rode the Santa Monica Mountains in Southern California, but there was not enough Government land left in this range to justify reservation. I shall never forget a 20-mile ride along the beach between the Santa Monica Mountains and the ocean. There was no road or trail and I rode the sand beach. It was entirely free of settlement at that time, and I did not see a soul all day till I came at night to the Malibu Rancho, which owned much of the ocean front. I haven’t seen it since, but I understand this ocean front is now lined with motion picture stars’ homes.

In 1904, I covered the Gallatin, the Tobacco Root Range, now in the Beaverhead, and the Castle Mountains, now in the Lewis & Clark. In the fall I looked at an area in the breaks of the Little Missouri in North Dakota. It contained only a few stringers of yellow pine, and I recommended against it, but it was proclaimed as the Dakota Forest Reserve, and a few years later was released.

In the late fall of 1904, Lew Barrett and I examined and readjusted the entire boundary of the Big Horn Reserve in Wyoming.

All of the Reserves in North Idaho were created before the regular boundary job. In Montana, as I recall, Coert DuBois did the Lolo. John Hatton did the Helena, R. V. R. Reynolds did the old Missoula, now in the Lolo, north of Missoula. DuBois also did the old Hellgate, now part of the Lolo, Bitterroot and Deerlodge. A man named Hereford did most of the Beaverhead.

About the only considerable area in Montana which was not covered in time was the range northeast of Missoula between the Blackfoot and the Clark Fork. This was lined up for examination, but we did not reach it before Congress took away the President’s authority.

In 1905, DuBois made a quick ride up the West Fork of the Bitterroot and eliminated a strip along the river which was alleged to be agricultural. It turned out to be mostly a mistake. In the same year I recommended some reduction in the area of the Madison and the Absaroka to eliminate some straight grazing land.

It would be interesting to know whether any of the old boundary type maps and reports still survive.

When the Department of Agriculture took over the Forest Reserves in 1905, nearly all of the old boundary crew were made general inspectors, and 1905 and 1906 were spent in inspections which resulted in a high percentage of the Land Office Forest Supervisors being dismissed. It was quite a shake-up.

Most of the boundary men took places in the new District Office organization when it was put into effect in 1908.

I do not recall much opposition which developed while the examinations were being made. I guess it was all done so fast that the local people didn’t quite know what was happening till T. R. signed the proclamation.

EARLY RANGER EXAMINATIONS IN MONTANA
By Elers Koch

In 1905, when the National Forests were transferred to the Department of Agriculture, one of the first essentials was to obtain a competent staff of men to man them. The personnel employed by the Land Office on the earlier created Reserves were all taken over, but as some of them were incompetent political appointees there was a good deal of immediate weeding out, which left vacancies to be filled. There were, to be sure, some mighty good men under the Land Office – fellows like Than Wilkerson of the Bitterroot, and Frank Haun and Page Bunker of the old Lewis & Clark. We gladly retained such men. There were also a lot of new Reserves, such as the Lolo, Cabinet, Hellgate, Helena, Beaverhead, Deerlodge, etc., which had to be organized and manned from the start.

Gifford Pinchot had promised the western people that so far as possible the Reserves would be put in charge of local men who knew the country and its traditions. As pioneer conditions prevailed, the aim was to select competent woodsmen for rangers – men who could shoot straight, handle horses, travel with a pack outfit in the hills, and generally take care of themselves outdoors.

The first job of the newly appointed general inspector for each region was to hold a series of ranger examinations. In 1905 I conducted three such examinations in Montana, at Missoula, Bozeman and Neihart.

In contrast to the present-day purely written Civil Service examinations, the original tests included two days’ field events and one day for the written portion. The field test included rifle and pistol shooting at a target, riding a horse, putting on a pack, a simple exercise in compass surveying and pacing, the use of an axe, and cruising of a block of timber.

From twenty to thirty men turned out at each place of examination. They included all sorts, from packers and bar-keeps to first-class woodsmen or cowpunchers. We usually proceeded first to the local target range for the rifle and pistol shooting, which aroused great interest and competition. Walt Derrick tells with great glee how his first pistol bullet shuck a rock thirty feet in front of him and ricocheted to the target to become firmly imbedded in the bulls-eye. He claims I allowed him the bulls-eye, since the bullet was there to establish it.

Most of the man got by fairly well with the horseback riding, since everybody rode in those days, but from the way a man approached a horse and swung into the saddle it was not hard to tell the good horseman.

The packing was the most fun. Obviously, some of the men had never put on a pack before, and they were required to cargo up a miscellaneous outfit of camp equipment and grub and pack it properly without the use of alforjas. Many and curious were the hitches used. I remember one fellow at Missoula who, after precariously balancing the two packs on the saddle, took the last rope and wound it full length around the horse and over the pack. I asked him what he called the hitch, and he said it was the “Oregon wind.”

The second day everybody mounted saddle horses or buggies and we proceeded to the nearest timber for the ax and cruising work. I usually picked a tough Douglas-fir for each man’s chopping demonstration. Some of them, of course, put the tree down in workman-like manner. Others went at it like some of our green CCC boys. I recall one barber who, after painfully beavering around his tree for ten minutes, stopped to wipe his streaming brow. One of the boys called to him, “Joe, it’s about time for you to stop and hone your razor.”

After the timber cruising, which finished the field test, we generally had a horse race back to town. I especially remember the race at Bozeman. I was riding a hard-mouthed, raw-boned black horse we called Nigger Baby which belonged to my brother. We came down out of Sour Dough Canyon hell for leather, and nobody succeeded in passing me in the ten miles to Bozeman.

Those examinations really were effective. The written test eliminated the illiterates, and the field tests insured that we got experienced hands. We got a lot of good men from these examinations. Several similar examinations were held over the next few years, generally conducted by the Supervisors. I think I held the last field examination in Missoula in the spring of 1910.

MY CLOSEST SHAVE ON A FIRE
By Elers Koch

Everyone who has fought big fires for thirty years has inevitably had a number of what seemed to be narrow escapes from death. Working up close to a hot fire, one faces danger of falling snags or being caught by a sudden rush of the fire. Scouting around a fire, usually alone, involves a continual risk of being cut off in a bad place.

As I look back on my experience, it seems to me that the tightest spot I was ever in developed on the Slate Creek fire in 1934 on the St. Joe Forest.

The fire had been going several days when I arrived at Avery. I obtained a saddle horse and rode up the trail to the lookout on Flash Peak. A CCC crew was camped here in charge of one of the camp superintendents. I can’t recall his name. I sent my horse back to Avery by a CCC boy and went down to look over the situation.

I found that a fire line had just been completed by this camp and another camp in Slate Creek down a draw to the main Slate Creek, about two miles. The line was in contact with the fire near the summit of the mountain, but gradually diverged from the fire edge and paralleled the draw down to the main creek, about one-third of the way up on the south slope. The fire had checked, for the most part at the bottom of the draw, but was all set for another run, and it was immediately evident to me that this line could not be held if the fire were permitted to burn up to it with an uphill drag.

It was the middle of the afternoon when I went down the line with the superintendent. I was afraid to start back firing that afternoon, but told him to start near the top of the mountain as early as possible next morning, and backfire down the line as fast as he could, expecting to carry the backfire as fast as possible all the way down to Slate Creek. I went on down the line and spent the night at the Slate Creek camp.

Next, morning I started out with Harry Gisborne. Just before I left Slate Creek Gisborne took the relative humidity with a sling psychrometer. He gave me the reading, which showed fairly high humidity, and I drew what turned out to be a wrong conclusion, that we could expect a fairly favorable day so far as burning conditions went.

Frank Bishop had charge of the crew from the Slate Creek camp, and together with him and his crew we climbed up the fire line till we met the superintendent near the top of the mountain. It was now the middle of the morning, and I was dismayed to find that he had not even started backfiring as I had ordered. I had figured the backfire would be half way down by that time. I am afraid I lost my temper and berated him rather severely.

It was now pretty late to start backfiring, but I knew the line could not possibly be held any other way and started his crew to work at once; setting a good deal of the fire myself. After a couple of hours, when the fires were going good, I started down the line to see what was happening below. Bishop, having heard my “cussing out” of the superintendent, had apparently made up his mind he was going to do his share, and had started enthusiastically backfiring the lower part of the line. I had not counted on that, as I wanted to work the backfire down from above, so we would always have a get-away route.

It was a dry south slope, densely covered with brush and interspersed with down logs and snags. The backfire was burning pretty hard, and the main fire at the bottom of the draw was beginning to stir.

It didn’t look too good to me, and as I went down the line observing it I discovered that the backfire below me had jumped the line and was making a run to the ridge top. Half of Bishop’s crew had withdrawn below the break, and about forty men remained with me in charge of Ranger Stan Larson.

I figured we had better be looking for a get-away, and we started back up the fire line. To my dismay the fire had also jumped the line above us and was raging toward the mountain top in heavy dead timber. The superintendent had withdrawn his crew over the mountain.

So here we were on a section of perhaps a quarter mile of unburned fire line with the fire across, both above and below us. We moved down toward the lower end, and I found a small ridge where the backfire had run out perhaps two hundred feet below the fire line. We moved out onto that, but the ground was still hot and smoking, and our island of safety seemed mighty small and precarious. I could see that the whole gulch was going out in a few minutes in a big burst of fire, and our chances of surviving such a general conflagration seemed mighty small. Things looked pretty bleak, and I figured next day Bishop would be sifting forty heaps of ashes for our buttons.

The men were uneasy, but quiet. I got Larson aside for a consultation. In the dense smoke we had no way of telling how wide the belt of fire was below us. It might be a hundred yards, or it could be half a mile. Larson said he didn’t believe we could stick it out where we were and thought perhaps we might make a run down the line through the fire, which was advancing up both sides of the fire line toward us.

It seemed like a counsel of desperation, but it was better to try something. So I said I would take the lead if he would come behind the crew. The fire was blazing hot in the brush and logs on both sides of the fire line, so I put my arm up over my face as a shield and dashed into it, the men close behind me. The heat and smoke were terrific, but there was no turning back, and a three hundred-yard run brought me out to where I could see clear sky through the smoke. I was never so glad to see anything in my life. If it had been much farther we couldn’t have made it.

We all got through safely, and found Bishop and his crew waiting below, wondering what had become of us. My eyes were so smoked up I could hardly see, and as the whole gulch was going out with a roar there was nothing we could do till it checked on the ridge top and we could get near the fire. So I pulled the whole crew down to the Slate Creek camp and spent the evening beside the creek putting wet cloths on my burning eyes.

The next morning, as I expected, the fire had checked on the ridge, and a day’s work by both crews pretty well sewed it up.

I have had a mighty high regard for Stan Larson ever since, and figure his judgment saved the lives of forty men.

THE LOCHSA RIVER FIRE
By Elers Koch

A forester in the Northwest dates the events of his life by fire years. The 1910, 1917, 1919, 1926, 1929 and 1931 fire seasons each have a character of their own, and in each year are individual fire campaigns which the forester remembers as the soldier recalls the separate engagements of the war.

The Lochsa River fire in 1929 is one that I recall most vividly. It stands out as one of the longest, hardest-fought campaigns in my personal experience, and its location in one of the most inaccessible and primitive regions of the United States added to the usual vicissitudes of fire fighting.

On the night of August 1 a sudden mountain thunder storm reverberated through the Lochsa River canyon. Chenowith and Larsen, the smokechaser and lookout at Castle Butte, sat in the glass-walled lookout house and took the bearing of each lightning stroke that seemed to reach the ground. By daylight they had spotted three smokes, and at 4:10 Chenowith set out with his back pack of forty-one pounds of grub and tools for the nearest smoke down in Bald Mountain Creek. When he reached the fire at 6:30 it had already covered three-fourths of an acre. A big dead cedar had been struck by a lightning bolt and scattered burning fragments in all directions. Chenowith laid down his pack and set to work with axe and mattock, to cut and trench a line around the fire, which was burning in heavy down logs.

About the middle of the afternoon a high wind came up, and in spite of his best efforts the fire blew across his line and made a run up the hill. The lookout was watching, and when the smoke commenced to roll up, he telephone called for reinforcements. Men came from all directions, from distant trail camps and lookouts. Case, the assistant ranger, and two men came up from the Lochsa Station. Three trail men came in from the Eagle Mountain trail, and three from Fish Creek.

By 7:00 the next morning there were nine men on the fire. The pack string from the Lochsa Station brought in supplies and placed the fire camp at a spring and the hillside half a mile above the fire. Again in the afternoon the dry southwest wind blew a gale. The fire scattered from rotten snags and swept up the slope, gathering intensity and velocity. The camp was burned, the cook barely getting out with his life. The men fell back to the river, a new camp and more men were brought in, and a fresh attack made.

On the 7th I was just completing an inspection trip on the Clearwater Forest when instructions came from the Missoula office for me to check up on fire conditions on the Selway. The Bald Mountain fire was reported out of control, and a serious situation was developing in Old Man Creek.

I left my car at Pete King, the main supply depot at the junction of the Lochsa and Selway Rivers. Here the forces were gathering, pack strings assembling, and truckload after truckload of food supplies and tools coming in from Spokane. I rode thirty miles on horseback to the fire camp on the river at the mouth of Bald Mountain Creek. Forest Supervisor Wolf was in charge in person, with a crew of about fifty men. That afternoon I scouted the fire sufficiently to obtain a general idea of the situation. The fire had burned down the creek nearly to the river and had burned about three-quarters of the Bald Mountain Creek drainage. Fire lines had been extended some distance up the ridges on either side of the creek and were holding successfully. About two miles back from the river the fire in its terrific rush to the ridge top had spattered spots of fire well down into Castle Creek, the next drainage to the east. Wolf and I both agreed that this was the critical point. If it could be controlled it was probable that the fire could be held to the Bald Mountain Creek drainage.

The crew was out before daylight next morning. The plan was for Ranger Hand with twenty men to continue the fire line up the west ridge. Townsend, with a pump crew, was to attack a heavy fire in the creek bottom, which threatened to back down the creek to the river, and Bill McRoberts, a trailcrew foreman, was to take twenty men up the east ridge and drop down to the fire in Castle Creek. A new camp was to be established at the Castle Butte Lookout and Bill’s men were to be brought up there for the night.

I decided to scout the fire in the upper part of Bald Mountain Creek. I started up the east ridge and then cut through on a contour across the freshly burned area into Bald Mountain Creek. The slope showed evidence of a terrific blast of fire. Every tree was charred black, and the fire had swept the ground like a blow torch, utterly consuming every particle of vegetable matter so that the soil on the steep slopes was a shifting black desert of granitic sand and ashes which slid and shifted under my feet. The ground was still hot, with many logs burning and snags crashing down at intervals.

I pushed my way across the burn as rapidly as I could, often walking down logs to keep out of the hot ashes, and with my eye cocked for dangerous snags, slipping and sliding on the steep ground. It was a blistering hot day, and I made a long, hard, half-day’s trip before I reached the upper edge of the fire. It was moving steadily in dead timber up the creek, blazing high in places where the fuel was heavy. I picked a quiet sector and managed to get across the live fire edge to the unburned ground.

It was a long pull from here up to the Lolo Trail at the summit, and I was more than glad when I hit the trail to intercept two pack strings headed for Castle Butte. Fortunately, one string had a spare bell mare without a pack, and I gratefully climbed aboard bareback for the five miles of steep trail to the lookout.

A fire camp was established at the lookout, and Bill’s men pulled in late, pretty well done up from the long climb.

The next morning I went down with the fire crew to the critical point in Castle Creek. The fire had spotted over the ridge in a long tongue, extending almost down to the creek between two lateral branches. It was burning fiercely at the lower end in heavy dead timber, but I hoped if we could cut it off at the bottom, the branch creeks would temporarily hold the fire from spreading laterally along the slope until we could extend the fire lines from the bottom up to the ridge top along the flanks of the fire. If I had had fifty men instead of twenty, I believe we could have made it.

Burning conditions could not have been worse – heavy dead timber killed in the 1910 fires, and grown up to dense brush. The timber was mostly white fir and cedar. Rotten white fir snags would catch fire in the tops and throw showers of sparks which again and again blew across our fire line and started fires in rotten wood back of the line. Big hollow dead cedars came crashing down across the line, shattered into kindling wood, and burst into flames. The falling snags were a constant hazard to the men. A 150-foot dead tree comes down with a slam that shakes the ground like the burst of a high explosive shell and is calculated to put fear into the hearts of the bravest of men.

For two days the Crew fought it out bravely, losing line, picking it up again, and losing again at another point. It was impossible to get the camp down into the Castle Creek canyon; and the 2000-foot climb up hill every night to the camp at Castle Butte was a man-killer. By the third day the fire had backed us down almost to Castle Creek. We held only a few hundred yards of fire line across the point between the forks of the creek, and were trying to hold the fire from crossing these forks with water buckets.

From the feel of the air I knew it was going to be an exceptionally bad fire day. About two o’clock I climbed up on a rocky point on the far side of the creek where I could overlook the fire. The flames were everywhere picking up in volume and intensity. Even as I watched, the fire crossed the small creek just above our fire line and swept up the slope, great masses of flaming gas rolling out of the black smoke, and whole acres bursting in to flame simultaneously.

Next I saw it cross the other fork and cut off our way back to camp. I still sat for five minutes looking down at the crew working on the line, thinking what a pitiful effort man can exert when the great forces of nature are really aroused. Two men were working immediately below me in the creek bed with canvas water buckets. A great white fir crashed down immediately over them. The two men dived under a protecting creek bank and came up out of a cloud of dirt and smoke, looking scared and foolish. A group of men were watching a big hollow cedar close to the fire line which was burning inside like a chimney. Down it came across the line, scattering flaming kindling wood in all directions.

I saw that the jig was up and the best we could do was to get out without scorching our hides. I dropped down the hill, spoke to the foreman, and we assembled the crew as quietly as possible. It was out of the question to get back up the mountain to the fire camp. Our best chance to get out was down Castle Creek about two miles to the river. There was no trail down the creek, and I knew the going would be slow along the brushy, log-choked creek bottom. I decided to abandon our tools in order to make better speed, as there was serious danger that the fire would spread down stream along the slope fast enough to cut us off. The men strung out down the creek, with the foreman in the lead. I brought up the rear to make sure there were no stragglers. The men were nervous, but fully under control.

The smoke was so dense nothing much could be seen, but we could hear the muffled roar and crackle of the fire and the crash of falling trees along the slope to our right. An occasional swirl of the high wind parted the smoke so that the flames could be seen sweeping wildly through the heavy stand of dead timber. For a time the fire moved down stream faster than we were traveling, but the head of the fire kept to the slope, and it lagged enough in the creek bottom so that we kept ahead of it. The men were laboring and cursing as they wallowed through the thick brush and clambered over and under the great down logs that choked the creek bottom. At length we left the fire behind us and came out on the river-trail, and so back to the fire camp at the mouth of Bald Mountain Creek.

The next morning, August 14, I took the crew back to Castle Butte, a climb of 4500 feet from the river. Reinforcements of twenty-five men had come in, so we were forty-five men strong at the upper camp. Townsend took charge of the crew and undertook to cut the fire off below the lookout while I scouted. The fire was burning hard in Castle Creek canyon where it had driven us out yesterday, and in the late afternoon, to my dismay, it crossed the river.

On the 15th there was a tremendous smoke up the river, and it was obvious that the fire had gotten quite beyond possibility of control for some time. Supervisor Wolf scouted east on the Lolo Trail, and tried to get down the Eagle Mountain trail to the river, but the fire had already passed that point and drove him back.

The District Office at Missoula now got into the game and commenced moving in men and pack stock. They arranged for the Clearwater Forest to move men in on the Lolo Trail, and for the Lolo Forest to bring a crew down from the Powell Ranger Station to try to cut off the march of the fire up the Lochsa canyon. By the 17th we had the fire line pretty well completed on Bald Mountain Creek and there seemed nothing to do but follow the fire up from the rear, cutting it off along the flanks. Flint flew over the camp in the fire patrol plane, and dropped a map of the fire and the morning paper from Spokane. The fire was up the river as far as Weir Creek, and Ranger Ed Mackay was moving down with fifty men.

I sat late at night alone on the lookout and watched the fire – a thrilling sight. Castle Creek and Buck Creek below me were lighted like a city at night with dead snags still burning, while the live edge of the fire was defined in wavering loops of light. Across the river the fire edge rose in a straight breast out of the canyon, and at the top, outlined in fire, was the image of a gigantic bear’s head snarling down river, with long fangs of flame – a most impressive symbol. I felt much depressed, and hopeless of accomplishing much.

The following day I moved in a new camp to a spring just off the Lolo Trail two miles east of Castle Butte, and Townsend took a crew of forty men down the Eagle Creek trail to try and cut off the fire on Lost Creek. The fire moved up so fast he lost what little line he could get in. He fired a foreman and fifteen men because they would not stand up to the fire. I spent the night in Townsend’s camp. We were camped at a spring on the hillside, just under the summit. The airplane dropped another map for us. They circled low over the camp and barely cleared the treetops on the ridge, then swooped low and dropped the message carrier, and zoomed over the ridge.

I went out with the crew at daylight next morning. We started in the creek bottom in Lost Creek and by noon had successfully carried the line out to the ridge top. This line held, and the next day we attacked the fire on Buck Creek. More men were coming in all the time, and Assistant Supervisor Gerrard of the Clearwater had come up. The Old Man fire across the river was smoking up big, and Ashpile Creek up the river went out with a great mushroom cloud of smoke. I knew Mackay must be having trouble up the river.

On the 21st I got word over the telephone from District Forester Kelley that he wanted me to take charge of the entire fire and coordinate the efforts of all three Forest organizations working on it. The plan was for the Clearwater to carry the line eastward along the Lolo Trail. The Selway had succeeded in cutting off the fire in the canyon on the downriver side, and the men were moving forward on the south side, while the Lolo men were vainly battling with the run of the fire up river.

I turned over command of operations on the north side to Gerrard and rode out along the Lolo Trail to Indian Post Office Lookout, passing the heads of Lost Creek, Indian Grave Creek, Weir Creek and Post Office Creek. They were all afire half way up from the river, and it looked like dangerous business to put camps down into them above the fire. It was a relief to get away from direct contact with the fire for a day, and I enjoyed the ride along the high divide in the cool of the morning.

Along the Lolo Trail I met Cool from the District Office escorting three strings of Montana Cayuses loaded with supplies and equipment. He had been four days en route from Powell Ranger Station, and had crippled and abandoned two horses on the trail. The half-broken cayuses with sawbuck saddles were quite a contrast to the sleek mules of the Government pack strings, well and uniformly equipped with Decker saddles and capable of carrying 250 pounds per mule.

I spent the night at Indian Post Office, a most remote spot in the Clearwater wilderness. It was near this summit that the Lewis and Clark journal comments, “From this elevated spot we have a commanding view of the surrounding mountains, which so completely enclose on us that though we have once passed them, we almost despair of ever escaping from them without the assistance of the Indian.”

On the 22nd I rode from Indian Post Office down the Squaw Creek trail to the river and made contact with the Lolo forces under Supervisor Simpson. Simpson and Ranger Ed Mackay had been fighting a losing battle since the 18th. The fire was making tremendous runs up the Lochsa River canyon every afternoon, going over their puny fire lines as though they did not exist. Three times, once in the middle of the night, they had been obliged to dump their camps in the river and retreat in more or less confusion to save their lives. The march of the conflagration up the canyon seemed irresistible and almost hopeless to check.

When I arrived, reinforcements and more overhead and equipment had come in from Missoula to back up the more or less demoralized and discouraged men who had been retreating before the fire. The crew, 150 men strong, was camped at what we called the beach camp, a wide, rock bar on the edge of the river, four miles below the Jerry Johnson cabin, which had been selected as the safest possible place in the face of the fire. I arrived just at supper time and found the long lines of men filing past the extemporized tables where the cooks were dishing out huge helpings of meat, potatoes, beans and coffee. After supper we held a council of war of all the Forest officers assembled in camp. Besides Simpson and Mackay, there were Thieme, Lommasson and Sandvig from the District Office, Rush from the Absaroka, and Ranger Olsen, who had come all the way from one of the Utah Forests to help out. They were all experienced fire fighters and men to depend on.

The head of the fire that night on the south side was just across the river from camp on the ridge overlooking Colgate Creek. On the north side it was still two miles below camp in Post Office Creek.

All sorts of suggestions had been made to stop the inexorable move of the fire up the river, from rigging up relays of pumps to building wide fire lines a mile or two in advance and backfiring. Our final decision was to get in as close to the fire as possible early in the morning and try to push the fire lines both ways from the river. If we got a favorable day or two we could crowd the fire up out of the draft of the canyon. If bad fire weather continued we could expect to lose our lines and fall back once more.

We were short on beds that night, and the best I could find was a spare canvas fly to roll up in. I was at any rate glad to get back on the river where I could get a decent wash. I had been on the fire for fourteen days with no baggage save a towel and a pair of socks, and was indescribably filthy with the dust and sweat of the fire line. A fire camp is no place for a fastidious man. One learns to gladly tuck under one’s chin the more or less dubious blankets a half dozen fire fighters may have slept in, to drink out of a common cup or water bag with fifty men on the fire line, and to let the flunkeys slop great dippersful of food onto a tin plate with more than a suspicion of grease on it and to devour it with appetite.

The cook’s breakfast call got us out in the dark of the early morning, and the first gray of dawn saw us out of camp. Simpson, Sandvig and Olsen took half the crew down to Post Office Creek on the north side, while Thieme, Lommasson and Rush, with their crew, waded the river and started a fire line from the river up a steep slope through a thick jungle of young timber on the ridge overlooking Colgate Creek. It was a desperate place to attack the fire if the weather turned at all bad, and I must confess I had little hope of the attack succeeding unless conditions changed for the better.

After getting the crews started I went into camp to get on the telephone. One of the packers reported seeing a spot of fire near the Jerry Johnson trail on the east side of Post Office Creek. If this were true we had fire east of our lines, and plans would have to be changed radically. I mounted my saddle horse and started up the trail to reconnoiter. By the middle of the afternoon I had satisfied myself that it was a false alarm and rode back down to the river. At the Jerry Johnson cabin I stopped for a moment and found Ed Mackay there and a new crew of twenty-five men that had just come down from the Powell Ranger Station, and three pack strings loaded with tools and supplies. I was anxious about conditions at the beach camp, and rode on down the river in that direction. A mile above camp was what is known as the Colgate Lick, one of the biggest game licks in the country. It is, or was, an interesting spot – a saline spring located in a grove of gigantic cedars. Elk trails converge from all directions, and over an area of three or four acres the forest floor was bare as a stock corral from the tramping of herds of game.

Half a mile from the lick I met two scared fire fighters, half running up the trail. They told me I couldn’t get through; that the fire had spotted in below the trail near the elk lick and was burning furiously. This looked bad. It meant the beach camp was cut off from any possible retreat, and might be in considerable danger. I determined to get through if possible, and sent my horse back to the Jerry Johnson cabin with instructions for Mackay to hold the men and pack strings there.

I hurried down the trail afoot and could soon see the smoke and hear the crackle of flames ahead of me. Two cow elk dashed wildly past me. I encountered the fire a quarter of a mile before getting into the lick. It was still below the trail and I yet hoped to get through. I broke into a run, and as I came into the lick there was a tremendous burst of flames ahead of me in a dense thicket of young cedar and white fir, with the terrifying rushing sound of fire crowning through green timber. It was hopeless to get through, and I turned and dashed back the way I had come. The fire was coming up the hill fast and burning so close to the trail that it was only by a close shave that I managed to get by at top speed.

There was nothing for it but to return to the Jerry Johnson cabin and hope for the best. Mackay had established a camp there and supper was under way for the men. The smoke rolled in from down river, the sky was a ghastly yellow, and by seven o’clock it was pitch dark. We were by no means sure that our position would be tenable, and at eight o’clock Mackay started the pack strings, which had been kept saddled and waiting, back up the river. I got out a supply of lanterns and had them ready for a night retreat if necessary. The men all rolled into their blankets, and Mackay and I lay down on the bunks in the old cabin with our clothes and boots on, leaving the smokechaser stationed there to keep watch. At ten o’clock he reported the fire in sight.

We got little sleep that night. The fire came within a quarter mile of us on the north side, the side we were on, and swept clear past us on the south side. Through the dense cover of smoke we could see ridge after ridge flare up across the river, and a spot started close to the river bank half a mile above the cabin. Several times I was about to rouse the men and move out. Mackay was a reassuring presence, and he felt we could safely stick it out. If we did get cut off we could always take to the river. About one o’clock in the morning the wind died down and the run of the fire ceased.

At the gray of dawn in the morning I was off down the trail for the beach camp, leaving Ed Mackay with his twenty-five men to do what he could with the most dangerous spot fires along the river. A half mile below the Jerry Johnson cabin I ran into the edge of the fire. Getting through on the trail seemed out of the question, so I dropped down to the river and made my way along the beach to the camp, where I got the history of the preceding day from Simpson and Thieme. The fire had spotted over from the Colgate ridge inside of Thieme’s line, and set fires across the river just below the Colgate Lick. Thieme withdrew part of his men to try to get these spots, and about the middle of the afternoon everything broke loose at once. The fire swept clear over Thieme’s line, and Simpson lost everything on Post Office Creek. The Colgate Lick fire cut them off from everything on Post Office Creek. The Colgate Lack fire cut them off from retreating up river, but fortunately the main fire or, the north side did not advance that far, and, while the fire burned to the water’s edge just across from camp, the beach camp itself was safe, though they spent a pretty anxious night.

Evidently another retreat was in order, but it was impossible to get a pack string through the fire on the trail to get out the outfit, so kitchen outfit and supplies were temporarily abandoned on the beach, and each fire fighter took a bed roll and one tool and made his way up river to the Jerry Johnson cabin, which was to be our next base of attack. The whole outfit was pretty well disorganized, and one detachment, which had been working on Post Office Creek, had not been able to get in to the beach camp the preceding night. We were somewhat worried about them, but they straggled in about noon.

We now had 160 men strong at the fire camp. The fire had run so far that we hardly knew where to start a new attack until we had done some scouting. One crew picked up the most advanced spots along the river while the other cleared, the Jerry Johnson trail for a back fire, to be used if necessary. Fortunately, as often happens after a big run, the fire lay rather quiet that day.

In the afternoon I scouted up Warm Springs Creek, which comes into the river from the south two miles above Jerry Johnson. There is a splendid big hot spring which pours into the creek, and a big lick even larger than the Colgate Lick. I surprised two elk and three blacktail deer in it as I walked up the trail. As near as I could tell in the dense smoke, the fire had not gotten into Warm Springs Creek, but stopped in the ridge to the west.

That night at a council of war we decided that, in the hopes of a better break in weather conditions, we would try the same tactics again and start new lines on both sides from the river close to the fire, rather than to try backfiring. I got encouraging reports over the phone from the Clearwater and Selway. Paul Gerrard was making great headway along the Lolo Trail, moving his camp forward across one drainage after another, and had already reached the West Fork of Post Office Creek. The Selway had one 25-man crew at Gold Meadows and one at Flytrap Butte, and were gradually moving their lines forward along the north side. We had a few drops of rain at night which would hold the fire from running much for a day or two.

From the 26th to September 1, in spite of many setbacks, we were successful in driving the fire lines pretty well back from the river, and felt that we had checked the main run of the fire. There was still an unburned strip of a mile between the Colgate Springs fire and the main fire on the north side, so we moved crews back to the beach camp and the Post Office camp.

On the first we had a man killed. I had just been over a hot sector of line which we were having difficulty in holding, as it was on a steep slope below the fire, and big rocks loosened by the fire were rolling down across the line and snags dropping frequently. Two brothers were working with a saw on the line when a tall snag came down without warning. It caught one of the men before he could move, crushing his skull and killing him instantly. There is always a considerable element of danger on the fire line. In my own experience I have seen three men killed in this manner, and narrow escapes are frequent. Minor casualties, such as axe cuts, broken limbs and sprains, occur regularly.

On the eight of September, fire lines were connected with both the Clearwater and Selway crews, and the fire was under control. As near as I could figure, there were about ninety-five miles of held fire line. The fire-fighting forces at the end of the job totaled four hundred eighty men. After thirty-three days in fire camp I was glad indeed to take the trail to the Powell Station and a car into Missoula. A soft bed and a civilized meal with a white tablecloth seemed the most desirable things in the world.