The summer of 1910 was the driest in memory across the northern Rockies. By August, some 1,700 separate fires were burning in the national forests of northern Idaho and western Montana, fed by a record drought, logging slash, and sparks from locomotives. Forest Service crews — many of them hastily hired immigrants and students — fought the scattered fires for weeks with hand tools. Then, on Saturday, August 20, a violent cold front drove hurricane-force winds across the region, and in about 36 hours the separate fires merged into a single firestorm that burned roughly three million acres. The Great Fire of 1910, remembered as the Big Burn, killed 86 people, most of them firefighters.
Wallace sat directly in its path. All that Saturday, smoke from the burning hills poured into the canyon until the town lay under a warm fog so opaque that the streetlights were turned on at three in the afternoon. Mayor Walter Hanson and Forest Service officials had prepared an evacuation plan, and now they put it into motion. The Northern Pacific made up special trains, stripping out cargo and even seats to make room. Women, children, and the elderly were ordered aboard; no pets were allowed, and no baggage beyond what a person could carry. The men of Wallace were ordered to stay behind and fight for the town, and soldiers of the U.S. Army's 25th Infantry, the Buffalo Soldiers, helped load the families, keep order, and defend the town.
The fire came down Placer Creek and over the ridge east of town. Shortly after nine that night, wind-driven embers ignited the wooden rear of the Wallace Times building, and the flames took hold of the east end of town. Before the night was out, the fire had destroyed a lumber mill, two hotels, a brewery, rooming houses, and dozens of homes and businesses. The refugee trains rolled out of the canyon ahead of the flames, gathering passengers at town after town on the run toward Missoula.
Wallace had burned once before, in 1890, and had rebuilt in brick, stone, and steel, boasting that its new buildings were fireproof. The Big Burn showed the limits of that confidence. The heat was so intense that in some brick buildings only the walls were left standing, all the glassware was melted, and apples were baked on the trees. When Sunday dawned, the hillsides around Wallace were blackened and the entire east end of town had burned down — roughly a third of Wallace was a smoldering ruin.
And then Wallace did what it had done before: it rebuilt. Crews cleared the rubble, and new brick and stone buildings rose on the old lots, giving downtown Wallace much of the face it wears today. The silver mines that were the town's reason for being roared back to life, and Wallace's prosperity returned with them.
The Big Burn's reach extended far beyond one Idaho town. The disaster — three million acres burned and enough timber destroyed, by the Forest Service's estimate, to fill a freight train 2,400 miles long — transformed the young U.S. Forest Service and set American wildfire policy on a course of aggressive fire suppression that lasted for generations. In Wallace, the fire remains the defining catastrophe of the town's history, and the handsome brick downtown that rose from its ashes is a large part of why the entire town is listed on the National Register of Historic Places today.