Young Men and Fire (17 page)

Back in the world where things can be determined, if not proved, the suit of Henry Thol reached the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, where Warren E. Burger, later chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, was one of the lawyers arguing against the retired United States Forest Service ranger’s charge that his son would have
made the remaining sixty or seventy yards to the top of the ridge except for the negligence of the United States Forest Service. Despite the number of times “United States” occurs in that sentence, nothing much happens because of it.

The court of appeals in 1954 upheld the decision of the district court for the district of Montana. Both courts therefore ruled that the Federal Employees’ Compensation Act could constitutionally exclude nondependent parents from receiving damages from the federal government beyond the burial allowance. The decision was also upheld that Mansfield’s amendment was constitutional in making itself retroactive so that it would apply to the dead of Mann Gulch. Therefore, after the parents had buried their boys, they received another two hundred dollars.

F
OR A TIME IT LOOKED AS IF
the four hundred dollars would put an end to the story. A court decision built on two hundred dollars plus two hundred dollars per body silenced the parents; they could not pursue their charge of negligence unless the decision of the court of appeals was reversed by our highest court. To the average citizen the government holds nearly all the cards and will play them when the government is both the alleged guilty party and judge of its own guilt.

For instance, late in 1951 (December 12) in Lewiston, Idaho, Robert Sallee made a second statement about the Mann Gulch fire to “an investigator for the United States Forest Service,” and less than a month later (January 1, 1952) Walter Rumsey in Garfield, Kansas, made his second statement to the same official investigator. The Forest Service was preparing its two key witnesses just in case, going so far as to bring them back to Mann Gulch for a refresher course. Their second statements follow closely their first, which were taken only a few days after their return to Missoula from the fire
(both dated August 10, 1949). In fact, their later statements follow their first statements word for word a good part of the way, so the alterations stick out like sore thumbs, which is still a good figure of speech at times. Two assurances were drawn from Rumsey and Sallee: they now protested at length that if those who died had followed Dodge’s appeals to lie down with him in his own fire (as they themselves hadn’t), they, like Dodge, would have been saved. Moreover, they now insisted at length that in escaping over the hill they had followed the up-gulch edge of Dodge’s fire “straight” to the top of the ridge and so Dodge’s fire could not have pursued those who were burned toward the head of the gulch, since they and his fire would have been going roughly at right angles to each other.

Some official documents about the fire, then, were retouched and given the right shading. More of them probably were just buried—some were even marked “Confidential” and were held from the public as if these fire reports endangered national security. Still others were scattered among different Forest Service offices from the headquarters of Region One in Missoula to the national headquarters in Washington, D.C. The Mann Gulch fire was so scattered that about a quarter of a century later the first mystery I had to solve about it was to find out where it had disappeared. It was like a burial at sea—it was hard afterwards to find the bodies in the wash, and I couldn’t have done it without the help of men and women of the Forest Service who felt the burial had been indecent. It’s a different world now anyway from what it was before the passage of the Freedom of Information Act in 1966, but I lived most of my life before that date and I can remember it being a loud laugh at Regional Headquarters in Missoula when an energetic, outspoken journalist tried persistently to get access to the documents there on the Mann Gulch fire. With eight lawsuits in the docket brought against the Forest Service for negligence in the deaths of thirteen of the West’s finest, the Forest Service was not opening its heart or its files for all to see. As far as the files marked “Mann Gulch Fire” were concerned, mum was the word.

The reasons why parents, relatives, and close friends hoped for silence are naturally very different from the government’s. The Forest Service sought silence; the parents were reduced to it, although in sad ways they may also have sought it. On the whole, they were not people of means and could not afford to appeal their case to the Supreme Court, even if they had wished, and, except for Thol, they must have had small understanding of their own case and therefore an underlying reluctance to pursue it. Most important of all probably is the secrecy of the grief and moral bewilderment suffered at the death of one of ourselves who was young, had a special flair, a special daring, a special disregard for death, who seemed, both to himself and to us, to be apart from death, especially from death leaving behind no explanation of itself either as a sequence of events or as a moral occurrence in what-kind-of-a-universe-is-this-anyway. It is the frightened and recessive grief suffered for one whom you hoped neither death nor anything evil would dare touch. Afterwards, you live in fear that something might alter your memory of him and of all other things. I should know.

A few summers ago, thirty years after the fire, I sent what I hoped was gentle word through a common friend to a mother of one of the Mann Gulch dead asking if I could talk to her, and she returned through the common friend gentle word saying that even after all these years she was unable to talk about her son’s death. I thought next I would try a father, and he came in dignity, feeling no doubt it was a challenge to him that he must meet as a man, and he talked in dignity until I began to tell him about his son’s death. I had assumed that he knew some of the details of that death and, as a scientist, would care for other details that would help him participate in his son’s last decisions, very thoughtful ones though tragic. As I mistakenly went on talking, his hands began to shake as if he had Parkinson’s disease. He could not stop them, so there is no story, certainly no ending to a story, that can be found by communicating with the living who loved the young who are dead, at least none that I am qualified to pursue. A story at a minimum
requires movement, and, with those who loved those who died, nothing has moved. It all stopped on August 5, 1949. So if there is more to this story for me to find, I shall have to find it somewhere else.

The silence, of course, could never be complete. Some things do remain—worn-out things, unconnected things, things not in the right place or clearly of another time: a worn-out fishing jacket, a few unrelated letters written by him, a few unrelated letters written to him, a childhood photograph that is hard to imagine as his, a picture in which something may be right.

A movie supposedly based on the Mann Gulch fire can still be seen now and then as a rerun on television. In 1952, while litigation was still in progress, Twentieth Century—Fox released
Red Skies of Montana
, filmed at the Smokejumper base in Missoula and on a fire just outside of town. The cast included Richard Widmark, Constance Smith, Jeffrey Hunter, and Richard Boone. At the beginning of the plot a foreman on a forest fire lights an escape fire, as Dodge did when the flames closed in; then he lies down in his own fire and the likeness to Dodge continues—his own men “do not heed him” and he alone survives only to live in disgrace.

At the end of the movie, though, there is another fire and the movie foreman again lights an escape fire. This time his crew heeds him, and everybody lives happily ever after.

Our story about the Mann Gulch fire obviously makes it hard on itself by trying to find its true ending. Here is this movie that lives on to rerun several times a year on TV and so has attained some kind of immortality by easily adding to small broken pieces of truth an old, worn-out literary convention. This added, life-giving plot is the old “disgraced officer’s plot,” the plot in which the military leader has disgraced himself before his men, either because his action has been misunderstood by them or because he displayed actual cowardice, and at the end the officer always meets the same situation again but this time heroically (usually as the result of the intervening influence of a good woman). By the way, this plot has
often been attached to movies and stories about Custer Hill. Perhaps this is a reminder to keep open the possibility that there is no real ending in reality to the story of the Mann Gulch fire. If so, then let it be so—there’s a lot of tragedy in the universe that has missing parts and comes to no conclusion, including probably the tragedy that awaits you and me.

T
HIS COMING PART OF THE STORY
, then, is the quest to find the full story of the Mann Gulch fire, to find what of it was once known and was then scattered and buried, to discover the parts so far missing because fire science had not been able to explain the behavior of the blowup or the “escape fire,” and to imagine the last moments of those who went to their crosses unseen and alone. In this quest we probably should not be altogether guided by the practice of the medieval knight in search of the holy grail who had no clear idea of what he was looking for or where he might find it and so wandered around jousting with other knights who didn’t know what they were looking for until finally he discovered he was home again and not much different from what he had been when he started except for some bruises and a broken lance. I early picked up bruises in my wanderings, but I tried to shorten the length of the search by pursuing several quests concurrently. As early as 1976 I started the serious study of the Mann Gulch fire by trying to recover the official documents bearing on it and at the same time reacquainting myself with the actual ground on which the tragedy had occurred. For an opener I took a bruising boat trip down the Missouri River to Mann Gulch. Even earlier I had started with the archives in Missoula because, both as headquarters of Region One of the Forest Service and as the location of the base of the Smokejumpers sent to the fire, it was the center of the Forest Service’s operations against the Mann Gulch fire. My opening jousts with both the archives and the ground went in favor of
my opponents, whoever they were. My brother-in-law, Kenneth Burns, who was brought up within a few miles of Mann Gulch and was then living in Helena, said he would have no trouble borrowing a boat and taking us down the Missouri from Hilger Landing to the mouth of Meriwether Canyon where, as you’ll remember, there is an almost vertical trail to the top of the ridge between Meriwether and Mann Gulch. Charles E. (“Mike”) Hardy, research forester project leader at the Northern Forest Fire Laboratory in Missoula and only recently the author of a fine study of the beginnings of research in the Forest Service (
The Gisborne Era of Forest Fire Research: Legacy of a Pioneer
, 1983), had this early interested me in a scientific analysis of the fire and had been good enough to make the trip with us to give me a close-up view of his theories at work. Although we did not quite make it to Mann Gulch on this trip, I am grateful to Mike for starting me in the right direction.

A cloudburst was already waiting to challenge us at the top of the ridge. From the bottom of Meriwether Canyon we could both see and hear it making preparations for a joust with us. As we tried not to fall backwards to where we started in the canyon, we could hear the storm rumble and paw the ground. When we neared the top, it tried to beat us back by splintering shafts of lightning on gigantic rocks. There was a lone tree near the top, only one, and in case we had any foolish ideas of taking refuge under it a bolt of lightning took aim and split it apart; it went down as if it had been hit by a battle-ax. Trying to reach the rocks, we were held motionless and vertical in our tracks by the wind. Only when the wind lessened for a moment could we move—then we fell forward. With the lessening of the wind the rain became cold and even heavier and forced us to retreat from the battlefield on top. The rain fell on us like a fortified wall falling. By the time we reached the bottom of Meriwether, we were shivering and demoralized and my brother-in-law probably already had pneumonia.

All this was like a demonstration arranged to let us know that Mann Gulch had power over earth, air, and water, as well
as fire. As the wind continued to lessen, the rain increased and fell straight down. It was solid now everywhere. It knocked out the motor in our borrowed boat, and we couldn’t get it started again; after a while we didn’t try anymore, and it took several hours to pole and paddle our way back to Hilger Landing. My brother-in-law was seriously sick before we got there; he would never go back to Mann Gulch. So for some time Mann Gulch was mine alone if I wanted it, and for some time I left it to the elements. I turned to the archives because I knew they would be dry and no wind would be there and the air would be the same air the stacks had been built around and nothing but a book or two had been moved since. The signs would demand “Silence” and even the silence would be musty, and for a time anything musty had an appeal.

The Forest Service archives in Missoula were about as hard to get anything out of as Mann Gulch. Although there wasn’t much trouble gaining access to the Regional Library, there wasn’t much stuff in its files on the Mann Gulch fire, and what was there was the ordinary stuff. Yet surprisingly even some of that was marked “Confidential.”

I hadn’t thought there would be much in the files, because you can’t dip very far into the Mann Gulch story without becoming suspicious that efforts have been made to scatter and cover the tragedy. Besides, you are not far enough advanced in your thinking to do research on the Forest Service if you don’t know ahead of time that the Forest Service is a fairly unhistorical outfit, sometimes even antihistorical. So when I first looked under “Mann Gulch Fire,” the cupboard was practically bare, but before long I met the great woodsman W. R. (“Bud”) Moore, who was then director of the Division of Aviation and Fire Management for Region One of the Forest Service. He is outspoken and devoted to the Forest Service and expects every American citizen, except the president of the United States, to be likewise. He sent out orders to round up all stray documents bearing on Mann Gulch that could be found in the region and make them available to me. They add up to a small but interesting file and contain most of the documents
in my collection marked “Confidential.” But all told, the Mann Gulch fire turned to ashes without depositing much in the offices of Region One of the United States Forest Service, and I had to make three visits to the Forest Service’s Office of Information in Washington, D.C., before I had a good working collection of documents on the Mann Gulch fire.