Great Fire of 1910

Fifteen miles east of Wallace, a gravel trail slips into a tunnel nearly two miles long, crosses steel trestles high above mountain creeks, and descends a canyon wall through the Bitterroot Mountains. The Route of the Hiawatha rail-trail follows the most expensive and difficult stretch of railroad ever built in the Northwest — the Milwaukee Road's crossing of St. Paul Pass — and every mile of it is steeped in the history of the men who built it.

Edward Crockett Pulaski was not a young man when he joined the fledgling U.S. Forest Service in 1908. Born in 1866, he had spent years in the West as a miner, a railroad worker, and a ranch foreman before pinning on a ranger's badge in the Coeur d'Alene National Forest, based at Wallace. "Big Ed," as the men called him, knew the ridges and canyons of the Silver Valley as few others did. In August 1910, that knowledge saved dozens of lives — including, barely, his own.

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.