WildfiresBig Fires Demand a Big Response: How 1910’s Big Burn Can Help Us Think Smarter about Fighting Wildfires and Living with Fire

By William Deverell and Elizabeth A. Logan

Published 28 September 2021

The aftermath of 1910 Big Burn in Northwestern U.S., the Rockies, and parts of British Columbia, led to bold decision-making in forest and fire management techniques and directives. Now, more than a century later, the 21st century’s big burns are a signal that things have gone terribly wrong.

Over two days in the summer of 1910, wildfires roared across the bone-dry forests of the inland Northwestern U.S., the Rockies, and parts of British Columbia. Whole towns burned. The blazes scorched 3 million acres of forest, an area the size of Connecticut, and left behind a legacy that profoundly changed how the U.S. managed wildfires – and ultimately how fires behave today.

The Big Burn shook firefighting agencies and officials, most notably the newly formed U.S. Forest Service and its leaders. As those who had witnessed The Big Burn rose through the pre-World War II Forest Service ranks, a firm and unyielding policy rose with them:

Forest fires were to be put out. All of them. By 10 a.m. the morning after they had been discovered.

While not widely known outside the Forest Service, the “10 a.m. policy” is one of the most consequential environmental actions in American history. This absolutist fire suppression ideology, later publicized by Smokey Bear, has as its origin the Big Burn complex of forest fires in 1910 and its roots in 19th-century settler colonialism.

The aftermath of 1910 led to bold decision-making in forest and fire management techniques and directives. Fire suppression, at least in the way the Forest Service and allied agencies went about it – militarized, technologically impressive, expensive – led the U.S. down a forest management path that neglected other, more nuanced approaches to fire. The dismissal of Indigenous ecological knowledge about fire and land stewardship undoubtedly contributed to the rise of suppressing all fires.

Now, more than a century later, the 21st century’s big burns are a signal that things have gone terribly wrong.

In 2020, fires in California alone burned more than 4 million acres and spawned a new term: the gigafire, a wildfire that burns more than 1 million acres. The August Complex was the first known modern gigafire. The Dixie Fire, which swept through the town of Greenville in northern California in August 2021, will likely be another gigafire before it is finally put out.

As historians of the western U.S. and heads of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, we and our colleagues have been exploring what went wrong with wildfire management in the region, and why.

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