National Park Service

U.S. Department of the Interior

Wildland Fire Program

A Test of Adversity and Strength

Wildland Fire in the National Park System

By Hal K. Rothman

NPS/J HENRY
A Test of Adversity and Strength: 

Wildland Fire in the National Park System 

By Hal K. Rothman, 

Principal Investigator 

National Park Service 

Cooperative Agreement Order #CA 8034-2-9003 

Special Consultant: 

Stephen J. Pyne 

Research Associates: 

Lincoln Bramwell, Brenna Lissoway, and Lesley Argo 

Project Managers 

David Sproul, Michael Childers, and Daniel Holder 

i 
Fire is the test of gold; adversity, of strong men. 

Seneca, Epistles 

ii 
Executive Summary 

The National Park Service’s mission, unique among federal agencies, has made 

its history of fire policy diverge from that of its peers. Federal fire protection began in the 

national parks in 1886, when the U.S. Army assumed administration of Yellowstone 

National Park. After the trauma of the 1910 fire season and creation of a civilian National 

Park Service in 1916, the new Service embraced the U.S. Forest Service’s policy of 

aggressive fire suppression. For almost fifty years, suppression was policy, a reality that 

only began to change in the 1950s. The Leopold Report, published in 1963, further 

articulated differences in the National Park Service’s mission with its call for parks to be 

managed as “vignettes of primitive America.” Following passage of the Wilderness Act 

in 1964, federal agencies – including the NPS – were compelled to reassess their 

management plans in the context of the new law. Steadily, each federal agency found its 

mission redefined and its goals recast; this translated into a more diverse spectrum of fire 

practices, at once splintering the former unity of purpose that surrounded suppression 

while demanding new ideas and devices to reintegrate those fragmented parts. By 1967, 

the National Park Service found itself at the vanguard of federal fire programs as it 

experimented with fire ecology, explored fire management strategies, and devised 

administrative models better suited to fire’s reintroduction than its removal. 

This new emphasis on the use of fire as management tool reigned for the rest of 

the twentieth century. The National Park Service moved to the forefront of federal land 

management agencies, for the difference in its mission gave it a latitude to experiment 

with fire that other agencies did not enjoy. As they extended the reach of their 

management to more and more public land in the United States, government officials 

found that their success depended on an ability to cooperate with peer agencies in new 

ways. The cooperative model of Alaska came to the rest of the nation in the 1990s. A 

series of devastating fires on public and private acreage threw this new set of strategies 

into doubt, but in the 1990s, the National Park Service remained in the forefront of fire 

management. Its ideas and practices led; other agencies, including the Forest Service, 

followed even as national parks experienced fewer fires and other federal lands bore the 

brunt. 

Fire remained an important tool in maintaining the national parks. The boundaries 

on its use continued to be in flux in the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first 

century. The question for the NPS became how to integrate its fire management goals 

with the controversy that surrounded both prescribed burns and those naturally occurring 

fires that were allowed to burn and with the new management structure that evolved 

during a succession of difficult fire years. 

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Table of Contents 

Executive Summary.......................................................................................iii 

Introduction....................................................................................................1 

Part I: Fight, Control, Exclude: The Era of Suppression 1872-1967 

1. 1872-1916: The Military Era..........................................................6 

2. The Development of a Fire Management Structure ........................32 

3. A Decade of Transformation: The New Deal and Fire Policy ........54 

4. Ecology and the Limits of Suppression...........................................82 

Part II: Put Fire Back In . . . But When, Where, and How? 

5. Allowing Fire in the National Park System.....................................120 

6. Institutionalizing a Structure for Fire Management ........................154 

7. Yellowstone and the Politics of Disaster.........................................186 

8. The Hazard of New Fortunes: Outlet, Cerro Grande, and the 

 Twenty-First Century.......................................................................220 

Bibliography ..................................................................................................236 

Photographs follow Part I, pp. 110-117 

iv 
Introduction: 

The National Parks and Fire 

National parks and fire have an intimate and unbreakable relationship. But since 

the 1872 establishment of Yellowstone National Park – the world’s first national park – 

the desire to suppress, control, and manage fire has been an integral part of the 

management of federal park areas. Managers, first the U.S. Army and, after 1916, the 

National Park Service, have tried to put fire out, to use it as a tool while trying to prevent 

harm to property and people, and ultimately to strike some balance between the presence 

of fire and its enforced absence. These goals and ideals shifted over time, as culture and 

science suggested better alternatives. 

The history of fire management in the national park system divides into two clear 

and distinct phases. From the 1872 establishment of Yellowstone National Park until 

1967, the dominant effort was to suppress wildfires. The idea of complete fire 

suppression began in the national parks with the appearance of the U.S. Army in 1886, 

and the model was carried to other federal land management agencies over time. In most 

cases, this model was easier to express than to achieve. Under Army administration, 

sincere efforts to put out fires consumed considerable military energy and resources. 

After the founding of the National Park Service in 1916, suppression in the Parks 

depended on congressional willingness to provide money to combat the blazes. The 

pittance that arrived pushed the infant Park Service to emulate U.S. Forest Service. 

Forged in the flames of the brutal summer of 1910, the Forest Service treated fire as an 

enemy. It controlled the vast majority of funding for federal fire response and its 

approach dominated. 

This situation lasted from the 1920s until the 1960s. For the National Park 

Service, two high points of resource accessibility punctuated this long era of suppression 

– the New Deal of the 1930s and Mission 66, implemented between 1956 and 1966. In 

these two eras, the NPS received unusual largesse and adroitly linked its objective to 

remove fire from its landscapes to capital development programs, which simultaneously 

served other purposes as well. At about the same time, a series of changes in management 

philosophy contributed to a revolution in the NPS’s approach to fire that became Service 

policy in 1968. For the second time, the national parks led. As Yellowstone forged a 

model for national park operations, so the National Park Service became the first federal 

land management agency to recognize the myriad ways fire could help maintain the 

landscapes so dear to the American public. Because of changes in scientific thinking that 

translated into new directions in management policy, the national parks became the 

testing ground for intentionally ignited fire, as well as for experiments in letting natural 

fires burn. Ecologically sound, this strategy was revolutionary, threatening, and even 

dangerous, yet the NPS persisted in the face of challenges to its authority, and in some 

case, intense questioning of its judgment. 

It took twenty years for the philosophical commitment to fire use to evolve into a 

formal planning structure that encouraged its introduction. Fire planning covered 

everything from the response to natural and accidental fire to the rules by which fire 

could be introduced to national park landscapes and the conditions under which this 

1 
process could take place. The innovations came slowly, codified in 1978 in NPS-18, and 

then applied in fire plans throughout most of the national park system during the early 

and mid-1980s. As the decade drew to a close, the NPS had a structure and process for 

managing fire, albeit one that had yet to be seriously tested. 

In the summer of 1988, that test came: the National Park Service faced a major 

fire at Yellowstone National Park. Though earlier experiments in fire use had gone awry, 

the consequences had been local. Major fires at the nation’s most iconic national park 

drew a wider set of critics than previous outbreaks, turning fire management into a 

national political question. The result was a challenge to NPS fire policy and objectives 

that threatened not only the way the National Park Service addressed fire, but also the 

very values at the center of NPS management. In response, the NPS reshaped its new fire 

policy, often guided by the Department of the Interior and pressure from Congress. That 

effort culminated in a national fire management plan in 1995. As the 1990s ended, the 

NPS had redefined its policies and instituted greater safeguards. It faced a century-old 

problem: much of the land in its care and even more of the acreage surrounding national 

parks had been subjected to suppression for a very long time. Very little of those forests 

had been treated to limit the primary consequences of suppression: a buildup of heavy 

fuel load. In a climate in which both urban and rural wildfire became a regular feature, 

the NPS wisely anticipated destructive fires on its lands. 

That expectation was realized in 2000, when the Outlet fire on the North Rim of 

the Grand Canyon and the Cerro Grande fire at Bandelier National Monument provided 

severe examples of prescribed fires –fires set intentionally for management purposes – 

that escaped control and caused considerable damage. In both cases, evacuations of 

communities followed. At Los Alamos, New Mexico, near Bandelier, the presence of the 

Los Alamos National Laboratory, home to important components of the nation’s nuclear 

and weapons research program, exacerbated the danger and fear that stemmed from any 

major fire. These fires seemed like errors in judgment, and they led to questions about the 

efficacy of introduced fire, as well as to concerns about the National Park Service’s 

management strategy. 

As the twenty-first century dawned, the National Park Service found itself with a 

complex mission in regard to fire. Suppression as the sole strategy was gone; the 

intentional use of fire had been developed, challenged, and then improved by the 

experiences of a generation of application. Fire had a firm role in the national parks but 

the evolution of management in response to demographic change, politics, and statute 

remained uncertain. 

As long as there are national parks, fire will remain an issue. It is one constant in 

varied landscapes. The history of wildfire management in national parks has paralleled 

the evolution of national park management. The increase in categories and types of fire 

that accompanied the shift to a policy of fire management rather than suppression 

reflected both the increasing professionalization of the National Park Service and 

political pressures. After 1968, NPS policy reflected a philosophy that natural fire had to 

be nurtured where it continued to thrive and fire reinstated where it had been suppressed 

– except near human habitation or essential infrastructure, where suppression would 

continue. This was a matter of practical ecology. It also became a highly symbolic 

expression of change of mission, that national parks should be managed not as primarily 

recreational or scenic entities but as coherent natural ecosystems, and that Americans’ 

2 
relationship to the wild had to change from control to celebration of its natural processes. 

New fire terms reflected freshly minted fire policies that in turn articulated new values. 

This seemingly arcane debate expressed a deeper turmoil over how American society 

should exist on the continent. Fire had an internal logic, American culture had another, 

and the two often collided spectacularly in precisely those places such as Yellowstone, 

Yosemite, and Everglades that had become cultural icons under the aegis of the National 

Park Service. 

3 
4 
Part I: Fight, Control, Exclude: 

The Era of Suppression 1872-1967 

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Chapter 1: 

1872-1916: The Military Era 

The creation of Yellowstone National Park in 1872 was a monumental moment in 

American history. With the preservation of the great expanse of the Yellowstone region 

as industrial expansion created vast and growing economic inequity throughout the 

nation, the United States seemed to agree on a number of premises. Important among 

them, the United States formally became “nature’s nation,” a political entity that defined 

itself as apart from its European antecedents as a result of its spectacular nature and its 

desire to protect such features from exploitation and development. Such a perspective 

was new and novel for Americans; the first 250 years of Euro-American settlement has 

been what the scholar Vernon L. Parrington called the “great barbecue,” an extended era 

in which Americans wasted more than they consumed.1 

Since the eighteenth century, a powerful counter tradition had existed alongside 

the overarching exploitive ethos. The residents of the New World had seen the 

spectacular in the natural, had pointed to the features of the American land as a primary 

piece of what made the New World special. This was Thomas Jefferson’s counter in his 

famous correspondence with famed eighteenth century naturalist and industrialist George 

Louis LeClerc Comte d’Buffon to the charge of North American inferiority; the 

sentiment was echoed at every subsequent comparison throughout the first half of the 

nineteenth century. Yellowstone codified that message and took it even further. The 

reservation of two million acres reflected a sense of loss of the natural in American 

society that demanded organized and systematic preservation. At the same time, 

Yellowstone foretold the increasing importance of an organized business community, for 

the park could not have been created at that time without the help of the railroad 

companies that by the 1870s spanned the West. Their economic and social contribution to 

the idea of national parks was great.2 

In all the huzzahing and hurrahing that surrounded national park proclamation, no 

one gave much thought to the management of the new park and its many and varied 

successors. Nathaniel Pitt “National Park” Langford, a transplanted Montanan, was on 

the Northern Pacific Railroad payroll when he visited Yellowstone as part of the 

Washburn-Doane Expedition in 1870. He later dramatically articulated a fundamental 

premise of American culture when he later lectured with his stereopticon images of 

Tower Fall, the Yellowstone River, and the geyser Old Faithful. In Langford’s 

construction, national parks affirmed the ideals of democracy; unlike in Europe, where 

1

 Vernon L. Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought: the Beginnings of Critical Realism in 

America, 1860-1920, reprint (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), 23-26; Barbara Novak, 

Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825-1875 (New York: Oxford University Press, 

1980), 1-37. 2

 Alfred Runte, National Parks: The American Experience 2d ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska 

Press, 1987), 33-45; David Shi, The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture 

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 1-25; Hal K. Rothman, Devil’s Bargains: Tourism in the 

Twentieth Century American West (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998), 1-26. 

6 
 

 

 

 

 

kings and barons owned such lands, in the United States, spectacular nature truly 

belonged to the people. Despite the enthusiasm this vivid cultural symbolism attached to 

park establishment, the question of actual management of park acreage was not 

addressed. Although Yellowstone National Park was assigned to the Department of the 

Interior, no federal agency received specific authority to manage this vast area; no 

organization or entity jumped to the rescue to protect the park, manage its many 

resources, and prepare it for visitors.3 

This oversight – or even the lack of a wider sense of obligation it indicated– 

meant that at its founding, Yellowstone embodied a dilemma that continued to haunt the 

national parks for the next four decades. Culturally powerful symbols, national parks and 

other federally reserved park areas, after 1906, national monuments in particular, were 

orphans in the federal system. No agency or individual was charged to manage them or to 

even check on their condition. Although the intrepid Langford was appointed to the 

unpaid position of superintendent of the new park, without resources or any genuine way 

to secure them, he did little improve facilities or create any kind of ongoing management. 

As U.S. bank examiner for the territories and Pacific Coast states, Langford was occupied 

elsewhere during his tenure at the park. He made only three short visits to the park during 

his superintendency.4 

The pattern established did not bode well. After 1872, the well-known and 

influential Langford failed repeatedly to secure appropriations, and he could not defend 

the park against hunters, intruders, or natural elements. His successor, political appointee 

Philetus W. Norris, who arrived in 1877, fared little better. In 1878, Congress finally 

provided a $10,000 appropriation to “protect, preserve and improve” the park. Norris 

received a $1,500 annual stipend soon after, suggesting the rudiments of a system, but the 

futility of the existing system of protection was driven home that same year, when a 

group of Nez Perce attacked tourists in the park, killing one. Nor did the presence of a 

superintendent significantly reduce vandalism, an ongoing problem in the park. By 1880, 

it was clear that a more comprehensive system of protection and management was 

5 necessary.

The proclamation of Yellowstone National Park included a fallacious assumption 

about the lands reserved. The park was purported to be “worthless land,” in the phrase of 

historian Alfred Runte, Jr., presumably empty of people and as a result, devoid of users. 

In truth, the Nez Perce who came through as they fled the U.S. Army in 1877 were 

indicative of a wider pattern of Native American use by many groups over any extended 

period. At the moment of its establishment, Yellowstone’s main corridors were crowded 

3

 H. Duane Hampton, How the Cavalry Saved Our National Parks (Bloomington: Indiana University 

Press, 1971), 32-33; Runte, National Parks, 35-54; Paul Schullery, Searching for Yellowstone: Ecology and 

Wonder for in the Last Wilderness (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997); Paul Schullery and Lee 

Whittlesey, “Yellowstone’s Creation Myth: Can We Live With Our Own Legends?” Montana: The 

Magazine of Western History 53 1 (Spring 2003), 2-13. 4

 Aubrey L. Haines, The Yellowstone Story: Volume Two (Yellowstone, WY: Yellowstone Library 

and Museum Association, 1977), 31, 448-49; Hampton, How the Cavalry Saved Our National Parks, 33-

35; Runte, National Parks, 41-46. 5

 Philetus W. Norris to Secretary of the Interior, June 18, 1878, RG 79.2.1, Correspondence from 

Yellowstone, 1877- (microfilm), National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD; 

Hampton, How the Cavalry Saved Our National Parks, 45-49; Hiram Chittenden, The Yellowstone 

National Park (Cincinnati: The R. Clark Co., 1905), 123-25; Richard A. Bartlett, Yellowstone: A 

Wilderness Besieged (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985), 13-21. 

7 
 

with hunters, trappers, campers, herdsmen, and countless others who used park resources 

in some manner.6

 Persuading such people that park designation demanded a change in 

their behavior became one of the most difficult jobs of early superintendents. 

The catalyst for the transformation of management at Yellowstone came in the 

guise of private industry. Railroads had been instrumental in creating Yellowstone 

National Park, sponsoring Langford’s speaking, cajoling noted scientist and renowned 

late nineteenth century public figure Ferdinand Vandiver Hayden to support the idea of a 

park, and in some accounts, providing the language for the Yellowstone park bill. Only 

when a branch line approached the park did concern emerge about the interaction 

between national parks and private business. In 1883, the Northern Pacific Railroad 

arrived in Livingston, Montana, fifty-six miles from the park. Six months later, a spur 

line reached Yellowstone, the first time a railroad had been built to a specifically tourist 

destination in the American West. Companies sought to capitalize on the new access, a 

prospect that some among the powerful and influential found discouraging and unworthy 

of the nation that established national parks as democratic institutions. Even before the 

spur line was built, no less a luminary than Lieutenant General Phillip H. “Phil” 

Sheridan, who became commanding general of the U.S. Army on November 1, 1883, 

observed that the national park had been “rented out to private parties.”7

 At the height of 

the Gilded Age, the notion of “national” remained strong enough to inspire some 

influential people to object to the norms of the Gilded Age. 

By the time the railroad arrived, Yellowstone National Park had the beginnings of 

a management staff. Norris arrived in 1877 and a staff person was added in 1880. By the 

early 1880s, a struggle for control of the park had been consummated. Secretary of the 

Interior Henry Teller of Colorado, long a proponent of western development and later a 

strong opponent of conservation, tried to circumvent the principle of a national park as 

Congress established it by leasing prime park land to the Yellowstone Park Improvement 

Company, to which he retained close ties. Congress intervened too late to stop the 

company’s primacy, but passage of an appropriation for ten assistant superintendents, a 

clear effort to put federal personnel in the park to mitigate the company’s de facto 

control, reflected the legislative body’s concern. A secondary consequence, recognition 

of the need for a management staff and a coterie of workers to implement decisions, also 

resulted.8 

The real change in park fortunes came in 1886, when Secretary of the Interior 

Lucius Q. C. Lamar, a Mississippian and former Confederate who had assiduously 

worked for national reunion, contacted the Secretary of War. A southerner in a post 

usually reserved for westerners, Lamar was unusual among secretaries of the interior. 

Far-sighted he had a greater appreciation for the idea of national parks than most of his 

peers. A cut in funding for Yellowstone National Park had already hamstrung the already 

limited protection the Department of the Interior could offer and the secretary looked 

6

 Philetus W. Norris to Secretary of the Interior, February 11, 1878; Philetus W. Norris to Secretary 

of the Interior, June 18, 1878; NARA RG 79.2.1, Correspondence from Yellowstone, 1877- (microfilm), 

National Archives, College Park, MD. 7

 Mark Daniel Barringer, Selling Yellowstone: Capitalism and the Construction of Nature (Lawrence: 

University Press of Kansas, 2002), 21-30; Runte, National Parks, 44-45; Bartlett, A Wilderness Besieged, 

43-72; Hampton, How the Cavalry Saved Our National Parks, 53-55; Rothman, Devil’s Bargains, 45. 8

 Henry Teller to President of the U.S. Senate, December 11, 1882, RG 79.2.1, Correspondence from 

Yellowstone, 1877- (microfilm), National Archives, College Park, MD. 

8 
 

 

 

 

 

elsewhere for the personnel he could not provide. In need of a pretext, Lamar found the 

Act of March 3, 1883, which authorized the War Department to provide troops for 

national park protection upon the request of the Secretary of the Interior. Lamar asked his 

counterpart for help, beginning a nearly thirty-year relationship in which the military 

provided the primary protection for the growing number of national parks and related 

areas in the United States.9 

On August 20, 1886, Captain Moses Harris and his fifty-man cavalry troop 

arrived at Yellowstone, made camp at Mammoth Hot Springs and took command of the 

park. It was a pivotal moment in national park history, illuminated by the large number of 

fires burning out of control inside its boundaries. Just days before the military arrived, 

fires raged, well beyond any kind of control. The cavalry quickly found itself in the 

business of fire suppression. Some local residents had formed a small firefighting group 

but they lacked the capability to combat anything more than small blazes. Others resented 

the intrusion of both the military and the preceding civilian administration. 

Harris quickly determined that intentionally set fires, what he called 

“incendiarism,” caused the most dangerous situations. He regarded such intentional fires 

as an attempt to undermine the accomplishments of his civilian predecessor, park 

superintendent D.W. Wear. Harris immediately ordered out his detachment, which put 

out sixty fires during the remainder of the summer.10 For the first time, a combination of 

circumstances committed the federal government to suppressing fires on public lands in a 

systematic manner. Federal dollars paid troops to stop fire, a novel prospect that both set 

the tone for the next three generations and became the model for fire fighting. Although 

the impact on actual fires was usually small, the precedent proved strong. The arrival of 

soldiers to administer Yellowstone and the commitment of resources to fight fire were 

simultaneous. Fire suppression was among the earliest management goals of the nation’s 

sole national park. 

From the beginning, a schism existed between fires that were close at hand and 

typically started by humans, and those that were far away from the main-traveled areas 

and stemmed from lightning. The military typically knew little of such blazes and so did 

little about it when such fires came to their attention. The only fires the Army could see 

were the kind that greeted it in 1886: the malicious, provocative burning that federal 

officials regarded as the result of a lack of administration of Yellowstone. In the end, the 

Army did better with fire nearby, both by putting it out and by preventing fires through 

education and effort. 

The military fought the fires it saw. Most of these were set by people, either 

carelessly or with what military officials regarded as malicious intent. Sometimes arson 

covered acts of poaching or reflected disagreement about the use of park resources. 

Intentional fire could be easily construed as an act of defiance against new rules. Civilian 

and military park administrators classed these as fires that resulted from bad behavior, 

which made it a small step to the supposition that their perpetrators were malicious. Most 

such fires were common across the West and on the edges of Euro-American expansion. 

9

 Hampton, How the Cavalry Saved Our National Parks, 79-80; Harvey Meyerson, Nature’s Army: 

When Soldiers Fought for Yosemite (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000), 80-81. 10 Report of the Superintendent to the Yellowstone National Park, 1886 (Washington, D.C.: 

Government Printing Office, 1917), 6-7; D.W. Wear to Secretary of the Interior, August 17, 1886, NARA, 

RG 79.2.1, Correspondence from Yellowstone 1877-(microfilm). 

9 
 

 

 

They sometimes had positive ecological impact, but under the military model, the 

existence of fire betrayed a moral failure that counteracted one of the Army’s greatest 

strengths, its ability to compel behavior.11 The tension between the military as enforcers 

of a national code and residents as representatives of an individualist past increased. 

Before the military arrived, park superintendents decided that tourists and their 

campfires were the most frequent sources of man-made fire. Without organized areas for 

camping and accustomed to spending nights outside wherever they chose, local and 

regional travelers did not yet regard Yellowstone as sacred space but rather behaved 

within its boundaries as they did anywhere else. Little in the federal code compelled them 

to act in any other way, for although Yellowstone had been formally established, no set 

of administrative regulations to govern it had yet been devised. This difference in 

perception required intervention from administrators. Once assistant superintendents 

were appointed, they functioned in the capacities later associated with rangers. Chief 

among their obligations was to assiduously monitor campfires. Careful with their own 

fires, they insisted that tourists who camped in Yellowstone show equal vigilance. Their 

efforts yielded positive results. In 1879, when July, August, and September had remained 

precariously dry after a stormy June, fires remained at a minimum. Superintendent 

Philetus W. Norris attributed this success to the persistent watchful nature of his charges 

and to their ability to impress the importance of close monitoring of fire on park visitors. 

As a result, Norris believed, “less damage was done within the park than around it, or 

than has heretofore occurred.”12 

A principle that attached itself to fire suppression ever after had been established: 

the practice succeeded most completely when an education program accompanied it, 

when park personnel patrolled heavily used areas with regularity, and as long as 

resources existed to devote to suppression. Luck in the form of regular rainfall and early 

winters helped, but even at the most rudimentary level, insisting on prevention went a 

long way toward assuring protection even before Captain Moses Harris’s troops arrived 

at the park. Despite the damage done by the “wonton [sic] carelessness of and neglect of 

visitors,” a sentiment expressed in the 1882 annual report by Superintendent P. J. Conger, 

by the early 1880s, park superintendents legitimately could claim effective fire 

management.13 

When Captain Harris and his men arrived in 1886, fire already had become a 

primary management obligation at Yellowstone. Although Langford reported few 

encounters with fire, perhaps a result of his lack of staff and frequent absence from the 

park, Norris listed fire among the most significant issues he addressed. The lack of 

resources accorded the park in his era made widespread fire suppression impossible, and 

without resources, strategy became simply edict against the use of fire within park 

boundaries. By order of the Secretary of the Interior, visitors and local residents alike 

were forbidden to use fire inside the park, but Norris and successive superintendents had 

few ways to enforce this rule. Although the assistant superintendents spent considerable 

time and effort managing fire and persuading visitors to exercise caution, the lack of 

11 Stephen J. Pyne to author, personal communication, December 5, 2002. 12 Report of the Superintendent to the Yellowstone National Park, 1879 (Washington, D.C.: 

Government Printing Office, 1917), 22. 13 Report of the Superintendent to the Yellowstone National Park, 1882 (Washington, D.C.: 

Government Printing Office, 1917), 9. 

10 
 

 

 

 

 

 

resources assured that annual reports of activities at Yellowstone pointed to fire as a 

primary problem.14 

The military presence enhanced Yellowstone’s ability to address fire issues. At 

the peak of the pre-military era, ten assistant superintendents functioned as park staff. 

Harris’s soldiers offered five times that number. A reduction in funding of assistant 

superintendents in the mid-1880s increased the importance of the military. At its most 

basic level, the arrival of the military provided a police force that reminded anyone in the 

park that they were not permitted to use fire. 

Yet Harris encountered a difficult situation typical of the problems at the early 

park when he arrived. A number of fires were burning, the most severe of which 

originated just days before Harris’ appearance, about seven miles from the Mammoth Hot 

Springs Hotel. The soldiers and the resources available were simply not sufficient to 

extinguish a fire of this size and it spread. In October, the fire still burned, having grown 

to as much as sixty square miles. A lesser fire had started along Tower Creek in early 

September and a few others appeared and either burned out or had been extinguished by 

Harris’s troops.15 In the first months at Yellowstone, soldiers spent a good portion of 

their time fighting fires. One of the first responsibilities the Army undertook in the 

national parks was to serve as a fire crew for the park; even more significant, an 

application of military resources was not a guarantee of effective fire management. 

Harris understood the origins of man-made fire in the park. The location of fires 

provided an important component of his deduction process. Most of the blazes originated 

near the road between Gardiner and Cooke City, Montana, a heavily traveled road along 

which many stopped to camp. Harris believed that those who lived near the park, what 

the officer called “a class of old frontiersmen, hunters and trappers and squaw-men,” 

were responsible for the remainder of park fires. Game had diminished outside park 

boundaries and these people chafed at federal regulations that outlawed hunting inside 

park boundaries. Harris surmised that they used fire in two ways. A well-positioned fire 

drove game to locations where hunters could legally shoot animals and simultaneously 

provided proof of the disdain such people often felt for any kind of government 

regulation.16 

It also articulated another problem: national parks prevented nearby residents 

from customary use of park resources as part of their diet and livelihood. The park had 

been open land, used communally by people in the region without restriction. Many “old 

frontiersmen” used nature in ways that echoed Native Americans. Fire was an important 

part of the regime, and while carelessness sometimes led to wildfires, the tool of fire was 

such an essential component of their subsistence regime that it was often worth the risk. 

Such activities were later given the label “light burning,” in essence, using fire to clear 

land for human purposes. Such practices directly conflicted with the Army’s objectives.17 

14 Report of the Superintendent to the Yellowstone National Park, 1879, 22. 

15 Report of the Superintendent to the Yellowstone National Park, 1886 (Washington, D.C.: 

Government Printing Office, 1917), 6-7. 16 Report of the Superintendent to the Yellowstone National Park, 1886, 6-7. 

17 Stephen J. Pyne, Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire (Princeton: 

Princeton University Press, 1982), 100-10; Stephen J. Pyne, Year of the Fires: The Story of the Great Fires 

of 1910 (New York: Viking, 2001), 112-13. 

11 
 

At Yellowstone, the military did not confront light burning in any systematically 

organized fashion; instead it simply faced down a ragamuffin band of old frontiersmen 

who used fire to promote hunting. Yet, the distinction was clear between types of 

practices. Reflecting the increasingly organized and corporate regime of late nineteenth 

century America and the professionalization and standardization of the officer corps, the 

military attempted total suppression. Area residents responded by continuing their 

existing practices, using fire to transform landscape and make their lives easier, even 

when deliberately set fires sometimes spun out of control and led to larger blazes. Such 

practices conflicted directly with the basis of military management, which at its core, 

boiled down to control of natural forces in the same way that in wartime it sought to 

master opposing armies. The difference in perspectives set the stage for a generation-long 

controversy in and beyond national parks that played out between local residents and first 

the Army and later, federal agencies such as the United States Forest Service (USFS) and 

the National Park Service. 

The creation of the de facto barriers that accompanied national park establishment 

enhanced existing tension. Establishing the boundaries of Yellowstone raised local 

eyebrows, for it cut into the base of subsistence upon which the scattered local 

community depended. Until the military arrived in 1886, residents proceeded with most 

practices, including the almost random small fires that were a feature of each summer. 

Civilian administrators could do little about local customs, and by all accounts, practices 

that existed before the park continued after its existence. When a troop of soldiers 

provided a different level of protection, it increased tension between the new 

administrators and local population. Intentional fires became a tactic that spoke volumes 

about the response of people who felt dispossessed by change. They had no investment in 

Yellowstone in any way, for the form they used to express their displeasure had such 

potential to damage the park that their actions precluded reasonable discussion. 

Despite the actions of the old frontiersmen, visitors constituted the single most 

frequent source of fire at Yellowstone National Park. Harris regarded carelessness as the 

cause of their fires, not detecting the malice he was certain existed in the actions of 

residents. Campers settled anywhere they chose for an evening or longer, governed by the 

availability of water, timber for fires and shelter, and even in some cases, game. They 

acted as if they were traversing the wilderness, not visiting nascent sacred space. Tourists 

randomly cut timber, left the detritus of their campsites and even the carcasses of recently 

shot animals. They did not adequately extinguish their campfires, nor were they 

consistently careful about the ways in which they used fire for cooking, staying warm, or 

anything else. The prevalence of fire in so many places close to the main arteries of travel 

provided further evidence of the origins of fire in Yellowstone. Where there were people, 

Harris observed, there was fire. The cause and effect seemed clear and the Army 

responded in a fashion characteristic of its management practices. By 1889, the military 

had developed an important response: it segregated travelers into designated 

campgrounds to better manage visitors and the fires they sometimes caused.18 

The patterns Harris saw continued throughout the late 1880s. Lightning fires 

burned far from the inhabited parts of the park. Soldiers stationed in the park fought fires 

whenever they found them, and most often they found them near the roads. The fifty 

18 Report of the Superintendent to the Yellowstone National Park, 1886, 7; Pyne, Fire in America, 

118. 

12 
 

 

 

soldiers Harris commanded did not prove a high water mark. Even as the number of 

soldiers in residence grew, in a park of more than two million acres, there were never 

enough to provide the combination of coercion and suppression that comprised early fire 

management. Military resources for park management were limited and their capabilities 

even more scant. Soldiers were not trained in firefighting in a systematic manner and 

remained defenseless against a major fire. They were able to fight smaller fires with some 

success, suppressing such fires repeatedly mostly by very difficult labor. 

By the early 1890s, the military officers who served as the superintendents of the 

park had come to regard fire as their greatest challenge. They could control most of the 

other issues that vexed them. They could manage vandalism, serve the growing numbers 

of tourists, and track and arrest poachers and other violators. Their troops were sufficient 

in number and a prominent enough presence to handle such matters. Fire posed a much 

larger threat. Not only did no such thing as fire training exist, any large blaze could easily 

overwhelm the limited resources at the park’s disposal. Although no major fires marked 

1887 or 1888, officers recognized that their situation was precarious. Arson remained a 

problem. Although one case resulted in the arrest of a man who had argued with officials 

and then set a fire as retribution, Army officers continued to attribute most fire to arson. 

Additional troops requested in 1887 arrived at Yellowstone in July 1888, expanding firefighting capabilities, but the park still needed more soldiers to fight the numerous small 

fires and to counter the ever-present threat of a larger fire.19 

In summer 1889, the northern Rockies exploded in flames and Yellowstone 

National Park experienced its most difficult season in a number of years. The new park 

superintendent, Captain F. A. Boutelle, who succeeded Harris in June 1889, continued 

the strong leadership that Harris began and that Boutelle had learned in a career in the 

western military. Boutelle was a veteran of more than twenty years in the Army, 

including an important role in the Modoc War of 1872, and he brought the forcefulness 

that marked his military tenure to fire fighting. Boutelle emerged as the most prescient of 

the early park commanders, implementing a comprehensive program to fight fire. 

Boutelle’s men built a system of roads, installed telegraph and telephone wires in the 

park, purchased new equipment to fight fires, and compelled travelers to stay in the 

campgrounds. When fires broke out that summer, Boutelle showed decisive leadership 

and garnered attention from important magazines such as Forest and Stream as well as 

from national newspapers.20 

Boutelle found himself a darling of the early conservation movement, with the 

already famous George Bird Grinnell his leading champion. A member of the patrician 

class only beginning to become interested in civic affairs, Grinnell was a leader in 

promoting the concept of noblesse oblige, the perceived obligations of the well-born to 

improve their society. He helped found the Audubon Society, the Boone and Crockett 

Club, and other late nineteenth-century conservation and culture organizations, and he 

published Forest and Stream, a newsletter that became a leading conservation magazine. 

Grinnell endorsed Boutelle’s strategies; the captain “displayed an amount of energy and 

19 Report of the Superintendent to the Yellowstone National Park, 8-9; “No Railroad in Yellowstone 

Park,” Forest and Stream, February 18, 1886; “Fires in the National Parks,” Forest and Stream, October 7, 

1886. 20 “Putting Out the Fires,” Forest and Stream, July 25, 1889; Robert Utley, Frontier Regulars: The 

United States Army and the Indian, 1866-1891 (New York: Macmillan, 1973), 205-13. 

13 
 

 

 

 

 

decision which promises great things for the future of the Park,” Grinnell wrote at the 

height of the 1889 fires. 21 

Grinnell’s enthusiasm for Boutelle’s efforts reflected more than a decade of elite 

concern about fire in the West. Harvard Professor Charles S. Sargent had included a map 

of the burned area and extensive commentary about fires in the 1880 census in his Report 

on the Forest of North America (Exclusive of Mexico), published in 1884. The American 

Forestry Congress of 1882 had targeted fire as a threat to the nation’s forests. Several 

immense, lethal fires had swept the Great Lake states, the most recent in 1881 in 

Michigan. By 1886, when soldiers arrived at Yellowstone, many sought institutional 

means of controlling the outbreaks. The Adirondacks Preserve, established in 1885 with a 

ranger force to patrol its boundaries, and “fire-rangering” adopted by Ontario and Quebec 

around 1885 provided prominent examples of this response. A comparative colonial 

perspective, particularly with the British and French, also existed. The British had created 

a system of forest reserves in the 1870s, and the opening question asked at the first 

conference among its on-the-ground foresters was whether fire control was feasible and 

desirable. There were serious disagreements, but the crucial experiments were conducted 

by military units.22 Early foresters and those who looked to Europe for examples were 

well aware of such conceptualizations, but the national parks were the first places where 

the United States government entered the situation. 

In this setting, Grinnell embraced the idea of suppression as a military obligation, 

emboldening Boutelle. The Army’s job was to put out fires in the park, and Grinnell 

insisted that the departments of Interior and War devote more resources to Yellowstone. 

Boutelle had vociferously protested the lack of resources for fire fighting and his 

complaining incurred the wrath of Secretary of the Interior John W. Noble, who 

contemplated the superintendent’s dismissal. Grinnell’s praise of the superintendent’s 

aggressive fire suppression strategy encouraged the officer to push even harder. His 

ongoing disagreements with the secretary, while productive in establishing a formal 

suppression policy and patterns of resource deployment, led to his removal late in 1890.23 

The dispute that led to Boutelle’s dismissal illustrated another way in which fire 

management was different from other forms of park management. Fires demanded 

immediate action and required the application of considerable resources. Boutelle found 

that when fire struck it took all the resources he had at his disposal. He needed more. 

Larger numbers of men permitted a greater initial response to fire, which in most 

21 Forest and Stream, February 16, 1886, 62; Forest and Stream, October 7, 1886, 1; Forest and 

Stream, October 14, 1886, 226; “Putting Out the Fires,” Forest and Stream, July 25, 1889, 1; John F. 

Reiger, American Sportsmen and the Origins of Conservation, revised ed. (Norman: University of 

Oklahoma Press, 1986), 32-34, 60-62, 93-142. 

22 Stephen J. Pyne, Vestal Fire: An Environmental History, Told Through Fire, of Europe and 

Europe’s Encounter with the World (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), 442-46; Charles S. 

Sargent, Report on the Forest of North American (Exclusive of Mexico) (Washington, D.C.: U.S. 

Government Printing Office, 1884). 23 Report of the Superintendent of the Yellowstone National Park, 1888 (Washington, D.C.: 

Government Printing Office, 1917), 4; Report of the Superintendent of the Yellowstone National Park, 

1889 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1917), 5; Report of the Superintendent of the 

Yellowstone National Park, 1890 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1917), 5; Hampton, 

How the U.S. Cavalry Saved Our National Parks, 97-99; Doug Weber, “Fighting Fire with Firepower: 

Firefighting in Yellowstone National Park, 1872-1918,” Yellowstone Science 8 3 (Summer 2000), 2-5. 

14 
 

 

 

 

circumstances limited the spread of fires. From Boutelle’s perspective, the solution was 

easy. From the secretary’s point of view, Boutelle’s charge of inadequate resources 

disparaged department management. Worse, it was amplified by the support of Grinnell 

and other conservationists, who made the secretary’s prerogative into a topic of 

discussion. Two tendencies converged in the dispute - the limitations of national park 

administration in the era and the immediate need to address the outbreak of fire with 

abundant resources that Yellowstone National Park did not possess. The two reinforced 

one another, leading to further internal pull and an inherently reactive response. A pattern 

characteristic of early conservation that ever after marked park and fire politics dated to 

the genesis of suppression regimes. Evident at the inception of fire management in 

national parks, this battle over policy and procedure repeated itself perennially. 

The military served more effectively as a deterrent than as a fire-fighting force. 

Soldiers prevented people from starting fires by restricting their location and by 

monitoring their activity within the park. In 1892, Captain George S. Anderson, who 

succeeded Boutelle on February 15, 1891, reported that he and his men faced countless 

fires during the season, but managed to extinguish them by a “ceaseless and numerous 

system of patrols.”24 Anderson’s observation seemed to support Boutelle’s position, and 

it also led to further emphasis on centralizing the locations in which visitors camped. 

Since most park fires were started by visitors, a process that kept the people most likely 

to be careless in a fixed area made a daunting task more manageable. In this, the Army’s 

capacity to deter served as its greatest asset. 

Through most of the 1880s, Yellowstone stood alone as the American national 

park. Only Mackinac Island, a small area designated as a national park only between 

1875 and 1895, followed until 1890, when Congress established Sequoia, General Grant, 

and Yosemite national parks.25 At the same time, federal administrative control of lands 

near national parks was extended when Congress created the first forest reserves around 

Yellowstone in 1891. Created under the auspices of Amendment 24 to the General 

Appropriations Act of 1891, forest reserves received no more direct or immediate 

resources than had Yellowstone at its establishment. While the forests stood without 

protection, Army troops were sent to the new generation of national parks under the same 

terms and conditions that propelled it to Yellowstone. In these newest creations, troops 

faced many of the same issues they had throughout their service in the nation’s first 

national park.26 

All three new national parks shared the “Big Trees,” the sequoias and redwoods 

that propelled preservation efforts in California and proved more difficult to manage than 

monumental scenery or charismatic animals. Unlike Half Dome or Tower Falls, trees 

were intimately connected to fire. Fire burned cavities into them; fires swept around their 

trunks almost annually at the time of earliest European reports. Suppression as practiced 

24 Report of the Superintendent of the Yellowstone National Park, 1892 (Washington, D.C.: 

Government Printing Office, 1917), 4-5; “Sheepherders and the National Parks,” Forest and Stream, 

August 4, 1894. 25 Alfred Runte, Jr. Yosemite: The Embattled Wilderness (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 

1990), 1-15, makes the case for Yosemite as the nation’s first national park. 26 Harold K. Steen, The United States Forest Service: A History (Seattle: University of Washington 

Press, 1976), 22-47; G. Michael McCarthy, Hour of Trial: The Conservation Conflict in Colorado and the 

West, 1891-1907 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1977), 11-17; David A. Clary, Timber and the 

Forest Service (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1986), 3-6. 

15 
 

 

 

 

had the combined affect of changing the ecology of the area around the Big Trees and 

altering a historic landscape by excluding a primary catalyst of earlier change. No less 

than Gifford Pinchot noticed the contradiction. When told that area residents had “saved” 

the Kaweah Big Trees from fire twenty-nine times, Pinchot wondered aloud who saved 

them during the previous 4,000 years.27 

Of the three new parks, Yosemite enjoyed an iconic status by the 1890s that 

increased the demands on its new military overseers. By 1890, John Muir had become 

“John of the Mountains,” the most famous figure in early nature preservation, and San 

Francisco had developed from a vigilante frontier town into the premier city and 

economic center of the West. At the same time, California had stepped to the fore in the 

complicated embrace of Romanticism, empiricism, and anti-modernism that so strongly 

foreshadowed the rise of legislated conservation. For an urban society grappling with a 

sense of loss that stemmed from rapid growth and rampant socioeconomic inequity, the 

beauty and serenity of Yosemite epitomized the cost of this transition.28 

However, Yosemite was also a real place, beset by serious management problems 

that predated national park status. As a state park from 1864 to 1890, it had become the 

best example of the struggle between preservation and use that so completely dominated 

early national park history. Yosemite quickly attained national prominence and 

Americans focused on the region as the locus for their as yet undefined national identity, 

an emblem of what made the relationship between the American nation and the land it 

inhabited special. Tourism bustled in the area even before the 1864 Yosemite Park Act, 

and by the 1880s, a series of problems had become evident. Not only did the 

establishment of a state park fail to guarantee protection, the cultural meaning of the new 

park in a rapidly industrializing society brought streams of visitors. The pressure from 

visitors and interested parties in California grew. The Yosemite Park Commission, a 

state-appointed entity, was charged with administration of the park, but it was not well 

equipped to manage what rapidly became an important emblem of American 

nationhood.29 

As was the case at Yellowstone, human use of fire to reshape Yosemite preceded 

the founding of the United States. The Ahwanhneechee people who long lived in the 

Yosemite Valley had used fire to arrange their environment for their own benefit, a 

practice common among Native peoples across the continent. They prized the black oak, 

a species that thrived on sunlight, for its black acorns, and systematically fired the region 

to burn pine, incense cedar, and other less hardy saplings. The black oak trees multiplied 

when the understory of saplings were removed, creating a vision of an open valley. 

Despite the removal of Native Americans from the park in the early 1850s, long-term use 

of fire resulted in relative stasis in the Yosemite Valley. For at least the twenty-year 

period between 1850 and 1870, the valley floor looked much the same. After Native 

Americans were removed from the valley, they returned seasonally to engage in historic 

27 Gifford Pinchot, Breaking New Ground (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1947), 44; Pyne, Fire In 

America, 302. 28 T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Anti-Modernism and the Transformation of American 

Culture, 1880-1920 (New York: Athenaeum, 1980), 3-7; Stephen J. Pyne, How the Canyon Became Grand: 

A Short History (New York: Viking, 2000), xi-xv, 12-22; Michael P. Cohen, The Pathless Way: John Muir 

and American Wilderness (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 271-72, 288-90. 

29 Runte, Yosemite, 15-37; Shaffer, See America First, 261-310. 

16 
 

 

 

 

 

practices, firing the saplings to allow mature trees to flourish and maintaining the rough 

equivalent of the biology they created before whites arrived to ultimately displace them.30 

By the 1870s, visitors to the valley floor reported a severe decline in the overall 

number of trees. Not only had the undergrowth that been the focus of regular burning 

disappeared, so had the thick stands of timber that had helped sustain Native American 

life. Increased plowing and grazing also led to a more open valley. Later scientists 

attributed this change to the compacting of the soil that accompanied increased 

agriculture. The vista was remarkably different: instead of the thick stands of black oak 

of the 1850s, the valley in the 1870s showed open fields and young pines and cedars.31 

The spectacular valley had been altered by the combination of fire suppression and more 

extensive agriculture and animal husbandry. The same transformation had taken place at 

lower elevation as well. 

As a state park, Yosemite had been consigned to the care of the Yosemite Park 

Commission, an entity created by the state of California. Its members had first been 

appointed in 1864, and for the next twenty-four years, the commission administered the 

park. Although famed landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted was the initial 

chairman, he soon departed, leaving the park in the hands of less creative people. 

Throughout most of their tenure, the Yosemite commissioners functioned as a 

development agency. They promoted roads and local business interests and sought to 

support all forms of development. The Department of the Interior opened lands along the 

park’s boundary to settlement, adding another constituency for the commissioners. 

Throughout most of their era, the commissioners worked closely with mining and timber 

interests, and as a result, considerable acreage moved into private hands.32 

The commissioners managed from a distance, deaf to the growing number of 

competing interests near the park. Although they saw themselves as managers of a park, 

their desire to preserve scenery was closely tied to its ability to make money. Their 

annual reports most often treated the park as an economic asset. They regarded its ability 

to generate revenue as a prime value, noting the growth of young merchantable timber in 

the lowlands in 1885-86, evidence of a successful suppression regime. For the better part 

of twenty years, this modicum of supervision sufficed even as enthusiasm for Yosemite 

grew in ways the commissioners did not see.33 

In 1889, the viability of this form of management ended. During the summer, a 

fire swept the famed Mariposa Grove. The suppression regime, imperfect as it was, 

created a context in which uncontrolled fire had disastrous consequences. The Yosemite 

Commission was poorly prepared to address fire. Its officers sought culprits. “That most 

despicable of crimes, forest arson, the result of carelessness on the part of campers or 

design on the part of sheepherders, turned the surrounding forest, outside the jurisdiction 

30 C. Kristina Roper Wickstrom, “Issues Concerning Native American Use of Fire: A Literature 

Review,” Yosemite Research Center, Publications in Anthropology No. 6 (1987); Mark David Spence, 

Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (New York: Oxford 

University Press, 1999), 101-08; Runte, Yosemite, 10-12, 38. 31 George Gruell, Fire in Sierra Nevada Forests: A Photographic Interpretation of Ecological 

Change Since 1849 (Missoula, MT: Mountain Press Publishing, 2001); Runte, Yosemite, 39. 32 Runte, Yosemite, 22-24, 49-53; Meyerson, Nature’s Army, 265. 33 “Report of the Commissioners to Manage the Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Big Trees, 1889-

1890,” (Sacramento, CA: Superintendent of State Documents, 1890), 6; Spence, Dispossessing the 

Wilderness, 102. 

17 
 

 

 

 

 

of this commission, into a flood of fire,” the annual report of the commissioners averred. 

“The fire at times almost surrounded the Great Sequoia Grove and invaded it at many 

points.” In one signal event, the inadequacy of the existing system was exposed. The 

cause and effect became inverted and the presumptive solution, complete suppression, 

transformed the grove over the subsequent seventy years.34 

The Mariposa Grove fire played a catalytic role in the demise of the Yosemite 

Park Commission and the arrival of federal troops to administer the park. The fire was 

widely regarded as final proof of the commission’s inept management, and in a changing 

nation, Yosemite was seen as a sufficiently significant symbol to merit national 

protection. The commission’s existence was under assault before the fire. The powerful 

conservation group that surrounded John Muir and that included Robert Underwood 

Johnson, the editor of Century magazine; Stanford University President David Starr 

Jordan; attorney Warren Olney, later the reform-oriented mayor of Oakland, California; 

scientist Joseph LeConte, a University of California professor who shaped science 

throughout California; Charles Robinson, an artist in Yosemite with an exaggerated sense 

of his own importance and a number of influential friends; and others, attacked the 

commission and sought to include the Mariposa Grove in the larger national park they 

planned. 

The Southern Pacific Railroad noted the advantages other railroads gained from 

conveying tourists to Yellowstone and pushed for national park status at Muir’s and his 

friends’ behest. A timely introduction of the park bill at the end of a congressional 

session led to easy passage, and on October 1, 1890, President Benjamin Harrison signed 

the new park into law.35 Yosemite National Park was now the responsibility of the federal 

government. 

The leading environmental figure of his time, Muir had strong feelings about fire. 

Imbued with a sense of the forests as sacred, he adamantly opposed burning, denouncing 

it as a much more severe waste than even logging. Muir detested sheep and their herders, 

and as a result, opposed the herders’ fires, no matter what their purpose.36 Muir’s 

pronouncements reiterated the characteristic link between bad fires and bad people, a 

hallmark of the military’s suppositions about fire and its management. In his famous 

account of two fires, he wrote of one roaring through chaparral slopes that, upon reaching 

the top, then slipped quietly through the open forested understory. In Muir’s day, the 

emphasis was on the raging blaze. A later generation read that landscape differently, 

placing its emphasis on the quiescent burn. 

34 “Report of the Commissioners to Manage the Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Big Trees, 1889-

1890,” 7-10. There is some debate about the frequency of fire in the Mariposa Grove. In his November 8, 

1890 report to the Secretary of the Interior, Lt. George Davidson notes that the “effects of the fire that 

swept through the grove in fall of 1888 are painfully apparent.” T.W. Swetnam, C.H. Baisan, A.C. Caprio, 

R. Touchan, and P.M. Brown, Tree-Ring Reconstruction of Giant Sequoia Fire Regimes (Final Report on 

Cooperative Agreement No. DOI 80181-0002, Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, California, 

1992), indicates no tree-ring evidence of fire in the grove in 1888. It is possible that Davidson was 

mistaken in the date for the fire. There are accounts of fire in July of 1889 and it may be that Davidson 

accepted an inaccurate report of when the fires occurred. 35 Runte, Yosemite, 52-55; Frank Norris, The Octopus: A Story of California (New York: Doubleday 

and Sons, 1901); Muir’s group soon became the founding members of the Sierra Club; see Michael P. 

Cohen, The History of the Sierra Club, 1872-1970 (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1988). 36 Cohen, The Pathless Way, 288-90. 

18 
 

 

 

 

In 1890, Secretary of the Interior John W. Noble created the first general 

regulations for national park use. He added specific rules for the three new California 

parks, General Grant, Sequoia, and Yosemite, for they were more heavily used than 

Yellowstone. Most important among the regulations was Point 6, which made it illegal to 

“start or kindle or allow to be started or kindled any fire in grass, leaves, underbrush, 

debris or dead timber down or standing.” Anyone who started a fire would be liable for 

the financial damage it caused, a stiff penalty for the largely impecunious homesteaders 

of the upper Sierras.37 The secretary’s rules enshrined suppression and insisted on 

individual control. 

Timber cutting and fires that resulted from the needs of tourists also created 

management issues in the California parks. On an inspection trip in support of the 

congressional inquiry into the practices of the Yosemite Park Commission, Department 

of the Interior Special Land Inspector Thomas Newsham discovered that significant 

numbers of trees had been cut away to provide visitors with better views of Bridal Veil 

and Yosemite Falls. “Below this, some distance, there are evidences of a recent fire 

caused by some tourist campers,” he wrote Secretary Noble, “but I am glad to say that it 

did not extend very far.” Newsham observed thousands of young pine and cedar and 

other trees, which he expected, “if left undisturbed, will soon make beautiful groves over 

most of the floor of the Valley.” Management had become a struggle between present 

uses and future opportunities: a resurgent forest would overwhelm the valley and pose a 

fire hazard, particularly on slopes away from the valley proper. 38 

An ongoing debate that centered on fire had already begun. Since the advent of 

federal management, the combination of loose hierarchical structure and limited 

resources combined to open the way for a range of proposals. In 1890, a representative of 

the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey advocated the employment at the Mariposa Grove of 

a “young, active, sensible, and conscientious Guardian, appreciating what is needed and 

proud of the responsibility of such a trust, with one or more assistants of similar 

character, would soon give a sense of security against fire.” This conception, ahead of 

the arrival of troops, became the baseline for management. It did not reflect the ongoing 

reality that sheepherders and those outside park boundaries neither appreciated nor 

respected Yosemite and “acts of spoliation and trespass,” as official documents referred 

to such incidents, continued unabated after the transfer to federal administration. As at 

Yellowstone, a response to fire was integral at the park even before the arrival of the 

cavalry.39 

The arrival of troops at Yosemite in summer 1891 transformed the day-to-day 

operations of the park. When forty-six-year-old Captain Abram E. “Jug” Wood arrived 

with his troops, they found circumstances that differed from Yellowstone in one crucial 

37 Secretary of the Interior, “Rules for National Parks,” NARA, RG 79.2.1, Correspondence from 

Yellowstone, 1877- (microfilm), National Archives, College Park, MD. 

38 Thomas Newsham to Secretary of the Interior, November 24, 1890, NARA, RG 79.2.1, Records of 

the Office of the Secretary of the Interior Relating to National Parks, Box 89. 

39 Lt. George Davidson, “Report on the Alleged Spoilations in the Yosemite Valley,” November 8, 

1890, NARA, RG 79.2.1, Records of Office of Secretary of the Interior Relating to National Parks, Box 89; 

“Reports of the Secretary of the Interior Relative to Yosemite Park, 1892” (Washington, D.C.: 

Government Printing Office, 1893), 4; “Report of the Acting Superintendent of the Yosemite National Park 

to the Secretary of the Interior 1891” (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1891), 8. 

19 
 

respect. A small cabal called the “Yosemite Ring” controlled the region, and its leaders 

resented federal intrusion. This was not new in the West. But because of the efforts of 

Muir, Underwood, and others, events at Yosemite were debated around the country. The 

degree of press scrutiny in the Yosemite region was atypical. In this climate, military 

rectitude was a prized commodity and Wood was more than equal to the task. He carried 

out his mandate with the upright aplomb that resulted from his thirty years in the Army.40 

Fire loomed large among the issues Wood and his men faced. The variety of 

human use, increasing visitation, and tension between the Yosemite Ring and the military 

led to different kinds of fire. Suppression made natural fire more threatening due to 

increased loads of flammable underbrush; accidental fire caused by tourists posed an 

even greater threat because of its proximity to inhabited areas; and malicious fire set by 

opponents of the park and federal administration heightened the danger. As at 

Yellowstone, most fire resulted from the carelessness of visitors. Yosemite’s fire policy 

became proactive prevention and reactive suppression. 

Wood pursued a policy that effectively managed the narrow space between ideals 

of aesthetic beauty and the economic goals of tourist endeavor. The Mariposa Grove had 

acquired an almost sacred position in the pantheon of the American spectacular, and 

protecting it took on added importance for the Army. The fires of 1889 set off a chain 

reaction of response that prompted the military to take proactive action. In its annual 

report after the fire, the Yosemite Commission advocated protecting the Mariposa tract 

by “surrounding it with a border over which a fire can not so readily pass.” 

Implementation of this barrier fell to Wood and the military. His men constructed a 

perimeter road and cleared dead and downed wood in 1892 and 1893. The debris was 

piled and burned in a systematic fashion, creating an open zone around the grove that 

enhanced its unique qualities and further enunciated the advantages of the Army 

presence.41 As a result of the Mariposa Grove blaze, the military’s aggressive actions to 

assure that it did not recur, and the growing national importance of Yosemite National 

Park, fire gained a new place as a widely feared adversary of national parks. Military 

suppression also climbed a notch, as did the concept of proactive management. 

Conversely, the clearing around the grove added another dimension that fit with 

the values of early conservation. By removing downed trees and underbrush around the 

big trees, the military contributed to the designation of the area as sacred space, apart 

from the profaned space of human living and industry. This articulation meshed perfectly 

with the Sierra Club’s standard. The pattern that dominated the first century of American 

conservation had been set, and fire and the Army’s response to it played a role in 

reinforcing those designations. 

Despite such efforts, national parks remained undefined in a national context and 

the military encountered people who had used the park for commercial extractive 

endeavor before its establishment and did not respect the values of conservation. 

Destruction of timber in and near the park continued, much of it left laying around, 

creating a possible fire hazard. Agricultural development added barbed wire to the 

problems of management, further dividing land and limiting the impact of military 

patrols. Some plants diminished in number, further evidence of human impact and of the 

40 Meyerson, Nature’s Army, 93-97. 41 “Report of the Commissioners to Manage the Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Big Trees, 1889-

1890,” 6-7; Meyerson, Nature’s Army, 97-98. 

20 
 

 

 

danger of ever-growing settlement in the region. By 1892, the Yosemite Valley floor 

looked as if it were a “poorly managed cattle ranch,” in the observation of General Land 

Office Special Agent Capt. John S. Stidger. The park neither preserved the natural setting 

nor protected resources from potential calamity.42 

Fires continued to vex not only Yosemite National Park, but the entire Sierra 

Nevada region. The 1890s represented a significant change in management efforts, for 

federal officials, General Land Office special agents prominent among them, began to 

visit and review land use practices throughout the Southwest. Homesteaders and ranchers 

had raised crops and animals without oversight for at least a decade, and as occurred 

elsewhere in the West, they resented the appearance of federal officials. They viewed fire 

as an essential component of their lives, something they simultaneously feared and relied 

upon and federal officials noticed and commented on this feeling. In a famous instance 

from the Plumas Forest Reserve in California in 1904, a forest supervisor noted that “the 

people of the region regard forest fires with careless indifference . . . . The white man has 

come to think that fire is a part of the forest, and a beneficial part at that. All classes share 

in this view, and all set fires, sheepmen and cattlemen on the open range, miners, 

lumbermen, ranchmen, sportsmen, and campers. Only when other property is likely to be 

endangered does the resident of or the visitor to the mountains become careful about 

fires, and seldom even then.”43 

Faced with a level of authority they neither understood nor inherently respected, 

such people evinced a wide gamut of responses. Intentional fire was among them. Some 

uses of fire, such as burning dry pasture, had historic precedent, but when they caused 

damage to the trees that were so prominent in the national imagination, federal officials 

responded. Though later studies of tree-rings suggest that fire in the region actually 

declined after 1864, a perceptual battle that reflected predispositions about the uses of fire 

took shape. That battle frequently pitted local people against the new federal system.44 

The same tension was evident at Sequoia and General Grant national parks, the 

other two new additions designated in 1890. The Giant Forest at Sequoia loosely 

mirrored the Mariposa Grove at Yosemite and the minuscule General Grant served 

almost as a non-contiguous section similar to the Minaret area of Yosemite. At Sequoia, 

when Capt. J.H. Dorst and Troop K of the 4th Cavalry arrived in summer 1891, they 

found conditions and conflicts that roughly paralleled those at Yosemite. Dorst observed 

the same resource questions that so troubled Wood and his Army successors at Yosemite, 

in particular the struggle to protect the park when the state owned the surrounding 

resources. Cutting of state timber had become an especially dangerous source of fire, 

Dorst noted, and he advocated transfer of much of the surrounding state timberland to the 

park as a way to limit the threat of fire. In his estimation, the state was too vulnerable to 

local constituencies to provide adequate protection for the park and its resources.45 

42 “Reports of the Secretary of the Interior Relative to Yosemite Park, 1892,” 7-10. 43 Pyne, Fire in America, 102. 44 U.S. Attorney General Richard Olney to Secretary of the Interior Hoke Smith, September 28, 1894, 

NARA, RG 79.2.1, Records of Office of Secretary of the Interior Relating to National Parks, Box 89. 45 “Brief Report of Captain J.H. Dorst, Acting Superintendent of Sequoia National Park,” ca. 1891, 

NARA, RG 79.2.1, Letters Received by Office of the Secretary of the Interior Relating to National Parks, 

Sequoia and General Grant 1890-1907, Box 47; Lary M. Dilsaver and William C. Tweed, The Challenge of 

the Big Trees: A Resource History of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks (Three Rivers, CA: 

Sequoia Natural History Association, 1990), 66-72. 

21 
 

 

Sequoia and General Grant soon mirrored Yellowstone and Yosemite in their 

struggles with fire. The Army responded to the fires it saw, mostly lighting fires near 

inhabited areas or those started by people. Backcountry lightning fires burned out of 

view. Each summer, fires erupted with a frequency related to the carelessness of visitors 

and the actions of cattlemen and sheepherders. A significant percentage of the cavalry’s 

work hours were devoted to containing fires within the parks. Most blazes were small, 

requiring a single detachment and a few days to bring them under control. Occasionally, 

fires spread or separate blazes merged and containment became more difficult, but rarely 

did they threaten property or life. The consistency of fire suggested some level of 

intentional burning, which in turn led to a closer look at resource extractive activities in 

the immediate region.46 

In the late nineteenth-century Department of the Interior, the GLO took 

responsibility for most investigations on public lands. Its staff of special agents was 

among the most dynamic and experienced members of the federal land bureaucracy. 

Beginning with the Homestead Act of 1862, they investigated homestead, timber, Timber 

and Stone Act claims, and countless other situations throughout the West. As late as the 

1890s, before the increase in the number of federal land management agencies that 

accompanied the Progressive Era, the GLO still assessed most land and resource 

questions. A GLO special agent was the natural choice to assess patterns of resource use 

and its impact on federal lands in Sierra Nevada.47 

During summer 1894, the GLO dispatched Special Agent W.F. Landers to the 

Sierra to investigate the causes and effects of forest fires. This characteristic response to 

the growing questions of the region marked a belated effort to bring the experience of the 

federal government to the complicated situation in the California Mountains. After a 

summer of observation, Landers concluded that the actions of sheepherders, still 

prominent in the California mountains, were the primary cause of forest fires. After 

pasturing their animals on public lands in the summer, sheepmen drove their flocks to 

lower elevations, and in a time-honored practice, returned to the uplands to set fire to 

trees and meadows to create pasture for the following season. These were hardly unusual 

practices. Native Americans had engaged in broadcast burns along routes of travel and 

for resource extraction for as long as they been in the mountains, and throughout the 

West, immigrants from the Basque region of Spain and other sheepherders had 

undertaken similar practices. Although he did not believe cattle were a major source of 

the problem, Landers discovered that cattle and sheep men in the area had created a 

rationale for continuing their practices. They firmly believed that forest fires helped 

rather than hurt the big trees.48 

Landers’s research suggested that fire management in the California mountains 

was as much a problem of perception as it was of practice. Local practice challenged the 

military construct formulating the battle between suppression and fire use as a struggle 

46 J. H. Dorst to Secretary of the Interior, August 4, 1892, NARA, RG 79.2.1, Letters Received by 

Office of the Secretary of the Interior Relating to National Parks, Sequoia and General Grant 1890-1907, 

Box 48. 47 E. Louise Peffer, The Closing of the Public Domain: Disposal and Reservation Policies 1900-50 

(Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1950), 8-31, 43-44. 48 W. F. Landers, “Report on the Investigation of Causes and Effects of Forest Fires in California,” 

September 1894, NARA, RG 79.2.1, Letters Received by Office of the Secretary of the Interior Relating to 

National Parks, Sequoia and General Grant, 1890-1907, Box 49. 

22 
 

between good and evil. To successfully implement a suppression policy, the cavalry 

needed to battle fire before it started, to engage in a program of education and dissuasion 

as it had at Yellowstone and Yosemite. But Sequoia and General Grant national parks 

presented a new challenge. At Yellowstone and Yosemite, the cavalry was asked to 

manage land within park boundaries, a task for which its numbers and skills were 

admirably suited and where its influence was at its greatest. At Sequoia and General 

Grant, most of the threats to the parks took place outside of their boundaries. And many 

of the culprits only traversed the region seasonally, making an ongoing campaign of 

behavior modification a far more difficult task. Although troops could manage the park 

and make inroads on other federal lands, it could not easily compel changes in behavior 

outside the park. 

Yellowstone had already experienced major fires but Yellowstone’s fires were 

very different from those in California’s Sierra Nevada. Typically, Yellowstone 

experienced crown fires through lodgepole pine, except in the Lamar Valley and similar 

winter ranges where fires burned through grasses and shrub. The Sierras experienced 

surface fires through various pine, chaparral, and fir complexes. That the Army reflected 

on its Yellowstone experience to assess the Sierras suggested a disadvantage in having a 

single agency manage two ecologically different parks. Officers inaccurately transferred 

experience from one setting to the other. 

The result of this transfer led to the implementation of programs at odds with the 

goals that the Army set out. At Sequoia in 1898 and 1899, a series of fires of significant 

magnitude allowed for the change in the calculus of fire and permitted the introduction of 

a Yellowstone-like set of proscriptions inside the park. In August 1898, an extensive 

forest fire spread throughout the northwest section of the park. A combination of state 

forestry agents and the cavalry had little success containing the fire, and it spread wildly 

until it burned itself out in late August. Although the fire did not harm the Giant Forest, 

the grove of Sequoias that gave the park its name, it did introduce a new fear of fire in the 

region. A state forestry agent was injured fighting the fire, the first such known case at 

Sequoia. The next year, two more fires burned out of control in the northwest part of the 

park. Both started outside Sequoia and appeared to be intentional, presumably set by 

herdsmen.49 

Two summers of major fires allowed the Army to institute changes in its park fire 

management policies. In 1898, J.W. Zaveley, a GLO special investigator who served as 

acting park superintendent, used the fires to exclude 20,000 sheep from the park and to 

remove any remaining sheep from General Grant National Park as well. Zaveley’s bold 

move was an initial step that eliminated only half the problem. It did remove animals 

from the parks, but it could not address actions that took place outside of the park but 

affected its resources. Captain Henry B. Clark, the acting superintendent, continued 

Zaveley’s policy, asking to extend his troop’s stay in the park until November 1, 1899, in 

an effort to combat both fires and trespassing hunters. He also confirmed the reactive 

strategy that Zaveley had begun. Clark articulated a policy that put the Giant Forest first, 

and together the two made protecting the large trees from the effects of fire the park’s 

49 J. W. Zaveley to Secretary of the Interior, August 4, 1898; Henry B. Clark to Secretary of the 

Interior, September 30, 1899, NARA, RG 79.2.1, Letters Received by Office of the Secretary of the Interior 

Relating to National Parks, Sequoia and General Grant 1890-1907, Box 49. 

23 
 

 

 

 

 

primary fire-fighting priority.50 The sacred-profane distinction so prevalent in early 

conservation extended even to the objectives of firefighting. 

In the new century, the Army remained the primary protection force in the large 

western national parks. As a result, it spread its doctrine of fire control, establishing a 

pattern of aggressive firefighting. In essence, military practice in the national parks 

created the paradigm that dominated firefighting until the 1960s. The Forest Committee 

of the National Academy of Sciences accorded the military example sufficient respect 

that in 1896, it recommended the additional of forestry to the curriculum at West Point. 

The Army was to initiate a new entity that was trained in forestry and would design plans 

and procedures for the protection of the forest reserves. Despite this recommendation, the 

task fell to a civilian agency. But before the turn of the twentieth century, the combat 

model of firefighting was firmly established; it would remain a powerful influence in the 

national park system for the next three generations. 

Even as the cavalry tried to establish clear practices and procedures for firefighting, the number of national parks speedily grew. Congress established Mount 

Rainier National Park in 1899 and Crater Lake National Park followed in 1902. Other 

parks, including Platt National Park in Oklahoma, later delisted and transformed into 

Chickasaw Mountains National Recreation Area, and Wind Cave National Park joined 

the collection. The passage of the Antiquities Act of 1906 allowed the creation of a 

second category of national park areas. These national monuments, as the category was 

called, could be created by executive proclamation without the consent of Congress, and 

the legislation was so vague that nearly anything on public land might be so designated. 

Following the proclamation of Devil’s Tower, the first national monument, in 1906, 

national monuments rapidly proliferated. By 1910, there were almost two dozen, 

including the Grand Canyon in Arizona, Glacier Bay in Alaska, Pinnacles in California, 

and archaeological sites throughout the Southwest.51 

During this same era, the administration of most federal forests was centered in 

the Department of Agriculture. Prior to that time, both the General Land Office and 

Gifford Pinchot’s Bureau of Forestry held federally designated forest reserves, the 

consequences of the Forest Reserves acts of 1891 and 1897. Pinchot successfully argued 

for the transfer of lands to a new entity, the United States Forest Service that he was 

appointed to lead in the Department of Agriculture. This heir to the idea of a military 

forestry corps received responsibility for the forest reserves.52 

Ostensibly established to protect upstream watersheds, the forest reserves were 

generally a poorly managed and impractical arrangement. The new post allowed the 

enterprising Pinchot to combine his knowledge of forestry, his relationship to President 

Theodore Roosevelt, so close that many referred to Pinchot as crown prince of the 

50 J. W. Zaveley to Secretary of the Interior, August 4, 1898; Henry B. Clark to Secretary of the 

Interior, September 30, 1899; Henry B. Clark to Secretary of the Interior, October 31, 1899, NARA, RG 

79.2.1, Letters Received by Office of the Secretary of the Interior Relating to National Parks, Sequoia and 

General Grant 1890-1907, Box 49. 

51 Hal K. Rothman, Preserving Different Pasts: The American National Monuments (Urbana: 

University of Illinois Press, 1989), 33-49. 52 Char Miller, Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism (Washington D.C.: 

Island Press, 2002). 

24 
 

 

 

Roosevelt administration, and his need to gain management authority over most federal 

timberland. At the same time, he attained the autonomy and resources to implement his 

version of conservation, contained in the concept, “the greatest good for the greatest 

number in the long run.” A new and viable competitor for the leadership of fire 

management challenged the military.53 

The Forest Service was born at a complicated, contentious time. The 

manifestation of Progressive Era ethos, the agency grappled with the same duality about 

fire that vexed the Army. Fire was the enemy when it damaged personal property. When 

it burned far away or did not hurt others, it often did not rise to the level of immediate 

concern. Although fire damaged communities throughout the nation - from San Francisco 

in the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake to towns such as Chicago, Peshtigo, and Hinckley 

in the Great Lakes states - it seemed distant from the concerns of the nation. Fire had 

been an important tool for humans since time immemorial and like most tools that 

humanity utilized, it had risks. Yet, the prevalence of fire and its potential to destroy 

communities raised the level of attention that the issue received. Sorting out these two 

conflicting impulses created considerable tension for the Forest Service during its first 

half-decade.54 

Both the Army and the new USFS would be sorely tested in 1910, aptly titled the 

“year of the fires.” That summer, the inland Northwest erupted in flames, the result of 

lightning sparks, locomotives, and scattered humanity as well as the heaps of burnable 

fuel left behind by logging, mining, and construction crews. The previous wet winter, 

subsequent dry spring and a drought-like summer exacerbated conditions. A fire of epic 

proportions ensued, seeming only to worsen as the summer passed until finally, the Big 

Blowup of August 20-21, 1910, consumed towns, villages, railroads, mining camps, and 

anything else in its way.55 

Two national parks, Yellowstone and Glacier, established in May 1910, stood in 

the path of these fires. The Army had administered Yellowstone for almost thirty years 

and it had established a pattern of response to fire. By the late 1890s, the military listed 

fire suppression as one of its three main obligations at the park and in most years, its 

forces kept control of fire with brigades of men wielding picks and axes. During some 

years, such as 1901, fires burned beyond the capability of the Army. That summer, Forest 

and Stream reported “axes and shovels were the only weapons of use . . . water buckets 

are the best “side arm” a soldier can carry.” Despite assistance delivered by troops from 

Fort Keough, Montana, the blazes burned throughout the region until fall rains brought 

them to a close.56 

Fire attracted the attention of the park’s most renowned early chronicler, Hiram 

Chittenden, the engineer in charge of building Yellowstone’s road system. His The 

53 Miller, Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism; Steen, The United States 

Forest Service, 69-102. 54 Pyne, Year of the Fires, 1-7; Hal K. Rothman, ed., “I’ll Never Fight Fire With My Bare Hands 

Again”: Recollections of the First Foresters of the Inland Northwest (Lawrence: University Press of 

Kansas, 1994), 139-77. 55 Pyne, Year of the Fires, 2-3. 56 Superintendent Capt. George S. Anderson, “Work of the Cavalry in Protecting the Yellowstone 

National Park,” Journal of the United States Cavalry Association 10 36 (March 1897), 6-7; “Report of the 

Acting Superintendent of Yellowstone Park, 1901” (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1902), 

4; “Fires in Yellowstone,” Forest And Stream, August 10, 1901, 102. 

25 
 

Yellowstone National Park had become the most widely read book on Yellowstone, the 

source for much of what the public knew about the park. By the 1905 edition, Chittenden 

recognized that fire was a primary park issue, a “source of anxious solicitude” for its 

military administrators. “The control of a forest fire,” he wrote, “is next to impossible 

except by the aid of rain.” Neither source of fire, human agency or lightning, could be 

entirely eliminated, but Chittenden believed that inside Yellowstone’s boundaries, 

suppression and education already had yielded important results. He also advocated a 

proactive program of fuel load management, breaking up dense masses of vegetation, the 

accumulated fuel load created by time and successful suppression, but he opposed using 

fire as a tool to accomplish this end. Despite Chittenden’s recommendations, little was 

done to lighten fuel loads and Yellowstone remained vulnerable.57 

In 1910, Yellowstone’s timber went up in flames along with the rest of the inland 

Northwest, and the Army provided the best possible response. Lightning far from the 

main roads ignited most of the park’s fires and high winds spread the blaze. A large area 

south of Yellowstone Lake burned, and new fires erupted throughout August and into 

September. In early August, more than 200 soldiers battled fire in the park. Despite 

adverse circumstances, they succeeded in stopping at least two of the outbreaks. Another 

remained out of control until a shift in the direction of the wind drove it toward 

Yellowstone Lake. Even as they fought fires, soldiers continued their preventive 

measures. Assiduous patrols of campsites helped keep new wildfires from starting, 

although at least four began when fires that were not entirely extinguished transformed 

into wildfires before the Army reached the scene. Fire cut off one troop of twenty-nine 

soldiers and backed it up against the lake. They managed to fight off the fire and escape 

with a few burns and considerable loss of equipment.58 By all accounts, the soldiers 

performed valiantly, but their efforts usually had little direct effect on the fires. 

Glacier National Park provided a different kind of challenge. Established in May, 

1910, it lacked the history of fire management by the Army that marked some of the 

other national parks. Its administration complicated by the struggle between Pinchot and 

Secretary of the Interior Richard A. Ballinger, Glacier National Park was in the middle of 

being transferred from the Forest Service to the Department of the Interior when the fires 

broke out. Although Pinchot had enjoyed free reign of the Department of the Interior’s 

forests under Ballinger’s predecessor, James R. Garfield, Ballinger, an appointee of 

William Howard Taft, banned foresters from Department of the Interior lands. The 

clamor resulting from a scandal about the leasing of Alaskan coal lands ended with 

Pinchot’s departure from the Forest Service just months before the establishment of 

Glacier National Park. In no small part, that departure paved the way for establishment of 

the new national park.59 

Just as the fires began, Ballinger sent an inspection team to Glacier National Park. 

Typical of the survey parties sent out to assess land in the late nineteenth century, it 

contained scientists, officials from nearby national forests, and Ballinger’s personal 

representative, Chief Clerk of the Department of the Interior Clements Ucker. The 

57 Chittenden, The Yellowstone National Park, 242-44. 58 Pyne, Year of the Fires, 116; “Fires in Yellowstone Park,” Forest and Stream, September 24, 

1910, 494. 

59 James Penick, Jr., Progressive Politics and Conservation: The Pinchot-Ballinger Affair (Chicago: 

University of Chicago, 1968), 1-17. 

26 
 

fourteen men and their ten pack animals entered the park and found themselves in the 

middle of a maelstrom. For an entire week, the fires severed their communication with 

the outside world as a frantic Ballinger tried to reestablish contact. When Ucker 

extricated himself and his party and reached Fort Yellowstone on August 12, he 

announced that the park was a “veritable fire-trap.” Turning the circumstances of the 

dispute to his department’s favor, he announced that the Forest Service had done nothing 

to prepare for the fire season during its long tenure in the region – despite its desire to 

show the world it could control fire. As a direct result, Ucker insisted, blazes in the 

“Crown of the Continent,” as George Bird Grinnell had enthusiastically labeled the area 

in the 1890s, burned out of control.60 

Realistically, the Forest Service did no less at Glacier National Park than it did 

anywhere else in the inland Northwest. Fire simply spread beyond the capability of 

diverse and poorly manned agencies. At least 2.6 million acres of national forest land 

burned in the Northern Rockies and an additional 2.4 million elsewhere, and certainly 

much more land that was not counted was burned as well. The fledgling Forest Service 

was not equal to the task. At the time, individual foresters administered as much as one 

million acres, often by themselves. They possessed small budgets and had little access to 

additional resources. When foresters needed help, they recruited workers from local and 

regional populations. Sometimes the agency went to cities in the region such as Spokane, 

Washington, in order to find people to fight fires. By August, the agency had more than 

5,000 firefighters on its payroll, but the number was nowhere near enough to stem the 

fires. Nor was the available technology equal to the blaze.61 By any legitimate measure, 

both the Forest Service and the Army performed admirably in their response to the Fires 

of 1910. 

Ucker’s indictment attained some credence because of presumptions that the fires, 

in Glacier in particular, resulted from human malice. The Great Northern Railway had 

laid off a sizable number of workers earlier in 1910, leading some to contend that a 

combination of the newly unemployed and wayfarers started fires in order to secure work 

putting them out. The accusation contained some truth. Instances of individuals igniting 

fires and then landing on the firefighting payroll were common, but as an indictment of 

Forest Service policy at Glacier, the argument lacked credence. The most dangerous and 

destructive fires in the summer of 1910 started by lightning and grew in force and size 

precisely because they were far from human view.62 They were complemented by a 

welter of escape fires, railway burns, and miscellaneous incendiary events that tied up 

resources and contributed to the breakdown. 

Despite such realities, the fires at Glacier National Park became part of the battle 

between Ballinger and Pinchot. At its core, this was a power struggle, over control not 

only of timber but of the very values of conservation as well. Although Pinchot had been 

ousted and Ucker’s subsequent belligerence was widely acknowledged, Pinchot had 

achieved control of the terms of the struggle. Not only was he far more adept at public 

60 Telegram, Clements Ucker to Franklin Pierce, August 10, 1910; Telegram, Clements Ucker to 

Franklin Pierce, August 12, 1910, NARA RG 79.7, Glacier National Park, General Records, 

Expenditures/Supplies/Materials/Fires, Box 22; Pyne, Year of the Fire, 109-11; Spence, Dispossessing the 

Wilderness, 77-90. 61 Rothman, “I’ll Never Fight Fire with My Bare Hands Again,” 66-89; Pyne, Year of the Fires, 201, 

233. 62 Pyne, Fire in America, 243-45. 

27 
 

 

 

 

relations, he was acknowledged as a leader in scientific forestry. Even Ucker 

acknowledged that reality, calling on the Forest Service and the much over-taxed Army 

to respond to the crisis. Cost figured into his call for the Forest Service. Glacier’s entire 

appropriation during its first year of existence was a mere $15,000, a sum so small that its 

application to combat the fires would exhaust it in a matter of days. In contrast, the Forest 

Service appeared willing to carry the costs of fire fighting until Congress agreed to a 

special appropriation after the end of the fire season to cover all expenditures.63 

By early August, the fires were so overwhelming that Henry S. Graves, Pinchot’s 

successor at the Forest Service, asked for the assistance of the Army at Glacier. Among 

the troops sent to the park was Company K of the all-African American Twenty-Fifth 

Infantry under command of Lieutenant W. S. Mapes. While other soldiers in the park 

found themselves with difficult but manageable tasks, Company K found itself doing the 

most difficult work. With two gangs of additional men, a thirty-seven-man crew of 

lumbermen hired by the park and a thirty-five man crew of Greek laborers offered by the 

Great Northern Railway, the Army company had to battle the most powerful blaze in the 

park. Social tension and differing goals complicated the interaction. Some of the hired 

crews refused to work more than a regular 7:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. schedule. The untrained 

laborers were only marginally useful until Lt. Mapes sandwiched individual workers 

between the soldiers. Disciplined troops outperformed the less trained workers in the 

brutal tasks associated with containing fires.64 

In the end, the combination of on-the-ground presence of even rudimentary 

firefighters and willingness to absorb costs until reimbursement gave the Forest Service 

control of the battle against the extraordinary fires of 1910 and ultimately over the 

culture, policy, structure, and organization of fire-fighting on public lands. Despite the 

acknowledgement that Forest Service efforts in the national parks and elsewhere 

amounted to little that brutal summer, only the Forest Service appeared ready to shoulder 

the enormous burden of fire fighting in the West. 

In the two affected national parks, the results of the fires were devastating. At 

Yellowstone, the fires burned more than 60,000 acres and firefighting efforts drained the 

park’s limited budget. The tourist hotels were not threatened as a result of the efforts of 

Major Benson and his troops. The military paid day laborers a total of $12,550 to help the 

troops dig firelines and even tried back burning at one location, but their actions did little 

to slow or stop fires. By 1911, the park had begun to construct fire lanes, but Benson 

clearly recognized that the military had too few people and too little experience to 

manage the national park, fight fire, select salvage timber for sale or disposal, and 

maintain order.65 

At Glacier, about the same area, 60,000 acres, burned, and there the ability of the 

Department of the Interior to support its national parks was thrown into question. Much 

of the area in question had considerable value as a source of timber, but in park 

supervisor Major William R. Logan’s estimation, little scenic value. The major fires were 

63 Telegram, Franklin Pierce to Clements Ucker, August 15, 1910, NARA RG 79.7, Glacier National 

Park, Expenditures/Supplies/Materials/Fires, Box 22; Pyne, Year of the Fires, 111. 64 Superintendent, Glacier National Park to Secretary of the Interior, October 9, 1910, NARA, RG 

79.7, Glacier National Park, Expenditures/Supplies/Materials/Fires, Box 22; Pyne, Year of the Fires, 117-

22; Pyne, Fire in America, 244. 65 Benson to Secretary of the Interior, October 27, 1910, Yellowstone Box Y-9, Letter Box-65, 

Yellowstone National Park Library; “Fire in Yellowstone,” Forest and Stream, September 24, 1910, 494. 

28 
 

 

away from the areas frequented by tourists, but many were adjacent to the railway. The 

expenditures associated with the fire were astronomical, and the Department of the 

Interior had little but the park’s basic appropriation, primarily allocated for road building, 

to cover its costs. Before the establishment of the National Park Service, individual parks 

received direct appropriations that were far from generous and usually earmarked for 

specific purposes. In the case of a cost overrun as at Glacier, the Department of the 

Interior needed to request an additional appropriation from Congress.66 

Glacier National Park provided a flashpoint for the tensions that would come to 

revolve around fire. Two important federal agencies, the Army and the Forest Service, 

grappled over control of an important dimension of land management with enormous 

implications for national parks. The Army pursued a mode of suppression derived from 

its experiences in other national parks since 1886, a pattern the Forest Service followed 

as it carved its own way in the world of land management. The Forest Service tried to 

rely on military help to fight fires in the national forests, extending the pattern begun in 

the national parks and firmly locking the suppression mandate of the Army in place, but 

the military declined to support the efforts of that agency. 

Elsewhere among the national parks that summer, fire problems were minimal. 

Mount Rainier and Yosemite both experienced a number of fires, but they paled in 

comparison to the ones in the inland northwest. At Mount Rainier, the only fires that 

required action were the result of unattended campfires. Yosemite experienced a number 

of fires, including one that burned within one-half mile of the Mariposa Grove, but only 

that fire required the attention of troops. At Sequoia, the only notable fire resulted from 

blasting on a road project and Wind Cave and General Grant both experienced typical 

lightning strikes.67 

The 1910 fire season proved pivotal. Until that summer, the Army had taken the 

lead not only in managing national parks, but in fighting the fires that erupted in them. 

Although it could not claim success against fire in 1910, the Forest Service found its 

purpose that brutal summer. It became the lead federal agency for land management and 

was so shaped by the fires of 1910 that its culture of suppression not only replaced that of 

the Army, but superseded its vehement suppression as well. After the summer of 1910, 

national parks followed the Forest Service’s lead in managing fire and for the better part 

of the subsequent fifty years. Suppression dominated that strategy. 

Suppression had its vehement opponents, most notably California advocates of 

“light-burning.” This practice, the regular burning of surface underbrush and litter, sprang 

from the conviction that routine burning had produced the forests, kept fuels down, and 

prevented larger fires. Also called the Indian way of forestry or in a pejorative variation, 

“Paiute forestry,” light burning had been advocated in California as early as the 1880s. 

Settlers and timber owners saw light burning as a sure way to reduce fuel load and limit 

uncontrollable fire. As early as 1902, calls to cease total suppression because it increased 

fuel load emanated from ranchers and timber companies in the California mountains, 

leading to a struggle between federal representatives, at this time mostly the Army, and 

66 Franklin Pierce to Major W. R. Logan, September 7, 1910; W. R. Logan to Secretary of the 

Interior, September 14, 1910, NARA, RG 79.7, Glacier National Park, 

Expenditures/Supplies/Materials/Fires, Box 22; Pyne, Fire in America, 244. 67 “Forest Fires of the Season of 1910 in National Parks,” NARA, RG 79.7, Glacier National Park, 

Expenditures/Supplies/Materials/Fires, Box 22. 

29 
 

 

 

settlers.68 A characteristic battle between national and local, the core dispute in the rise 

of federal land management agencies, took another of its many forms. 

Light burning gained enthusiastic endorsements in 1909 and 1910. T.B. Walker, a 

timber owner near Shasta, California, had been a proponent of light burning for more 

than decade. Although federal managers in both the departments of the Interior and 

Agriculture pronounced the practice ineffective for large areas, Walker published an 

article for the National Conservation Commission in 1909 that described his practices. 

Another Shasta resident, G. L. Hoxie, a self-described timberman linked to the Southern 

Pacific Railroad, advocated mandatory light burning the following year in a piece in the 

influential Sunset magazine. Hoxie’s call was the most radical yet, but it came as the 

worst of the fires of 1910 broke out.69 

The light burning controversy provided a focus for Forest Service goals. The 

agency was devastated both by the fires of 1910 and by the dismissal of Pinchot, and it 

needed a new focus. Light burning represented a collection of practices that were the 

opposite of Pinchot’s vision of systematic, scientific national management of resources. 

Even worse from the Forest Service’s perspective, the hated Ballinger had advocated 

light burning. The Forest Service revamped itself as a fire-fighting agency, its 

commitment to suppression and its contempt for light burning complete. Despite some 

efforts by Pinchot’s successor, Henry Graves, to experiment with light burning, the 

Forest Service focused its newly prodigious fire management expertise against the idea of 

light burning.70 

As the era of military management of the national parks ended in 1914, the core 

issues that defined national park fire management and indeed federal fire management in 

general were clear. In any major fire situation, the need to quickly act overrode all other 

considerations. Park managers could neither afford to wait nor to go through bureaucratic 

channels. Managers recognized that only prompt action offered even the remote chance 

of holding off disaster. The lack of resources remained dramatic. Episodic fire forced 

small governmental units such as national parks to look to larger entities such as 

departments or Congress for assistance. An inability to cope with a big fire or a big-fire 

year often obliterated the incremental improvements of a decade or more. Creating 

infrastructure - roads, trails, lookouts, patrols, fire brigades - and funding had been a 

paramount response that the Army provided. A civilian agency that replaced it would 

have to invent and duplicate it. 

In a more philosophical vein, the controversy over a correct approach had begun 

to form. Suppression, the Army and ultimately the federal strategy, was juxtaposed 

against controlled burning. The confusion over the role of fire in the Big Trees had 

become a theme that remained in place for the subsequent half-century. Preservation and 

the rise of conservation created a dissonance in vision between elites throughout the 

country and the ordinary people who made a living from western land. Two value 

systems that presented diametrically opposed visions of the West grappled over how to 

best address fire. 

After 1910, a series of changes in conservation culture created a powerful impetus 

for the creation of an agency to manage the national parks. The proliferation of park areas 

68 Pyne, Fire in America, 100-03. 69 Pyne, Fire in America, 104; G. L. Hoxie, “How Fire Helps Forestry,” Sunset August 1910, 145-51. 70 Pyne, Fire in America, 104-05. 

30 
 

after the passage of the Antiquities Act played a significant role in the process, as did the 

struggle over Hetch-Hetchy and the construction of a dam inside the boundaries of 

Yosemite National Park. Military reluctance to continue in the role of national park 

management, an arrangement terminated by the Secretary of War on May 1, 1914, also 

increased the obvious need for some kind of system for park management. With war 

looming in Europe and the U.S. involved in an expensive excursion into Mexico, 

Secretary of War Lindley Garrison determined that the Department of War would no 

longer pay for the management of national parks, a responsibility he believed should be 

paid for from appropriations for public lands rather than the military budget. The nearly 

$400,000 per annum from the military budget for national parks seemed to him an 

“abuse” and he served notice that it would not long continue. Nevertheless, national parks 

had begun to be seen as reflections of the essence of American nationalism. These factors 

combined to open the way for the passage of the Act to Establish the National Park 

Service, which President Woodrow Wilson signed on August 25, 1916.71 

Because of this new law, the final Progressive Era federal land management 

agency was born. Labeled a “service” as were so many of its peers in that era, the 

National Park Service was born with a need to establish itself and its position among peer 

agencies that overlapped with its mission and its constituency. Its primary rival was the 

Forest Service, and until 1945, the two agencies struggled against one another with a 

venomous consistency in nearly all endeavors. Such a rivalry reflected both the parallels 

and the differences between the two agencies. Very often, they offered different plans 

and programs for the same tracts of land. Their leaders learned to resent each other, and a 

tenor of distaste often pervaded interagency interaction through World War II. 

With such a relationship, it seems surprising that the National Park Service would 

accept Forest Service leadership in any area, but when it came to fire, the Forest Service 

led. After 1910, the Forest Service invested significant resources in fire suppression, 

creating a culture that became the model for federal fire response. It embraced the 

military ideal of suppression, shaped in the national parks. Once the military withdrew 

from the parks, there was no other body of federal workpower handy. No matter how 

National Park Service leaders felt about the Forest Service, they had nowhere else to turn 

for information, technology, and resources to fight fire. The degree of danger posed by 

fire trumped all other concerns, providing an early model of interagency cooperation. At 

the establishment of the National Park Service, the Army-based system of firefighting 

was crumbling and the new agency faced a monumental task. Not only did it have to 

build an infrastructure for the park system, it also had to fight endemic fire and resist 

episodic colossal fire. 

71 Secretary of War to Secretary of the Interior, May 1, 1914, NARA, RG 79.2.1, Records of Office 

of Secretary of the Interior Relating to National Parks, Box 89; Robert Shankland, Steve Mather of the 

National Parks (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1953), 104-13. 

31 
Chapter Two: 

The Development of a Fire Management Structure 

 

 

The founding of the National Park Service in August 1916 heralded a new era for 

both the national parks and national monuments. While Congress had established the 

initial national parks – Yellowstone, Yosemite, General Grant, and Sequoia – with 

specific objectives in mind, the passage of “An Act for the Preservation of American 

Antiquities,” known as the Antiquities Act of 1906, transformed the proclamation 

process. It allowed the president to establish national monuments from the public domain 

with the stroke of a pen. The Act placed few restrictions on what kinds of sites could be 

included in the monument category and neglected to provide resources for administering 

the new areas. The result was a numerical explosion in park areas after 1906, complicated 

by the remarkable diversity of the new areas preserved. Not only did the park system 

contain spectacular and expansive natural areas like the first national parks, it now 

included archaeological areas, natural curiosities such as the petrified forest of Arizona 

and diverse properties that held countless natural and cultural treasures.72 

The array of park areas posed an important challenge for Stephen T. Mather, the 

businessman turned civic exemplar who took the reins of the National Park Service at its 

birth. Born July 4, 1867, Mather was raised in California during an exciting era. He 

matriculated from the University of California in Berkeley in 1887, a devoted adherent of 

the fraternity Sigma Chi and among the many in the era who inhaled the heady fumes of 

public service that had begun to entice the privileged classes. Mather first worked as a 

journalist under the storied Charles A. Dana at the New York Sun, leaving the newspaper 

to seek his fortune in the development of American borax. He took charge of promotion 

for borax king Francis Marion Smith, creating the Twenty-Mule-Team brand and making 

a name for himself in the nascent public relations and advertising community. Mather had 

a knack for publicity and for keeping a product in the national eye. Following a nervous 

breakdown that briefly institutionalized him in 1903, Mather left Smith’s empire to join 

an old friend in a new borax mining endeavor. Eleven years later, he had become 

sufficiently wealthy to retire and pursue his other passion: public service.73 

Even before he became successful in public relations, Mather had been known as 

someone with a strong desire to accomplish civic goals. An inveterate joiner, he belonged 

to nearly every major civic, social, and charitable organization in every city he inhabited. 

His fraternity remained important to him all his life and expanded to a range of other 

activities. Mather seemed the classic good citizen; he was involved in so many civic 

activities that it was hard to find an organization of any significance to which he did not 

72 Hal K. Rothman, Preserving Different Pasts: The American National Monuments (Urbana: 

University of Illinois Press, 1989); Alfred Runte, National Parks: The American Experience 2d ed. 

(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987); “An Act for the Preservation of American Antiquities,” 16 

USC 431-433, June 8, 1906. 73 Robert Shankland, Steve Mather of the National Parks (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), 1-41. 

32 
 

belong. In love with California and among the state’s greatest cheerleaders in the early 

twentieth century, Mather connected especially to the outdoors, so remarkable in his 

native state. This fascination drew him to the national parks. 

Mather’s involvement with the national parks began with an apocryphal story that 

illustrated much about the cozy nature of the American ruling class at the start of the 

twentieth century. One of Mather’s college classmates, Sidney Mezes, advised President 

Woodrow Wilson, leading to the appointment of a coterie of Californians – and indeed 

University of California graduates – to high posts during Wilson’s presidency. One of 

them, Franklin K. Lane, who had been at Berkeley at the same time as Mather, became 

Secretary of the Interior. Acquainted with the new secretary, Mather wrote him a scathing 

letter after a visit to the national parks. Lane purportedly responded, “Dear Steve, if you 

don’t like the way the national parks are being run, come on down to Washington and run 

them yourself.” Mather in fact accepted an offer from Lane, beginning at the Department 

of the Interior in 1915 as a special assistant with national parks as the primary part of his 

portfolio.74 

Eighteen months later, Wilson appointed Mather the first director of the new 

National Park Service. Mather had come to see American nature as the extraordinary 

characteristic of the nation. Leading the National Park Service offered him a way to 

illustrate the importance not only of the physical continent, but of the principles of Bull 

Moose Republicanism that he had embraced in the 1912 election season. By 1916, 

Mather was a dedicated Progressive, among the many who believed that government 

could and should provide for the common good in the United States. 

The reality he encountered quickly made hash out of the idealism he brought with 

him. Mather inherited a complicated situation. Little direct management of the national 

parks had taken place since the Army renounced its commitment to the task in 1914. 

Mather had a very limited staff in the nation’s capital and few people in the field. Nor did 

he have a plethora of resources available to him. Chosen because he had an extraordinary 

way with people, voluminous connections, access to resources, and unmatched 

dedication, he faced a task equal to his prodigious skills. 

For all his marvelous attributes, Mather was not a scientist, and fire management 

was very low on the Service’s initial list of priorities. In part, this stemmed from the 

minimal role fire played in the national parks, but the chief reason for Mather’s lack of 

interest was the array of issues that faced the new agency. Mather was a Progressive to 

the core and he reflected its values, which included the concept that actions such as flood 

control, predator removal, and fire management were all difficult responsibilities best left 

to specialists. Mather had to sell a new idea to Congress, arrange for funding for park 

management, foster the creation of travel networks so he could build a national 

constituency for the National Park Service, administer cranky and sometimes tendentious 

congressional representatives and their local friends, and otherwise establish his 

foundling agency as a player in the federal land management bureaucracy. 

The fires of 1910 had begun to fade in memory, and when Mather looked across 

the federal bureaucracy, he saw the post-Gifford Pinchot Forest Service actively 

embracing fire suppression as a core agency mission. Pinchot’s successor, Henry Graves, 

considered fire protection to be 90 percent of his agency’s mission. Pulled by his 

fledgling agency’s many needs, Mather likely never considered any kind of proactive fire 

74 Shankland, Steve Mather of the National Parks, 7, 53-54; Runte, National Parks, 109-110. 

33 
 

 

 

 

 

 

management regime. His official correspondence shows evidence only of reaction to 

crisis. Despite the incipient rivalry between the Forest Service and the National Park 

Service, Mather was content to leave the difficult obligation of firefighting to the Forest 

Service.75 

Even that agency was only beginning to learn about the enormous challenge it had 

chosen to make its own. The science of fire management remained in its infancy, and the 

Forest Service recognized that it could do little about major fires. The Big Blowup of 

1910 forever shaped the Forest Service’s vision of fire. The inadequacy of existing fire 

strategies and the inability to genuinely impact major fires struck hard at the core of the 

sense of duty and worth that early foresters held. When they looked around, they could 

see real reasons for the agency’s weakness when faced with major fires. The lack of 

technology for transporting vehicles and pumping water, the vast array of federal open 

space in the West, and the incredible need for dollars and labor to make any kind of a 

dent in a major fire simply was beyond the reach of any federal agency throughout the 

1920s. To its credit, the Forest Service thought long and hard about fire. It continued to 

experiment with light-burning and allowing some natural fires to burn into the 1920s but 

became primarily a fire-fighting agency as it built the disasters of 1910 into its creation 

myth.76 In contrast, the early Park Service invested much less of its intellectual energy 

and fiscal resources in fire. Not a single staff member had fire control or management in 

their job description. 

The nascent Park Service made early tactical mistakes. Its efforts to attract the 

public had the adverse affect of increasing the risk of fire. Since Yellowstone in 1886, 

anyone who managed a national park area recognized that people caused most of the fires 

that required an organized response. Under Mather, the Service’s goal was to attract 

visitors, often as many people as could arrive by the conveyances of the day. NPS efforts 

were devoted to ensuring that people had access to exciting natural and cultural sites, 

were comfortable in the parks, and brought home souvenirs that memorialized their stay. 

Abundant visitors were the focus. In contrast, the Forest Service was prepared to deny 

access to its lands as a way of controlling people and with them, the fires that agency so 

dreaded. As Mather built a constituency for the national parks, he inadvertently 

encouraged precisely the conditions that led to fires. People came to the parks in greater 

numbers and visited more places inside their boundaries; among the countless other ways 

they had an impact on parks, they made campfires and tossed aside cigarettes. Fires 

outside the backcountry grew in direct proportion to the increase in visitation but the 

Washington office of the National Park Service looked past the issue.77 

75 Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation 

Movement, 1880-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959), 1-5; Stephen J. Pyne, Fire in 

America: A Cultural History of Rural and Wildland Fire in the United States (Princeton: Princeton 

University Press, 1982), 295-96; Mather’s official files in NARA RG 79.3.2 for this period show no 

mention of fire. 76 Pyne, Fire in America, 295-97; Hal K. Rothman, ed., “I’ll Never Fight Fire With My Bare Hands 

Again”: Recollections of the First Forest Rangers of the Inland Northwest (Lawrence: University Press of 

Kansas, 1994), 1-16, 110-36; Harold K. Steen, The U.S. Forest Service: A History (Seattle: University of 

Washington Press, 1976), 37-59. 77 Pyne, Fire in America, 296-97; David Carle, Burning Questions: America’s Fight with Nature’s 

Fire (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002), 11-26; Runte, National Parks, 102-04; Shankland, Steve Mather of the 

National Parks, 92-99, 133-42. 

34 
 

At the same time, individual park managers found themselves responding to fire 

with whatever means were available to them. Especially in the Sierra Nevada and in the 

Northern Rockies, each summer brought fires that necessitated a response. Problems with 

communication, transportation, and the inevitable lack of resources placed park 

superintendents alone in the agency in their battles against fire. They turned to local 

residents and other federal agencies in their immediate vicinity because these were 

neighbors with whom they shared problems. In this respect, individual National Park 

Service units achieved a level of autonomy that they were not generally permitted in 

more mundane affairs. 

As a result, fire remained a local issue for the first decade of the National Park 

Service’s existence. Washington expected individual parks to deal with fires that 

occurred inside their boundaries or in their immediate vicinity. Superintendents reported 

fires and how they dealt with them, but underscoring any communication was the stark 

reality that they addressed fire only with the resources they had on hand. As a result, most 

developed strategies to offset the lack of fire fighters and dollars. Superintendents 

cultivated local residents and worked with area Forest Service rangers to develop 

response systems. In most cases, the response was positive. Everyone recognized that 

survival at the edges required interdependence. Fire demanded cooperation. In real fires, 

only full-fledged cooperation provided a chance of retarding the destructive progress of a 

blaze. 

For most of the national parks, the 1916 founding of the National Park Service 

had done little to change fire management realities, and absent the soldiers who 

shouldered so much of the fire-fighting burden, the new agency was forced to make do. 

The exigencies of World War I contributed to this situation as early budgets were limited, 

but even after the end of combat in 1918, the resources available to the Service did not 

grow in proportion to its obligations. New parks and larger visitor numbers spread limited 

resources ever more sparsely across the national park landscape. This complicated every 

mandate and goal the new agency possessed, for the National Park Service effectively 

was forced to do more each year without a substantive increase in available resources.78 

The NPS’s fiscal circumstances and a lack of general understanding of the 

demands of fire and its implications for the park system combined to keep fire protection 

on the periphery of the agency’s thinking. Nor did the Service make a special effort to 

change its fire management situation. Fire protection and preparation remained an 

afterthought. As a result, National Park Service standards did not measure up to the 

protection the Army once provided. Myriad reasons contributed to this shortcoming. 

Unlike the Forest Service, which received congressional authorization in May 1908 to 

overspend its budget on fire fighting, the Service had to fight fire from its general 

appropriation. There were no specific earmarks in advance of fires. Financial conditions 

remained abysmal. No individual park had a fire budget or staff member specifically 

devoted to fire management in any form. Personnel was spread thin across many 

responsibilities, and few in the Service, save Colonel John R. White, who joined the 

agency as a ranger in Hawaii and became superintendent at Sequoia and General Grant 

78 Runte, National Parks. 

35 
 

 

 

 

 

national parks for more than two decades, had any experience with fire or inclination to 

think about it.79 

The federal appropriations process did not yield positive results for fire protection 

in the park system. The war years were hard, although Mather was able to transcend 

many of the problems that befell other federal agencies. His relationships with members 

of Congress and his ties to influential people across the country mitigated the impact of 

war on his fledgling agency. Although Albright recalled the “agony of appropriations” as 

an annual spring rite, the agency did as well as could be expected. In spring 1918, the 

peak of American involvement in Europe and with no end to combat yet in sight, the Park 

Service received $754,195 in a lump sum annual appropriation. In his memoirs, Albright 

complained that the budget provided no special funds for new roads and only a little 

money to improve El Portal Road in Yosemite. “For fire fighting, not a penny was 

allocated,” he remembered many years later.80 

This situation reflected not only Congress’ parsimony, but the agency’s hierarchy 

of requests as well. The few remaining papers that address the National Park Service’s 

budget requests show no evidence of a specific request for fire fighting. Mather primarily 

focused on access; he thought about roads and contracts with visitor service providers, 

leaving more direct resource management questions to subordinates. In the 1910s and 

1920s, the Service still struggled with the need to expand. Its energy and effort was 

directed toward land acquisition ahead of protection of lands already in the national park 

system. Without resources to support on-the-ground activities, much of the work that 

assisted in fire protection –clearing and brush removal in particular – was limited to local 

efforts. The small size of the Service and its vast responsibilities contributed to a distinct 

division in its operations. Superintendents acquired de facto autonomy, but without 

resources at their disposal, they faced difficulty in giving it meaning. In theory, park 

superintendents had considerable discretion. The small fixed appropriations for most 

translated into limited action.81 

The dominant technological advance of the age posed another kind of problem. At 

the founding of the National Park Service, railroads were critical to the Service’s 

formulation of its future. Rails would bring the visitors who elected the officials who 

funded the park system and their ability to reach national parks topped the early National 

Park Service’s list of goals. Major national parks such as Glacier and Yellowstone were 

well served by the steel rails either within the parks or near their boundaries. Yet trains 

and the sparks they threw off remained a prominent cause of fire. In some situations, such 

as the Inland Northwest during a dry summer, a railroad as much as fifty miles away 

could represent a serious threat to a park. The rapid spread of fire made rails a catalytic 

factor. Fires accompanied rail lines with a certainty that was frightening, and park 

superintendents watched nearby rails with trepidation.82 

79 Carle, Burning Questions, 236-38; Lary M. Dilsaver and William C. Tweed, Challenge of the Big 

Trees: A Resource History of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks (Three Rivers, CA: Sequoia 

Natural History Association, 1990), 151-69. 80 Horace M. Albright and Marian Albright Schenck, Creating the National Park Service: The 

Missing Years (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 276-79. 81 Confidential Files of Horace Albright, arranged by subject, 1916-1933, NARA, RG 79.3.2; Joseph 

W. Ernst, Worthwhile Places: Correspondence of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and Horace M. Albright (New 

York: The Rockefeller University, 1991), 3-15; 24-28. 82 Rothman, “I’ll Never Fight Fires with My Bare Hands Again,” 103-36. 

36 
 

 

Parks faced other kinds of fires, natural and human-induced. When lightning 

ignited a powerful fire in a remote area, it required less reaction from the National Park 

Service. Such fires simply burned until they consumed all the available fuel or were 

extinguished by precipitation or blocked by geographical barriers. When fires were closer 

to people, often because carelessness had been their cause, parks relied on fear of the 

fire’s spread to catalyze organized response. Everyone in the fire’s path tended to pitch in 

to slow, divert, contain, or suppress fire. With limited tools and fewer resources available 

to counter fire, any blaze had the ability to leap out of control and damage everyone’s 

property. In the late 1910s and early 1920s, national park areas did the best they could 

when they faced fire. When fire spread and outstripped the sorely limited resources, the 

National Park Service called on the Forest Service for whatever assistance that agency 

could offer.83 

The National Park Service failed to develop an overarching fire policy of any 

kind, and as a result, the response to fire varied from park to park. Those with 

considerable timber and significant histories of fire devoted greater resources to thinking 

about fire though most lacked the money to make a substantial investment in any kind of 

prevention program. But most park superintendents and custodians addressed fire as if it 

were an unexpected event instead of an endemic condition, reflecting the reality that most 

managers did not plan for any kind of annual fire management. Without a line item 

budget for fire, any resources allocated for suppression came from those initially 

allocated to other activities. NPS officials in Washington provided little guidance or 

structure. Early park managers recognized that no matter what they did, if fire reached the 

level where it demanded significant reallocation of resources, no manager had to do more 

than make a token effort to slow a blaze. The most common agency response to a major 

fire in those years was to look to the skies and hope for rain.84 

As long as most park fires were small and local, this haphazard management 

system proved adequate. As soon as a fire got loose, it exposed the limited nature of 

existing practice and the philosophy of benign neglect that underpinned park fire 

management. The buzz that Mather and his associates created – inspired by a 

combination of promotional publications, speeches, and the aggressive posture of 

Congress in proclaiming new park areas – made insufficient action an even graver failing. 

If the agency had gaps in its practice in its first few years, its inability to respond to fire 

held a prominent place on its lists of shortcomings. 

From August 1916 until the summer of 1919, the National Park Service was 

simply fortunate: no major blazes took place inside national park areas. The small fires in 

the parks were handled by zealous application of every available resource. Mather was 

able to promote the parks, build support for them, deliver influential people to a range of 

83 Pyne, Fire In America, 353-56; Carle, Burning Questions, 238; Harold K. Steen, The United States 

Forest Service: A History (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1976), 129-31, 176-79. 84 A thorough review of agency files in NARA, RG 79.7 reveals no examples of proactive fire 

planning. Albright’s two memoirs, Albright and Cahn, The Birth of the National Park Service, and Albright 

and Schenck, Creating the National Park Service, contain a total of five references to fire, all but one of 

which are comment on the impact or aftermath of specific fires. No correspondence of Mather in the 

NARA, RG 79.3.2 or 79.7 suggests any proactive approach to fire. The small collection of his papers at the 

Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, only peripherally address the early years of the 

NPS. Although it is difficult to prove a negative, the author is quite convinced that the National Park 

Service had no comprehensive fire strategy in its early years. 

37 
 

 

 

 

 

areas, and otherwise further the objectives he and Secretary Lane established without 

ever facing the reality that hounded the era’s Forest Service managers: a fire would 

expose both a lack of control of the physical world and the elaborate fiction of protection 

from which federal agencies derived their significance. For three years, the National Park 

Service only recognized fire when it could be melded with other functions. Yellowstone, 

the crown jewel of the system, served as the example. In 1917, the Service maintained 

miles of fire trails in the park for horseback and auto tours. Clearing the roads served a 

dual purpose: it allowed the transportation of men and equipment in the event of a fire 

and more importantly, it permitted visitors to see the park’s most scenic parts.85 

In 1919, the first indication that the National Park Service strategy would not 

work much longer became evident. By then, Glacier National Park had developed a 

cumulative fire problem. Each year since its establishment in 1910, the northwest 

Montana park faced fires, sometimes large ones. The park had a complicated history that 

included the exclusion of the Blackfeet people and the elimination of their usufruct rights, 

their legal right to use lands for hunting and ceremonial purposes, that they ceded to the 

government for a national park. Glacier was full of timber and people, some still angry at 

its creation. The influx of timber companies, which began almost immediately after the 

1910 fires, added another potential fire source. By the end of the decade, northern 

Montana was full of timber operations small and large, and many had become 

mechanized. Railroad lines that traversed the region, some large such as the Burlington 

Northern, others simple log-hauling roads, increased the possibility of incendiary 

incidents. Sparks from an engine or any of the railroads could ignite dry brush, posing an 

ongoing and widening threat.86 

As activity increased, the number of acres of timber lost to fire rose each year, as 

did the cost of suppression. In 1917, fire consumed more than 7,000 acres of park timber 

and fire-fighting costs totaled $11,968. On July 23, 1917, sparks from a Great Northern 

Railway engine ignited blazes near Belton Hills and Rock Hill in the Flathead National 

Forest. The fire spread into Glacier National Park, causing one-tenth of the damage the 

park sustained that summer. The park paid for its fire damage out of its budget, later 

providing evidence in court against the railroad when the federal government sued to 

recover costs of fighting the fire. Two years later, more than 50,760 acres of timber 

burned, at a cost of $46,000 from the park budget. Most of the fires resulted from railroad 

sparks even though the Great Northern Railway aggressively cooperated to minimize the 

threat. In addition, Glacier Superintendent Walter W. Payne claimed depreciation on park 

equipment of more than $10,000, a result of the fire’s destruction of machinery and the 

locations in which it was stored. In 1920, the cost rose to $81,849, a sum that exceeded 

the park budget for the year.87 The increase in cost suggested dramatic changes in the 

patterns of fire in the area that promised only greater trouble. 

85 Department of the Interior, Report of the Director of the National Park Service to the Secretary of 

the Interior, for the fiscal year ended June 30, 1917 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1917), 34. 86 Superintendent’s Annual Report, Glacier National Park, 1911, 7; Superintendent’s Annual Report, 

1916, 8, NARA, RG 79,7.7 Glacier National Park, Superintendent’s Annual Reports, 1910-1983. 87 Superintendent’s Annual Report, Glacier National Park, 1919, 22; W. W. Payne to The Director, 

December 30, 1919; George Goodwin to Director, September 9, 1920, NARA, RG 79.7, Glacier National 

Park, , Box 22; Mark D. Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the 

National Parks (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 88-95. 

38 
 

 

Fire posed the same threat it had in the late nineteenth century, exacerbated by 

increased population and better technology. Without development of a comprehensive 

agency structure, response remained localized. During the years the Army guarded the 

national parks, carelessness caused most human-induced fires; major fires often resulted 

from the sparks caused by railroad wheels. By the late 1910s, a prevalence of railroad 

engines and even a few automobiles added another contributing cause. Park responses 

stayed much the same. Labor remained scarce and parks often had to import day labor 

from nearby communities to fight fires. The park almost always had to bear the cost, with 

the general budget typically the source. Fire fighting took up “the greater portion of the 

energies of the working force as well as the funds available for improvement work during 

the past summer,” Superintendent Payne wrote in Glacier’s 1919 annual report in a 

typical example of sentiment.88 Superintendents looked at their predicament and the 

absence of a budget and recognized that creativity was essential if they were to combat 

the growing problem of fire with any effectiveness. 

Technological solutions were at the top of the National Park Service’s list. 

Compared to the slim chance of additional appropriations for personnel, new technology 

seemed a better alternative to park superintendents. By the early twentieth century, some 

rudimentary fire equipment had become available. In the early 1920s, the famous Pulaski 

hand tool, the vaunted combination of a mattock and an axe, remained the standard firefighting tool, but a revolution that relied on more complicated pumping equipment 

already had begun in earnest. The Forest Service tested pumping equipment – developed 

for urban fire fighting – in the field, and Canadian timber companies developed 

nominally “portable” pumps. Western parks in Canada adopted the technology and it 

soon crossed the border to Glacier National Park. The machines pumped water from an 

available water source – a stream, river, or lake – and horses pulled them from place to 

place. To the National Park Service, this was an important advance and officials eagerly 

pursued the idea. Superintendent Payne at Glacier enthusiastically endorsed the 

equipment. Properly applied, he believed, the pump would diminish the impact of 

campfires that got out of control.89 

The technology had severe limits; horse-pulled engines required more than simple 

storage. The utility of the machine depended on a corral full of horses and nearby pasture, 

close enough to quickly round up the animals when the call came, but large enough to 

allow them to graze and run to stay healthy. Without the animals in the early automotive 

era, crews could not bring the equipment to a fire in a timely fashion. Payne asserted that 

even these rudimentary pumping engines were an improvement over anything the park 

possessed. He hoped the Service would purchase enough to supply a number to Glacier 

National Park. The NPS did not provide equipment in 1920, but planned to seek an 

appropriation the following fiscal year.90 

The National Park Service found that fire fighting demanded cooperation with 

nearby national forests. The Forest Service had long promoted such cooperation, 

encouraging private timber protective associations in the Northern Rockies and 

supporting other ways to assure a strong response to fires. Other federal representatives, 

88 Superintendent’s Annual Report, Glacier National Park, 1919, 22; Superintendent’s Annual Report, 

Glacier National Park, 1920, 16, Glacier National Park Archives, Glacier National Park, MT. 

89 W. W. Payne to Director, May 17, 1920, NARA, RG 79.7 Glacier National Park, Box 22. 

90 Ibid. 

39 
 

 

 

especially the area’s grizzled foresters, contributed resources and expertise every time a 

major fire started. This powerful presence helped negate the sometimes half-hearted 

enthusiasm of local residents. Park superintendents recognized the interrelated nature of 

fire fighting and followed the Forest Service lead, even as the two agencies grappled for 

control of federal land management. Superintendents complemented their peers at the 

Flathead, Blackfeet, and Lewis and Clark National Forests.91 The Service joined an 

existing model of cooperation. 

After a significant fire at Glacier in 1921, the National Park Service did as much 

as it could to develop a fire protection system there. Consistent recommendations 

emanated from the park, asking for more rangers for patrols in the summer, advocating 

construction of fire patrol and boundary trails, and employing fire guards in especially 

bad years. By 1922, lookout cabins were on the priority list, as was a cross-park 

telephone line to alert people in case of fire. In 1923, Glacier built telephone lines to 

Huckleberry Mountain, Riverview Mountain, and Indian Ridge – now called Numa 

Ridge – and established lookouts. In 1925, the park purchased twelve pumps, its first 

genuine capital outlay for fire protection, and the new equipment proved an effective 

response to the ongoing fire problem.92 

Fire remained an ongoing problem throughout the national parks, a combination 

of individual behavior, lack of resources, and lack of statutory authority to enforce 

standards limited the response of the National Park Service. Even in the early 1920s, the 

Service lacked an appropriation to fight fire. Each year, at the end of the fire season, 

national parks presented their bills for fire fighting to the Washington office, which 

sought special congressional appropriations to restore much needed operating dollars to 

the parks. This cumbersome system resulted from the fact that Congress had yet to 

contemplate a formal structure for managing fire on federal lands.93 

Only in 1922 did the National Park Service receive its first direct appropriation 

for fire fighting, a $25,000 lump sum for the entire system. The Service’s budget had 

remained small because of the errant presumption that the parks would pay for 

themselves that existed since the founding of Yellowstone. This assumption made asking 

for a base budget, much less an additional appropriation, a difficult task. The small sum 

of $25,000 seemed an inconsequential amount after the spate of recent fires, but it 

paralleled what had become a congressional pattern of after-the-fact deficiency spending 

to solve specific problems in parks. In 1920 alone, when the entire NPS operating budget 

was $907,070, Congress appropriated $25,000 for fire prevention above Yellowstone’s 

base budget of $250,000. The same year, Glacier National Park received $62,000 in 

deficiency spending above its regular allotment of $85,000. Even as the NPS operating 

budget grew to $3,027,657 in 1925, the $25,000 allotment was a congressional stopgap, a 

way to appear to address a growing problem and to eliminate the consistent parade of 

91 Superintendent’s Annual Report, Glacier National Park, 1918, 35; Superintendent’s Annual Report, 

Glacier National Park, 1919, 22; Superintendent’s Annual Report, Glacier National Park, 1923, 8, Glacier 

National Park Archives, Glacier National Park, MT; Hal K. Rothman, “‘A Regular Ding-Dong Fight’: 

Agency Culture and Evolution in the Park Service-Forest Service Dispute, 1916-1937,” Western Historical 

Quarterly 20 2 (May 1989), 141-61. 

92 Superintendent’s Annual Report, Glacier National Park, 1921, 21; Superintendent’s Annual Report, 

Glacier National Park, 1923, 15; Superintendent’s Annual Report, Glacier National Park, 1925, 11, Glacier 

National Park Archives, Glacier National Park, MT. 

93 Pyne, Fire In America, 266-72. 

40 
 

 

deficiency spending requests. The limits on it were clear: the money could only be used 

to fight fire, not to engage in fire prevention strategies, practices, and tactics. Inadequate 

even in a year with few fires, the sum represented an important first step.94 

The $25,000 sum became the standard allocation during the rest of the first half of 

the 1920s, an annual addition to the NPS’s small budget that allowed the Service to 

mitigate at least some of the impact of fire. In most years, it did not cover its total 

expenditures for fire fighting, and large fires still necessitated specific after-the-fact 

legislation to recoup costs. However, a line-item appropriation in the annual budget 

represented a different way of thinking about the impact of fire on the park system.95 

The small national appropriation assured that as late as the mid-1920s, the 

National Park Service spent dollars from park appropriations to fight fires. Fire remained 

a local responsibility, fought with the existing budget and whatever workpower a 

superintendent could cajole from the surrounding area. NPS rangers often fought fires 

outside park boundaries, not only to keep fires away from parks, but also to create a 

community of interest that allowed park officials access to non-NPS firefighters when a 

park needed them for a fire within its borders. The agency also paid cash for outside fire 

fighters, but finding resources was a difficult process that invariably drained the pool of 

money for other park activities. Maintenance on roads and trails halted when blazes 

demanded workers, and the dollars allocated for such activities disappeared into the 

smoke of any major fire.96 

The lack of national resources left an inordinate amount of discretionary decisionmaking at the local level. In general, the early National Park Service was a hierarchical 

organization. Communications between superintendents and the NPS’s upper echelon 

often resulted in attempts to impose national-level solutions on local problems. Unlike 

the Forest Service, which encouraged decentralized authority and local adaptations, 

senior NPS officials favored policy emanating from its core and implemented in 

individual parks. But without financial resources to support these directives, 

superintendents exercised much greater leeway than Washington cared to admit. 

Responding to fires, this deviation from Service norms was even more pronounced.97 

The lack of resources devoted to fire complicated an already difficult situation. In 

the 1920s, the Service had already divided fire management into two competing models. 

The first, fire exclusion, required suppression; the second, fire use, involved light 

burning. In choosing between these, the National Park Service faced an important 

dilemma. The Service could look to its own heritage, with the Army, or to the Forest 

94 Fourth Annual Report of the National Park Service, 1920 (Washington, D.C.: Government 

Printing Office, 1920), 278-301; Report of the Director of the National Park Service for the Fiscal Year 

ended June 30, 1927 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1928), 104-17; Barry Mackintosh, Visitor 

Fees in the National Park System: A Legislative and Administrative History (Washington, D.C.: National 

Park Service, 1983), 2-10; John Ise, Our National Park Policy: A Critical History (Baltimore: Johns 

Hopkins University Press, 1961), 619-24. 

95 Arno B. Cammerer to Secretary of the Interior, September 15, 1922; Arno B. Cammerer to 

Secretary of the Interior, June 11, 1924, NARA, RG 79.7., Glacier National Park, Box 23. 96 Superintendent’s Annual Report, Glacier National Park, 1924, Glacier National Park Archives, 

Glacier National Park, MT, 8. 97 Ronald A. Foresta, America’s National Parks and Their Keepers (Washington, D.C.: Resources for 

the Future, 1984), 21-37; Hal K. Rothman, Preserving Different Pasts: The American National Monuments 

(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 67-92; Harold K. Steen, The United States Forest Service: A 

History (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1976), 76-78, 98-99. 

41 
 

 

Service, which had absorbed and remade the military example. At the local level, some 

superintendents departed from both models and employed light burning. Under this 

model, parks managed fire as best they could, choosing practices based on the application 

of their very limited resources. Officials might selectively let fires burn, as much a result 

of the lack of funds for firefighting as for any ideological reason. 

At the national level, the Park Service naturally leaned toward the Army-Forest 

Service suppression paradigm. Their only model for such management practices was the 

military and Forest Service experience in the national parks. The U.S. Army had served 

as important stewards beginning in 1886 and the military approach to fire-fighting had 

been the dominant paradigm. In both the California parks and Yellowstone, soldiers 

formed the backbone of fire-fighting manpower. To the early National Park Service, this 

policy made considerable sense. Its problem was finding a way to replicate the Army’s 

approach without having the resources of the War Department at its disposal. 

Sequoia National Park provided a rare testing ground for alternative ideas about 

fire. As a species, sequoias offered a natural counter to the idea that suppression was a 

sound management alternative. The big trees had existed for millions of years and fire 

was essential to their propagation. When the National Park Service implemented a 

suppression approach, underbrush no longer burned regularly, increasing the fuel load 

surrounding the trees. Fires that had once nurtured the sequoias suddenly became capable 

of damaging them. An important symbol of the national park ideal, the sequoia was 

peculiarly vulnerable to management efforts that did not take the species’ ecological 

context into account. From the first moment the NPS stopped a fire in the sequoias, wellintentioned Service officials inadvertently endangered one of the symbols they and the 

American public most cherished. 

Superintendent Col. John R. White of Sequoia National Park became the 

Service’s most vocal proponent of light-burning. White watched the light-burning 

controversy with interest throughout the 1920s, engaging in a vigorous debate with 

Horace Albright, himself an unabashed proponent of suppression. The two squared off 

with vigor, both pointing to their experiences as justification for their perspective. White 

found himself with what was in essence an unfunded mandate, to which a little bit of 

burning in a controlled way was an effective and inexpensive solution. The powerful 

Albright was both a product of the age in which fire was an enemy and a canny 

bureaucrat who recognized the need to toe the line on policy if he wanted to secure some 

of the benefits for his agency. Raised in the California desert, Albright was as hard as the 

climate that produced him. He was not one to brook dissent on such an important topic, 

and with his vast influence and reputation for punishing opponents, much of the Service 

rallied around him for political as well as ideological reasons. Charles Kraebel at Glacier 

National Park weighed in, calling light-burning an “ogre,” after Albright himself called 

the practice “unsound and fraught with an enormous amount of danger.” Isolated, White 

persisted, asking for a new look at the idea. He even tried a number of controlled burns at 

a time when suppression was the rule in fighting park and forest fires.98 

White became an advocate of controlled burning, applying it within Sequoia 

whenever possible. He watched the aftermath of the disastrous California fires of 1924 – 

98 Arno B. Cammerer to Colonel White, September 8, 1924; Horace M. Albright to Sir, September 

15, 1924; John R. White to Arno B. Cammerer, September 20, 1924, Fire Records, 1904-1930 Man – U – 

Box 275, Folder 2, Sequoia National Park. 

42 
 

 

 

 

 

which largely missed the national parks – and recognized the flaws in the National Park 

Service’s suppression strategy. White complained in 1926 that suppression practices 

contributed to the worst fire in the region’s history, a 120-square mile blaze that 

destroyed ten square miles of park timber that year. The “forest floor is thick laid with a 

mass of combustible pine needles, branches, logs, and snags,” he insisted in his 1926 

annual report, “which makes a fire almost impossible to control.” White devised his own 

remedies, national policies to the contrary. In at least one instance, White ordered his 

men to burn an area – much to their consternation – and with a staff of rangers, the first 

intentionally ignited controlled burn in the park system was a success.99 

White held a minority perspective. The institutional power of the Forest Service 

and its role as the lead agency in firefighting gave it primacy, subordinating all other 

points of view to suppression. State-level decisions confirmed this pattern. In 1923, a 

California government agency ruled against light-burning. The 1924 Clark-McNary Act, 

which allowed federal assistance and grants of aid for fighting forest fire, effectively 

turned fire protection into the basis for cooperative forestry and federal-state relations, 

and light burning disappeared from discussions about fire management. Chief Forester 

William Greeley regarded the Clark-McNary act as his finest moment, for it cemented the 

Forest Service’s leadership in the field, gave that agency control of considerable 

resources for forest and fire management, and assured some measure of federal control 

over what went on in U.S. forests. The Act provided rapid results. In 1928, the Forest 

Service received $1 million for the prevention and suppression of forest fires.100 

Throughout the 1920s, the National Park Service worked to standardize 

management, creating not only an administrative infrastructure but independent 

specialized divisions as well. The Washington, D.C., headquarters grew in strength, with 

Albright as its chief legislative liaison even as he served as superintendent of 

Yellowstone. Without an intermediate layer of management, superintendents 

communicated directly with the nation’s capital, bringing local problems squarely into 

the view of Service leadership. The NPS’s only field office, in San Francisco, handled 

facilities development, adding the beginnings of what became interpretation and resource 

management in the early 1920s. Californians were prominent in development of 

interpretation and resource management. The appointment of Ansel F. Hall, another 

University of California graduate, as the Park Service’s first chief naturalist in 1923, 

began a process of promoting innovative park-level staff to leadership positions. 

Naturalists often were assigned responsibility for fire management at the park level, and 

Hall was set up to be the counterpoint to the well respected White.101 

By the mid-1920s, the National Park Service’s response to fire was pulled 

between policy and operational realities. The Service had committed to the ideal of 

cooperation inspired by the Clark-McNary Act, in the process ceding the dominant 

99 Superintendent’s Annual Report, Sequoia National Park, 1926, 10. 

100 Act of June 7, 1924 PL 68-270, Ch 348, 43 Stat 653; Laws and Legislation, 1924: Clarke-McNary 

Act, U.S. Forest Service Headquarters Collection, Forest History Society, Durham N.C.; William G. 

Robbins, A History of National, State, and Private Cooperation (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 

1985), 85-104; Pyne, Fire in America, 353-57. 101 Shankland, Steve Mather of the National Parks, 262; Donald W. Swain, Wilderness Defender: 

Horace M. Albright and American Conservation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970); William C. 

Winkler and Merrie H. Winkler, “Ansel F. Hall, 1894-1962,” in William Sontag, ed., National Park 

Service: The First 75 Years (New York: Eastern National Park and Monument Association, 1991), 21-22. 

43 
 

 

position in fire suppression that national parks had held under the Army to the Forest 

Service in return for access to that agency’s increasing skill and the vast resources that 

stemmed in no small part from the Clark-McNary Act. Albright’s power and standing 

guaranteed that the National Park Service would choose his view over White’s. It was 

one thing to swear loyalty to the principle of suppression, joining the family of federal 

agencies and state governments committed to following the Forest Service’s lead. 

Implementing such a policy on the ground was a far more complicated task. 

Still, individual parks made strong progress in light burning. Under John White, 

Sequoia National Park implemented a full-fledged fire regime. He directly countered 

existing National Park Service policy, initiating what amounted to controlled burns on a 

number of plots and experimenting with the strategic use of fire throughout Sequoia. This 

served as one model, a direction that made the headquarters leadership more than a little 

uncomfortable. Not only did it challenge NPS policy, it ran directly against the dominant 

current in the Forest Service, where the decisions about allocating resources the Service 

desperately needed were made. White was able to engage in a clear violation of National 

Park Service policy for two distinct reasons. First, he commanded great respect within the 

agency, his service dating almost to the founding of the Service; second, he had the good 

sense to keep the knowledge of his practices within a small circle, many of whom were at 

least ambivalent about suppression as a goal. 

The countervailing force, the place where the NPS followed the Forest Service’s 

pattern, was Glacier National Park, which by 1926 seemed to be prepared to grapple with 

fire. In the course of the decade, a combination of factors, including funding, equipment, 

and technology, had changed this park from a place where fire had been a consistent 

problem to one where the Service had mustered the limited resources it had to fight fire 

and officials believed they had a plan to successfully battle it. Even the replacement of 

Superintendent Walter Payne with Charles Kraebel, a veteran of the Forest Service, 

reflected a new National Park Service aggressiveness about fire. Kraebel promoted 

himself as knowledgeable about fire, engaging in debate with well-known authors about 

the efficacy of light burning. A new era seemed ready to dawn, but whatever confidence 

developed was shattered in August 1926, when the worst fires to hit the Inland Northwest 

since 1919 began.102 

By the beginning of August, Glacier National Park already had wrestled with a 

number of fires. Summer weather conditions mirrored those of 1910, with extended high 

temperatures, little moisture, and significant winds. Most federal managers were nervous, 

and the behavior of some local residents worsened an already tense situation. In June, a 

fire from a logging operation run by George W. Slack of Belton, Montana, spun out of 

control. To fight it required park pumps and two rangers. In forceful language, Kraebel 

informed Slack that “the entire responsibility of [the fire] rests with you,” that Slack had 

to provide workers to control of the fire until it was “dead out,” and that Slack would be 

expected to pay the fire-fighting costs. Slack ran a salvage operation within the park on 

contract and had been negligent in complying with his obligations. The fire seemed one 

102 John R. White to Arno B. Cammerer, September 30, 1924, Fire Records, 1904-1930, Man – U – 

Box 275, Folder 2, Sequoia National Park; Superintendent’s Annual Report, Sequoia National Park, 1925, 

4; Charles Kraebel to Arno B. Cammerer, September 3, 1924; Charles Kraebel to The Director, telegram, 

August 15, 1925, NARA, RG 79.7, Glacier National Park, Box 23. 

44 
 

 

more consequence of a sloppy operation and in a season with elevated risk of fire, a 

particularly dangerous one.103 

By the end of July, fires had created a crisis in park management. Blazes started 

in five separate locations in Glacier, spreading so rapidly that by August 1, 19,000 acres 

of timber were burned or in serious danger of burning. Among the sites were fires along 

Fish Creek, on the North Fork of the Flathead River and on the Blackfeet National Forest, 

west of the park boundary. The earliest of these originated in the national forest on July 7 

and jumped the park boundary five days later. Kraebel responded with the resources at 

his disposal, but not as vigorously as people in the area had hoped. Some residents 

expressed their ire. One of them, W.A. Boz, held a personal grudge against Kraebel. 

Boz’s relationship with Montana Senator Thomas J. Walsh, an early nemesis of the 

Service, earned his complaints a serious hearing. In response, the Department of the 

Interior dispatched Horace M. Albright, Mather’s right-hand man and at the time, 

superintendent of Yellowstone, to Glacier to take charge of fire fighting inside the park. 

On August 3, Albright filed his first report from the blaze. He announced the 

establishment of eight fire camps with a force of 425 men. As always, the adept Albright 

demonstrated rapid control of a situation that only days earlier seemed almost beyond 

hope.104 

Even as Albright established the solid administration for which he was known, a 

new fire started. Slack, the logger who had been reprimanded earlier in the year, 

continued to operate within Glacier. On July 31, with a high wind blowing, the gasoline 

tank on one of Slack’s trucks exploded, igniting a fire that spread quickly in the high 

winds. It crossed Fish Creek, and reached Lake McDonald, one of the primary features of 

the park. Albright feared that it would ruin that scenic section of Glacier although the 

terrain it contained was “the most difficult [he] had ever seen” for fighting fire.105 

This particular fire devastated the land it burned, much as had the initial fire in the 

Blackfeet National Forest. It was as “intensely hot,” Albright noted, as the one that had 

started in the national forest. The understory, the combustible material that built up on the 

ground in the absence of sporadic fire, was particularly thick, mute testimony to the 

success of localized fire suppression since 1910. “The timber is thick and heavy, and the 

ground is covered with brush, down timber, and deep humus of pine needles and rotten 

leaves,” Albright observed.106 Although no one at the time recognized the connection, the 

Lake McDonald fire graphically illustrated the inherent problem of suppression. Success 

in fighting all fires thickened the understory and created a more powerful fuel load, 

guaranteeing a hotter and more destructive fire when an area finally did burn. 

Albright recognized the danger of the Lake McDonald fire and mustered all the 

resources that could be spared. He drafted 100 men from construction crews, moving 

them to the west side of Lake McDonald on August 5. In the next twenty-four hours, they 

trenched the fire to the summit of Howe Ridge, blunting its advance. At the same time, 

high winds – the most powerful that many long-time Montanans recalled ever 

103 Charles Kraebel to George Slack, June 6, 1926, NARA, RG 79.7, Glacier National Park, Box 23. 104 Arno B. Cammerer to Stephen T. Mather, July 31, 1926; Department of the Interior, Memorandum 

for the Files: For Immediate Release, August 3, 1926; Arno B. Cammerer to H. A. Noble, August 3, 1926; 

Horace M. Albright to The Director, August 4, 1926, NARA, RG 79.7, Glacier National Park, Box 23. 105 Horace M. Albright to The Director, August 4, 1926; Horace M. Albright to The Director, August 

14, 1926, NARA, RG 79.7, Glacier National Park, Box 23. 106 Horace M. Albright to The Director, August 4, 1926. 

45 
 

 

experiencing – drove the West Huckleberry fire down the north slope of Apgar Mountain 

until it merged with another branch of the Lake McDonald fire. The meeting of the two 

fires, Albright told Mather, “compelled considerable readjustment of our fire fighting 

organization.” Digging trenches in front of these fires required the redeployment of a 

number of the men and took almost four days to accomplish. By August 14, Albright felt 

he had the majority of fires under control. Only a little trenching work remained, he 

reported, and nearly all the fires were contained. Rain would accomplish the rest.107 

The Glacier fires in 1926 were a disaster for the National Park Service. Not only 

did more than 50,000 acres of timber burn at a cost of almost $230,000 even as the NPS 

employed 3,583 men to battle the blazes, but the Service also found itself on the political 

defensive. Many elected officials on the northern plains already evinced strong antifederal government sentiments, a legacy of earlier struggles about federal reservation of 

land as well as of conflicts with Mather’s agency. Attacked by the powerful Senator 

Walsh, the fire situation challenged the dependability of its park superintendent, an 

experienced Forest Service man, and even the adroit Albright. A complicated ecological 

event landed in a distinctly political context. Worse, the Service had to fight these fires 

without even the promise of resources. The National Park Service had only $38,000 in its 

budget for fire management in the entire system.108 

The gaps in the National Park Service’s fire management system were never more 

apparent. For years, superintendents had complained of the inadequacy of fire strategy, to 

little avail. This new fire considerably altered the equation. Even Mather’s most trusted 

deputy could not keep the situation entirely under control. Service leaders recognized that 

they faced an adversary with unparalleled ability to disrupt the best plans officials could 

design. Fires threatened the national parks not only as natural spectacles but challenged 

the Service’s credentials as a professional organization capable of administering such 

areas. Unlike political or personal adversaries, fire did not respond to simple 

mollification, could not be buttonholed in congressional corridors, or programmed 

according to annual budgets. 

From the wreckage of the 1926 fires at Glacier National Park came the desire to 

create a new National Park Service system to administer fire. When it burned in the 

summer of 1926, the fire set off a chain reaction that led to the Service’s first fire 

management system. This second major fire season forced it to rethink its fire strategy. 

The 1926 fires acted on the NPS as the 1910 fires had on the Forest Service; they 

galvanized it into a systematic response. While individual parks always had lacked the 

resources to adequately fight major fires, the 1926 fire season elevated that problem to a 

national issue, something that the Service could not expect to solve on its own. NPS 

leaders no longer could simply return fire to park superintendents. They were forced to 

recognize it as a primary issue for agency-wide policy makers. The fires also highlighted 

NPS vulnerability not only to political leaders – something the Service well knew after 

being in existence for a decade – but to local constituencies and the media. These lessons 

contributed to a more sophisticated response to fire in general. 

After a decade in which fire was subsumed in the National Park Service’s 

systematic programs of constituency building, capital development, and land acquisition, 

107 Ibid. 108 “Fire History of Glacier National Park (Based on extracts from Glacier National Park Master Plan 

and other records), NARA, RG 79.7, Glacier National Park, Box 23. 

46 
 

 

 

it finally faced fire in cold, hard way: it could not be dealt with as a local episodic 

problem. Instead, it was a system-wide endemic issue that required leadership at the 

national level. After 1926, fire management demanded much more than a piecemeal 

response and the Park Service responded with new approaches. 

The National Park Service turned to Chief Naturalist Ansel F. Hall, who took on 

the role of Chief NPS Forester after the 1926 Glacier fires. The adept Hall had risen 

quickly in the Service. Hall graduated from the University of California with a degree in 

forestry in 1917 and served as park naturalist at Yosemite from 1920 until his 1923 

promotion to chief naturalist at 29. Even before becoming chief naturalist, he had begun 

an extraordinary career in institutional development, raising private funds for the 

Yosemite museum and showing the creative leadership that became the hallmark of his 

career.109 The selection of the capable Hall as chief forester illustrated the new 

importance of fire management to the Service. 

Such a designation combined different needs for the National Park Service. 

Albright had advocated a more specialized NPS management structure, with experts in 

specific areas of significance. The new approach to fire, the recognition that it was 

system-wide and endemic, required a general manager on the national level. Still, Hall 

had many responsibilities in the Service, limiting the amount of time he could devote to 

fire management. Placing forestry under the naturalist division made sense, but it also 

subsumed fire management to other activities. Within two years, Hall recognized that fire 

management was beyond the capability of NPS naturalists. By some accounts, his 

emphasis on collecting material culture and designing museums helped prompt his 

recommendation to Mather in 1928 to create a position called “fire-control expert.”110 

This job, different from forestry in some ways, reflected not only the growing 

specialization of the NPS but Hall’s recognition that fire management required a great 

deal more time and energy than it had received. 

The move to find a forestry specialist for the National Park Service accelerated 

after Sequoia Superintendent White reopened the light burning controversy. In August 

1928, in the aftermath of a fire that crossed national forest, national park, and state lands, 

White wrote the Los Angeles Times, congratulating the newspaper for resisting 

sensational reporting on the impact of the fire on the national park. The state of California 

suppressed the fire after three weeks, its work complicated by a backfire White and his 

men set. White trumpeted the instance as a positive example of light burning. At about 

the same time, an important California timber business, the Red River Lumber Company, 

announced that it planned to resume light burning.111 In an era when superintendents 

communicated directly with the NPS’s leadership, White had initiated an important 

challenge to accepted policy from the local level. In an instant, fire in the national park 

system had become more than a management issue; it was also a public issue of 

considerable import. 

Even more telling, an investigation into the 1928 fire revealed that the National 

Park Service had been an active participant in fighting the fire, not the detriment that 

109 Winkler and Winkler, “Ansel Hall,” National Park Service: The First 75 Years, 21. 110 Shankland, Steve Mather of the National Parks, 259-262; Swain, Wilderness Defender: Horace M. 

Albright and American Conservation; Winkler and Winkler, “Ansel Hall,” National Park Service: The 

First 75 Years, 21; Pyne, Fire in America, 298. 111 Shankland, Steve Mather of the National Parks, 262; Pyne, Fire in America, 112. 

47 
 

 

 

 

 

some news sources reported. Initial newspaper reports claimed that because of White’s 

belief in light burning, the NPS had not responded to the fire with all of its capabilities. In 

truth, the investigation showed, the Service aggressively fought the fire inside and outside 

Sequoia’s boundaries, and it spent more per acre doing so than any of its counterparts. 

Still, White’s beliefs attracted negative attention and seemed to affect his rangers’ 

morale. Albright often fired people for public disagreements with National Park Service 

policy, but White dated from the earliest days of the Service and remained a proven 

administrator. Rather than level his wrath at a dependable man who had been an 

important part of the NPS so long, Albright simply assured other agencies that White’s 

emphasis on light burning did not reflect NPS policy.112 

The creation of the Forest Protection Board in 1927 further isolated White and his 

viewpoint. The 1924 Clark-McNary Act created the context for greater federal-state 

cooperation through the Forest Service and the board was established in 1927 to 

coordinate fire management activities among federal agencies. Dominated by the Forest 

Service and its increasing fire hegemony, the board became the primary federal policymaking body for forests. Other agencies easily bent to the Forest Service’s perspective. 

Not only had that agency made great strides in fire suppression under Chief Forester 

William Greeley during the 1920s, but the Forest Service still held the only blank check 

for fire fighting. With his calls for light burning, White made the NPS look unruly and 

out of touch, threatening the image Mather and Albright sought for the Service. Colonel 

White’s lone voice was drowned in the Forest Service’s rise to leadership in fire fighting 

and the National Park Service’s acquiescence. 

With the controversy raging, the National Park Service looked for someone with a 

strong background in fire management and the ability to explain and address the different 

facets of this contentious issue. Most of the nation’s fire expertise was housed in the 

Forest Service, throughout the 1920s a common place for the NPS to seek specialized 

professionals. With California figuring so prominently in the light-burning controversy, 

Service officials focused on finding someone with experience in the Golden State. They 

settled on John D. Coffman, supervisor of the California National Forest, now the 

Mendocino National Forest, home to numerous light-burning advocates. An experienced 

forester and forest manager, he brought a compendium of skills and knowledge that the 

NPS had not previously possessed. And he had successfully squelched light burning, an 

attribute that increased his desirability to the Service. If anyone could mend the NPS’s 

tattered reputation about fire, it was someone of Coffman’s stature.113 

Coffman found little to impress him when he became the sole Fire Control Expert 

in the NPS. The National Park Service had devoted little of its resources to creating a 

permanent response to fire. As late as 1929, the Service’s entire fire corps consisted of 

Coffman, a special fire organization at Glacier National Park that was one more result of 

the 1926 fire, and a sole fire guard at Sequoia National Park. Although he actively 

developed larger administrative functions, in particular making the NPS an important 

112 Horace M. Albright to M. B. Pratt, November 1, 1928; Superintendent, Sequoia National Park to 

H. M Albright, November 8, 1928; J. D. Coffman, Memorandum Re: Colonel White’s Letter of November 

8, November 12, 1928, Fire Records, 1904-1930, Box F2, Sequoia National Park. 113 Shankland, Steve Mather of the National Parks, 262; Pyne, Fire in America, 112; Carle, Burning 

Questions, 135-37. 

48 
 

 

 

 

 

presence in the Forest Protection Board, Coffman faced the same problem that had vexed 

the Service since it began. Treated as a local rather than as a national issue, fire did not 

command limited resources. Congress did not allocate sufficient funds to manage fire in 

the parks and the Service’s national leadership persisted in seeing fire as a local problem 

that episodically flared to higher levels. Although Coffman’s hiring was an important 

symbolic gesture, he alone could not reverse what were really four-decade-old trends. 

The dollar figures remained ludicrous; in 1928, the year Coffman was hired, the NPS 

received $30,000 to manage fire on its 6,133,614 acres. Unless, as White argued in 1926, 

the Service could secure appropriations “before rather than after needs arise,” it seemed 

unlikely that Coffman’s expertise alone could solve the issues that the NPS faced.114 

Still, Coffman built the beginning of an organizational structure to address fire. In 

1928, he produced the first Forest Protection Requirements report, a document 

necessitated by the National Park Service’s membership in the Forest Protection Board. 

On the ground, his efforts focused on problem parks, Glacier especially. Neither the 

California parks nor Yellowstone suffered great fires in the late 1920s. Nor did other 

parks experience severe fire seasons during this generally wet time, providing the NPS’s 

first fire boss with a little breathing room. Coffman could focus on his greatest problem, 

Glacier, where his special fire force manned four lookouts on the park’s western side 

while he considered a fifth lookout on Mt. Brown. The Forest Service’s Moran ranger 

station provided training for NPS fire guards and lookouts, providing another measure of 

cooperation between the two feuding agencies. In early summer 1929, park guards and 

lookouts detected and suppressed thirty-seven fires, a major accomplishment. Despite the 

obvious limitations, Coffman recognized progress from his efforts. The primary obstacle 

to greater success remained basic lack of resources that limited the effectiveness of his 

endeavors.115 

Coffman also introduced fire planning to the National Park Service, a major step 

forward. He transferred Forest Service planning procedures, which evolved from regional 

forester and Forest Service stalwart Coert duBois’s classic Systematic Fire Protection in 

the California Forests. Coffman brought the Forest Service’s implementation model to 

the Park Service. The NPS had accepted the ideas in principle before that time, but had 

not acted on them in any systematic way. The duBois model was a plan for efficiency: it 

told how to do better what the Service decided to do, not what it ought to do. In this way, 

policy followed from procedures. The Forest Protection Board mandated the 

development of fire control plans, and in an effort to show its sincerity about membership 

in the organization, the National Park Service ordered fire control plans for all its 

parks.116 

Glacier became the National Park Service’s focal point, for no park in the 1920s 

provided a better example of the need for fire planning. At the time the Service hired 

Coffman, Glacier had become the NPS’s major fire park, and its issues dominated the 

thinking of the Service’s new and enthusiastic fire specialist. In interviews many years 

114 Yearly Report of Superintendent (Col. John R. White), 1926, Man – L – Box 3, Sequoia National 

Park Archives; Pyne, Fire in America, 270, 298. 115 “Fire History of Glacier National Park (Based on extracts from Glacier National Park Master Plan 

and other records), NARA, RG 79.7, Glacier National Park, Box 23. 116 Pyne, Fire in America, 298; Coert duBois, Systematic Fire Protection in California (San 

Francisco, CA: USDA Forest Service, Pacific Southwest Region, 1914). 

49 
 

 

later, Coffman recalled the time as exhilarating. He believed that Glacier served as a 

template for the issues of fire in the national parks, and that if he could solve the problem 

of fire there, he could create a model that would apply throughout the park system.117 

Essentially a one-man fire program, Coffman focused his efforts on Glacier National 

Park because its situation seemed to him both most critical in the need for response and 

most characteristic of the problems he found his new agency facing. 

In spring 1929, Coffman and Chief Ranger F.L Carter drafted a fire control plan 

at Glacier National Park, the very first such effort in any national park area. The 

document outlined an organizational structure, with the park’s chief ranger as its fire 

chief and each district ranger responsible for prevention within his area. All lowerechelon fire crewmembers reported to the district ranger. A dispatcher at the park 

headquarters initiated action on all fires and kept track of the disposition of crews and 

fire-fighting equipment. The plan dictated reporting requirements, emphasized the need 

for cooperation with other agencies, and provided instructions for maintenance of 

communication sets and other equipment.118 

That plan proved a model for the National Park. Beginning in 1930, Coffman 

initiated the fire plans at other parks. Remarkable attention to detail accentuated the 

gravity of the issues addressed in the plan, the emphasis on structure reflected both the 

military character of the early National Park Service and the inherited legacy of the 

Forest Service’s need for close administration of its decentralized agency. The tight 

organization the plan demanded spoke volumes about the need for precision and 

dependability when fire struck. For the better part of a decade, in Coffman’s estimation, 

the Glacier plan stood as the Service’s best.119 It served as clear proof of the impact 

Coffman had on agency fire policy. 

The reality of fire differed greatly from even the most meticulous plans, and 

another serious fire at Glacier seriously challenged Coffman’s structure. In August 1929, 

just a few months after the plan had been adopted, a fire broke out in slashings cut by the 

State Lumber Company on private land ten miles from the park boundary. The fire began 

at 4:40 pm on Friday, August 16, and was reported almost instantly. Thirty-five men 

promptly fought the fire, a number that quickly increased to 165, but they could not stop 

it in the dry conditions and high winds. Wind proved the catalyst for the fire’s rapid 

spread, negating the efforts of men on the fire lines and pushing the fire beyond the 

trenches they had dug. The NPS watched carefully during the first few days, its rangers 

visiting the fire camps outside Glacier. As late as August 18, most agreed that the fire 

would not reach the park. That expectation proved too optimistic. “The wind blew hard 

all Sunday night,” Coffman recounted in his summary of the fire, and on August 21, five 

days after it began, it jumped the park boundary. 

A crown fire “of the most destructive type,” Superintendent J. Ross Eakin later 

wrote in his annual report, the Half Moon fire was “beyond human agency to stop.” 

Immediately, the call went out for reinforcements. Coffman arrived at Glacier on August 

23 to bring administrative and front-line experience. The NPS hired temporary fire 

117 John D. Coffman, interview by Herbert Evison, October 29, 1962, Herbert Evison Papers, Western 

History Collection, Denver Public Library, Denver, Colorado. 118 Glacier National Park Fire Control Plan: Instructions for the Fire Protection Organization, NARA, 

RG 79.7, Glacier National Park. Box 976. 

119 John Coffman interview, October 29, 1962. 

50 
 

 

 

fighters but could not stop the blaze. It burned through the park, missing the headquarters 

building by a half mile, but burning buildings at Apgar and scorching about two miles of 

shoreline at Lake McDonald. In the end, the fire raged for more than two weeks. “Despite 

desperate efforts to check it,” Horace Albright observed, the fire proved its “particular 

viciousness.” Only after a rain in early September did the fire die down enough to allow 

fire crews from other parks to begin to return to their regular duties. Finally, on 

September 5, Glacier declared the fire under control. In the final damage assessment, as 

much as 50,000 acres of timber inside the park burned and an equal amount of damage 

outside its boundaries was reported.120 Fighting the fire cost more than $120,000 and 

required more than 700 firefighters at the peak. 

The analysis of the Half Moon fire represented a new dimension in the Service’s 

response. Coffman took the lead, authoring an authoritative twenty-page report that 

included a chronology, the various perspectives, and the most solid analysis of a fire the 

NPS had yet produced. By the time the blaze began, the National Park Service had 

successfully suppressed twenty-nine fires inside Glacier and another fourteen beyond its 

boundaries in 1929 alone. Coffman was “justly proud” of this record and regarded this as 

proof of the NPS’s efficiency. In his view, suppression required “quick detection 

followed by quick attack with an adequate number of firefighters.” The Service met that 

test all year; Coffman believed that the failure of the private timber company to provide 

rapid response was the factor that allowed it to spread to Glacier.121 

Coffman strongly defended the Service. Understaffed, National Park Service 

crews concentrated on protecting government property, particularly the park 

headquarters. This decision drew the ire of private landowners inside Glacier’s 

boundaries. Some even demanded payment for the work they did to protect their own 

property. Coffman persuasively argued that landowners outside the park provided their 

own fire protection, often hiring firefighters from the same pools of labor that the 

National Park Service utilized. He saw no reason landowners inside Glacier should 

expect preferential treatment and saw even less justification for their claims of 

reimbursement. Superintendent Eakin made a convincing argument that the destruction of 

the park headquarters, a $200,000 investment, would have crippled the National Park 

Service’s fire-fighting response. “Had Headquarters burned,” he insisted, “we would 

have been practically helpless to combat the fire after the high wind subsided . . . . Had I 

scattered our forces and lost Headquarters, my position would be untenable.”122 

Even more, the National Park Service learned important lessons about the power 

of the fire. Half Moon was truly stunning, a fire that fed on itself and spread as a result of 

brutal weather conditions. It had been quickly detected, but even rapid reporting did not 

allow a more comprehensive response. Instead, Half Moon mirrored the fires of 1910 and 

1926 at Glacier, in which people did what they could, but only the rain on September 2 

dampened the fire and made control possible. 

120 Superintendent’s Annual Report, 1929, 1; Fire History of Glacier National Park: Based on extracts 

from Glacier National Park Master Plan and other records, 2; Horace M. Albright to Walter Newton, 

October 25, 1929, NARA, RG 79.7, Glacier National Park, Box 254. 121 John D. Coffman, “Review of Half Moon Fire – 1929,” NARA, RG 79.7, Glacier National Park, 

Box 254, 1-17. 122 Ibid., 18-20; J. Ross Eakin to the Director, October 12, 1929, NARA, RG 79.7, Glacier National 

Park, Box 254. 

51 
 

 

Half Moon illustrated the agency’s primary problems: catastrophic fire remained 

impossible to contain and its impact negated many of the positive results of planning and 

preparatory work. Coffman’s strategy worked with small fires. But all the preparation in 

the world meant little when faced with an enormous and out-of-control fire. Without 

better technology, more resources, more people, and better planning, the National Park 

Service could not manage large fires. Even more, fires that began outside park boundaries 

asked difficult questions of NPS managers. The Service had to determine whether it 

should fight fires beyond its borders as a preemptive strategy. Half Moon reaffirmed that 

the Service could easily handle small-scale fire on a daily basis; it challenged every NPS 

assumption about how to deal with catastrophic fire. 

In the aftermath of the 1929 Glacier fire, the National Park Service looked for 

guilty parties to help defray the cost as the park tried to cope with the physical and 

psychological damage such a large fire caused. The dilatory nature of the response of the 

State Lumber Company prompted the NPS to consider suing for damages. The company 

asserted that it had fought the fire as well as it could, even surrounding one fire. Its crews 

built ten miles of fire line and John R. Stolze, on behalf of the company, insisted that the 

company’s presence was an asset rather than a detriment when faced with fire. In the end, 

Coffman agreed that the chances of the Service recouping any of its costs were so slim as 

to make a lawsuit impractical.123 Superintendent Eakin was the most affected. He had 

invested a good portion of his resources in establishing a firefighting organization that 

had succeeded for much of a difficult year. Suppression could work, Eakin and Coffman 

were certain, but only when the Service could apply its techniques directly to the fire 

before it exceeded a certain size. 

Even as the National Park Service dealt with the aftermath of the Glacier fire, 

larger economic changes altered the climate in which it operated. The stock market crash 

of 1929 hurt funding prospects. Within a year, the federal government slashed 

expenditures, cut programs, and otherwise sought to staunch the flow of dollars. National 

parks were not immune. The National Park Service’s popularity with the public stood it 

in good stead, but the funding to support programs could not be found, and it entered a 

difficult time. The Service’s role in society seemed frivolous when almost a quarter of the 

nation’s population was out of work. Even the National Park Service’s celebrated 

political cachet did not serve it well after the stock market crash. The loyal Albright, a 

staunch Republican all his life, was rebuked by Ted Joslin, a White House staff member, 

when he quietly informed him that his informal poll revealed that Hoover would lose the 

election. Stunned, Albright realized that in such times, even a popular agency such as the 

NPS had to expect cuts in its resource base.124 

By this time, the Service had accepted suppression and fire exclusion as agency 

policy. Dissent still existed, but it had been confined, isolated, and explained to other 

agencies. The Service’s institutional structure had coalesced during the 1920s, and fire 

control policy became one dimension of that maturation. At the same time, fire exclusion 

was fantasy. No agency, not even the Forest Service, could fight every major fire and no 

one could really do much about major blazes. Available resources were directed to the 

123 John R. Stoltze, “Commentary on “Half Moon” Forest Fires;” Horace M. Albright to Walter H. 

Newton, October 25, 1929, NARA, RG 79.7, Glacier National Park, Box 24. 124 Swain, Wilderness Defender, 206-08. 

52 
places with the highest value, but even those resources were not always sufficient to stave 

off disaster. 

The National Park Service accepted a secondary role in fire suppression, 

subordinating itself to the Forest Service. The Forest Protection Board served as the 

vehicle that made this otherwise awkward relationship between the two agencies 

function. The Forest Service controlled the board and the mutual aid agreements that 

stemmed from it. The National Park Service easily took a lesser role in this process. 

When the NPS needed fire expertise, it went to the Forest Service; when it hired for its 

own fire positions, it filled them by luring away Forest Service staff. As a result, the 

agency’s position developed into a reflection of the Forest Service’s. 

Yet the same dilemmas remained, made worse by the Depression of 1929. The 

National Park Service lacked the resources to fulfill the mandate it laid out for itself. 

Unlike the Forest Service, which by the 1930s had a broad enough institutional base to 

assure more than a tepid response in most circumstances, the NPS had no depth to plumb, 

nowhere near the fiscal reach of the Forest Service when it sought short-term labor such 

as casual firefighters. This poverty turned out to be a disguised blessing, although one 

that the Service leadership did not recognize at the time. Because the NPS could not 

suppress fire with the vigor it wanted, fire and the ecological benefits it brought persisted 

in many places in the national park system. The lack of resources to fight fire prevented 

an overzealous response. 

The lack of agency resources and the prominence of the Forest Service confirmed 

the foresters’ position as the lead federal agency in firefighting. The National Park 

Service ceded any claim it had to a position of primacy, willingly acquiescing to the 

ascendance of the USFS. Through cooperative fire protection, it established national 

hegemony and the Forest Service became the voice of fire management. For its part, the 

National Park Service wished fire would simply go away. Since fire was an endemic 

condition in the parks, the Service moved to quell it and with it, any unfavorable 

publicity it generated. The model for NPS strategy was the Forest Service, which used its 

many friends in Congress to stake out a claim to most of the firefighting resources in the 

country. The rivalry between the two agencies, so vituperative in the transfer of lands, 

was muted in fire policy as the National Park Service accepted a secondary role. 

By the time Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected president in November 1932, four 

years after Coffman had been hired, the National Park Service could point to significant 

improvement in its understanding of how to address fire, but as a result of the 

Depression, no overall improvement in its ability to respond. The agency had become a 

follower rather than a leader. With White’s lone voice advocating controlled burning, 

suppression remained the order of the day, but the agency could not even claim to be able 

to fight major fires. The first sixteen years of National Park Service history taught hard 

lessons about fire: try as it may, the Service could not fulfill its goal of suppressing fire 

with the resources available to it 

53 
 

 

Chapter Three: 

A Decade of Transformation: 

The New Deal and Fire Policy 

Beginning in 1933, a set of dramatic changes in the way the federal government 

operated in the United States led to the implementation of a full-scale National Park 

Service fire management regime. The National Park Service developed and adhered to a 

strategy that almost perfectly mirrored the avid fire suppression tenets of the U.S. Forest 

Service, taking its cues from that agency, and applying the resource-heavy philosophy to 

the national parks. In no small part a result of the influence of people such as the 

agency’s first fire boss, John D. Coffman, the National Park Service embraced the 

doctrine of suppression as the best strategy for protecting national park lands from what 

its staff widely regarded as the scourge of fire. Fire suppression and all it meant 

dominated the NPS view of fire. 

In 933 the NPS finally received the labor and financial resources to implement a 

comprehensive fire management strategy. New resources extended fire protection 

everywhere on public lands. The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), a New Deal fusion 

of labor policy and conservation, provided the manpower to enhance fire control and 

prevention. The National Park Service could finally fulfill its image as the protector of 

pristine nature. The National Park Service suppressed fire because it could secure funding 

and workpower to do so, because the practice was consistent with the management goals 

it had developed during its first fifteen years, and equally important, because it allowed 

the Service to keep its major parks in a condition acceptable to its constituents. National 

parks were seen as the emblem of American nature, a physical manifestation of the 

meaning of nationhood. Expansive forests with mature trees were an important 

component of that image, and preserving the symbol became as important as protecting 

the resource. In effect, this distinction separated the NPS from the Forest Service, giving 

it a broader motive for suppressing fire.125 

The national parks were only part of a larger strategy on federal land. The New 

Deal, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s program to counter the ongoing economic malaise that 

began in 1929, extended resources to every federal agency, and no single entity made 

greater use of them than the Forest Service. National forests received even greater 

largesse than did the national parks and the foresters responded with vigor. With its new 

resources, the Forest Service conceived of an end to historic boundaries in its ability to 

fight fire. It tackled suppression in the backcountry as well as near developed areas. 

The result was a new vision of suppression. If federal agencies operated in a 

climate of uncertainty until after 1932, in the aftermath of the New Deal, they had new 

confidence, derived from the plethora of resources at their disposal and the aggressive 

125 Alfred Runte, National Parks: The American Experience 2d ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska 

Press, 1987), 33-47; Richard W. Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks (New Haven: Yale 

University Press, 1997), 140-44. 

54 
 

 

 

leadership of the Forest Service. The idea that no acre of national forest was beyond the 

foresters’ control reflected American attitudes toward nature: science, technology, and 

resources could bring it to submission. This same extension of reach satisfied federal land 

managers.126 It extended beyond the national forests, to places deep in the backcountry of 

the national parks. 

At the same time, the National Park Service never forgot it was different than the 

USFS and that the foresters represented its main competition. Throughout the 1920s and 

1930s, the two agencies were locked in a fierce struggle over land in which the National 

Park Service gradually gained dominance.127 The rivalry was severe at times, inspiring 

animosity that was at once substantive and petty, meaningful and ridiculous. Fire defied 

administrative rivalry as well as the jurisdictional boundaries between federal agencies. 

Even in the worst moments of internecine conflict, the National Park Service and the 

Forest Service cooperated to prepare for fire and control its consequences. At the same 

time, national parks were different from national forests, and it served the National Park 

Service well to enunciate those differences whenever possible. As the National Park 

Service created a mission of fire management that replicated the actions of the Forest 

Service, it espoused a different agenda for a set of reasons that had more to do with the 

Service’s vision of itself as keeper of American sacred spaces than it did with the goal of 

fire suppression. 

Nor did actual conditions compel the National Park Service to reconsider its fealty 

to the idea of suppression. Again, the Service was fortunate. The drought years of the 

early 1930s coincided with the greatest influx of resources in the agency’s history, and as 

had been the case earlier, fire protection activities dovetailed with other National Park 

Service objectives. They had the added attraction of being able to provide work to 

enough young men to bring the National Park Service to the center of government efforts 

to create jobs for a financially ravaged and despondent nation. In a decade-long push, the 

National Park Service was able to implement a conservation program that combined with 

infrastructure to make a formal regime of suppression possible within national park 

boundaries. 

New Deal resources allowed the National Park Service to expand fire protection 

throughout every major national park.128 Prior to the New Deal, NPS fire response often 

was concentrated on the areas closest to headquarters, visitor centers, campgrounds, and 

other facilities. This situation simply was a function of the available resources. With New 

Deal programming, the National Park Service was able to extend the reach of its 

suppression programs to remote areas in national parks, to monitor distant fires, and to 

construct fire roads and pathways to once isolated locations. Finally confronted by the 

126 David Clary, Timber and the Forest Service (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1986), 94-

106; Ronald Foresta, America’s National Parks and Their Keepers (Washington, D.C.: Resources for the 

Future, 1984), 43-47; Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American 

West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 10-15, 330-34. 

127 Ben W. Twight, Organizational Values and Political Power: The Forest Service Versus Olympic 

National Park (State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1983), 1-16; Hal K. Rothman, “‘A 

Regular Ding-Dong Fight': Agency Culture and Evolution in the Park Service-Forest Service Dispute, 

1916-1937,” Western Historical Quarterly 20 2 (May 1989), 141-61; Hal K. Rothman, American Eden: An 

Administrative History of Olympic National Park, (Draft, December 2003), 1-4; 39-73 128 Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks, 126-27; Stephen J. Pyne, Fire in America: A 

Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 298-99. 

55 
 

 

vast weight of federal resources and the workpower it provided, fire seemed as if it were 

one more of the many natural problems yielding to human ingenuity and technology. 

Before the New Deal, the image of fire protection in the National Park Service 

exceeded the reality of implementation. Without adequate resources, John D. Coffman’s 

meticulous fire plans and the strategies he proposed for the park system remained a faroff ideal. The National Park Service had recognized the problem and created a context for 

addressing it, but until resources were devoted specifically to fire suppression, controlling 

and responding to fire competed with everything else that occurred at a national park. 

The nation’s premier national park, Yellowstone faced the same predicament as every 

other park area. The resources available were not equal to the task of fire management. 

Fire protection – the art of recognizing fire and quickly responding with a suppression 

strategy – became a stand-in for suppression even at the brightest of the Service’s crown 

jewels. 

When Coffman developed in 1929 the first fire analysis of Yellowstone, a source 

of episodic major fires, he announced that protection was “not normally a very serious 

[problem],” as long as crews “discovered and controlled promptly” any fires, preventing 

them from becoming crown fires that would spread uncontrollably. This set a standard, 

creating an expectation that the park would find and address any fire. Coffman believed 

in prompt detection, but found the number of Yellowstone fire lookouts, two – one on 

Mt. Washburn and the other on Mt. Sheridan – inadequate to the task. Neither lookout 

contained sufficient facilities to allow a spotter to spend the day and night. In most cases, 

a fire observer made a daily trip from the nearest station to the lookout post.129 The 

situation at Yellowstone was better than at most parks, but it was far short of what 

Coffman and the National Park Service envisioned. 

Fires in Yellowstone during the summer of 1931, two years after implementation 

of Coffman’s fire plan there, characterized the limits of protection before the New Deal. 

Yellowstone had not experienced a serious fire since 1919, and even before 1931, 

Superintendent Roger Toll worried that the park staff had grown complacent, and was not 

terribly vigilant about fire. After many years without a major fire, they discounted the 

danger. Yellowstone simply did not experience serious fires, many insisted. That 

summer, they were proven wrong. The park faced 112 fires, twenty-five of which 

required fire crews. More than 20,000 acres of timber burned before crews contained the 

outbreaks. No one could claim after 1931 that fire was not a threat at Yellowstone. “The 

experience of the past summer,” Toll drolly observed in his annual report, “has thrown 

this belief into the discard pile.”130 

From another perspective, Coffman’s plan for Yellowstone revealed some 

success: the fires were managed effectively. In a drought year, with a hot dry summer 

following a mild winter with light snowfall, Coffman’s preparatory system assured rapid 

response when a fire started and lookouts quickly discovered its existence. Several fires 

broke out in remote areas in Yellowstone, but the park’s fire stations soon sighted them. 

With hard work from the road maintenance crew and the rangers, and deployment of the 

very caches of fire equipment and supplies that Coffman insisted upon two years earlier, 

the park was able to keep those remote outbreaks from becoming a serious threat. Even 

129 John D. Coffman, “Report on Fire Protection Requirements of Yellowstone National Park, 1929,” 

Yellowstone Box Y-223, Yellowstone National Park Archives. 130 Roger W. Toll, “Annual Report for Yellowstone National Park 1931,” 1. 

56 
 

 

 

 

the worst fire, an 18,000-acre blaze near Heart Lake, was under control at the end of the 

second week of response. Coffman could look at his plans and see real success: 

Yellowstone had experienced a serious fire season but was able to keep the many fires 

from causing severe problems.131 

From Superintendent Toll’s point of view, the plan’s cost to the park was simply 

more than could be borne. He calculated that the total cost of fighting the fires exceeded 

$150,000, stripping Yellowstone of a good portion of its road maintenance budget and 

limiting facilities development. “The entire ranger personnel as far as possible was used 

on fire protection work,” Toll noted, at great cost to nearly every other park program. In 

one instance, efforts to control insects such as mountain pine beetles were drained of 

resources by the cost of fighting fire.132 The fires may have been stopped, he averred, but 

the cost of the fire season impeded every other National Park Service program at its 

premier national park. 

Yellowstone received special attention even during the worst of times. In 1932, in 

part to compensate for the expenditures that resulted from the 1931 fire, the park obtained 

$122,780 in emergency reconstruction and fire-fighting funds and an additional $16,300 

dedicated to forest protection and fire prevention, sums so grand that they represented 

five times the amount allocated for fire in the entire park system just a few years before. 

The injection of resources prompted greater planning and cooperation between federal 

agencies involved in fire fighting in the Yellowstone region. In 1932, three important fire 

conferences took place in the park. The first brought together the heads of all government 

departments and the protection staff in the vicinity to discuss fire principles and to 

develop strategies for cooperation. In addition, Yellowstone convened a summit with 

Forest Service officials to discuss cooperation between the park and the surrounding 

national forests and John Coffman also presented a three-day fire training symposia.133 

That year alone, Yellowstone engaged in more planning than in any previous year. At the 

same time, the park tacitly admitted that managing fire required the cooperation of 

surrounding jurisdictions. 

Yellowstone demonstrated that the conundrum that eternally vexed the National 

Park Service remained: suppression seemed an attainable goal, but the Service could not 

implement it and accomplish all the other priorities that NPS managers, Congress, and 

the public had for the park system. The Service’s most basic priorities remained land 

acquisition and facilities development to accommodate the ever-growing number of 

visitors the NPS encouraged. In this era, landscape architects dominated the National 

Park Service and their leadership vision promoted planning and development. The 

Service sought to expand its domain as well. After 1929, NPS Director Horace M. 

Albright turned much of his attention to acquiring eastern parks and the nation’s historic 

sites.134 When NPS leaders received resources, they still typically devoted them to visitor 

131 Ibid, 1; John Coffman interview by Herbert Evison, October 28, 1962, Denver Public Library, 

Western History Collection, NPS Cons 56 Box 1, Folder C, 6, 13; John D. Coffman, “Report on Fire 

Protection Requirements of Yellowstone National Park,” January 18, 1930, Yellowstone Box Y-223, 

Yellowstone National Park Archives. 132 Roger W. Toll, “Annual Report for Yellowstone National Park 1931,” 2-3. 133 Annual Report of the Superintendent of Yellowstone National Park, 1932, 3-4. 134 Horace M. Albright, Origins of National Park Service Administration of Historic Sites 

(Philadelphia: Eastern National Parks and Monuments Association, 1971), 1-17; Ethan Carr, Wilderness by 

57 
 

 

 

 

 

services or access to national parks. Fire was a recognized threat to those parks, as 

Coffman’s hiring attested, but planning a response and providing the resources to 

implement it were significantly different steps in a long process. As a result, the National 

Park Service continued to respond to fires where and when they occurred, dramatically 

limited by the absence of resources to implement any plan that Coffman might conceive. 

Despite ambiguity about the battle against fire in Yellowstone in 1931, the 

situation provided proof that Coffman had made tremendous progress in developing a fire 

policy. As the 1932 elections approached, Albright and others in the National Park 

Service recognized the scope of Coffman’s accomplishments, and invited him to the 

annual national park superintendent’s conference in Washington, D.C., to brief NPS line 

staff on his efforts. At the time, the superintendent’s annual meeting was the most 

important event in the National Park Service’s operational year and Coffman’s 

appearance accentuated the significance of his work.135 The National Park Service 

granted fire control increasing importance. The NPS cadre of chief field officials heard 

from the man in charge of fire, learning what they might do when the inevitable reached 

them. A significant problem remained: without resources or a staff dedicated to the 

purpose, much of Coffman’s planning seemed beyond the Service’s reach. A plan could 

only be as good as the implementation structure that underpinned it and the National Park 

Service still had little in the way of resources to bring to fire management. 

While Yellowstone’s size and position gave it some flexibility to respond to fires, 

the absence of infrastructure and resources was even greater elsewhere in the system. 

Yellowstone’s privileged status accorded it a disproportionate share of National Park 

Service resources under any circumstances. In most years between 1920 and 1933, 

Yellowstone’s funding exceeded that of the next three national parks combined. If fire 

protection at Yellowstone was inadequate, it was far worse almost everywhere else in the 

park system.136 

Coffman’s hiring had inaugurated a new era in the National Park Service, and he 

spent his first two years in the Service traveling to parks and writing one fire plan after 

another. Although occasionally someone such as Sequoia National Park Superintendent 

John R. White might disagree with him, no one disputed that Coffman was the Service’s 

guiding force as well as the lead person for fire management. Coffman formulated a 

servicewide fire policy, which would require a fire plan from each unit in the system. The 

Glacier National Park plan he began during his first days on the job became the Service’s 

benchmark, the model against which other plans were measured for the subsequent 

decade. His efforts quickly yielded a considerable body of preparatory material. Fire 

plans and information maps for planning a response to fires became standard at national 

Design: Landscape Architecture and the National Park Service (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 

1998), 55-94. 135 Coffman interview, October 29, 1962, 14; Swain, Wilderness Defender, 184-88. 136 Report of the Director of the National Park Service for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1926 

(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1926), 32, 33; Report of the Director of the National Park 

Service for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1926 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1928), 

41-43; Paul Schullery and Lee Whittlesey, Myth and History in the Creation of Yellowstone National Park 

(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 92-99; Chris J. Magoc, Yellowstone: The Creation and 

Selling of an American Landscape (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999), 235-54; Mark 

Barringer, Selling Yellowstone: Capitalism and the Construction of Nature (Lawrence: University Press of 

Kansas, 2002), 1-16. 

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parks. The Clarke-McNary Act of 1924 granted the NPS access to federal fire protection 

funds administered by the Forest Service under a complex array of formulas. National 

Park Service estimates of cost for fire fighting – with estimates of reportable expenses 

permitted under Clarke-McNary, added to plans of response and deployment of 

equipment in the case of emergency – furthered the image of the NPS as a competent, 

professional organization. The new circumstances even enhanced the coveted pseudomilitary image of the NPS, already accentuated by the olive drab, World War I era 

National Park Service uniform.137 

The New Deal and the resources it furnished changed the context in which the 

National Park Service operated. The largess permitted the implementation of Coffman’s 

program, a significant fire suppression regime backed by enough workpower and 

resources to inspire confidence in the idea of fire suppression in the national parks. 

President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s constellation of programs to revive the U.S. economy 

and with it the national spirit transformed the country. The New Deal inaugurated 

powerful and lasting changes in the role of government in the United States. Before 1933, 

federal government officials only had a peripheral role in daily life for most Americans. 

Despite the ideals and reforms of the Progressive Era and the pivotal expansion it created 

in government responsibility, most of the changes inaugurated from 1900 to 1932 were 

regulatory in character. By 1933, the federal government contained agencies that 

administered public affairs in the most general of ways, but it still lacked the mechanisms 

to create day-to-day realities for most ordinary Americans.138 

Of a privileged social and economic class, Progressives hewed to a top-down 

vision of U.S. society. They believed that if they made rules and laws, the rest of the 

republic would respect and obey any strictures they created. This vision embodied 

optimism and naïveté but strangely, it worked. In a top-down world, making rules seemed 

enough. Enforcing them was often beyond comprehension. Nor did national institutions 

offer compelling reasons to abide by rules and regulations. Before 1933, most people 

rarely looked to government as a source of employment and sustenance. Government was 

remote and occasionally oppressive, but it was usually far from daily life.139 

The New Deal inexorably altered the relationship between the national 

government and the people. Roosevelt brought a dramatic tenor of activism to 

presidential affairs, a hands-on approach to the nation’s needs. The years following 1929 

had been hard on Americans, hard on their pride and sense of destiny. After the 

Depression began, people began looking to national leadership for direction and 

137 John D. Coffman, “Memorandum for Chief Ranger Baggley,” November 13, 1931, Yellowstone 

National Park, Records of the Branch of Forestry, Forest Fire Reports, 1928-1949, Yellowstone 1933-1941, 

Box 3; John D. Coffman, interview by Herbert Evison, October 29, 1962, NPS CONS 56, Box 1, Folder C, 

Western History Section, Denver Public Library, 9-13; Foresta, America’s National Parks and Their 

Keepers, 33-37. 138 Richard Polenberg, Reorganizing Roosevelt’s Government: The Controversy over Executive 

Reorganization, 1936-1939 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966), 1-11; Robert M. Crunden, A 

Brief History of American Culture (New York: Paragon House, 1994), 129-59, 185-236; T.J. Jackson 

Lears, No Place of Grace: Anti-Modernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 2d ed 

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 1-58. 

139 William Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (New York: Harper and Row, 

1963), 1-15; Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency (Cambridge: Harvard University 

Press, 1959); Robert M. Crunden, Ministers of Reform: The Progressives Achievement in American 

Culture, 1889-1920 (New York: Basic Books, 1982), 1-27. 

59 
 

 

guidance. During President Herbert Hoover’s term, they did not find what they needed. 

Although one of the best prepared individuals ever to assume the presidency, Hoover did 

not grasp the public’s profound need for inspiration, comfort, and direct assistance. A few 

governors, most notably Pennsylvania Governor and former Chief Forester Gifford 

Pinchot, initiated relief programs, but the administration’s only response was to convene 

the Cabinet daily to toss a medicine ball on the White House lawn to project an image of 

fitness and strength to the nation.140 In the 1932 election, an electorate that wanted 

something he could not provide chased Hoover from office. 

Franklin D. Roosevelt recognized the need for government action, and the New 

Deal’s many programs soon provided work for a distraught nation, primed the pump of 

the sluggish economy, and inspired hope. At the same time, the New Deal transformed 

conservation into labor policy. Under its auspices, conservation programs ranked as 

highly as capital development ventures – both put large numbers of people to work. 

Under New Deal programs, more work was done on federal land than had been 

accomplished in the forty years since conservation became a recognized ideal. The 

Tennessee Valley Authority, an enormous regional planning program designed to help 

the impoverished people of Appalachia, provided one component, as did programs to 

rehabilitate overgrazed Indian reservation lands and the Dust Bowl regions of Kansas, 

Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas. Conservation required intensive 

workpower. No commodity existed in greater abundance in 1930s America. Conservation 

projects became one of the era’s most essential employment devices.141 

A few weeks into his presidency, Roosevelt proposed that an army of unemployed 

men be sent into the rural parts of the nation to perform basic work on federal and state 

land. They would work in forestry by clearing brush and trees and cutting fire trails, 

preventing soil erosion, and helping with flood control projects. As it developed, the CCC 

became one of the central institutions of the New Deal, part of the process by which the 

federal government put people to work and helped them see a positive future in an 

otherwise dismal economic time.142 

The creation of a federally funded work force gave land management agencies the 

opportunity to implement conservation programs that prior to 1933 had simply and 

completely been beyond their reach. The CCC developed plans for work on federal lands, 

hired hundreds of thousands of young men, and kept them at work in six-month 

increments called “enrollment periods.” Young people flocked to these programs in 

search of opportunity, so scarce in the 1930s, and stayed as long as they could. Even 

more, the establishment of so many federal work relief programs inserted the government 

140 Char Miller, Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism (Washington, D.C.: 

Island Press, 2002), 315-18; Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1-23; Kendrick A. 

Clements, Hoover, Conservation, and Consumerism: Engineering the Good Life (Lawrence: University 

Press of Kansas, 2000), 148-208; Richard Norton Smith, An Uncommon Man: The Triumph of Herbert 

Hoover (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), 7-14. 

141 Hal K. Rothman, Saving the Planet: The American Response to the Environment in the Twentieth 

Century (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000), 60-84. 142 John C. Paige, The National Park Service and the New Deal (Washington, D.C.: National Park 

Service, 1985), 8-18. 

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directly into people’s lives in ways the Progressives never envisioned, and changed 

people’s vision of government.143 

The CCC was a godsend for a struggling nation. It took single men between the 

ages of eighteen and twenty-five and gave them hard physical work on the forests, parks, 

and other public lands of the United States. CCC workers were counted among the 

fortunate during the Depression. The young men lived in barracks, worked six days a 

week for a $30 a month, all but five dollars of which was sent home to their families each 

month. They built roads, trails, firebreaks, structures, and a range of other necessities and 

amenities on public land. During its nine-year existence, more than two million enrollees 

worked in 198 CCC camps in national park areas and 697 camps in state, county, and 

municipal parks. The national forests and other public lands contained countless others. 

Under the bureaus that administered CCC programs – the Emergency Conservation Work 

program (ECW), the Public Works Administration (PWA), the Works Progress 

Administration (WPA), and others – crews built more than one thousand miles of park 

roads and 249 miles of parkways in national park areas.144 

The National Park Service under Horace Albright was nothing if not adaptable. 

The canny NPS director recognized in the New Deal an answer to every resource need 

the National Park Service had. Developing goals that meshed with the New Deal instantly 

became his primary focus. Despite his long history as a Republican, Albright embraced 

the new Democratic administration, making friends among the new leadership with 

dazzling speed. He and Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Interior, the irascible Harold L. 

Ickes, found much common ground. Ickes had been a visitor in Yellowstone in the early 

1920s, and he heard Albright, then superintendent, deliver an impressive talk. Ickes and 

Mather had been close and the secretary, a strong proponent of conservation and national 

parks, wanted to maintain that relationship with Albright. Not only did Ickes spend an 

extra hour with Albright at their first meeting, the relationship grew into weekend tours 

of historical sites in the Washington, D.C., area. A suspicious person by nature, Ickes 

learned to trust the affable if hard-edged Albright, giving the National Park Service and 

its director an edge as New Deal programming developed.145 

With Ickes’s ear, Albright became an important figure in the new administration. 

His support for the New Deal and his recognition of what it could do for the National 

Park Service put him out ahead of the rest of the Department of the Interior. Albright 

cemented this recognition with his characteristic personal touch. On April 9, 1933, the 

director went on the most famous automobile ride in national park history. After lunch on 

a trip to Herbert Hoover’s old retreat on the Rapidan River, Roosevelt told his staff that 

he wanted Albright in the jump seat of his car. In a discussion as the car rolled along the 

Rappahannock River, the director made his case for the transfer to the Park Service of 

historical parks and national monuments administered by other agencies. Albright and the 

president talked about other things, not the least of which was the value to the National 

143 Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 6-9; Rexford Tugwell, FDR: Architect of 

an Era (New York: Macmillan, 1967), i-xiv; Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to 

Power (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), 241-60; Phoebe Cutler, The Public Landscape of the New Deal 

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 1-8, 90-106. 144 Paige, The National Park Service and the New Deal, 21-25. 145 Horace Albright as told to Robert Cahn, The Birth of the National Park Service: The Founding 

Years, 1913-1933 (Salt Lake City: Howe Brothers, 1985), 283-88; Tom H. Watkins, Righteous Pilgrim: 

The Life and Times of Harold L. Ickes, 1874-1952 (New York: Henry Holt, 1990), 550-55. 

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Park Service of the Civilian Conservation Corps. With Roosevelt’s approval and Ickes’ 

beaming support, the director embarked on plans that would change the Service.146 

Long a champion of fire control, Albright drew Coffman into a pivotal role. 

Albright intuited one of the ideas that became a hallmark of the New Deal – 

programming that could be applied across geographical, regional, and even cultural 

differences. Fire control, which required similar deployment of resources almost 

everywhere it was necessary, easily fit such a model. Immediately after Roosevelt’s 

inauguration, Horace Albright assigned Coffman to develop a report that showed how an 

emergency forestry and public works program could be implemented. The idea of CCClike work camps had already been formed, and the ever-astute Albright recognized that 

the National Park Service could play a significant role and reap important benefits.147 

Starting March 15, 1933, Coffman was “busy night and day” developing the 

report that Albright sought. He delivered it on March 28 and awaited further instructions. 

Told to come to the nation’s capital, Coffman arrived on April 3 and promptly joined 

Albright in a visit to the White House to learn what the president had in mind. Colonel 

Louis Howe, Roosevelt’s long-time political operative who served as the most private of 

the president’s private secretaries until his death in 1936, spoke with the two and 

introduced the National Park Service duo and a number of Forest Service and U.S. Army 

officials to Robert Fechner, the man Roosevelt had selected to head the Emergency 

Conservation Work program. Fechner already had a number of plans and Coffman 

discovered he was central to their implementation. “I didn’t realize at the time that it was 

going to be eight-and-a-half months before I saw my family again,” Coffman recalled in 

1962. “During the remainder of that year, I was the busiest I have ever been in my 

life.”148 

Under Albright’s tutelage, Coffman vaulted to a position of influence and power. 

Albright’s close relationship with Ickes landed the National Park Service authority for 

emergency conservation work within the Department of the Interior, as Ickes appointed 

the NPS director as the department’s liaison to the ECW program. Albright in turn 

selected Coffman as his designee to serve in this critical role. The selection affirmed not 

only the importance of fire to Albright, but the director’s faith in Coffman as well. 

Albright “requested me to work up a program of emergency forestry and public works 

that could be carried on by these youth camps that were planned for establishment,” 

Coffman remembered nearly three decades later. This department-wide charge was new 

to the National Park Service, until that time, a secondary bureau in the unwieldy 

Department of the Interior. It also presaged the largest conservation battle of the decade, 

Ickes’ later attempt to create a Department of Conservation under his leadership that 

included the entire Department of Agriculture.149 

The pressure on Coffman was intense. The president set a goal of 250,000 at work 

by July 1, 1933, and although the number strained the limited administrative structure set 

up for the purpose, the National Park Service strove to meet the objective. Coffman 

146 Albright as told to Cahn, The Birth of the National Park Service, 288-90; Swain, Wilderness 

Defender, 219-25. 147 Coffman interview, October 28, 1962; Albright as told to Cahn, The Birth of the National Park 

Service, 292-97; Swain, Wilderness Defender, 219-25; Caro, The Path to Power, 341-51. 148 Coffman interview, October 28, 1962, 13-14. 

149 Coffman interview, October 28, 1962, 14; Watkins, Righteous Pilgrim, 447-594. 

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worked at a torrid pace. In May, the Service had places for 12,600 workers in sixty-three 

camps within the park system. An additional seventy camps were authorized and being 

prepared to accept enrollees. By the July 1 deadline, more than 34,000 people were 

enrolled in 172 emergency conservation work camps within the national park system, and 

the National Park Service had made plans to accommodate many thousands more.150 

The impact of New Deal programs on the National Park Service changed its 

trajectory. The NPS base budget increased from a little under $11 million in 1933 to 

almost $27 million in 1939. In addition, between 1933 and 1937, public works agencies 

poured more than $150 million into projects in the national parks. The number of camps 

in national parks rose from seventy in 1933 to a peak of 115 in 1935, continuing with no 

less than seventy-seven through 1941. In addition, the National Park Service oversaw as 

many as 475 camps each year in state parks throughout the country. As many as 150,000 

enrollees worked in National Park Service programs in the peak years, with more than 

6,000 permanent supervisors.151 

The process transformed the National Park Service’s fire control infrastructure. In 

1930, the entire park system only had seventeen primary fire lookouts. A decade later, as 

a result of the New Deal, sixty primary lookouts and fourteen secondary structures 

offered far more comprehensive ability to recognize and respond to fire. In 1930, the 

National Park Service employed twelve lookout observers and sixteen fire guards. By 

1939, the numbers had increased to fifty-nine lookout observers, fifty-five fire guards, 

and six fire dispatchers paid by Clarke-McNary Act funds to supplement park rangers. 

Many others in the National Park Service and affiliated with it had fire protection as a 

component of their daily responsibilities. In addition, 754 miles of telephone lines, 

twenty guard cabins, forty-seven fire equipment storage buildings, 522 miles of roads, 

1,767 miles of fire trails, 109 miles of firebreaks, and a range of other improvements 

enhanced NPS capacity. The National Park Service also developed fire danger rating 

stations.152 

The sheer number of workers in the program guaranteed that every wish list any 

superintendent in the park system had on hand became a blueprint for action. The eversavvy Albright took note, observing in the agency’s 1933 annual report that CCC crews 

accomplished “work that had been greatly needed for years.” He used the New Deal to 

chastise opponents, pointing to its immediate successes as proof that the Service’s 

approach had been correct. Recognizing the advantage of this new source of workpower 

and funding, Albright championed greater access to funding for the National Park Service 

from the moment he heard of the plan, and the agency’s fate and the CCC were 

completely intertwined throughout the 1930s.153 

Fire prevention became one of primary responsibilities of CCC camps, altering 

the tenor of the NPS’s response to any kind of blaze. After their arrival at national park 

areas, many crews began to construct firebreaks, remove deadwood, erect telephone lines 

for better emergency communication, build lookouts, and engage in other fire protection 

150 Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 11-15; Paige, The National Park Service 

and the New Deal, 11-19; 213. 151 Paige, The National Park Service and the New Deal, 18-19; 213. 152 L. F. Cook, “Forest Fire Protection in the National Park System, 1930-39,” Occasional Forestry 

Note No. 5, March 25, 1940, Sequoia National Park, SNP 42, Box 375, F2, 5-6. 153 Annual Report of the Director of the National Park Service, 1933 (Washington, D.C.: Government 

Printing Office, 1934), 2-4. 

63 
 

 

preparation. In the first year alone, ECW literature claimed that the presence of its 

workers reduced the amount of national park acreage lost to fire by 1,600 acres.154 The 

availability of labor obliterated many of the resource issues that attended fire suppression, 

giving the National Park Service the ability to apply the tenets that Coffman had 

advocated since he joined the Service in 1928. 

The combination of the seemingly endless supply of federal resources, the fear of 

more major fires, and the dominance of the Forest Service in fire policy and planning 

created de facto NPS policy. Successful suppression depended on resources. The 

contribution of federal relief programs to fire management in the park system was 

astonishing in its scope: 688,255 work days of fire fighting and 837,783 work days of fire 

suppression in the course of the program permitted a vision of National Park Service 

capabilities that would have seemed a dream a mere few years before 1933. Even as 

Coffman’s responsibilities in the Roosevelt administration expanded, he thought about 

fire as the forester he was trained to be. The Forest Service model was already accepted 

as the only viable approach. With the obligation to administer programs in other 

agencies, the National Park Service followed the Forest Service lead. This tied the NPS to 

a policy that ran counter to National Park Service objectives in important ways. Fire as 

spectacle, creeping over the edge of Glacier Peak to the delight of tourists, was consistent 

with the Service’s image of its obligation to accommodate visitors. Wild fire, which 

might very well have provided ecological benefit, was not. 155 

The National Park Service’s obligation to manage programs outside the Service 

was even more taxing. Responsibility for department-wide programs was new to the 

National Park Service. Despite forays into assisting state parks during the 1920s, the 

National Park Service usually had minded its own affairs. Only in the middle of the 

1920s did it reach any kind of parity with the Forest Service, equaling that agency’s 

political reach and finding its own cultural values more in tune with the tenor of the 

times. The breadth of the National Park Service’s new responsibility was broad and wide. 

It included programs for the Indian Service, Bureau of Mines and other agencies within 

the Department of the Interior, as well as state parks throughout the nation. As Albright’s 

primary operations manager for New Deal projects, Coffman found himself with 

responsibilities well beyond what he imagined just a few years before as a forest 

supervisor in the Forest Service.156 

To reward Coffman and reflect his new responsibility, Albright created a Field 

Education Division in the NPS’s Branch of Research and Education and appointed 

Coffman division head under Branch Director Dr. Harold C. Bryant. The National Park 

Service already had established a tie between forestry and fire, the same relationship that 

The Forest Service had earlier developed. The arrangement gave the National Park 

Service a fire structure that paralleled the Forest Service’s. Coffman initially balked at the 

appointment. His title in the National Park Service had been “fire control expert,” with 

154 Emergency Conservation Work Press Release, October 23, 1933, NARA, RG 79.4.3, Records of 

Branch of Forestry; Third Report of the Director of Emergency Conservation Work, For the Period April 

1934 to September 30, 1934 (With Certain Data from April 5, 1933 through September 30, 1934), 29-46. 155 Robert Shankland, Steve Mather of the National Park (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953s, 303. 156 Coffman interview, October 28, 1962, 15-16; National Park Service, “Conference of 

Superintendents and Field Officers, Washington, D.C., November 19-23, 1934, 145; Harold L. Ickes, The 

Secret Diary: The First Thousand Days, 1933-1936, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954), 18-19; 

Shankland, Steve Mather of the National Parks, 297-303; Donald Swain, Wilderness Defender, 223. 

64 
 

 

 

the lead responsibility in forestry falling to Ansel Hall, the Berkeley-trained forester who 

served as chief naturalist in the Service. Hall nominally headed the National Park 

Service’s forestry and fire-fighting efforts, but spent most of his time working on 

museums and park interpretation. Coffman’s reticence about the offer was 

understandable. He and Hall had grown close during the more than five years they 

worked together, and he did not want to be seen as usurping his friend and superior. 

Albright reassured Coffman that he was not superseding Hall, and he accepted the 

appointment. The change represented an acknowledgement of the growing importance of 

Coffman and his fire programs. Coffman headed the new division, which vociferously 

promulgated the message of suppression. Coffman’s division became the center of the 

Department of the Interior’s fire management activity, transforming policy into 

practice.157 

When Coffman assessed models, the Forest Service still dominated the field of 

fire management. Well before the beginning of the New Deal, the foresters had made 

suppression their practical religion. Since an important regional foresters’ conference in 

the nation’s capital in 1930, the USFS settled on goals and contemplated the extension of 

their reach in fire management. This theme became a major element of the Copeland 

Report, a 1,677-page behemoth formally titled A National Plan for American Forestry, 

which the Forest Service unveiled just after Roosevelt took office. The tacit question that 

drove Forest Service policy was simultaneously simple and complex: how far could the 

National Park Service extend its systematic fire protection – in geographic, technical, 

administrative, and financial terms. By the early 1930s, the Service enjoyed technical 

capabilities, but complete exclusion of fire remained too much to ask of the era’s 

technologies. An enormous domain and insufficient resources ensured that USFS 

officials recognized limits to their control. Instead, that Service fashioned different 

categories for the fire protection status of its lands: critical, marginal, and acceptable. 

Defining what constituted each category proved far more difficult than creating the 

structure in which they fit. Prompt and thorough protection or no protection at all were 

agreed upon as the available options for response.158 

Even as the National Park Service implemented the USFS ideal of suppression, 

powerful voices in the Forest Service were challenging that model in the aftermath of the 

1934 Selway fires in Montana. Their severity prompted Elers Koch, a prominent forester 

whose personal history with fire stretched back even before the terrible summer of 1910, 

to question the agency’s approach to fire. Speaking of the northern Rockies and the trails 

and roads that the Forest Service had cut to aid fire response, Koch saw a mistake – a 

destruction of wilderness to no avail. He “firmly believed that if the Forest Service had 

never expended a dollar in this country, there would be no appreciable difference in the 

area burned over.” Such a bold critique of existing practice from someone of Koch’s 

stature guaranteed a hearing for the new set of ideas, but in the Forest Service, only the 

innovative Robert Marshall and the brilliant Aldo Leopold supported him. The rest of the 

157 Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks, 126-27; Coffman interview, October 29, 1962, 

16; J. F. Kieley, A Brief History of the National Park Service (Washington, D.C.: Civilian Conservation 

Corps, Department of the Interior, 1940); Harlan D. Unrau and G. Frank Williss, Administrative History: 

Expansion of the National Park Service in the 1930s (Denver: National Park Service Denver Service 

Center, 1983), 245. 158 Pyne, Fire in America, 270-73, 346-50; David Carle, Burning Questions: America’s Fight with 

Nature’s Fire (Westport, CT: Praeger Press, 2002), 52. 

65 
 

 

 

 

National Park Service blamed a lack of resources as the problem and concocted even 

stronger measures to eradicate fire. Despite Koch’s criticisms, suppression remained the 

dominant Forest Service model.159 

Forest Service policies such as the hour control program and the 10:00 a.m. 

standard illustrated that agency’s technical proficiency and its commitment to the 

exclusion of fire. The Forest Service’s research program emphasized fire protection. The 

goals it set – the 10:00 a.m. policy in particular, which specified that all fires be brought 

under control by 10:00 the morning after their sighting or by each successive morning at 

10:00 – were only achievable with the resources of the New Deal. Federal programs such 

as the CCC permitted Forest Service leaders to think about fire in much larger terms than 

ever before. The programs created led to a level of implementation that no earlier era ever 

matched, and they gave the foresters greater autonomy. They no longer lamented the lack 

of the Army that had once helped the Department of the Interior, finding in the CCC their 

own general labor force. Instead, foresters launched the comprehensive modernization of 

the fire management system, replete with the goals of the early to middle twentieth 

century. The Forest Service began to use scientists and other professionals in its research 

program. With this plethora of resources now at their disposal, foresters expected no less 

than the complete conquest of fire. In this, they began to treat fire as they did other 

natural elements such as soil and water. This push for control of nature was the style of 

the era.160 

The National Park Service’s aspirations in relation to fire were more modest. 

Coffman’s roots in the Forest Service provided the National Park Service an advantage as 

it structured its fire and forest planning, but at the same time, what he advocated 

accentuated the USFS vision of fire management. With neither the cosmological 

viewpoint nor the overwhelming dread of fire and its consequences that stemmed from 

the summer of 1910, the National Park Service never quite accepted suppression as more 

than a policy objective. With its vision of protecting nature for visitation, the National 

Park Service utilized USFS procedures, but in a more flexible way. For the USFS, fire 

was a defining antagonist. The National Park Service readily absorbed USFS land and 

some of its practices, but it never reacted to fire as deeply as did the USFS. 

Suppression did become the keystone of NPS policy. Leaders divided the park 

system into different categories. Large western parks, usually in the proximity of national 

forests, always had been the center of thinking about fire. With the threat of major fires 

ever present, parks such as Glacier, Sequoia, Yellowstone and Yosemite implemented 

more widespread suppression programs than ever before. CCC camps spurred the 

process. In 1933, five camps at Sequoia, five at Yosemite, nine at Glacier, four at 

Yellowstone, and three at neighboring Grand Teton National Park attested to the 

importance of fire protection.161 With direct instructions to use CCC resources to enhance 

suppression, the western parks finally had the resources they needed to mount extensive 

programs. 

159 Elers Koch, “The Passing of the Lolo Trail,” Journal of Forestry 33 2 (1935), 98-104; Elers Koch, 

Forty Years a Forester, 1903-1943 (Missoula, MT: Mountain Press Publishing Company, 1998), 91-107; 

Pyne, Fire in America, 278-82; Stephen Pyne, Year of the Fires: The Story of the Great Fires of 1910 (New 

York: Viking Books, 2001), 264-66. 160 Pyne, Fire in America, 272-75. 161 Directory of CCC Camps Supervised by the National Park Service (Updated to December 31, 

1941) (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1942), 1, 4, 7. 

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The results of the CCC presence and the increased emphasis on planning were 

almost immediate. The northern plains experienced the same declining precipitation that 

prompted the Dust Bowl to the south, and by the mid-1930s, conditions were droughtlike. From 1933-1935, Yellowstone experienced acute fire hazards resulting from mild 

temperatures, below-normal precipitation, and the early melting of snow from the 

warmer-than-usual conditions. Despite a large number of fires, the park suffered little 

damage. Some interpreted this as the triumph of fire control, for Yellowstone passed a 

critical test. The new infrastructure and increased resources prevented a replay of past 

bad fire seasons, proving Coffman correct and tempering Superintendent Roger Toll’s 

pleas for vigilance. During 1933, more than 800 men worked on fire protection projects 

that included reforestation, clean-up, and road, trail, bridge, and telephone line 

construction. In 1934, six CCC camps were organized for fire emergencies, with the 

workers divided into “flying squadrons” of fifty fire fighters, with two additional squads 

of forty each. CCC enrollees were attached to ranger stations to act as smokechasers. 

“They have been of invaluable aid in this capacity,” Toll reported, “and in numerous 

cases have prevented small fires from increasing to considerable size because of their 

prompt action, and because of the fact that they were immediately available for fire 

suppression duty.” In 1935, all fire fighting was consolidated under the chief ranger, with 

responsibility for structure fires moved from the aegis of the master plumber to the ranger 

division.162 Fire had new precedence and a coordinated response developed. 

The results were stunning, a testimony to the ability of adequate resources to 

make suppression a successful strategy in specific circumstances. In 1933, Yellowstone 

experienced thirty-seven fires, the largest of which was 850 acres. In 1934, only nine 

fires were reported before June 30. All were minuscule. In 1935, the trend continued: the 

park faced thirty-five fires, only four of which were Class C blazes of ten acres or 

larger.163 In each of the years, Toll had anticipated a severe fire season. Light winter 

precipitation and dry spring weather made the prospect of fire extremely daunting, but 

each of the first three years of the CCC program, Yellowstone was able to control the 

fires it faced. 

The difference at Glacier National Park was equally dramatic. Suppression 

worked so well that until a freak fire on October 4, 1934, the park had kept its net fire 

loss to less than 100 acres of timber for the year. A combination of the workers from the 

park’s nine CCC camps, more than any other single unit in the park system, and the 

deployment of smokechasers and lookouts created a near perfect suppression regime in a 

short time frame. The October 4 fire spread wildly because of unusual circumstances. 

After a snowfall of eighteen inches, the park released its CCC enrollees. “We were so 

certain that our fire season was over,” Superintendent Eivind T. Scoyen observed in the 

aftermath, “that we had put away all our fire equipment for the winter.” With snow on the 

ground, rangers began to burn brush, a common fall practice. During one burn on the east 

side of the park, a “wind of almost hurricane proportions,” as Scoyen recounted, spread 

162 Annual Report of the Superintendent of Yellowstone National Park, 1933, 3; Annual Report of the 

Superintendent of Yellowstone National Park, 1934, 4-5; Annual Report of the Superintendent of 

Yellowstone National Park, 1935, 5; Circular No. 25, October 8, 1935, Superintendent’s Monthly Report, 

October 1935, Yellowstone National Park Library. 163 Annual Report of the Superintendent of Yellowstone National Park, 1933, 3; Annual Report of the 

Superintendent of Yellowstone National Park, 1934, 4-5; Annual Report of the Superintendent of 

Yellowstone National Park, 1935, 5. 

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the flaming material into a crown fire that spread along the North Shore of Sherburne 

Lake. Bringing men from the CCC camps on the west side of Glacier, Scoyen and his 

full-time staff quickly brought the fire under control.164 

Other fires at Glacier National Park presented challenges, with blazes during 

August 1936 proving particularly taxing. A fire on the Glacier Wall on August 18 

became a crown fire before it was detected. With the efforts of almost 500 men, it was 

under control by August 22. A dry thunderstorm on August 22 started ten fires in the park 

and more in the adjacent national forest. More than 200 workers were dispatched to these 

fires, 125 taken from the Glacier Wall fire. Two days later, the combination of rain and 

the addition of 1,200 new workers from the Forest Service put an end to that blaze. A fire 

discovered August 30, a remnant of the August 18 Glacier Wall fire finding new life, 

spread. It quickly became three separate fires: one on McDonald Creek, another a few 

miles north of Granite Park Chalets, and a third near Ahern Pass. The intensity of the fire 

shocked observers. “I have never seen as complete a burn-out as occurred in Swiftcurrent 

Valley,” Scoyen recorded. “With the exception of a few swampy areas, every green 

living thing, from rocks on one side of the valley to the other, has been destroyed.” The 

fire leveled all of the park’s buildings in the Many Glacier area, three of the chalets 

across the road from the Many Glacier Hotel and many of the cabins. The hotel was 

saved because of the efforts of its employees.165 

Many factors contributed to this new ability to fight fire, but the clearest change 

came from the combination of labor and money. The CCC provided something the park 

system had never before experienced: an abundant supply of labor. Superintendents at 

parks with complicated fire histories could direct those resources at fire and came to see 

the New Deal as the solution to their problems. Toll recognized the impact at 

Yellowstone, as did Scoyen at Glacier, White at Sequoia, Charles Goff Thomson at 

Yosemite and many others. Scoyen rated the 1936 fire season as “one of the most 

dangerous ever experienced” in the northern Rockies. “The entire park organization did a 

magnificent job during this emergency,” he informed Director Arno B. Cammerer. 

“Everyone, no matter in what capacity employed, willingly and cheerfully worked day 

and night without any complaint whatsoever, to bring the situation under control.” Even 

Howard Hays of the Glacier Park Transport Company, a friend of the park who was 

sometimes critical of its operations, concurred. “Considering the unprecedented drouth to 

which the Park has been subject,” he told Cammerer, “I feel we have been most fortunate 

to escape without a much greater loss.” As a doctrine, suppression was possible when 

resources were available. When workers cleared underbrush, built roads, trails, and fire 

lines, and especially when lookouts with communications were staffed, reacting to fire as 

Coffman insisted gave the national park system a very good chance of mastering all but 

the most cataclysmic of fires.166 

One of the greatest coups of the 1920s had been the acquisition of the major 

national parks, Shenandoah, Great Smoky Mountains, and Mammoth Cave, in the eastern 

half of the United States. Far more heavily visited as a result of proximity to so much of 

164 E.T. Scoyen to the Director, October 11, 1934, NARA, RG 79.7,, Glacier National Park. 165 E. T. Scoyen to Director, September 10, 1936, Howard H. Hays to Arno B. Cammerer, September 

7, 1936, NARA, RG 79.7, Glacier National Park. 166 J.D. Coffman, Memorandum for the Superintendent, Sequoia National Park, August 6, 1933, 

Sequoia National Park. F275, F2. 

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the nation’s population, eastern parks presented a different set of challenges in 

responding to fire. The humid nature of the region stood in contrast to the aridity and lack 

of water so common among the western parks. Fires were endemic because of human 

behavior. The combination of visitors and long-standing patterns of local use, some of 

which included seasonal burning, made such parks vulnerable not only to the carelessness 

that marked national park visitors across the country, but also to intentional fire-setting. 

National Park Service officials attributed the increase in number of fires during the 1930s 

to the creation of eastern national parks.167 These situations mirrored the problems of 

Yellowstone and Yosemite in the late nineteenth century. In such places, local residents 

continued patterns of use after the establishment of the parks, burning in a casual manner 

that defied suppression efforts. 

At Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky, authorized in 1926, but not 

established until 1941, the National Park Service faced the problem of fire from a new 

perspective. Unlike western parks carved from public lands, Mammoth Cave and the 

other eastern parks had to be bought, parcel by parcel, from private landowners or 

obtained by cajoling, negotiating, or exchanging with state, county, and local 

governments. At Mammoth Cave, two associations purchased land for the park 

throughout the 1930s. Before formal establishment, the National Park Service took 

administrative responsibility for the lands that were to be included in the park. This long 

and often drawn-out process left the Service with vast and scattered holdings that were 

hard to manage and even more difficult to consolidate. In essence, throughout the period 

between authorization and establishment, the National Park Service invariably managed a 

patchwork of land interspersed with parcels of private, state, and county lands. 

Mammoth Cave had a different pattern of fire than did most of the parks in the 

system. Fires occurred in its vicinity in winter, with many just outside park boundaries 

and even more on private parcels inside the proposed park. Fires on private land within 

the park boundary required a Service response. NPS officials worried that such fires 

might spread and damage the park, and in any event, they expected eventually to acquire 

such lands. If it aggressively battled fire, the National Park Service also stood to gain 

friends in an area where it was resented. With the CCC available for fire fighting and 

protection work, the National Park Service stood to benefit from any fire protection 

efforts in more than one way.168 

Eastern parks such as Mammoth Cave highlighted the benefits of using a 

cooperative approach to fire response. The laudable goal of fire protection beyond park 

boundaries became an objective in large part because the CCC provided enough 

resources to contemplate it. Since early in its history, the National Park Service 

recognized that response to fire should extend beyond park boundaries. In the West, 

examples of interagency cooperation abounded; rangers and park staff fought fires on 

167 Cook, “Forest Fire Protection in the National Park System, 1930-39,” 3; Durwood Dunn, Cades 

Cove: The Life and Death of an Appalachian Community, 1818-1937 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee 

Press, 1989); Warren Hofstra, The Planting of New Virginia: Settlement and Landscape in the Shenandoah 

Valley (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); Margaret L. Brown, The Wild East: A 

Biography of the Great Smoky Mountains (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2000). 168 “Report on Mammoth Cave, 1937,” NA, RG 79.4.3, Branch of Forestry, Forest Fire Reports 1928-

1949, Box 2; John Ise, Our National Park Policy: A Critical History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University 

Press, 1961), 254-56. 

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national forest and private lands even as workers from other agencies battled national 

park blazes. 

By 1935, the impact of the New Deal largess on fire response offered the Service 

a critical choice. The National Park Service could consider a formal policy of extending 

fire protection beyond park boundaries, effecting fire control in a regional context. 

Protecting parks from fire meant investing in the management of adjacent lands. The 

eastern national parks were central to this expansion of obligation. The circumstances at 

Mammoth Cave illuminated the question. “Due to CCC labor we are in a position to 

suppress numerous fires outside the park,” observed NPS representative Robert P. 

Holland, who became Mammoth’s acting superintendent in 1936, “and thereby assist our 

fire prevention program by making local people fire conscious.” Common enough at 

other parks, such a policy promoted the agency’s objectives at Mammoth Cave. Coffman 

concurred. “If it is necessary for the NPS to fight all fires with the maximum boundary in 

order to afford proper protection to the area within the minimum boundary, and there is 

no other agency who can be looked to for efficient protection,” he wrote, “then I feel the 

maximum boundary constitutes the park’s protection boundary.”169 In the East at least, 

the National Park Service served the function of the Forest Service, in the West, as the 

dominant fire response and control agency. 

By the end of the decade, the National Park Service had pulled back from this 

perspective. Experience showed that even with the CCC, the task often exceeded the 

resources available. By 1939, Lawrence F. Cook, head of the Western Region of the NPS 

Division of Forestry, deemed fire-fighting efforts outside of park boundaries as beyond 

the reach of the Service. “Little or no control over the use of fire on these outside lands 

can be exerted by the Service,” he observed in his summary of the decade. “Dependence 

must be placed on the agency responsible for protection of the area.”170 The National 

Park Service in the West benefited from the fact that its neighbors were primarily federal. 

With mostly private or state lands around eastern national parks, the NPS found less 

assistance in implementing a comprehensive fire control program. 

The nation’s first archaeological national park, Mesa Verde, generally 

experienced few fires. Colorado’s high mesa country offered few opportunities for fire to 

spread and at 52, 122 acres, the park encompassed a much smaller area than most western 

parks. In the first twenty-five years of park history, only one fire, the Todd Nine fire in 

1926, was considered major. It burned only twenty acres of vegetation, barely reportable 

by the standards of parks such as Glacier and Sequoia. The park received three CCC 

camps, which in the summer 1934 housed 1,300 workers. When two fires started in July, 

the park responded. The first, the Wild Horse Mesa fire, began on the adjacent Ute 

Reservation on July 9. CCC workers fought the fire and briefly brought it under control. 

But the fire broke away, spreading rapidly and eventually subsuming the Wickiup Fire, a 

286-acre burn that started on July 11. The blazes eventually burned a total of 4,492 acres 

of timber, 2,229 of which were inside Mesa Verde. More than 1,000 workers battled the 

169 Robert Holland Memorandum, March 26, 1935; John D. Coffman, Memorandum, April 17, 1935, 

NA, RG 79.4.3, Branch of Forestry, Forest Fire Reports 1928-1949, Box 2. 170 Cook, “Forest Fire Protection in the National Park System, 1930-39,” 3-4. 

70 
 

 

 

 

blazes, including CCC enrollees, members of the Indian Service, and residents of 

Mancos, Colorado, and other nearby communities.171 

The fire created a new consciousness about the threat Mesa Verde faced, and the 

CCC camps allowed the park a formidable response. Superintendent Ernest P. Leavitt 

recognized that the park had been fortunate. The fires on Wickiup and Wild Horse mesas 

did little damage to park facilities; if similar events had occurred on Chapin Mesa, he 

noted, Mesa Verde’s developed areas would have been ruined. Leavitt emphasized the 

development of fire-fighting infrastructure. He wanted lookout towers, truck trails, and 

fire trails to allow the rapid movement of workers and materiel from headquarters to 

outlying mesas. The CCC and other New Deal programs provided his solution.172 Again, 

suppression depended on resources and technology. It had become the National Park 

Service’s only strategy. 

Despite its increasing success, the National Park Service’s attempt to eliminate 

fire became a source of consternation for wildlife scientists within the Service. NPS 

scientists suggested that the Forest Service was clumsy in its approach, its methods 

heavy-handed and excessive. Under Coffman, some charged, New Deal programs made 

some national park areas look more like national forests, managed landscapes rather than 

vestiges of a natural past. In 1935, Adolph Murie, the noted naturalist, challenged 

existing NPS practice. He believed that clearing a twelve-square-mile area in Glacier 

National Park as the National Park Service intended was “gross destruction. . . . 

Removing natural habitat from a national park,” he declared, was tantamount to declaring 

war on the national park idea. Clearing brush and removing dead trees, denuding 

roadsides to enhance the visual impact of parks, and otherwise altering existing 

conditions fit older notions of tamed nature, not the pristine nature that so many 

demanded of the national parks. The rise of wilderness organizations, especially the 

Wilderness Society, headed by Robert Sterling Yard and Bob Marshall, stemmed from 

this sense of lost wild as well as from other factors such as the spread of automobile 

tourism. Some scientists vociferously complained about NPS actions, arguing that such 

human-induced removal of brush impeded wildlife patterns, altered terrain, and generally 

disrupted natural cycles.173 

Suppression proponents such as Lawrence F. Cook blanched at the accusation that 

his staff had become “destroyers of the natural.” National Park Service foresters sought to 

preserve the “natural values” of parks, eliminating excessive fuel loads and maintaining 

the easy access that promoted fire protection. A protection regime gave “nature” a better 

chance of long-term survival, Cook insisted. Without such protection, supporters argued, 

the National Park Service could not expect to preserve scenic and recreational values or 

even any semblance of native biology.174 

171 Annual Report of the Superintendent of Mesa Verde National Park, 1934, NARA, RG 79.7, Mesa 

Verde, Box 1; Paul Rogers, “Mesa Verde Fire History, March 2002,” unpublished paper, Mesa Verde 

National Park archives, Mesa Verde National Park, 5-7. 172 Rogers, “Mesa Verde Fire History, March 2002,” 7. 173 Adolph Murie to Ben Thompson, July 13, 1935; Adolph Murie, “Memorandum for Ben H. 

Thompson, August 2, 1935,” NARA RG 79.7, Glacier National Park, Box 973; Paul S. Sutter, Driven 

Wild: How the Fight Against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement (Seattle: University 

of Washington Press, 2002), 23-53; Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks, 128-29. 174 Lawrence F. Cook, “Memorandum for the Chief Forester, August 28, 1935,” NARA, RG 79, 

Glacier National Park, Box 973; Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks, 130. 

71 
 

 

The difference between the perspectives illustrated a gulf between two disparate 

ideals of national parks. Murie advocated something resembling a fictive pure nature, a 

physical world that appeared untrammeled to the visitor’s eye and satisfied his scientific 

vision of the concept of natural. Cook argued for a managed scenic landscape, an ideal 

vista that coincided with the idealized image of national parks that the National Park 

Service advanced and the public embraced. In a sense, both fit the definition of nature. 

Both were managed, albeit in different ways, one by action and the other by the 

consequences of inaction, and both easily fell within the purview of National Park 

Service logic and vision. Simultaneously both pointed to a different kind of fire 

management future for the Service. 

The debate took place at a pivotal moment in the history of fire management, 

during which the assumptions of the moment obscured longer-term judgment. Fire 

loomed large during the New Deal for ecological reasons. After an extended period in 

which truly major fires were limited to 1910, between 1919 and 1934 five major fire 

years occurred, heightening concerns and bringing fire to the forefront of planning. The 

National Park Service experienced these significant outbreaks along with the Forest 

Service, awakening both agencies to the consequences of cataclysmic fire and 

challenging them to conceive of their missions in new ways. With adequate resources, 

suppression appeared to work. The positive responses of NPS superintendents to their 

new circumstances affirmed the direction in which the National Park Service took fire 

policy. The result was the argument for Forest Service-like management that Cook and 

others offered. They advocated suppression because it was the NPS’s goal in fire 

management.175 

Suppression, with CCC workpower, appeared to work. At the same time, an 

influential countertrend emerged. When George M. Wright, the NPS’s first chief of the 

Wildlife Division, initiated a new plan for wildlife management, the National Park 

Service had the opportunity to recast its fire response in a manner distinct from the Forest 

Service. Wright and his growing cadre of wildlife biologists never agreed with Coffman’s 

perspective; they liked his policies even less. The biologists believed that leaving dead 

timber material on the floor of the forest was healthy for the forest and the wildlife that 

lived in it. Fauna No. 1, the first wildlife policy directive the National Park Service 

issued, advocated preserving the forest as it was, letting natural processes drive any 

changes in ecology. Coffman’s forestry model, extending protection throughout the 

national parks, attempted to protect them against not only fire, but insects, fungi, and 

other threats. Wright’s model suggested a dynamic forest, ever-changing; Coffman’s 

conceived of a forest frozen in ecological time. The latter remained attractive in no small 

part as a result of the looming threat of major fire and the success of suppression at the 

major parks. Following the Forest Service, which controlled the money available for fire 

protection, the National Park Service hired foresters instead of plant biologists or 

botanists to manage its fire programs, consigning scientists to the narrow realm of plant 

and wildlife management. Wildlife biologists found themselves alone as advocates of 

ecological management as the foresters continued to follow USFS practices.176 

175 Pyne, Fire in America, 255-56; Pyne, Year of the Fires, 253-67. 

176 Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks, 126-28. 

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The human resources of the CCC created a confidence in the National Park 

Service, a sense that it could face and defeat fire. With its embrace of suppression, the 

National Park Service also adopted another USFS idea, that nature could be shaped and 

controlled by human endeavor. This precept was more complicated for the National Park 

Service than for any other federal land management agency. With its tacit value that 

nature was to be preserved within its boundaries, the National Park Service outwardly 

embraced the idea of nature preservation even as it developed tourist facilities in national 

parks and made other significant accommodations for visitors. Fire suppression was not 

incongruous with the Service’s vision of nature protection, for it preserved a vision of a 

pristine, pre-human America. A nation filled with forests surely greeted the first 

European settlers, American mythology announced with certitude, and fire suppression 

protected the very trees that attested to this complicated historical fiction. At the same 

time, the results of suppression provided a tacit justification of the means. Different in 

that they contained diverse species of trees instead of the monoculture of USFS planting, 

the national park area forests cleared of brush and understory in the Forest Service style, 

allowed trees to remain and let the National Park Service deploy its newly found 

resources to respond to fire away from heavily traveled areas. The National Park Service 

could suppress fire and defend nature with only a modicum of discomfort about the 

contradictions such a formulation contained. 

Although a number of other factors clearly contributed to this positive record, the 

prevailing thinking about fire management pointed directly at the resources available for 

suppression. NPS circulars began in 1934 and became more focused on fire fighting and 

forest conservation after 1935. In 1936, Coffman added the CCC-funded NPS state parks 

program to his responsibilities. That same year, the Branch of Forestry initiated a review 

of each park’s fire-fighting program. Specialized training for CCC enrollees became 

common. The idea that fire could be contained through proactive strategies became such 

a dominant ideology that when Cook later assessed the decade, he drew stark and clear 

contrasts. “Prior to 1928,” Cook observed, “little training or planning for fire protection 

had been done. As a result, large acreages were burned. . . . With the advent of the 

Civilian Conservation Corps in 1933, much more rapid strides have been made in 

completing the most needed physical improvements for protection.”177 This perspective 

became the baseline National Park Service view, one that tied it to the Forest Service and 

the vast resources that National Park Service commanded for fire-fighting and protection 

and that marked the Service’s cosmology and point of view. 

The National Park Service’s preventive fire protection became more aggressive, 

necessitating greater levels of organization. The presence of the CCC put considerable 

pressure on parks, for some of the activity undertaken by the ECW program conflicted 

with park goals. In some instances, park officials had to contend with overaggressive 

enrollees removing or cutting more than the National Park Service wanted. Because of 

the vast number of people working in most national parks and the confusion about what 

they were supposed to do and how they were supposed to do it, a clear set of guidelines 

177 L. F. Cook, “Forest Fire Protection in the National Park System, 1930-1939,” Occasional Forestry 

Note No. 5, March 25, 1940, Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Sequoia National Park 

Archive, SNP 42, Box 275, Folder 2. 

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became necessary. Coffman developed principles to guide NPS fire protection. He 

approached the idea with his characteristic thoroughness and clear-headed thinking.178 

The circular Coffman authored to direct CCC efforts offered a scientific approach 

to managing ground cover that contributed to fires. Coffman insisted that he covered only 

“dead vegetative matter from the standpoint of fire hazard reduction giving due 

consideration to the requirements of aesthetics and wildlife.” This definition resulted 

from the increasingly vocal complaints of wildlife biologists and the avid work of CCC 

enrollees, whom the National Park Service often took to task for not differentiating 

between dead and living material. Coffman recognized that such work should be 

overseen by trained foresters, but knew that such specialists were in short supply. Direct 

administration fell to forest technicians, who Coffman insisted had to be concerned with 

“furthering the objectives of wildlife and landscaping.”179 

Coffman designed the instructional circular to create a common understanding of 

obligations and the terminology that defined them. He intended to describe conditions 

and to establish standards for management that could be applied to fire protection 

activities. “Debris on the ground is a natural condition in all forests,” he wrote in a 

section entitled “Limitations.” “Unfortunately, fire hazard reduction as an ECW project is 

too often conceived to mean the complete removal and disposal of all dead standing and 

down material from large forest areas. . . . Fire hazard reduction often serves as an excuse 

for intensive forest cleanup which is almost invariably ascribable to and governed by an 

inherent human tendency to tidy up the woods.”180 This philosophical observation 

reflected what had become Coffman’s dichotomy, the problem of doing the job so well 

that it damaged the features the park was meant to preserve. 

In the end, such circulars attested to both the success of the program and to the 

changes it brought to park ecology. When Coffman reminded his charges that complete 

removal of dead and downed timber was not a primary objective of cleanups and that 

wildlife and landscape values had to be taken into consideration, he asserted the values of 

the National Park Service over those he brought from the Forest Service. Fire protection 

was a crucial activity, but even to Coffman, it was not a precondition of National Park 

Service objectives in the way that it was for the Forest Service. Despite its embrace of the 

USFS model, the National Park Service vision of fire differed. It no longer even nodded 

toward the dissenting point of view that Superintendent John White advanced in favor of 

light burning. In the same circular, Coffman called light burning a “practice [that] cannot 

be tolerated in the national parks.” In response to a suggestion from Yellowstone 

National Park to let remote and valueless timber burn after a summer in which the park 

lost more than 25,000 acres of timber to fire, Coffman responded with a firm articulation 

of NPS policy. “I for one do not concur with any such policy for the national parks and 

monuments,” he announced. “There are extremely few areas where any fire starting is not 

a threat to high values.”181 NPS fire policy did not demand the sanitized forests that the 

National Park Service attributed to its chief rival. National parks were to look like nature 

178 Coffman interview, October 29, 1962, 19. 

179 Miscellaneous Circular No. 15 for Western Parks and Monuments, December 17, 1934, FR 31-34, 

Man U, Box 2, F20, Sequoia National Park, 1-2. 180 Ibid. 4-5. 181 Ibid., 2; Superintendent’s Annual Report, 1940; John D. Coffman, Memo to Regional Director, 

Region II, November 8, 1940, 883-03.3, Y-240,Yellowstone National Park. 

74 
 

 

and be free of fire. In many ways, accomplishing these ends was a more difficult 

assignment than simple fire eradication. 

CCC enrollees proved less compliant than Coffman hoped and his message had to 

be repeated throughout the remainder of the decade. Coffman and others in the National 

Park Service repeatedly issued rules to govern CCC actions and to affirm National Park 

Service oversight and responsibility. Even under National Park Service supervision, the 

CCC sometimes lacked the subtle touch that Coffman and the National Park Service 

sought. The crews often cleared indiscriminately, a valid response to both their training 

and to the USFS model from which it derived. The National Park Service sought a better 

balance between clearing and landscape and wildlife values. In this respect, the CCC 

became a liability as well as the tremendous advantage it certainly provided. The 

National Park Service had to grapple with the embarrassment of riches ECW programs 

offered. In fire management, officials learned that an abundance of resources did not 

always yield the precise results they sought. The CCC drove fire control as much as fire 

control directed the CCC. 

The National Park Service’s language during this era contributed to the confusion. 

Fire plans typically were aggressive in articulating their intent. “The fire control plan 

recognizes no Sundays, holidays, or 8-hour days or shifts,” Grand Teton National Park’s 

1939 fire plan enunciated. “When a fire is discovered or reported, immediate action is 

demanded, and control and patrol measures must be continuously applied without 

interruption until the fire is out.” At Grand Canyon, the park’s policy reflected similar 

objectives: “to reach and combat every fire that starts in the park, or that threatens the 

park, with such speed, skill, strength, and equipment as to confine it to the minimum of 

acreage burned and damage caused.”182 Despite some complaints about overly 

enthusiastic CCC enrollees, fire suppression remained the lexicon of the National Park 

Service. 

The most permanent dimension of the impact of resources was the degree of 

organizational structure it permitted. Before 1933, fire response had been a matter of 

quick action by anyone who was available. With New Deal resources, the National Park 

Service now had trained people and dedicated materials that it could deploy in a strategic 

fashion. The burgeoning communications networks in the national parks, combined with 

the many fire lookouts, allowed for a level of planning that extended far beyond the 

theoretical response of the 1920s. The New Deal changed the nature of fire plans. They 

became comprehensive documents that described leadership, responsibilities and 

strategies, while allocating resources and considering contingencies instead of general 

statement of goals. In some ways, the fire plans were draconian: in an age when 

cigarettes were ubiquitous, Grand Teton’s document forbade smoking during fire season 

except in prepared camps and designated places. Grand Canyon’s plan permitted the park 

superintendent to draft visitors to help fight fires.183 

With infrastructure provided by access to resources, the NPS facilitated a series of 

cooperative arrangements with adjoining national forests that extended the cooperative 

fire protection that began in the 1920s. Fire forced agencies into alliances and these 

182 “Grand Canyon National Park, Fire Control Plan, Season of 1939,” 1; “Fire Control Plan for 

Grand Teton National Park, 1939,” 2. 183 “Fire Control Plan for Grand Teton National Park, 1939,” 4-5; “Grand Canyon National Park, Fire 

Control Plan, Season of 1939,” 2-3. 

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relationships became a hallmark of the New Deal. U.S. Forester William Greeley became 

the primary advocate of cooperative fire protection. Even before he left office in 1928, 

structures such as the Forest Protection Board that supported interagency responses were 

in place. The New Deal provided a greater degree of centralized control, which affected 

all kinds of agencies, not just federal land managers. Most national parks had created 

relationships with other federal land management agencies. Although such agreements 

had existed since the 1910s, Yellowstone’s 1932 agreement with the Absaroka National 

Forest served as a model. Before the New Deal, the two agencies were both short of 

resources and they essentially agreed to pool what they had. “Overhead will be loaned to 

adjacent units insofar as practicable,” the agreement read, “without endangering the unit 

loaning the overhead.” Both agreed not to charge each other for anything more than 

expenses, to deputize members of the other agency when necessary, and to share law 

enforcement obligations.184 

The preponderance of resources had changed the nature of such agreements, 

enhancing their significance and pointing toward comprehensive regional planning. A 

1936 agreement between Glacier National Park and the Blackfeet Indian Agency created 

a “mutual purpose in aiding one another in suppressing all fires as soon as possible with 

whatever means that may be at hand.” At Grand Canyon National Park, a 1939 agreement 

conceded that the boundaries between the two agencies were artificial and emergency 

responses could transcend jurisdiction. “Division lines will not be closely drawn,” the 

document attested. “It is to be understood that there shall be no delay by either 

organization in going to a fire when there is a question as to which side of the boundary 

the fire is on.” The first crew to arrive was expected to provide the initial response, its 

leader to serve as acting fire boss until the arrival of the lead person from the agency with 

jurisdiction. At Yellowstone, a new agreement with the Shoshone National Forest in 1938 

extended the park’s cooperative arrangement into similar terms.185 

By the end of the decade, the National Park Service had developed a clear and 

distinct set of strategies for addressing fires. CCC resources had been a basis, but the 

National Park Service had learned much more. Service officials relied on leadership at 

the park level to emphasize the importance of fire response, argued vociferously for 

careful assessment of fire experiences and for continuous updating of fire protection 

planning, collected data about the sources and causes of fires, and recognized the value of 

frequent training for everyone involved in the fire protection system. By 1939, the 

National Park Service had anticipated the end of the CCC. Superintendents were 

admonished to develop new sources of fire fighters in local communities and beyond. 

“The Service has an enviable position among agencies responsible for fire protection in 

that practically all the users of the parks are contacted directly by protection personnel,” 

observed Lawrence Cook, a bit optimistically. “We have a wonderful opportunity to 

advance fire protection not only for our own areas but also in the general field of fire 

184 “Fire Cooperation Agreement Between Yellowstone National Park and Absaroka National Forest, 

June 13, 1932,” W-238, Yellowstone National Park. 185 R. R. Vincent to Director, August 11, 1936; “Cooperative Agreement,” (ca. 1936), NARA, RG 

79.7, Glacier National Park, Memorandum to Field Officers A-17-1, Cooperative Fire Fighting 

Agreements, December 17, 1938, NARA, RG 79.4.3, Branch of Forestry, Box 281; “Fire Cooperative 

Agreement: Kaibab National Forest Service-Grand Canyon National Park,” Grand Canyon National Park. 

76 
 

 

 

 

 

prevention.”186 The National Park Service not only saw its experiences with fire as 

valuable, it also believed its educational mission could be used to support the goals of 

suppression. 

Cook also recognized that completely preventing human-induced fires was 

impossible. “The Service, perhaps, cannot expect 100 percent elimination of man-caused 

fires despite all that we can do, although our efforts should be pointed in that direction,” 

he summarized. “Any park can well be more proud of a record of reduction of 

preventable man-caused fires than in a reduction of area burned.”187 This differentiation 

attested to the lessons that the National Park Service had learned. Prevention was good, 

but control was essential. More than any other idea, this subtle shift enunciated the 

differences between the National Park Service and the Forest Service. The primary threat 

to the parks remained the actions of people. 

The initiation of hostilities in World War II changed the climate in which 

National Park Service fire management took place. From 1941 to1945, the war took men 

and materiel away from civilian purposes, directing it toward defense efforts. The 

National Park Service did not escape unscathed. The Service’s budget was cut in half in 

the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Between that date and 

the end of the fiscal year in June 1942, the National Park Service lost almost 25 percent 

of its permanent workforce. A year later, the number had fallen again, from 4,510 in 1942 

to 1,974 at the end of June 1943. It dropped to 1,577 by 1945. The CCC was disbanded in 

1942; most of the young men who worked in it went on to the military. The situation 

became so dire that the Service relied on camps of conscientious objectors to open and 

maintain trails for visitor use and fire protection in Glacier National Park. The National 

Park Service moved from its Washington, D.C. headquarters to Chicago and slipped into 

an inconsequential role as the war effort demanded more and more of the budget and the 

nation’s resources.188 

Fire presented a different kind of threat in wartime. “To the normal problem of 

fire protection,” NPS Director Newton B. Drury wrote in his 1943 annual report, “an 

acute threat of sabotage and enemy incendiarism was added.” Areas of extreme fire 

hazard within 300 miles of any coast were included in the fire protection allocations of 

national defense agencies. The National Park Service contributed to the war effort in 

every way that it could; its contribution often extended to cooperating in fire fighting and 

in some cases, investing NPS resources in larger fire protection efforts. Labor shortage 

186 Cook, “Forest Fire Protection in the National Park System, 1930-39,” 9; Arno B. Cammerer, 

Director, “The National Park Service,” in U.S. Department of the Interior, Annual Report of the Secretary, 

1940 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1940), 191-93. 

187 Cook, “Forest Fire Protection in the National Park System, 1930-39,” 10. 188 Department of the Interior, Annual Report for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1939 (Washington, 

D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1939), 273-74, 296; Newton B. Drury, Director, “Report of the Director 

of the National Park Service, 1943,” in Department of the Interior, Annual Report of the Secretary of the 

Interior, 1944 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1944), 207-08; Paige, The Civilian 

Conservation Corps and the National Park Service, 1933-1942, 132; Lary M. Dilsaver and William C. 

Tweed, Challenge of the Big Trees: A Resource History of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks 

(Three Rivers, CA: Sequoia Natural History Association, 1990), 159-67. 

77 
 

 

 

 

allowed women serve as fire lookouts, a task like so many others typically reserved for 

men prior to the outbreak of hostilities in 1941.189 

The war also increased military use of the parks, providing a faint echo of the 

Army’s earlier involvement in national parks. Instead of protection, their purpose now 

was largely recreation, as Drury noted in 1943 in his famous plea to maintain protection 

of the national parks. National parks functioned as emblems of Americanism, he argued, 

embodying ideals for which the nation fought. This symbolic role elevated the national 

parks’ significance and made their protection even more essential. “Their proper 

protection in wartime is a responsibility of the first magnitude,” Drury insisted in his 

annual report.190 

Although fire management suffered during World War II, the consequences were 

not as dire as anticipated. The war may have taken resources from the national park 

system, but it simultaneously impeded opportunities to travel. A dramatic decline in 

visitation, in no small part the result of gasoline and tire rationing, meant a primary cause 

of park fires – careless people – was in equally short supply. Even the influx of soldiers 

and sailors did not counteract the decline in visitation. In one astonishing example of the 

shift, the 1941 Clarke-McNary Act report for Arizona showed seventeen national park 

areas with more than 1 million acres of forest and no reportable fires. The list included 

Boulder Dam National Recreation Area, Grand Canyon National Park, Organ Pipe 

Cactus National Monument, and smaller areas. A bizarre parity existed: the National Park 

Service no longer had the ample resources of the decade before, but neither did it 

experience high levels of visitation. Fire disappeared as the number of visitors 

diminished, confirming something that park officials noted all the back to the era of the 

cavalry in the nineteenth century: ongoing fire stemmed from human action with form 

consistency. In 1943, only 308 fires were reported in the entire park system, a level 23 

percent below the average of the previous decade.191 A number of those were spotted by 

wartime volunteer lookouts, some of them women. In essence, the NPS receded from the 

vision of the 1930s, that it would fight fire anywhere it found it, and returned to an earlier 

vision of battling only proximate fire. 

Still, the Service’s ideology remained constant. Suppression remained the goal of 

the National Park Service and it still successfully battled fire wherever it found it, with 

whatever resources it could muster. No shift in perspective accompanied the diminished 

resources, leaving the National Park Service with home guard-like skeleton fire crews to 

guard vast expanses. Federal land management agencies followed national trends, 

recruiting older men and some women to replace those who went off to war. The NPS 

even considered using Japanese internees as fire fighters, but found insufficient numbers 

of men, because most of the people in the age group for fire fighting had already 

volunteered for the war. For the most part, the replacements lacked the “experience and 

training desirable for most of these positions.” The National Park Service and the Forest 

Service shared workers as well. The “excellent fire programs” that Region II Regional 

189 Newton B. Drury, Director, “Report of the Director of the National Park Service, 1943,” in 

Department of the Interior, Annual Report of the Secretary, 1943 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing 

Office, 1943), 207-08. 

190 Newton B. Drury, “The National Parks in Wartime,” American Forests (August 1943), 37-42; 

Drury, “Report of the Director of the National Park Service, 1943,” 207. 

191 Memorandum for the Director, January 24, 1942, Grand Canyon National Park Archive; Newton 

B. Drury, Director, “National Park Service,” in Report of the Secretary of the Interior, 1944, 223. 

78 
 

 

 

 

Director Lawrence C. Merriam observed at Yellowstone and other parks served as the 

best form of training. They paid “big dividends,” Merriam noted, providing an essential 

component of park response.192 Experienced observers could be forgiven thinking that 

they had landed in the 1920s: the limits imposed by war were so great as to mirror the 

uncertainties of that earlier time. 

The national parks rarely suffered major fire during World War II. Despite a 

prominent fear of “enemy incendarism,” the threat of enemy bombers or balloon-borne 

incendiaries igniting massive forest fires never materialized. Restrictions and rationing 

limited travel; shortages of gasoline and rubber tires made remote national parks hard to 

reach. Overtime work provided plenty of money to civilian workers, but took the time 

that some might have used to travel to the national park system. As a result, humaninduced fires diminished in number and the remaining park crews, as lightly staffed as 

they were, did the best they could under the constraints they faced. The National Park 

Service tried to scatter experienced fire fighters among less practiced ones, hoping for 

leadership in fire situations. Even as the Forest Service adhered to the 10:00 am policy, 

its leaders recognized that “an acute manpower shortage will probably make it impossible 

to put this policy universally into effect,” the regional forester for the northern Rockies, 

C. N. Woods, told Yellowstone Superintendent Edmund Rogers in 1942. “We will have 

to take more chances of a given fire getting out of control than if we had unlimited 

manpower with which to attack it.” The constraints of wartime were ominous. The 

attempts to respond were typically innovative, but other than the diminished number of 

reported fires, the results remained difficult to assess.193 

By the time the war ended in 1945, the CCC and its resources were a distant 

memory. Region Four Director Owen A. “Tommy” Tomlinson recognized the impact. 

“For the first time since 1932,” he informed his superintendents in 1946, “the agencies 

handling forest fire protection will not be able to call upon organized mass labor such as 

the CCC [and] the armed forces.”194 This was a new reality, he instructed his charges, a 

shift back to the early days of suppression. Tomlinson asked that his staff do more with 

less, precisely how the national park system functioned before the New Deal. 

Suppression remained a powerful intellectual model of response to fire for the National 

Park Service. The realities shifted back toward a replica of an earlier time. 

The New Deal and its resources changed the National Park Service in many ways, 

and the ability to address fire reflected a prominent improvement in the Service’s ability 

to fulfill its functions. Suppression had been an ideal; the CCC and its workpower, the 

millions of dollars from public works programs, and the addition of fire specialists to the 

National Park Service combined to inspire confidence in its model. With enough 

resources, suppression worked. Parks faced and fought fires and were able to minimize 

192 “Special Report, Law Enforcement Conference, Forest Service Remount Depot, Huson, Montana, 

March 3 to March 12, 1942,” Yellowstone National Park, W-1; Carl G. Kruger to Superintendent, 

Yellowstone National Park, April 9, 1943, Yellowstone, Y-232; J. S. Veeder to Colonel R. G. Walters, July 

24, 1943, Hugh H. Miller, “Memorandum for the Assistant to the Secretary in Charge of Land Utilization, 

March 7, 1945,” Yellowstone, Y-232; Lawrence C. Merriam, “Memorandum for the Superintendent, 

Yellowstone National Park, April 7, 1943,” Yellowstone, Y-230.

193 “Report of Interagency Committee No 1, 1942,” NARA, RG 79.4.3, Branch of Forestry, Box 3; C. 

N. Woods to Edmund B. Rogers, March 13, 1942, Yellowstone, Y-232.

194 Memorandum for all Region Four Areas, February 27, 1946, Sequoia National Park Archives, 

Box 275, F2; “Special Report: Law Enforcement Conference, 1942,” 1. 

79 
their impact, except in the most dramatic of circumstances. Even if cataclysmic fire 

remained beyond the Service’s reach, ordinary day-to-day fires and most extraordinary 

fires could be controlled without terrific damage. As a result of the New Deal, fire 

seemed to become one more natural force that human ingenuity subdued. 

This vision, of an orderly intact nature managed by humans, reflected the stance 

of the foresters in the National Park Service. It also coincided with the views of landscape 

architects, who remained the driving force in the Service. This neatly manicured version 

of nature contrasted with the messier ideal held by wildlife biologists and other scientists. 

The foresters’ vision held sway even as the signs grew that the success of suppression 

was only temporary. In the post-war era, the tension between these two perspectives 

accelerated, highlighted by new experiences with fire within the park system. 

80 
81 
 

 

Chapter 4: 

Ecology and the Limits of Suppression 

The end of World War II inaugurated a new era for the National Park Service, one 

of unexpected growth and precipitous change. The enormous increase in the number of 

travelers and their desire to experience the national parks pulled the NPS from its historic 

moorings and compelled the Service to envision new ways to manage its holdings. The 

demands on the park system changed. Postwar prosperity allowed Americans to satisfy 

their pent-up desire for goods and new experiences. As car ownership became 

commonplace and leisure time widespread, many sought outdoor adventures. 

Beneficiaries of a revolution in expectations, access, and affluence, Americans visited the 

parks to see their country, feel its power, and ultimately to understand themselves and the 

powerful nation they had become. 

Such behavior was part and parcel of a larger transformation of U.S. culture and 

society. Almost everything about the nation – from race relations to recreation – changed 

as a result of the war. The victory over fascism carried in its wake a transformation of 

American society. A new optimism swept the nation; many believed that life would get 

better for everyone. Indeed, evidence to support this idea appeared everywhere. The 

position of African-Americans changed dramatically, first in symbolic ways such as the 

integration of major league baseball in 1947, then in more substantive moves such as the 

integration of the military in 1948, and later in the law with cases such as the Supreme 

Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, which declared “separate but equal” 

education facilities illegal. Federal home loan legislation made homeowners out of 

renters; veteran benefited from the G. I. Bill. Americans bought houses by the thousands 

in new suburbs such as Levittown on Long Island, N.Y., achieving the American dream 

of home ownership. Observers at the time noted that everyone in the nation seemed to 

have raised their aspirations.1 

These trends contributed to the democratization of American attitudes about 

nature and the revival of the Progressive-era concept of conservation, albeit in a new 

form. Conservation had been a prominent social sentiment early in the twentieth century 

and the New Deal that began in 1933 had enhanced public sentiment that favored the 

idea, but the role of federal work programs changed the meaning of the concept. Instead 

of being a reflection of ideas about nature and its protection, conservation became 

shorthand for available work. During the New Deal, conservation became labor policy, 

dependent on federal dollars to drive the process. The war brought that model to a halt, 

consigning the principle of saving for the future to the status of afterthought. By 1945, 

“conservation” meant one thing, while “conservationist” indicated quite another – the 

amateur, upper crust tradition of the early twentieth century handed down among 

American elites. Divorced from politics and policy making, individual conservationists 

1

 Eric Goldman, The Crucial Decade – and After: America, 1945-1960 (New York: Random House, 

1960), 4-5, 12-15; James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (New York: 

Oxford University Press, 1996), 61-65. 

82 
 

 

had influence but rarely exercised it. Conservation had become a philosophy that 

belonged mostly to American elites.2 

The post-war era encouraged greater appreciation of American nature by a 

broader cross-section of the public. Recreation played a crucial role in this expansion of 

perception. After World War II, the traveling public expanded in numbers and breadth, 

and its members’ expectations reflected a different ethos. The prosperity generated by the 

war gave more of the American public an opportunity at the perquisites of the good life, 

and the constituency for vacation-type travel increased immensely in size. Within a few 

years of the war’s end, many Americans enjoyed greater disposable income and paid 

vacation time. A combination of affluence, accentuated by heightened demand for leisure 

after more than a fifteen-year period in which amenities were not available, and new 

fashions that stressed a wider intellectual and conceptual vision of the world as part of the 

pleasures of middle class life, heightened the meaning of American nature. Most 

Americans still defined themselves in terms of the national relationship to the physical 

world. With the means to consummate that relationship, they ignited a revolution in 

travel patterns, and in the aftermath of the war, millions of Americans went to see their 

national parks.3 

Much of this travel occurred by automobile, the personal conveyance that 

promised individual freedom and authentic experience. After 1945, automobile 

ownership, an impossible dream for most during the Depression, evolved into a badge of 

middle-class status. The demand for recreation in national parks soared so high that the 

Park Service could not keep pace. Not only were available campsites scarce but existing 

campgrounds were covered with uncollected garbage, debris from timber illegally cut for 

firewood, and other eyesores. The National Park Service recognized the prospect for 

post-war demand even before World War II ended, and Superintendent John White at 

Sequoia offered a peculiarly poignant observation of the conditions that ensued. “In the 

national parks, we have always been in the position of engineers compelled to dam a 

stream without opportunity to divert the flood waters,” he observed in his 1947 annual 

report. “It looks as though we must hope for another depression to help the National 

Parks. Despite our best efforts, our public camps are run down, our scenic spots 

improperly protected, our park buildings and all facilities inadequately maintained, and 

the public neither protected nor advised, nor educated.” Others soon echoed White’s 

trenchant sentiments. In response to what he regarded as a landscape destroyed, noted 

author and iconoclast Bernard DeVoto recommended closing the national parks if they 

could not be better managed. The rapid increase in automobile ownership and the driving 

vacation had strained the limits of the park system.4 

2

 Stephen Fox, John Muir and His Legacy: The American Conservation Movement (Boston, Little, 

Brown & Co, 1980), 333-57; Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the 

Rise of American Environmentalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 1-13, 119-24. 3

 Hal K. Rothman, Devil’s Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth Century American West (Lawrence: 

University Press of Kansas, 1998), 202-05. 4

 Superintendent’s Annual Report for Sequoia National Park, 1947, Sequoia National Park, 

Superintendent’s Files, 2; Bernard DeVoto, “Let's Close the National Parks,” Harper's Magazine CCVII 

(1953), 49-52; David Clary, Timber and the Forest Service (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1986); 

John Jakle, The Tourist: Travel in Twentieth-Century North America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska 

Press, 1985), 185-98 

83 
 

 

 

Automobile tourism typically took place between Memorial Day in late May and 

Labor Day in early September, the classic boundaries of summer, when children were out 

of school, days were long and warm, and families could spend time together. Two days 

before Memorial Day weekend, tourist camps and motels sat vacant; two days after Labor 

Day, the cacophony subsided and they returned to silence. The chaos started so quickly 

and ended so abruptly that it mirrored the traits of vacationing that emerged in television 

cartoons such as Yogi Bear, the story of a madcap bear who inhabited Jellystone Park and 

gave both the mythic Ranger Smith and park visitors fits. Auto usage created clear 

patterns of travel and behavior. Tourists went everywhere and anywhere, purchased 

enormous quantities of food, gasoline, and other staples, filled motels and hotels, and 

generally kept moving, staying only an insignificant length of time in all but one or two 

of their stops. A chaos of auto travel existed, in which tourists traveled the mythic 

landscapes of the West without seeming rhyme or reason, staying only where they landed 

at the end of a day. 

As they vacationed in growing numbers, exemplified by the new highs for 

visitation set at Grand Canyon National Park each summer month after August 1945, 

these new visitors to the nation’s parks had an impact on the natural world that soon 

caused the visitors themselves to take notice. What Americans found in many of their 

national parks and forests shocked them. Growth in western cities as a result of the war 

brought millions more people into proximity to the most stunning attributes of American 

nature, and their demands for vacation homes, electricity, water, and roads made a visible 

dent in forests and crowded the banks of rivers, lakes, and oceans. Clear-cutting of forests 

adjacent to highways in particular drew public attention to questions of the management 

of American nature. Convinced of the efficacy of technological solutions to all problems, 

Americans began to recognize that their actions in the physical world multiplied by their 

ever-growing numbers had dire consequences for the land that made the nation special.5 

New patterns of vacation travel almost perfectly coincided with fire season in 

western parks, bringing together the catalyst for most fire – the carelessness of visitors – 

and the season in which fires were most likely to start. The NPS encountered more 

visitors in more places at a time when resources to manage them remained constant or 

even diminished. In such circumstances, the Service returns to tried and true methods. In 

fire management, the situation dictated that suppression would be the sole policy goal and 

that the Service would do its best to react to fires, preserving the bulk of its limited 

resources for crisis situations. For people such as NPS fire guru Coffman, with two 

decades in NPS fire management before 1950 and aspirations for a comprehensive 

system of preparation, this reality was a severe disappointment.6

 From the aggressive 

suppression-based posture of the New Deal, the NPS returned to a pattern of making do 

in its battle against fire. 

At the same time, the National Park Service tacitly began to unshackle itself from 

the Forest Service model that had driven NPS policy since Coffman was hired. The two 

5

 Bernard DeVoto, “The National Parks,” Fortune XXXV (1947), 120-21; Bernard DeVoto, “Let's 

Close the National Parks,” 49-52; Robert D. Baker, Robert S. Maxwell, Victor H. Treat, and Henry C. 

Dethloff, Timeless Heritage: A History of the Forest Service in the Southwest (Washington, D.C., 1988), 

59-68, 131-33; Ronald A. Foresta, American National Parks and Their Keepers (Washington, D.C.: 

Resources for the Future, 1984), 50-55. 6

 John D. Coffman, “Forest Protection in the National Parks,” interview by Amelia R. Fry, 1973 

(Berkeley: CA: The Bancroft Library, 1973), 75-77. 

84 
 

 

agencies continued to grapple over land issues, with one of the first fights coming over 

the proclamation of the Jackson Hole National Monument during World War II, where 

the state of Wyoming, federal foresters, and their supporters resented the de facto use of 

the Antiquities Act. One ranger cabin that was turned over to the National Park Service 

had been stripped of every interior fixture, reflecting the Forest Service’s annoyance. 

Interagency relations remained uneasy into the 1950s. As visitation numbers grew, the 

NPS was forced to commit more of its resources to the basic processes of managing 

visitation. The result simultaneously increased the importance of suppression – for 

investing resources in visitors necessarily meant that less was available for fire protection 

and response and increased the importance of being able to detect and extinguish fire – at 

the same time it changed its purpose. The Forest Service maintained strong fealty to the 

tenets of suppression. Its sponsorship of fire science culminated in the National Fire 

Danger Rating System, an effort to standardize the categorization of fire by scientific 

measures that began in the 1950s and culminated in definitions in 1972, the establishment 

of three USFS laboratories to study fire, the recruitment of new labor such as the 

Southwest Forest Fire Fighters, the upgrading of fire crews, and especially the transfer of 

surplus military equipment to civilian fire protection enhanced its role as the lead fire 

agency. The National Park Service found it could neither keep pace nor embrace the 

objective with the same wholehearted enthusiasm. In an era of mechanization, the Forest 

Service focused on fire protection and suppression. The National Park Service looked 

elsewhere, investing in the prevention of fires through education and supervision of its 

visitors.7 

During the immediate post-war era, important changes in the NPS response to fire 

began. At Yellowstone National Park, Park Engineer Aubrey Haines, who later earned 

renown as the park’s first historian, completed a “Fire Lookout Evaluation Study” in 

1946. Following the Forest Service’s model, he researched fire records from the previous 

decade and pinpointed ongoing trouble spots within the park. Haines recommended a 

fire-danger map for Yellowstone, a base document to enhance park managers’ ability to 

detect fire and respond to it. Haines’s efforts were repeated at other parks. The first NPS 

Interregional Fire Control Training Conference convened at the Grand Canyon in 1949, 

bringing together fire personnel from throughout the West. Smokejumpers, front-line 

firefighters dropped as shock troops to control a fire at its inception, were introduced at 

Glacier in 1946 and at Yellowstone in 1951. Smokejumping had first appeared in the 

Forest Service in the late 1930s, and in 1945, NPS Regional Forester Frank Childs 

recommended that the National Park Service introduce smokejumpers to the northern tier 

parks. By the mid-1950s, new fire detection technologies were under consideration. In 

one widely circulated instance, the idea that television cameras would replace human 

lookouts gained credence. While possible, the idea proved impractical. It cost a great deal 

and was unreliable.8

 The emphasis on labor as the primary way to suppress fires 

continued. 

7

 Stephen J. Pyne, Fire in America: A Cultural History of Rural and Wildland Fire (Princeton: 

Princeton University Press, 1982); Robert Righter, Crucible for Conservation: The Struggle for Grand 

Teton National Park (Niwot, CO: Colorado Associated University Press, 1982), 103-26; Hal K. Rothman, 

Preserving Different Pasts: The American National Monuments (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 

1989), 225-49. 8

 Aubrey Haines, “Fire Lookout Evaluation Study,” Yellowstone National Park files, N-33, 883-02.1, 

Yellowstone Archives; Frank Childs to Regional Director, Region II, March 3, 1945; “TV Camera Can 

85 
 

 

Smokejumpers were simultaneously valuable and glamorous. The idea had begun 

in the Forest Service with David Godwin, an innovative leader and an advocate of 

technologically sophisticated response to fire. Under the Aerial Fire Control Project, a 

direct response to the 10:00 a.m. policy, Godwin attempted to drop chemical retardant on 

fires from the air in the late 1930s. Soon he replaced the chemicals with people, dropping 

firefighters by parachute in an effort to attain immediate fire control. Smokejumpers 

touched a nerve in the American public; like Pony Express riders, they faced the 

unknown with bravery and aplomb. They heightened the already powerful image of 

firefighters by creating a new cachet, and giving smokejumpers a distinctive swagger. 9 

By the time the first Yellowstone unit was formed, smokejumpers were lionized 

figures in the battle against fire. Thirteen had died in the Mann Gulch fire in 1949, their 

deaths later emblazoned on the national stage first by a 1952 movie, Red Skies of 

Montana, and later by the 1992 publication of Norman Mclean’s Young Men and Fire 

and the mystique persisted. Following the placement of the first NPS smokejumper unit 

at Glacier, Superintendent Edmund Rogers at Yellowstone sought one. Rogers tried to 

interest national forest supervisors adjacent to the park in a joint unit in 1950. They 

demurred. “With so small a stake in the proposition,” Acting USFS Regional Forester 

Clarence C. Strong noted, “it does not appear feasible to us.” The foresters were willing 

to help the National Park Service create its own units, but were not prepared to split their 

own force to accommodate individual park needs.10 

The desire for smokejumping units stemmed as much from the dramatic image 

they projected as from their real utility as tools to fight fires. With NPS running 

smokejumpers only at Glacier National Park amid the growing proliferation of similar 

entities in the Forest Service, the addition of such crews at Yellowstone fit the NPS 

vision of its capabilities as a fire-fighting entity. At Yellowstone, Rogers recognized that 

the NPS had to consistently grapple with peer agencies for preeminence in the public 

imagination. It did not serve the NPS to have its premier park perceived as lacking any 

service provided by a mere national forest adjacent to its boundary, even though 

smokejumper units were expensive and arguably of only marginal advantage in fighting 

fire. 

The Yellowstone unit resulted from a 1949-1950 Fire Review and Fire Control 

Replanning Study. In 1949, Yellowstone experienced a difficult fire year. Five large fires 

dogged the park, forcing reconsideration of existing policy. There were too many 

shortcomings in the existing strategy, NPS Forester Maynard B. Barrows observed. 

Yellowstone needed a full-time fire dispatcher when fire conditions threatened a major 

fire. The report suggested reassigning an assistant chief ranger to the task, but this was a 

mere stopgap solution. Emergency lookouts were planned, with extra workers on blister 

rust and trail crews to fill the task. Aerial detection patrols were an important addition, 

but the study concluded that more training was necessary, and additional prevention 

measures would clearly help. The park’s single greatest need, Barrows wrote, was “the 

Spot Fires,” Rocky Mountain News, July 31, 1955. Haynes trained as a forester, achieving considerable 

fame for his work as a historian. Despite a lack of formal training, he was the leading historian of 

Yellowstone National Park throughout his life. 9

 Pyne, Fire in America, 371-73. 10 Clarence Strong to Lawrence C. Merriam, March 8, 1950, Yellowstone Archives, Box Y-232; 

Norman Mclean, Young Men and Fire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Superintendent’s 

Annual Report for Yellowstone, 1950, Yellowstone National Park. 

86 
 

 

 

employment of a plane for aerial detection and transportation of smokejumpers based at 

West Yellowstone for one month of the year.”11 

With the technical assistance of nearby Forest Service units, Rogers built the 

second smokejumping unit in the NPS. Agency policy dictated that an aerial fire-fighting 

response was the most effective and the least intrusive, when compared to truck trail 

construction and other development strategies. Beginning in 1951, the new NPS 

smokejumpers were trained by the Forest Service at Missoula, Montana, and transferred 

to the National Park Service payroll during the fire season. At its inception, the 

Yellowstone unit consisted of only a five-man crew, but it represented a significant 

upgrade in response time over the previous Missoula-based USFS unit that had fought 

fires in the national parks and inspired the desire for a separate NPS unit. Rogers wanted 

to have his smokejumpers based at West Yellowstone for the most dangerous part of the 

fire season, typically from mid-July to mid-September, more than Barrows anticipated. 

The park leased a hangar at the West Yellowstone Airfield and let bids for a plane. 

Cooperation between the USFS and the NPS led to the first smokejumper deployment in 

1951.12 

Yet smokejumping was a sideline for the National Park Service, an emblematic 

dimension of a larger transition. Much like the flying aces of World War I, who soared as 

symbols of the glory of conflict above the real mechanized war between millions of men, 

the smokejumpers reflected the mechanization of firefighting. Aerial fire control – 

accomplished through helicopters, airtankers, and the aerial delivery of firefighters and 

supplies – became the dominant mode. Smokejumpers represented the individualized 

ideal of response to fire, the heroic mythology of preindustrial society translated into a 

new time. Smokejumpers were valuable primarily as symbols; firefighting had become an 

institutional operation and technological advances dwarfed even the most heroic exploits 

of any firefighter.13 

Yellowstone remained a problem fire park, and others drew wide attention. In 

1948, Yosemite experienced its first major fire in almost a decade. The Rancheria 

Mountain fire began on September 9, discovered by a three-man trail crew at about 1 

p.m. They had no communication equipment and were more than eight miles from the 

nearest telephone. The crew assumed that lookouts would spot the fire and notify park 

managers, so they battled it as best they could. Lookouts did not see the fire until the next 

day, when it was reported to headquarters at 10:15 a.m. Beginning in Tulomne River 

Canyon about two miles downstream from Pate Canyon, a section that was almost 4,000 

feet deep and three and one-half miles wide from rim to rim, the prevailing pattern of 

wind drove the fire upslope, keeping it from rising high enough to be seen by lookouts. 

Before it was brought under control twelve days later on September 21, the Rancheria 

Mountain fire burned more than 11,840 acres of timber.14 

11 Forester to Regional Forester, February 17, 1950, Yellowstone Archives, Box Y-240. 12 “Superintendent’s Annual Report for 1951, Yellowstone National Park,” Yellowstone National 

Park, Superintendent’s Files, 16; Edmund Rogers to Supervisor, Targhee National Forest, July 10, 1950, 

Edmund Rogers to Julius Schoener, May 20, 1953, Yellowstone N-33 “Smokejumpers,” Yellowstone 

Archives, Box Y-232. 13 Stephen J. Pyne to Hal Rothman, January 26, 2004. 

14 Board of Review Report, Rancheria Mountain Fire, Yosemite National Park, September 9-21, 

1948, 1-3; Yosemite National Park Annual Forestry Report, 1948, 3; Fire Control Plan, January 1949, 

Yosemite National Park, 1, Fire Records by Year, 1931-1974, Yosemite National Park Archives. 

87 
 

The blaze taxed the park’s available workpower. Late in the fire season, it 

required a response from a quickly assembled force. Park staff already had been reduced 

to ten temporary rangers, one ranger naturalist, five fire control aides, forty-seven blister 

rust workers, and seventy maintenance workers. With the small permanent staff, this 

comprised the park’s entire workforce. The National Park Service was able to marshal a 

combination of seasonal and permanent staff members to fight the fire. Eighteen rangers, 

three naturalists, three fire control aides, forty-three blister rust workers, and eighty-five 

members of the maintenance crew manned the fire lines. The Forest Service recruited 

fifty-five more firefighters in Stockton and brought them to the park. The Yosemite Park 

Company, Curry Company, state fish hatchery, the U.S. Post Office, city of San 

Francisco, and the Davis Lumber Company together provided another 153 workers to 

battle the blaze. On September 16, as the fire began its second week, 220 soldiers from 

Fort Ord, California, arrived to assist. With the arrival of the military, enough workpower 

had been accumulated to bring the blaze under control.15 

While the workpower could be deemed adequate, Yosemite had other weak points 

in its fire protection strategy. The lack of communication equipment loomed large. The 

telephone line that stretched from Harden Lake to Pate Valley to Benson Lake was 

perfectly positioned to report the fire. However, the line was out of commission. In 1942, 

maintenance on the line stopped as a result of a lack of funds and workpower, a direct 

consequence of the dismantling of the Civilian Conservation Corps. If the line had 

worked, news of the fire would have reached headquarters two days earlier, significantly 

accelerating the response. Radio transmission was irregular in the steep valleys of the 

Yosemite country, where topography and atmospheric conditions made signals 

undependable. Insufficient scouting on the fire line contributed to an overall lack of 

knowledge of the scope and size of the fire, and the perennial need for workpower 

periodically left crucial gaps in firefighting capability.16 Yosemite’s fire protection 

system needed an upgrade. 

A new fire control plan completed at Yosemite the year after the Rancheria 

Mountain fire articulated the issues. The post-war NPS placed a premium on devising 

new fire plans that fit the changing realities of the national park system. Following John 

D. Coffman and the changing circumstances of the Service, revised fire control plans 

became essential tools in addressing the impact of increased visitation. The park’s goals 

for fire control remained congruent with the rest of the NPS. The 1949 plan reinforced 

the 10 a.m. policy that the Park Service had followed since the 1930s, sought to confine 

all fires to the smallest possible area and rearticulated the objective of eliminating all 

human-induced fires, which comprised the overwhelming majority at the park. In 1948, 

seventeen of the twenty fires in Yosemite were the result of human action. Clearly, a 

combination of prevention and education could eliminate much of the fire problem.17 

The 1949 Yosemite plan epitomized the NPS vision of the response to fire. In it, 

as in nearly everything the Service had written since Coffman arrived in the late 1920s, 

fire was the enemy and the park’s job was to put it out as soon as possible. Yosemite’s 

problems almost perfectly mirrored historical trends in NPS fire management. Its greatest 

15 Board of Review Report, Rancheria Mountain Fire, Yosemite National Park, September 9-21, 

1948, 3-4. 16 Ibid. 

17 Fire Control Plan, January 1949, 2-4. 

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problem was the behavior of its visitors. They started fires by accident and with intent, 

and park staff scurried to respond. Detection was a crucial piece of park and Service 

strategy; once fires were discovered, the weight of the intricate fire suppression network 

could be placed upon them. When they were not or when communications failed, as in 

the case of the Rancheria Mountain Fire, the fire grew out of proportion to its genesis and 

became a significant problem. In the 1950s, suppression reigned supreme at Yosemite 

and throughout the western national parks. It remained the only philosophy the National 

Park Service embraced. 

If challenged on its strategy, the NPS could point to the success of its suppression 

programs. Education loomed large: the “remember, only you can prevent forest fires” 

campaigns of the Forest Service graced the 1950s, and the heavily visited national parks 

benefited from the wide currency of the notion even more than the larger but less 

frequented national forests. By 1953, the National Park Service achieved a reduction of 

almost 50 percent in acres burned, from an average of almost 27,000 acres per annum 

between 1947 and 1952 to a new recorded low of 14,833 acres in 1953. The trend 

continued in 1954, with a 4 percent decrease in human-caused fires and a light year for 

lightning strikes. At the same time, 1953 was among the NPS’s most difficult years for 

fire fighting. Severe lightning fires in remote areas of Yellowstone and Yosemite, 

combined with drought-like conditions in the Southwest and California, made vigilance 

an even more prized commodity. NPS observers noted the importance of the decrease in 

human-induced fires. Had the previous years’ frequency continued in a year with many 

lightning strikes, the limited firefighting resources of the NPS would have been stretched 

thin.18 

The decrease in human-induced fires in comparison to lightning fires changed one 

significant dimension of the NPS mode: fire could no longer be explained simply as a 

people problem. The National Park Service had to confront nature as nature, not as 

human behavior gone awry. Lightning fires had been consistent, but often beyond the 

reach of park capabilities. Yet with the success of suppression, lightning fires flourished. 

Human-induced burning had competed with lightning for fuels, burning areas that might 

otherwise have combusted naturally. As suppression succeeded, fuel loads increased 

dramatically, and on a small scale, lightning burned more of that fuel. Better detection, 

particularly by aircraft, brought more of these fires to the attention of the NPS. With new 

technology, the National Park Service found more fires that would have gone out on their 

own if no one had seen them.19 The NPS seemed to have traded one kind of fire problem 

for another. 

As visitation increased in the 1950s, the strain on fire protection resources grew. 

Even as education diminished the number of human-induced fires, the immensity of the 

task of stopping fire stunned NPS officials. So many more people came to the national 

parks every year that numbers offset much of the gain from prevention and education. 

Technology and innovative ideas helped with response, but no one believed that the 

18 National Park Service, Annual Fire Report, January 1-December 31, 1953, 1-6; Acting Regional 

Director to Region Two Field Areas, February 26, 1954; National Park Service, Annual Fire Report, 

January 1-December 31, 1954, 1-3; Regional Chief of Operations to Superintendents, Region Two Areas, 

March 14, 1955, Office of the Superintendent, Grand Teton National Park, Grand Teton National Park 

Archives. 

19 Stephen J. Pyne to Hal Rothman, January 29, 2004, copy in possession of the author. 

89 
 

 

 

status quo would remain for long. Too many variables, especially the inexhaustible public 

desire to see the national parks, created ferment within the Service. Even as suppression 

succeeded, NPS officials worried about the future. By 1954, Forester Lawrence F. Cook 

couched his appreciation of the Service’s suppression accomplishments by pointing to the 

increase in visitation to a record 47,833,913. In 1955, more than 50 million visitors 

descended on the national parks; in that year, education and prevention decreased the 

number of human-induced fires from 247 to 173 in the entire system.20 Cook fairly 

crowed about the accomplishment. He could be forgiven his palpable pride. 

Along with the positive news, a sense of strain simultaneously permeated the 

annual fire reports. While suppression worked, it continued to attain its goals at the 

expense of other operational areas at each national park. The annual increases in 

visitation challenged Service leaders to conceive of other ways to deal with fire. 

Suppression still reigned over the federal system and the National Park Service. When 

they looked at longer trends, managers saw the average number of fires per annum 

gradually increasing, from 356 between 1945 and 1950 to 362 between 1950 and 1955, a 

trend that pointed to limits in what could be achieved through educating the public. What 

shocked fire tabulators was that 1956 reported 422 fires, a much larger number than 

either of the previous clusters. With the decrease in human-induced fires, the only 

possible cause could be lightning fires. Worse, the continuing increase in visitors 

suggested that the number of human-induced fires would also increase.21 Leaders could 

not be blamed if, under the weight of dramatic increases in visitors, with the increase in 

lightning fires, and without a concomitant injection of resources, they feared for their 

future and pined for another way to address the annual crises that fire caused. 

A different vision of the role of fire and the Service’s response to it existed, but it 

came from a region of the country that the National Park Service had not associated with 

forestry. Everglades National Park offered a counter to the suppression model, but the 

NPS struggled to integrate this park with its historical vision of fire control.22 Codified in 

the NPS Fire Control Handbook, a collection of strategies and approaches for 

administering, finding, and fighting fire, the NPS experience with fire was western in 

character, shaped in the mountains of California and the inland Northwest at the major 

fire parks – Glacier, Yellowstone, Sequoia, and others. Despite significant differences in 

their conditions, they were of a piece. Everglades represented something different, a lowelevation, wet park that biologist Daniel Beard, who became the park’s first 

superintendent in 1947, remarked “burns off twice a year.”23 Everglades became a 

counterweight to the National Park Service’s generalizations about fire, the place that 

20 National Park Service, Annual Fire Report, January 1-December 31, 1954; Acting Regional 

Director to Superintendents, Region Two Field Areas, April 10, 1956, Office of the Superintendent, Grand 

Teton National Park, Grand Teton National Park Archives. 21 Annual Forest Fire Report of the National Park Service, 1956, 1; Regional Director to 

Superintendents, Region Two Field Areas, March 22, 1957, Office of the Superintendent, Grand Teton 

National Park, Grand Teton National Park Archives. 22 United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service, “Fire Control Handbook,” ca. 

1958, NPS Technical Information Center, Denver, microfilm. 

23 Daniel Beard, “Wildlife Reconaissance: Everglades National Park Project,” (National Archives, 

RG 79, Everglades National Park, 0-35, Proposed Park file, A2621, 1. 

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disproved existing theories of fire management and offered a new look at how the NPS 

could approach fire. 

Although authorized by Congress in 1934, Everglades was not formally 

designated a national park until December 6, 1947. During the intervening years, the 

National Park Service acquired land for the park, closely following the parameters that 

Congress authorized. This acquisition process paid little attention to questions of 

management, and only when the park finally was dedicated did the NPS began to discern 

what it had obtained. Spread out over much of south Florida, the new park presented 

incredible opportunities and even greater challenges. 

Within a very few years, the National Park Service recognized that Everglades, 

among the first parks established for biological purposes rather than monumental scenery, 

did not fit the model that the NPS developed for its western parks. According to its 

organic legislation, Everglades was established to create a “wilderness, (where) no 

development ... or plan for the entertainment of visitors shall be undertaken which will 

interfere with the preservation intact of the unique flora and fauna of the essential 

primitive natural conditions.” This powerful legislative mandate simultaneously differed 

from and challenged park management standards of the era.24 

Fire distinguished Everglades from the western national parks. In a different 

climate and environment, the Florida park experienced endemic fire, but observers 

believed that fire in the Everglades had a salubrious effect. “Within a few weeks after 

fire, the glades are green with sawgrass shoots, and the pinelands full of flowering herbs 

and new grasses,” observed William B. Robertson. Hired as a fire technician, he 

gravitated to research and conducted a study of fire at the park in 1953. “Even the scars 

of burned-out hammocks are soon hidden by rank growth of fireweed shrubs and vines,” 

he said.25 Robertson’s tone reflected the disconcerting nature of what he saw. Fire in the 

Everglades had a different impact and even a different function than it did in the western 

parks. It was undeniable, ever present, more acceptable to the surrounding natural 

communities, and more complicated by the region’s peculiar hydrology and biology. 

By the time the National Park Service arrived in South Florida, the patterns of fire 

in the Everglades had been long established. Despite newspaper accounts throughout the 

early twentieth century that sought to dispel the notion that the Everglades continually 

experienced natural fire, lightning had been a consistent causative factor. The region 

experienced frequent and widespread lightning fires that typically occurred during the 

May to October wet season and did little damage. Such fires played a crucial role in 

maintaining many plant complexes. From such fires, observers after 1947 inferred that 

fire in general had little impact on the park, an assumption that belied a far more 

complicated reality. Fires in drier periods of the year, November to April, often caused 

greater damage, inducing plant succession by destroying the root systems of even fireresistant plants. Such fire even consumed dried-out organic soils. Typically, large 

24 Everglades National Park Authorization Act, 16 U.S.C. sec 410 (1988) (enacted 1934); on 

December 6, 1947, President Harry S Truman dedicated the park with the words: “Not often in these 

demanding days are we able to lay aside the problems of the time, and turn to a project whose great value 

lies in the enrichment of the human spirit. Today we make the achievement of another great conservation 

victory. We have permanently safeguarded an irreplaceable primitive area. We have assembled to dedicate 

to the use of all people for all time, the Everglades National Park.” 25 William B. Robertson, A Survey of the Effects of Fire in Everglades National Park (Washington, 

D.C.: National Park Service, 1953), 1. 

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lightning fires were far from settlements; community interests aggressively squelched 

closer ones. 26 

Human fire produced an even more pronounced impact. Native peoples had 

clearly used fire to modify their environment, as they did throughout the Americas and 

indeed the world. When Euro-American settlers came to the region, their efforts 

“beggared” their predecessors, Robertson noted. “The frequency of man-made fires 

probably increased sharply as whites replaced aborigines.” Settlers came from a culture 

of aggressive use of fire, and on the peripheries of their world, social order diminished 

and carelessness that led to fires often resulted. In an effort to improve agricultural 

prospects, Euro-American settlers began to drain the Everglades. The lowered water 

levels that resulted increased both the frequency and severity of human-induced fires. An 

arterial canal system begun in 1905 and the completion of a dike at Lake Okeechobee in 

1935 exacerbated existing problems. As drainage became more effective, fires increased 

in severity. The newer desiccation, especially of the lower glades, extended the fire 

season by months, pressuring the nascent fire response mechanisms of the NPS. When 

fires occurred, their intensity led to greater destruction of hardwood forest vegetation as 

well as organic soils. Robertson’s characterization of an “imposing picture of fire 

occurrence” as a result of the Euro-American presence provided a strong rationale for 

aggressive NPS action.27 

Everglades clearly presented an entirely different range of fire problems. In the 

four years following its establishment, the park experienced extremes of fire. In 1948, 

only 1,965 acres burned; two years later, in the year of the three fires, 121,370 acres of 

vegetation went up in flames. Specific problems were already evident. The hammocks on 

the western half of Long Pine Key were severely damaged. The June 1951 Ironpot 

Hammock and Shark Valley fires gutted many tree islands and destroyed much of their 

organic soil, while also burning out remaining muck deposits of sawgrass areas. The 

situation appeared dire and called for new strategies. The NPS was confronted with a 

management question it had not considered.28 

By the early 1950s, the National Park Service had seen enough fire at Everglades 

to recognize that conditions there challenged its assumptions about fire control. Its first 

crisis came in 1950, when three large fires, called Tamiami No. 3, Long Pine Key Fire 

No. 3, and Mowry Fire, required simultaneous suppression. The park lacked the resources 

to fight three fires at the same time. The “fire emergency merely spotlighted this fact,” 

Dan Beard wrote in the aftermath of a critique held at park headquarters. Beard believed 

that the park showed strength in “the spirit of the men and women (permanent, seasonal, 

and temporary) who tackled the undertaking.” Despite their valiant efforts, he said, their 

attempts were inadequate. Although the park could take pride in suppressing three fires 

“each of which experienced fire fighters and ‘glade cats’ said nobody could put out,” 

26 David McCally, The Everglades: An Environmental History (Gainesville: University of Florida, 

1999), 18-20. 27 Robertson, “A Survey of the Effects of Fire in Everglades National Park,” 3-13; Pyne, Fire in 

America, 302-03; McCally, The Everglades, 31-57. 28 Robertson, “A Survey of the Effects of Fire in Everglades National Park,” 167; Pyne, Fire in 

America, 302. 

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Beard insisted, “I am determined that the park staff will not be called upon to undergo 

any repeat performances.”29 

These fires clearly showed that the park’s technical capabilities were inadequate. 

The combination of information and mechanization that characterized the era had not yet 

reached Everglades, a relatively new park far from the main focus of the NPS. The park 

had not yet developed a fire management plan. Park maps were old and outdated, without 

roads, trails, and in some cases, terrain and plant distribution. Firefighters started with 

inaccurate information about the geographic features they encountered and the fuel types 

and loads they battled. The park’s communication systems also fell short of optimal. 

Dependent on walkie-talkies as a result of the absence of telephone lines, the park simply 

did not have enough sets for its firefighters. The park did not own enough radio sets to 

assure constant communication and their range was insufficient. The park’s dispatchers 

lacked training for fire management, park vehicles did not possess sirens, and the park’s 

safety mechanisms were undeveloped. Contingency plans for hiring temporary fire 

fighters did not exist; no one had thought to develop a ready supply of potential workers 

before fire season. From an infrastructural perspective, the park fell far short in almost 

every respect, an endemic problem especially for eastern national parks during the early 

1950s. 30 

Robertson recognized the combination of employee strain and inadequate firefighting resources as a severe obstacle to managing fires. Five years of fire fighting had 

“absorbed much of the productive energy” of the Everglades staff, he noted, but the 

results “inspired no feeling more robust than a very reserved optimism.” The problems 

seemed beyond the reach of park staff, a sentiment with which Beard concurred in the 

aftermath of the 1950 fires. Despite learning a great deal about the park and its fires and 

developing and implementing a comprehensive fire-fighting program, the NPS could do 

little about the real problem – the diminishing amount of water available in the 

Everglades. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers planned an enormous flood control 

project for central and southern Florida. The NPS viewed this project with considerable 

trepidation. Less water than the already diminished supply was not even conceivable 

from the NPS view. Without more water, “the best efforts of fire detection and 

suppression,” Beard insisted, “are likely to provide only local victories in a lost war.”31 

This tacit admission of the impossibility of implementing policy was a first in the 

National Park Service and led to the embrace of a different vision of fire in the 

Everglades. 

A move to formalize the use of prescribed fire in Everglades National Park 

ensued. The park’s specific conditions made suppression a dangerous strategy. Officials 

long had recognized that suppressing fire in rockland areas led to rapid domination of the 

landscape by hammock vegetation. Early NPS suppression efforts had succeeded, 

allowing broad-leafed hammock vegetation to spread, especially along rock pinnacles, 

29 Fire Critique, Everglades National Park, May 16, 1950, Records of Key Officials, Box 7, File 19, 

E-Fees, Everglades National Park, Everglades National Park Archives. 30 Ibid., 3-4. 

31 Robertson, “A Survey of the Effects of Fire in Everglades National Park,” 169; Fire Critique, 

Everglades National Park, May 16, 1950; Thomas J. Allen to District Engineer, Jacksonville District, U.S. 

Army Corps of Engineers, August 5, 1949; Devereux Butcher to Newton B. Drury, February 24, 1948; 

Newton B. Drury to Devereux Butcher, February 27, 1949, Records of Key Officials, Box 7, File 19, EFees, Everglades National Park, Everglades National Park Archives. 

93 
 

 

 

northerly facing sections, and in the wettest areas. In some places, the plants reached 

twenty feet in height. In all areas, they created a dense understory, the predicate of a 

“calamitous” fire, Daniel Beard wrote in 1956, “perhaps killing pine as well as 

understory.” 32 

Beard quickly turned into an advocate of the use of fire. In 1956, he argued that 

its absence promoted the expansion of hardwoods, which in turn would lead to the 

extinction of the southern Florida slash pine and other pineland plants. Committed to 

protecting Long Pine Key and other park areas as pineland, Beard regarded fire 

suppression as the chief obstacle to his natural resource management goals. Beard’s 

memorandum catalyzed support for controlled burning at the Everglades. Regional 

Director Elbert Cox sought NPS Director Conrad L. Wirth’s approval for this 

controversial plan. Wirth authorized a specific management plan for the project, with the 

caveat that he see the plan and approve it before it was introduced and that the 

conservation community be given a look as well. In June 1957, a completed plan reached 

the Washington office of the NPS. After much deliberation and a thorough review of the 

differences between Everglades and the rest of the park system, in October 1957 Conrad 

Wirth approved the first controlled burning plan within the national park system in more 

than thirty years.33 

The plan was elaborate and persuasive, showing the impact of almost a decade of 

research in South Florida. The initial proposal called for one round of burning, with 

careful evaluation before any additional burns took place. It outlined eleven burning 

blocks, lettered A through K, with initial plans to fire nine of the eleven. D and K, which 

later was redefined as blocks K through Y, were to be left for the future. NPS managers 

planned to burn backfires into the wind, only lighting headfires sufficient to immolate 

advanced hardwood succession. The park built twenty miles of roads on Long Pine Key 

to accommodate the fire plan. By spring 1958, Everglades stood ready to implement its 

plan.34 

When park rangers lit fires in Block B on Long Pine Key on April 21, 1958, they 

inaugurated the first long-term prescribed fire plan in the national park system. Between 

1958 and 1973, forty-nine prescribed fires were set in Blocks A through Y. Fifty-two 

more were begun between 1973 and 1979, comprising the vast majority of NPS 

prescribed burning in that era. Burning during the summer was less frequent; only 

thirteen of the 101 fires in this era were started between June and September. The period 

between October and January became the favored season. In 1976, time-of-year 

restrictions were finally removed.35 

Everglades presented a fire scheme unfamiliar to the National Park Service. The 

first generation of fire managers had all learned their skills in the West, influenced by the 

Forest Service and the legacy of the 1910 fires. Everglades was different. The NPS had 

32 Daniel Beard, Memorandum to Regional Director, July 11, 1956, Everglades National Park, 

883.01; William B. Robertson, “Fire and Vegetation in the Everglades,” in E.V. Komarek, ed., Tall 

Timbers Fire Ecology Proceedings (Tallahassee, FL: Tall Timbers Research Station, 1962) No.1, 67-80. 33 Dale L. Taylor, “Fire History and Fire Records for Everglades National Park, 1948-1979,” Report 

T-619 (Homestead, FL: South Florida Research Center, 1981), 14-16. 34 Superintendent to Regional Director, June 21, 1957; Memorandum from the Director, October 9, 

1957; Superintendent to Regional Director, January 6, 1958, Everglades National Park, 883.01. 35 Taylor, “Fire History and Fire Records for Everglades National Park, 1948-1979,” Report T-619, 

16-17. 

94 
 

 

no experience with local residents who said: “This country has always burned and always 

will, and anyway fires don’t hurt anything here,” as Robertson was told repeatedly. Yet, 

officials could identify a pattern that threatened the NPS’s long-term ability to protect 

park values. As the Everglades became drier, sustaining the ecological and scenic status 

quo became progressively more resource intensive and expensive. The park lacked the 

time, resources, and workpower to reverse the effects of the human-induced drying of the 

area. The fires that resulted did real damage, destroying the very attributes that made the 

Everglades ecologically important. 

The situation presented a dilemma. The National Park Service remained devoted 

to the principles of suppression, but local conditions did not support the implementation 

of such a strategy. Residents did not react to fire with the outrage common in the West. It 

seemed to them inevitable and not much of a problem. Nowhere had the National Park 

Service encountered a situation where it regarded fire as a more severe threat than did its 

neighbors. The specter of prescribed burning had been buried by Albright and Coffman in 

the 1930s, and even the Forest Service’s wartime recognition of the value of the practice 

did not sway the NPS toward a broader conceptualization of the role of fire.36 Inside the 

Service, no one advocated a shift in policy. 

Still, Everglades was not the first or the only park to experiment with prescribed 

burns. As early as 1950, Superintendent Eivind T. Scoyen of Sequoia National Park, a 

venerated NPS leader and a man of considerable vision, supported the designation of the 

Kaweah Basin in the upper Kern River drainage as a research area that would not be 

subjected to fire suppression. Even as he advocated the conceptual change in fire 

management, Scoyen asked to retain authority to intervene if fire there threatened other 

areas of Sequoia.37 The National Park Service accepted the principle that fire should not 

be instantly suppressed in some parts of the park system even before the controlled burn 

program at Everglades began. 

The decision at Kaweah Basin hardly represented a nationwide policy change. 

Regional Director Owen A. Tomlinson took great pains to establish that the Kaweah 

Basin presented a unique situation, telling NPS Director Newton B. Drury that the area 

was “so completely isolated, with unique values that depend completely on its being left 

alone, that such a special designation would establish no precedent.” Kaweah Basin was 

more than 11,000 feet in elevation. Its lightning fires could not be easily seen from 

lookout posts, but with the advent of aerial fire reconnaissance, fires were spotted inside 

the basin more easily. When Lowell Sumner, a veteran NPS biologist who assessed parks 

throughout the West, urged that Sequoia managers allow the basin to remain in “a natural 

state, free from any human interference,” he argued for a piece of wild nature that had 

little implication for other forms of park management.38 By succeeding with an argument 

about the unique attributes of the basin, Sumner, Scoyen, and Tillotson achieved a small 

36 Bruce M. Kilgore, “Fire Management in the National Parks: An Overview,” Tall Timbers Fire 

Ecology Conference Proceedings, No. 14, 45-58. 37 E. Lowell Sumner, “The Kaweah Basin Research Reserve: An Untouched Area for the Future;” 

Regional Director to Director, February 6, 1950, Sequoia National Park, FR 1950, 1970-1976, Ma-U, Box 

327, F317, Sequoia National Park Archives. 38 Sumner, “The Kaweah Basin Research Reserve: An Untouched Area for the Future,” 6; Regional 

Director, Memorandum of August 24, 1949, Sequoia National Park, FR 1950, 1970-1976, Ma-U, Box 327, 

F317, Sequoia National Park Archives. 

95 
 

 

 

objective: they protected the prerogative of a research area. They did not intend nor did 

they make a claim for a larger use of fire in national parks. 

Other instances of variance with policy with official sanction followed during the 

1950s. At Pipestone National Monument, Superintendent Lyle K. Linch experimented 

with controlled burning of grasslands inside the park. Recognizing that the scene around 

the famed Hiawatha quarry no longer resembled historic descriptions of the area because 

the absence of fire created a more heavily wooded vista than had existed before, Linch 

sought support for burns that would recreate historic conditions. Photographic evidence 

from the 1920s bolstered his case; even the grasslands of that era had become heavily 

wooded in the ensuing thirty years. At the regional office in Omaha, Linch found 

archaeologists and other cultural resource professionals supportive. In 1950, as the 

summer travel season began, with the help of the Pipestone community, Linch burned 

grasslands inside the park. The community found nothing unusual in this practice. 

Farmers and ranchers in the region had long burned their lands at the end of the summer 

as well.39 

The Pipestone experiment was unusual, but it characterized a strategy that 

circumvented the restrictive NPS suppression policy. Into the 1950s, many park 

superintendents retained considerable autonomy, with some still able to operate more or 

less as free agents. Countless idiosyncratic practices were common, especially at remote 

or less significant parks that had strong ties to local cultures. The emergence of 

prescribed burnings at Pipestone and other isolated parks reflected the lack of centralized 

authority, an historic point of pride for the National Park Service. It also suggested that 

compelling the proliferating number of parks to hew to the overall NPS line on fire was 

more difficult than the NPS Division of Forestry anticipated. Linch was an exception. He 

told his superiors about the upcoming burns, couching them in terms of a debate about 

the authenticity of the cultural resources setting at the park. Posed this way, the use of fire 

was not a challenge to the status quo. It stemmed from the kind of zealous professional 

rectitude that marked Linch’s career. Viewed as an eccentric by his superiors, Linch 

created leeway for the use of fire, although it hardly qualified as precedent. Although the 

regional office eventually curtailed the practice, Linch was neither sanctioned nor 

removed from his office because of this violation of policy. Tolerance might not describe 

the NPS view of such activity, but times had changed since the days when Albright, 

Coffman, and others weighed heavily on any advocates of fire’s practical use. 

By this time, scientific thinking about fire had begun to change. Universitytrained scientists had already revolutionized their approach. At the University of 

California, Berkeley, Harold Biswell arrived in 1947 to teach range management. 

Although he had been advised to avoid precisely this controversy, Biswell promptly 

committed what was at the time a heretical act: he advocated controlled burning in 

California. Biswell had learned the practice during a stint in the South and had the good 

fortune to make his suggestion just as a reversal in California state policy allowed the use 

of controlled fires to improve rangelands. He jumped into the debate at a fortuitous 

moment – the first time that the use of fire as a tool to shape landscape had been seriously 

39 Superintendent, Pipestone National Monument to Regional Director, March 21, 1950, Pipestone 

701, National Archives and Records Administration, Central Plains Region, Kansas City, MO; Hal K. 

Rothman, Managing the Sacred and the Secular: An Administrative History of Pipestone National 

Monument (Omaha: National Park Service, 1992), 177-79. 

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discussed in almost 50 years. Biswell “was a wonderful guy, and completely unabashed 

in his enthusiasm for fire, and its role,” Robert Barbee, who first encountered the 

professor during the 1960s, remembered. “We worked well together because he was a 

showman. He got it done; he would have done well on Madison Avenue. We had little 

press conferences, and we would go out and have little seminars for people where we had 

the media there, and that sort of thing.”40 Although the array of forces in California allied 

against the practice remained powerful and prominent, Biswell’s program reflected a 

vision for a different future of fire management. 

The idea of “light burning,” as controlled burning had been known, had never 

really died, but it had been eliminated from the world view of federal agencies. Western 

in their orientation toward fire, federal land managers largely accepted the paradigms of 

the forestry profession as implemented by the Forest Service, which determined to 

eliminate the practice. The Forest Service’s control of fire management through the 

Forest Protection Board and other mechanisms exiled anyone who thought of using fire 

as a tool to manage land to the far peripheries of fire management. Those who thought 

about using fire were denied access to USFS resources, the largest available source of 

funding for fire. Advocating controlled burning and accessing federal fire protection and 

response resources became an impossible combination. With no other real sources of 

support for fire available, most land managers accepted suppression and did not publicly 

challenge its tenets. 

Biswell became the pivotal figure in bringing ideas about prescribed fire to 

federal agencies. A native of the Midwest, he learned his craft in both the West and the 

South. After completing a Ph.D. in botany and forest ecology at the University of 

Nebraska, he was hired in 1930 to work at the USFS forest experiment station on the 

University of California campus at Berkeley. In the decade Biswell spent there, he 

studied mountain meadows and woodland-grass ranges. In 1940, he transferred to the 

Forest Service Southeastern Experiment Station in North Carolina, bringing the western 

forester’s vision of fire as the enemy. There he witnessed the Forest Service’s 

experiments with burning in the southern pineries in 1943, a revolutionary decision for 

that agency. The seven years Biswell spent in North Carolina changed his understanding 

of the role of fire in natural communities.41 

When he returned to Berkeley in 1947, Biswell carried with him to the hostile 

intellectual climate of the American West a generation of knowledge gleaned elsewhere. 

The South had changed him and his views, although not for the better in the view of his 

Forest Service mentors. Even after he was gently cautioned by his USFS mentor, Edward 

I. Kotok, in 1947 chief of research for the Forest Service, to stick to range management 

when he reached California, Biswell soon returned to studying the impact of fire on range 

management. He found that fire improved range land in the woodlands of the Sierra 

foothills and developed a method of burning upslope without firelines in chaparral. And 

40 Jan W. van Wagtendonk, “Dr. Biswell’s Influence on the Development of Prescribed Burning in 

California,” The Biswell Symposium: Fire Issues and Solutions in Urban Interface and Wildland 

Ecosystems (USDA Forest Service, General Technical Rep., PSW-GTR-159, 1995), 11-14; Robert Barbee, 

interview by Hal Rothman, Part I, November 12, 2004; Pyne, Fire in America, 119; David Carle, Burning 

Questions: America’s Fight with Nature’s Fire (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002), 58-60. 41 van Wagtendonk, “Dr. Biswell’s Influence on the Development of Prescribed Burning in 

California,” 12; Carle, Burning Questions, 57-58. 

97 
 

 

he began to burn ponderosa pine – the most prevalent tree in California, covering almost 

4 million acres – in 1951.42 

Biswell’s return to California precipitated a revolution in the way federal agencies 

approached fire. Federal fire response had been shaped in the voluminous fires of the 

Northern Rockies and the Sierras. In a distant mirror of the westward motion of 

southerners after the Civil War, the ideology of southern fire management moved west 

through the person of Harold Biswell. Southern practices offered a counter, even a 

rebuke, to existing thinking; at Biswell’s urging, the scientific community increasingly 

seemed willing to consider such ideas. Only the diehards, the federal agencies that 

depended on the Forest Service for leadership and funding, retained full-fledged 

commitment to suppression. 

A considerable body of scientific literature argued that fire could be a useful 

instrument of resource management. Forester H. H. Chapman led the way; after him 

others developed situation-specific research that advanced the idea of controlled burning. 

One influential piece, forester Harold Weaver’s 1943 Journal of Forestry article titled 

“Fire as an Ecological Factor in the Ponderosa Pine Region of the Pacific Slope,” 

attracted Biswell’s attention. Weaver’s later writings were also worthy of note. Working 

for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Weaver implemented a controlled burning program on 

the Fort Apache Reservation in 1950, burning more than 50,000 acres of ponderosa pine. 

In the subsequent two years, wildfires were reduced by more than 90 percent on the 

burned acreage, a rate less than one-ninth that on land that had not been burned.43 

Clearly, in certain circumstances, planned fire could be used to obviate wildfire. 

Despite the experience of the Everglades and the growing consensus among 

scientists that there was a role for fire in ecological settings, the National Park Service 

was slow to assess the possibilities of the new strategy. Visitation, not fire, was at the 

forefront of Service concern in the early 1950s, and the efforts at Everglades were 

anomalies. During the post-war era, visitation grew from a low of 6,838,000 in 1943 to 

31,735,000 in 1949 and 46,225,000 in 1953. Both 1941, before the war, and 1946, after it 

ended, had been in the 21 million-visitor range. By 1949, that number had increased by 

more than fifty percent. No dimension of the NPS – not visitor services, not the ranger 

division, and certainly not fire protection – could keep pace. Inundated and overwhelmed 

best described the national parks; addressing the onslaught took all the limited resources 

at NPS disposal. Director Conrad L. Wirth encapsulated the problem for Reader’s Digest. 

The Service could not “provide essential services. Visitor concentration points can’t be 

kept in sanitary condition. Comfort stations can’t be kept clean and serviced. Water, 

sewer, and electrical systems are taxed to the utmost. Protective services to safeguard the 

public and preserve park values are far short of requirements. Physical facilities are 

deteriorating or are inadequate to meet public needs. Some of the camps are approaching 

rural slums. We actually get scared when we think of the bad health conditions.”44 

42 van Wagtendonk, “Dr. Biswell’s Influence on the Development of Prescribed Burning in 

California,” 12; Carle, Burning Questions, 57-58. 43 Carle, Burning Questions, 62-63. 44 National Park Service, “Public Use of National Parks: A Statistical Report, 1941-1953”; National 

Park Service, “Public Use of National Parks: A Statistical Report, 1954-1964; Charles Stevenson, “The 

Shocking Truth About Our National Parks,” Reader’s Digest January 1955; Conrad L. Wirth, Parks, 

Politics, and the People (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980), 237-38. 

98 
 

This problem was not confined to national parks, it permeated public land 

management throughout the 1950s. Campers left campfires to burn out without 

supervision and drivers tossed the ubiquitous cigarette butt out the car window and onto 

dry terrain, where it smoldered in brush until all too often it started a forest fire. Despite 

an extensive fire awareness campaign, education ran up against the fundamental 

recalcitrance of the public. As long as suppression remained the model, the solution to the 

woes of heavier use and increased carelessness could only be the application of an evergreater quantity of resources to the problem of fire.45 

One answer for the National Park Service came from an unexpected source. In 

1956, MISSION 66, a ten-year program to upgrade facilities and staffing in advance of the 

fiftieth anniversary of the 1916 founding of the National Park Service, provided the park 

system with its second comprehensive development program. In the decade-long 

program, Congress poured more than $1 billion into the parks, which translated into an 

enormous impact on every dimension of the National Park System. MISSION 66 financed 

countless visitor centers and other structures, improved employee housing opportunities 

at most parks, paid for road construction, built campgrounds and other visitor facilities, 

and helped end the public cries to close the national parks if they could not be properly 

maintained. MISSION 66 had as transformative an impact on the park system as did the 

New Deal.46 

Although MISSION 66 was not specifically designed to achieve fire suppression 

goals, many of its activities supported a new emphasis on this objective. Suppression had 

succeeded when resources were available to support it. World War II had pushed the NPS 

away from efforts to suppress fire everywhere in the parks, restricting its activities to 

easily accessible places. The post-war era compelled a fundamentally reactive posture. 

With important exceptions – such as the Everglades, Kaweah Basin in Sequoia National 

Park, and Pipestone National Monument – most parks simply responded to fires and 

sought to put them out as quickly as possible. Major fires were the most threatening crisis 

any park faced and the most difficult to anticipate. 

 Among MISSION 66’s primary activities, building roads and trails offered 

advantages for fire control as a result of the improved access they created. Roads and 

trails made it easier to get the firefighters’ vehicles and heavy equipment on which fire 

control increasingly depended to the places where fires raged. Parks such as Olympic 

National Park routinely used the elaborate trail systems inherited from the Forest Service 

as the basis of their fire response strategy. MISSION 66 funds lessened the strain of 

upkeep, making these pathways even better tools of access for fire suppression, while 

they still supported other purposes. 47 

In fire management, MISSION 66 first exacerbated the problems of the post-war 

era, and then began to provide a remedy for them. In fire protection, as in so many other 

areas, MISSION 66 functioned as a more comprehensive version of the New Deal. It 

provided an injection of federal resources that allowed the National Park Service to 

45Baker, Maxwell, Treat, and Dethloff, Timeless Heritage, 131-33; Hal K. Rothman, Saving the 

Planet: The American Response to the Environment in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 

2000), 129-30. 46 Roy E. Appleman, “A History of the National Park Service Mission 66 Program,” January 1958, 1-

22, NPS Technical Information Center, Denver, microfilm. 47 Guy Fringer, Olympic National Park: An Administrative History (Port Angeles, WA; National Park 

Service, 1991), 102-3, 105-6, 131-32. 

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respond to the changes in visitation patterns and to increased use of national park lands. 

The inclusion of fire protection in what was essentially a capital development program 

took a number of years. MISSION 66 began in 1956, and its impact on the system was 

almost immediate. By 1960, Acting NPS Director Eivind T. Scoyen, who had 

considerable experience with fire as a result of his superintendencies at Glacier, Sequoia, 

and other parks, recognized the implications of MISSION 66 on the fire management 

program. “The MISSION 66 Program to date [has] altered the patterns of use by park 

visitors,” he informed the regional directors “Operating programs have changed and 

many other factors indicate the need to restudy the forest protection program for each 

park.”48 

Scoyen recognized that MISSION 66 efforts made the parks’ fire situation worse. 

Capital development allowed more people to visit places that previously had been out of 

reach, increasing the danger of human-induced fire in many new places even as lightning 

fires were simultaneously on the rise due to the increased fuel load that resulted from 

successful suppression. An old pattern had repeated. As the National Park Service pulled 

back from its New Deal-era commitment to fight fire everywhere, people brought fire to 

new places because of development. The Service had to galvanize MISSION 66 for fire 

protection as well as development. 

The fault, Scoyen believed, was that existing funding schedules for fire did not 

accurately reflect the situation in the national parks. Requests for Forest and Fire Control 

reserve money far exceeded the available funding, a circumstance Scoyen believed 

stemmed from poor planning, but in fact was a historic problem in the NPS. Resources to 

fight fires had never been sufficient – except as a result of extraordinary programs such 

as the New Deal. Scoyen sought an overall review of fire control as the NPS practiced it, 

looking for both an assessment of infrastructure and of practice. He asked the regional 

directors to assess the methods of detection, the operational phase of fire control, and to 

document estimated increases in revenues. 49 

Suppression had become increasingly untenable, a fiction that the National Park 

Service told itself. The vast resources that poured in through MISSION 66 masked the 

increasing difficulty of the 1950s with a characteristic salve – the application of 

enormous amounts of dollars to the system’s problems. It provided a second instance in a 

thirty-year period during which the NPS had enough resources to meet every whim a 

superintendent or a regional director might ponder. Cleared trails had the same influence 

on fire-fighting in the 1960s as they had in the 1930s. So did thinning of underbrush, 

clearing of danger spots, and an array of other practices that the Service engaged in as a 

reflex. MISSION 66 promoted the possibility that suppression could remain viable – if 

only enough resources were devoted to it on a regular basis. 

At the same time, a new heady era began for the National Park Service in 1956. 

MISSION 66 had finally given the Service the facilities to accommodate the tremendous 

growth in travel that followed World War II. Because of a divergent series of forces in 

post-war American society, the National Park Service began to move in new management 

directions. Two significant changes – the G.I. Bill that trained so many scientific 

48 Memorandum: Forest Protection Planning, Acting Director to Regional Directors, Regions One, 

Two, Three, Four, and Five, July 21, 1960, Yellowstone Archives, Yellowstone Box Y-239. 

49 Memorandum: Forest Protection Planning, Acting Director to Regional Directors, Regions One, 

Two, Three, Four, and Five, July 21, 1960, Yellowstone Archives, Yellowstone Box Y-239. 

100 
 

 

 

 

 

specialists at the college level, and two reports, the A. Starker Leopold Committee’s 

Report on Wildlife Management in the National Parks and the National Academy of 

Sciences’ A Report by the Advisory Committee to the National Park Service on Research, 

known as the Robbins Report after its lead author – compelled a new vision of National 

Park Service management.50 In a way never before tenable, the Service embraced science 

as a guiding administrative force, its people focusing with renewed vigor on resource 

management as a core mission. Fire management became a significant component of that 

obligation. 

Fire science continued to move forward, largely apart from the National Park 

Service. Tall Timbers, a Florida research station created in 1958 to study long-term fire 

ecology, became the conduit for some of the most exciting research on the use of fire. 

Developed by a wealthy landowner and a well-known wildlife biologist who operated a 

wildlife experiment station, Tall Timbers set a high standard. Beginning with the 

publication of its first conference proceedings in 1962, Tall Timbers became the center of 

innovation in fire ecology and directly contradicted the Forest Service model. Under 

Edward V. Komarek, the visionary scientist who pioneered the use of fire during the 

twenty-five years he worked in the region prior to the founding of Tall Timbers, the 

research station became the most innovative place in the world of fire study. The most 

original and even heretical ideas about fire usually could get a hearing at the annual Tall 

Timbers conferences, and the open inviting climate created healthy discussion about the 

role of fire in the natural world.51 

This type of intellectual innovation was new to the NPS. The Service had been a 

tight-knit cadre since its inception, with tremendous loyalty to the values of leadership 

across generations of employees. There were “greenblood” families, second- and by the 

1960s, third-generation members of families serving in the NPS. The presence of Horace 

M. Albright, more than thirty years past his directorship but still a vital and influential 

force, added to the reverence for historical practices. Despite the efforts of the first head 

of the NPS Wildlife Division George M. Wright, whose life had been cut short by an 

automobile accident outside of Deming, New Mexico, in 1936, science had rarely been a 

particularly strong dimension of the NPS culture.52 

In this context, the Leopold and Robbins reports set a higher standard for science 

in the national park system and greatly influenced the Service’s natural resource 

management policies. Written by a group of noted wildlife scientists, the Leopold report 

transformed a report on the condition of wildlife in the national parks into a powerful 

argument for a new approach to management of national park areas. The report 

50 Richard West Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks: A History (New Haven: Yale 

University Press, 1999), 212-22; A. Starker Leopold, et al., “Wildlife Management in the National Parks,” 

in James B. Trerethren, Transactions of the Twenty-Eighth North American Wildlife and Natural Resources 

Conference (Washington, D.C.: Wildlife Management Institute, 1963); National Academy of Sciences, 

National Research Council, “A Report by the Advisory Committee to the National Park Service on 

Research,” typescript, Aug. 1, 1963; for more on the larger changes of the era, see Patterson, Grand 

Expectations, 174-75, 277-78, 313-20 and David Halberstam, The Fifties (New York: Villard, 1993), 286-

94, 495-96, 623-25. 51 Carle, Burning Questions, 43, 94, 117-19; Pyne, Fire in America, 293, 302. 52 Donald Swain, Wilderness Defender: Horace M. Albright and Conservation (Chicago: University 

of Chicago Press, 1970), 311-16; Richard Sellars, “The Significance of George Wright,” George Wright 

Forum 17:4 (2000), 46-50. 

101 
 

recommended maintaining or recreating the original ecology of a park as a “reasonable 

illusion of primitive America,” a goal much at odds with the manipulated nature of many 

parks. Believing that natural conditions should prevail, the authors suggested removing 

all non-native species from parks, putting biologists rather than interpreters in charge of 

managing wildlife, and emphasizing the role of fire in forest regeneration, among other 

management practices. The Robbins report focused on the National Park Service’s 

research needs. Everglades was among the parks the committee visited, and it paid close 

attention to that park’s experiments with fire. The report concluded that the NPS should 

preserve national parks primarily for the aesthetic, spiritual, scientific, and educational 

values they offered the public. The Service’s research agenda, in the committee’s view, 

should directly support those goals. Fire was included in the mix of components the 

report thought valuable to the park system.53 

The Leopold Report specifically addressed the role of fire in national parks and 

argued for a change in direction. With its primary focus on wildlife and habitat, the report 

saw fire as a tool for shaping the park environment. Pointing to the experience of the East 

African grasslands, where humans used fire to shape their environment for centuries, the 

report argued for fire as a strategy for habitat management. Controlled fire was “the most 

‘natural’ and much the easiest and cheapest to apply,” the report averred. It 

acknowledged that fire suppression created conditions that had to be modified before any 

systematic plan of controlled burning could take place. Conversely, suppression had 

created a need for aggressive management before controlled fire could be introduced.54 

The two influential reports challenged existing National Park Service practices, 

powerfully arguing for a stronger ecological basis for park management. Influential, they 

combined with an internal Service transformation to create an ecological strain in NPS 

thinking. Among the thousands of veterans who went to college, some saw careers in 

government as a viable extension of their military service. A small number became 

biologists, wildlife specialists, and other natural resource-oriented researchers. Some of 

these joined the NPS, many hired with funds provided by MISSION 66. Trained as 

scientists in the era that saw the Soviets put a spacecraft in outer space, they seemed 

representative of the new. Before their arrival, most NPS staff members had been 

generalists, but these new employees brought a specialized perspective to park 

management. By the early 1960s, they comprised a constituency that favored precisely 

the sort of recommendations that the Leopold and Robbins reports offered, albeit one that 

had yet to dramatically influence NPS policy.55 

The twin reports began to create a position for scientific management in the NPS, 

giving science, in particular the discipline of ecology, much greater visibility in making 

policy. By the mid-1960s, the National Park Service committed itself to professional 

management of natural resources and for the first time since the era of George Wright, 

appeared to listen to its scientists. Wildlife biologists and other scientists in the NPS 

looked for a way to push a science-based management agenda forward. The scientists 

brought a different vision. Where the first two generations of the National Park Service 

53 A.S. Leopold, S.A. Cain, C.M. Cottam, I.N. Gabrielson, and T.L. Kimball, Wildlife Management in 

the National Parks: The Leopold Report (Unpublished, 1963), 10; Ethan Carr, Wilderness By Design: 

Landscape Architecture and the National Parks (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998). 54 Leopold, Wildlife Management in the National Parks, 14. 55 Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks, 214-32, 242-45. 

102 
 

hated fire and treated it as an enemy, these newly trained arrivals regarded it in a much 

more dispassionate manner. Fire was a tool they could use, they believed, and the 

growing body of research, much of it stemming from Tall Timbers and from Harold 

Biswell and his students, supported their vision. Their very presence in the Service 

helped spur the move toward a different kind of strategy to manage fire.56 

Leopold and Biswell’s relationship greatly contributed to both the ideas in the 

Leopold Report and the implementation of its goals. Both men taught at the University of 

California, Berkeley, with their offices just across the street from one another. An 

innovative pair, they collaborated on research, profoundly influencing one another’s 

thinking about fire. The two lunched together and jointly taught seminars for graduate 

students. A group of students and faculty interested in the same topics grew around them, 

for at a time when the University of California was acclaimed as the best public 

university in the nation, the opportunity to study with a pair of such natural resource 

luminaries could not be matched anywhere in the country. Their labs became crucibles 

for a new generation of fire scientists. A number of their graduate students pursued the 

ramifications of fire as dissertation topics. Four – Bruce Kilgore, who matriculated in 

1968, Jan van Wagtendonk (1972), James Agee (1973), and David Graber (1981) – 

became National Park Service scientists who influenced fire policy during the subsequent 

generation.57 In the long run, Biswell’s impact, in concert with that of the Leopold 

Report, extended well beyond high-level discussions; it created a generation of 

scholar/practitioners who carried his ideas forward. 

The idea of using fire as a tool spread in the aftermath of the Leopold Report, the 

most influential and controversial scientific report the NPS had yet commissioned. Tied 

to the historic models of the Forest Service and dependent on funding that stemmed from 

that agency, senior NPS officials remained wary of the shift away from suppression. 

Obstacles certainly remained, but at the grassroots, managers began to look at the 

environment around them and the consequences of fire and see real advantages in 

controlled burning. With more than twenty years in fire parks, Superintendent Scoyen 

served as a counter to older views of fire in the Service’s highest echelons. He helped 

soften resistance to the new ideas. When the appreciation of the use of fire migrated from 

anomalous parks such as Pipestone to the parks the public knew best, Scoyen helped 

counter the skepticism at the top. 

Implementation exploded on the NPS landscape. In 1965, Yellowstone National 

Park began to experiment with controlled burning. As it had been elsewhere in the 

system, the introduction of induced fires was couched in terms of another management 

goal: the development of resource management. As part of the park’s Elk and Habitat 

Management Plan, Yellowstone undertook an aspen restoration program that relied on the 

controlled use of fire to achieve its goals. The program had two objectives: to ascertain if 

the burning of a former stand of aspen, taken over by conifers, would cause the area to 

revert to aspen, and to see if burning would enhance the “number and vigor of Aspen 

sprouts in a decadent stand,” as Park Biologist Robert E. Howe described it. The park 

planned a large burn, but the summer remained too wet to sustain sufficient fire. Scaling 

56 Sellars, Preserving Nature In the National Parks, 214-16; Foresta, America’s National Parks, 133-

36, 148-62; Carr, Wilderness by Design, 1-14. 57 Jan van Wagtendonk, “The Evolution of National Park Service Fire Policy,” 329-330; James Agee, 

interview by Hal Rothman, June 10, 2004. 

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down his expectations, Howe carefully selected a location, a five-acre patch on a northfacing slope just south of the old Tower Fall road. Conifers had taken over a stand of 

mature aspen. Surrounded by grasslands, it provided an excellent opportunity for an 

experiment in controlled burning.58 

Finding optimal conditions proved difficult. By the end of September, the chance to 

burn seemed to have passed. In early October, Howe tried to set up the burn, only to be 

thwarted by a six-inch snowfall. Undaunted, the biologist kept trying. At 1:45 p.m. on 

October 28, in gusting winds of up to eighteen miles per hour and with a relative 

humidity of 50 percent, a crew under the supervision of District Ranger Bohlin began to 

intentionally burn timber inside Yellowstone National Park. The men sprayed the 

conifers with diesel oil and ignited them. The fire went up into the crowns and burned 

about ten trees closely clumped together. As the gusty winds died down, the fire 

followed, and despite efforts to reignite it, the crew recorded little success. After three 

hours and 200 gallons of diesel fuel, they decided that the conditions “weren’t going to be 

favorable this year for a burn,” Howe told his superiors.59 

Despite the failure to truly burn anything of significance, the very act of 

attempting to burn in Yellowstone represented a major step toward the idea of controlled 

burning. Yellowstone remained the signal park in the national park system, the barometer 

of the status and meaning of national parks. The idea that the National Park Service 

would throw over the historic practices of fire suppression – even under the guise of an 

elk management plan – was revolutionary. The importance of even indirect 

implementation at the nation’s most important park without a sound from the powerful 

advocates of suppression throughout the Service spoke volumes about the imminence of a 

formal change in policy. 

Even more stunning, the regional office encouraged the continuation of the 

experiment. In December, Acting Regional Director George Baggley visited the plot with 

Howe and Superintendent John S. McLaughlin, and pronounced that he was pleased with 

the experiment. “The lack of complete success should not deter you from going ahead 

with the program,” he told McLaughlin. Baggley knew the literature on controlled fire 

and suggested that the very lack of fuel load that attracted Howe to the location might 

have made the experiment go awry. “You have a situation at Yellowstone which does not 

fit the book, so far as controlled burning is concerned,” he continued. “Keep it up though 

because I certainly think the results will be worthwhile.”60 

If not quite an attack on existing policy, the Yellowstone experiment reflected the 

importance of the newest studies of fire emanating from Biswell’s program at the 

University of California. Much of that work focused on California, where sequoias had 

always posed an intellectual problem for fire suppression. The big trees seemed 

impervious to burning, and ancient as they were, they forced a different calculus. 

Suppression was new, but the trees were very old. Asserting that the absence of fire had a 

positive impact on the big trees was an exercise in futility. Biswell began research in 

1965 on stand modification and fuel reduction among the giant sequoia. In 1967, another 

58 Park Management Biologist to Chief Park Ranger, Memorandum: Prescribed Burn Experiment, 

November 18, 1965, Yellowstone National Park, N16,

59 Ibid, 2. 

60 Acting Regional Director to Superintendent, Yellowstone, December 20, 1965, N-1427 MWR, 

Yellowstone National Park Archives. 

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fire researcher, Richard J. Hartsveldt of the University of California published “The Fire 

Ecology of Sequoia Regeneration” in the 1967 Tall Timbers Forest Ecology Conference 

Proceedings. Immediately preceding his article was Biswell’s “Forest Fire in 

Perspective,” an assessment of fuel loads and fire hazards in the Sequoia region. 

Together, the two papers clearly articulated a strategy of prescribed burning among the 

sequoias.61 

This new intellectual regard for fire led to serious strategic rifts in the NPS. No 

matter how hard they tried, many of the more senior professionals in the Service could 

not swallow their distaste for the idea of intentionally burning vegetation. Their careers 

had been built around stopping fire in any way possible. Most had lost friends to fire; all 

had witnessed destruction of the parks – blackened forests and burned ranches, 

homesteads, and lodges. Many could intellectually understand the way in which 

prescribed fire could prevent greater calamity, but in their hearts, they believed – and 

everything they had ever seen taught them – that fire was too dangerous to be 

intentionally let loose. Just because the Leopold Report said the NPS should burn did not 

mean that generations of park professionals were simply going to go along.62 

For a number of years, the National Park Service’s fire control structure did its 

best to ignore the ideas developed in the Leopold and Robbins reports. Although 

assessing fire increasingly involved scientific analysis, fire prevention still dominated the 

NPS perspective. By the middle of the 1960s, the Service attempted to quantify the 

environmental conditions that influenced annual fire levels. Comparative levels of 

moisture began to be a feature of the annual fire report at individual parks, with the 

comparison of types, numbers, and distribution of fires increasingly linked to the patterns 

of rain and snowfall. Yet, throughout the middle 1960s, fire management goals remained 

the same and suppression remained atop the list of NPS objectives when it came to fire. 

When Glacier National Park offered a new fire control plan in 1965, it reiterated the longstanding vision of suppression so crucial to the Service’s formulation of its obligations: 

“Every fire when discovered shall be reached and extinguished as quickly as possible,” 

the report insisted, “whether caused by man or lightning, and whether originating in a 

developed section or in a wilderness area.”63 

The NPS finally had to face the implications of the Leopold Report. Resistance in 

the ranks was stiff. In response to the new mandate, Director Conrad Wirth averred that 

less intense suppression merited consideration, but he did not contemplate an immediate 

change in policy. Lawrence Cook, Coffman’s successor and a longtime devotee of 

suppression, manipulated information to support his beliefs. For months, Hartesveldt’s 

study of fire ecology in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, a document that 

threatened the viability of suppression as a strategy, lay in a pile of papers on Cook’s 

desk. Without support from the highest echelons of the NPS, a change in suppression 

policy seemed unlikely. Lacking a catalyst to compel a change in their views, the Service 

61 Harold H. Biswell, “Forest Fire in Perspective,” 43-64; R. J. Hartesveldt and H. T. Harvey, “The 

Fire Ecology of Sequoia Regeneration,” 65-78, in Edward V. Komarek, Sr., ed. Tall Timbers Fire Ecology 

Conference Proceedings, No 7. (Tall Timbers, Fl: Tall Timbers Research Station, 1967); Pyne, Fire in 

America, 302. 62 Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks, 255; Art White, interview by Richard McCaslin, 

November 15, 1990, copy possession of the author. 63 “Glacier National Park, Forest Fire Control Plan, March 1965,” Glacier National Park, Fire Cache 

Records, 1910-1990, Box 2; NPS Fire Control Handbook, 1965. 

105 
 

 

 

leadership seemed content to maintain the status quo no matter what the Leopold Report 

advocated.64 

The National Park Service faced two large-scale problems with suppression. The 

fragmentary constitution of the national park system raised the issue of scale repeatedly. 

Even at its largest parks, the NPS could not maintain a fire program sufficient to meet the 

demands of an exceptional year. Parks were constantly overstaffed if fire did not come, 

but dangerously understaffed if major fires occurred. Even more, fire defied any and all 

strategy; it was not a bureaucratic category that submitted to administrative solutions. 

Fighting fire was not at all like repaving roads or maintaining clean restrooms. It worked 

by its own impenetrable logic. 

As had become common for the National Park Service by the 1960s, the impetus 

for change came from outside the Service – from its friends and supporters, energized by 

the environmental revolution and increasingly wary of even this most benign of federal 

agencies. The research supporting light burning was overwhelming. The sequoia 

remained the focus of most of the study, and for more than one hundred years, the big 

trees had their own constituency. As the NPS recognized how closely its fate was tied to 

public opinion, officials finally looked for accommodation with the enthusiastic 

advocates of parks and the environment who emerged in the 1960s.65 

Even suppression’s most avid proponents acknowledged that it had been a 

dangerous strategy. More than thirty years of application showed that it worked best 

when money and manpower were abundant. The New Deal and MISSION 66 made 

suppression viable, but only temporarily. And it continually created problems. High 

levels of fuel loads, first noticed by Colonel John White in the 1920s, resulted from 

suppression and the results of the fuel-driven blazes could be catastrophic. Some agencies 

could live with the consequences of such overwhelming fires, but the National Park 

Service could not. The iconography of the parks was so significant in the mid-century 

United States that large swaths of apparent destruction inside their boundaries seemed a 

rebuke of democracy. Even more, out-of-control fires threatened people and damaged 

valuable resorts, hotels, and other commercial property as well as NPS facilities. After 

the Leopold Report, a change in strategy became hard to resist but suppression persisted. 

Yosemite, moving toward the center of intellectual revolution that Biswell 

spawned, maintained the existing method of fire suppression even as the Berkeley 

professor’s students engaged in the research that revolutionized the field. Yosemite 

emphasized education; it trained 1,181 children in fire safety in its junior ranger program 

in 1966 alone. That year, the number of human-induced fires in Yosemite grew 

remarkably, from thirteen in 1965 to forty-one. The decade-long average had been 

sixteen. Attributing the increase to a greater number of fires started by cigarette smokers 

in heavily trafficked areas, the park stepped up its prevention programs, added new 

patrols, and increased the number of fire prevention posters and “high fire hazard” 

posters and signs throughout the heavily trafficked areas of the park. Signs along roads 

64 Bob Linn, email to Hal Rothman, February 11, 2004, copy possession of the author; Sellars, 

Preserving Nature in the National Parks, 255-56; Kilgore interview, February 16, 2004; Agee interview, 

June 10, 2004. 65 Lary M. Dilsaver and William C. Tweed, Challenge of the Big Trees: A Resource History of 

Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks (Three Rivers, CA: Sequoia Natural History Association, 

1900), 263-65; Sellars, Natural Resource Management in the National Parks, 257; Foresta, America’s 

National Parks and Their Keepers, 68-74. 

106 
 

 

and trails that exclaimed “no smoking while traveling” provided another warning.66 At 

this most pivotal of national parks, suppression remained the dominant policy a full three 

years after the Leopold Report was issued. 

The annual fire season always brought suppression advocates to the fore, and the 

Northern Rockies usually provided the most dramatic test case. The region had been 

quiescent since the end of the New Deal, in no small part as the result of the application 

of federally funded fire-fighting resources. Infrastructural developments contributed as 

well. The Forest Service’s Remount Depot supplied the countless pack mules essential to 

fire control, and the widespread use of aircraft, which not only allowed cargo to be 

dropped in remote mountain valleys, but also allowed smokejumpers to be dropped onto 

the perimeter of any fire, provided powerful examples. Airplanes also were used in 

experiments with dropping chemical agents on fire, offering another approach to fire 

control.67 If fire could truly be tamed, it would have to be in the Northern Rockies, as 

only the conquest of this dramatic center of American fire would thoroughly prove the 

ongoing viability of suppression as a strategy. 

In 1967, the Northern Rockies experienced a brutal fire season that reminded the 

NPS that the region was dangerous fire country. Beginning in July, fire broke out 

throughout the Northern Rockies and the Inland Empire, as the intermountain area in 

Idaho and Montana was called. More than 5,000 fires were reported, and more than thirty 

exceeded 1,000 acres in size. On July 12, 131 fires burned until they were doused by rain; 

on August 9, 167 started; on September 6, ninety-seven more began, and on September 

21, another 167 were recorded. Before the rains came in late September, lightning alone 

ignited more than 1,400 fires. 

When the Northern Rockies burned, Glacier National Park always was a critical 

concern. During the spring, fire was far from the minds of park staff and regional 

officials. Instead, they worried about a repeat of the dramatic floods of 1964. At 5,000 

feet elevation in early May, the snow pack was 152 percent of normal. Even that late in 

the year, flooding seemed a more realistic threat to Glacier National Park than the 

prospect of fire. Precipitation up to the 3,000-foot elevation level had been about normal, 

and prolonged dry spells had not plagued the park. However, the snow melted slowly and 

the rains first diminished and then ended by mid-July. Through May and June, south 

slopes lost their snow mantle and began to dry. By mid-June, Glacier officials could see a 

crisis in the making. The situation only became worse. July, August, and September 1967 

became the driest months that had occurred at West Glacier since the advent of recordkeeping fifty-three years earlier. The precipitation of .98 of an inch was barely one-fifth 

of average.68 

Few parks were as well prepared for fire as Glacier, one of the most heavily 

burned places in the system. Coffman wrote his first fire plan for Glacier and the park’s 

fire-fighting preeminence had continued. Glacier also was one of the most heavily 

planned parks when it came to fire response. If the NPS wanted to demonstrate the 

viability of suppression once again, Glacier was as good a location as any. 

66 Forest Fire Control, 1966, 1-3, Yosemite National Park. 

67 Pyne, Fire in America, 256-57. 68 “Glacier Fire Film, 1967, Glacier National Park, 1910-1984 Collection, 309-5; Glacier National 

Park Forest Fire Review, November 30-December 1, 1967” Glacier National Park, 1910-1984 Collection, 

309-22. 

107 
 

 

 

During the evening of August 11, 1967, dry lightning that crossed the Continental 

Divide and continued in the early morning hours of August 12 inaugurated Glacier 

National Park’s fire season. Fire spotters counted more than 100 ground strikes, the first 

at 6:25 p.m., with the first new fire reported at 7:05 p.m. The sparks started twenty new 

fires, burning in total more than 12,000 acres of timber. One of the most aggressive fires, 

the Flathead Fire, was discovered about halfway up the Apgar and Huckleberry 

mountains. The fuels of this fire were lodgepole-larch reproduction with heavy snags, the 

result of the major 1926 fire in the region. By early afternoon on August 17, the fire had 

spread to 650 acres. It doubled in size in the next seven hours, with a strong convection 

column angled up the slope. A cold front changed the direction of the wind, and by 10:30 

p.m. on August 18, the fire had jumped the North Fork of the Flathead River, reaching 

the Flathead National Forest. It continued to spread downhill until August 20, when the 

center portion of the fire burned out and created two smaller fires, one on the northwest 

part of a ridge and the other on the southeast. By August 22, more the 4,645 acres of 

timber had burned.69 

The situation turned worse on August 23. The Weather Bureau issued a red flag 

weather alert, predicting that a weak Pacific frontal system passing through the area 

would bring high winds and dry lightning storms during the subsequent twenty-four 

hours. In response, the park tried to tie in bulldozer and hand-dug fire lines before the 

winds arrived. By 3:00 p.m., before the lines could be joined, the winds accelerated to 

between forty and sixty miles per hour. Firefighters were forced to retreat as the fire 

rapidly spread. Individual fires could be found as much as a half-mile in front of the main 

fire, with embers thrown ahead by the force of the wind. By the end of the day, another 

3,500 acres of vegetation had burned.70 

Fires continued for another month, a result of the dry conditions, and when they 

came to an end, suppression advocates pointed to their successes. Throughout the 

Northern Rockies, fires had been controlled and a comparison with the terrible fires of 

1910 highlighted a stunning contrast. Instead of the roughly 3 million acres of timber that 

burned in 1910, the 1967 fires only covered a total of 90,000 acres. Fatalities dropped 

from seventy-eight to three, with one resulting from a heart attack. Technology played an 

enormous role in this success. Aerial infrared scanners, oblivious to the smoke plumes 

that obscured vision, mapped fire perimeters. Fires that would have burned for days in 

1910 were detected early and control efforts began within hours. Radio, telephone, and 

teletype networks provided instantaneous communications, allowing for immediate 

knowledge of new fires and coordinated responses. A national infrastructure also 

contributed to the 1967 success. The region was declared a national disaster area, and the 

federal Office of Emergency Preparedness joined in suppression efforts. Full closure of 

the national forests, a status akin to martial law, was enacted, keeping visitors away and 

limiting the chance of additional accidental fire. The response was impressive; the 

damage – with the exception of the 56,000-acre Sundance Fire in northern Idaho – was 

minimal. Suppression, most observers agreed, worked.71 

However, a tone of exhaustion and impending doom permeated the accounts. 

Suppression advocates no longer trumpeted their successes with a vision that they were 

69 Glacier Fire Film, 1967, 3-6. 

70 Glacier Fire Film, 1967, 8-10. 

71 Pyne, Fire in America, 257-59. 

108 
winning the fight. Instead, the fires of 1967 were another episode in a never-ending war 

against an opponent that could not be vanquished. The National Park Service finally 

recognized a hard reality: Fire would not go away; nor could it ever truly be suppressed. 

As long as the existing policies remained, the NPS would continue to invest ever-greater 

resources in an irresolvable conflict. Every year, it would have to scrounge for dollars 

and firefighters. Each successive season, the Service would recount the damages, savor 

any victories, lick its individual and collective wounds, and prepare for the next year. 

The 1967 Glacier fires also subjected the National Park Service to severe 

criticism. Led by former U.S. Senator Burton Wheeler, D-Mt., a long-time nemesis of the 

Service, inholders charged that the NPS botched the management of one fire. It was a 

simple matter to put it out, some averred, and pointed to NPS mismanagement as the 

source of their losses. Such recriminations were typical in the aftermath of most fires, but 

Wheeler’s status gave this set of attacks more serious ramifications. Irate complainants 

ignored the other thirty-five fires in the park that summer as well as two bear maulings, 

but the criticism still stung. Even when the NPS provided suppression, it could still be 

chastised by an ungrateful public. The situation offered one more reason to break the 

cycle, and to consider new approaches to fire. 

The vision of a new strategy was already extant. By 1967, the general tenor of 

scientific thinking about fire truly had changed. Fire had come to be seen as a natural 

force in an age that valued the concept of nature. To scientists such as Harold Biswell, 

suppression seemed outdated. MISSION 66 had provided a reprieve for the National Park 

Service; its injection of resources breathed new life into the strategy, but the program 

could not counteract the problem of the eternal struggles, and throwing resources at fire 

did not take into account the change in the general direction of thinking. Changes in the 

Service and in science combined to demand a new approach. Even as the Northern 

Rockies grappled with 1967 fire season, the end of the era of suppression was at hand. 

109 
 

Figure 1: Ranger Cecil Metcalf and Superintendent John R. White confer as an unidentified man 

looks on during an early National Park Service controlled burn at Sequoia National Park during the 

1920s. Courtesy National Archives, Washington, D.C. 

Figure 2: Superintendent John R. White monitoring a backfire on the Cold Springs Trail in Sequoia 

National Park during a 1920s experiment in prescribed burning. Courtesy National Archives, 

Washington, D.C. 

110 
Figure 3: Commissary for 200 men set up near the scene of an August 1928 fire at Merced Grove, 

Yosemite National Park. Courtesy, National Park Service, Yosemite National Park. 

Figure 4: Mack Fire Truck, with Half Dome in the background. Sept. 1, 1931. Courtesy, National 

Park Service, Yosemite National Park. 

111 
Figure 5: Portable fire pump, 1925. Courtesy, National Park Service, Yosemite National Park. 

Figure 6: Ranger and fire equipment. Courtesy, National Park Service, Yosemite National Park. 

112 
 

 

Figure 8: (R) Dr. Jan van Wagtendonk 

Figure 7: (L) William Colony. Courtesy Jan van Wagtendonk 

Courtesy National Park Service, 

Glacier National Park photo archives. 

Figure 9: Dr. Jan van Wagtendonk and NPS Fire Ecologist Caroline Nobel on a wilderness burn in 

Yosemite National Park. Courtesy Jan van Wagtendonk. 

113 
Figure 10: Jim Cook. Courtesy of Jim Cook. 

Figure 11: Jan van Wagtendonk and Dr. Harold Biswell during the first prescribed burn in Yosemite 

National Park. Courtesy Jan van Wagtendonk. 

114 
Figure 12: Dr. Harold Biswell. Courtesy Jan van Wagtendonk 

 Figure 13: Jim Agee. Courtesy Jim Agee. Figure 14: Lawrence Cook. Courtesy National 

Park Service, Harpers Ferry Center Historic 

Photo Collection. 

115 
Figure 15: John Coffman. Courtesy National 

Park Service, Harpers Ferry Center, Historic 

Photo Collection. 

Figure 16: Bruce Kilgore, Zion National Park, 

1991. Courtesy Bruce Kilgore. 

Figure 17: Bruce Kilgore in 1968, studying fire 

scars on Ponderosa Pine after Harold Weaver 

prepared wedge in tree using an older, higher 

impact technique. Picture by Harold Weaver. 

Courtesy Bruce Kilgore. 

Figure 18: Elaine and Bruce Kilgore, 

Pocatello, Idaho, 2002. Courtesy Bruce Kilgore. 

116 
Figure 19: Meeting at Whitaker’s Forest, UC Berkeley Experimental Forest, adjacent to Sequoia 

National Park, July 24, 2003. From left, Jim Agee, University of Washington – Forestry; Scott 

Stephens, UC Berkeley – Forestry; Nate Stephenson, former scientist at SEKI; Jan van Wagtendonk, 

USGS Yosemite National Park; Hayle Buchanan, Weber State University; Bruce Kilgore, retired 

NPS; Frieder Schorr, UC Berkeley. Courtesy Bruce Kilgore. 

117 
118 
Part II: 

Put Fire Back In . . . 

But When, Where, and How? 

119 
 

 

 

 

Chapter 5: 

Allowing Fire in the National Park System 

“The presence or absence of natural fire within a given habitat is recognized as 

one of the ecological factors contributing to the perpetuation of plants and animals native 

to that habitat,” attested page 17 of the 1968 Administrative Policies for Natural Areas in 

the National Park System, the “Green Book” that compiled the administrative and 

management policies for NPS natural areas. Fires would be allowed to “run their course” 

when fire remained within pre-established boundaries and such burning contributed to 

management objectives. Similar changes appeared in the Blue and Red books, the Service 

policies for recreation and historic areas. This was indeed a revolution, a complete 

restructuring of the National Park Service’s approach to fire. After fifty-one years of NPS 

history and nearly a century of reliance on fire suppression in the national parks, the 

National Park Service embraced a new vision of the role of fire and the obligations of 

managers in the national parks.1 

Those few understated sentences that described this new policy did not do justice 

to the immensity of the transformation that implementation required. For almost 100 

years, the goal of U.S. land management agencies had been to put out every fire in every 

national park, indeed every fire on public land in the United States, as quickly as 

possible. Not only did the new policy discourage suppression, it actively encouraged 

prescribed burning, the intentional setting of fire to achieve natural resource management 

objectives. The very idea that the NPS would initiate fire to craft landscapes to its 

objectives struck many as veritable heresy. Fire had been the enemy for so long that the 

concept that it could be a useful tool offended the sensibilities of generations of NPS 

staffers. Anyone who opened the Green Book could see that a new era in management 

had begun; suppression was no longer the singular goal of NPS fire policy. 

The introduction of fire as a tool in NPS policy reflected larger changes in federal 

philosophies and in American society in general. Federal land management underwent 

radical revisions in the 1960s, first in a response to an energized and sometimes 

intransigent public and then as new congressional statutes transformed the climate in 

which federal agencies managed. The generation-long pressure for wilderness 

preservation that began with Howard Zahniser and The Wilderness Society and David 

Brower and the Sierra Club generated a spate of new legislation at precisely the moment 

that the wider public embraced the new set of values labeled “environmentalism.” This 

remarkably concentrated period of lawmaking gathered momentum throughout the 1950s 

and reached an initial peak with the passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964. It culminated 

1

 National Park Service, Administrative Policies for Natural Areas of the National Park System 

(Washington, D.C.: US Government Printing Office, 1968), 17; National Park Service, Administrative 

Policies for Recreation Areas of the National Park System (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing 

Office, 1968), 20-21; National Park Service, Administrative Policies for Historical Areas of the National 

Park System (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968), 20, 36. 60. 

120 
 

 

 

in the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970 and the Endangered Species Act (ESA) 

in 1973 and continued through the five-year reauthorization of the ESA in 1978. During 

this fourteen-year heyday, the rules by which federal agencies governed public resources 

changed dramatically, allowing for far greater public input and much more sustained 

compliance activity. The geometry of federal fire management changed as a result, 

creating new alliances for the NPS and putting the historically dominant U.S. Forest 

Service on the defensive. The results affected federal fire policies in dramatic ways.2 

The impact on fire management was enormous. As environmentalism became part 

of the national language and the nation confronted the “Quiet Crisis,” as Secretary of the 

Interior Stewart Udall labeled looming questions about the quality of the physical 

environment in 1963, federal agencies broadened their approach to fire. The Boise 

Interagency Fire Center was established in 1969 to unite the Bureau of Land 

Management’s developing fire expertise with the existing prowess of the Forest Service. 

The result was a higher level of interagency cooperation that led participants in new 

directions. The Forest Service soon modified its suppression policy, initiating natural fire 

experiments in 1972 that began a change in direction that followed the NPS. Soon after, 

the move to integrate fire activities among federal agencies gained more momentum. The 

National Wildfire Coordinating Group first met in 1973, tasked to bring every aspect of 

fire management, including multi-agency fire planning and training, under one 

standardized rubric. In 1974, this culminated in the doctrine of total mobility that allowed 

firefighting resources, especially crews, to be used by any agency anywhere. Prior to 

1974, each agency had its own standards and could only accept crews and resources that 

met those standards. Because of a memo of understanding between the secretaries of 

Agriculture and Interior, the agencies worked toward a common standard, furthering the 

cooperation essential to response.3 

With its bold and at the time idiosyncratic change in policy, the National Park 

Service moved to the forefront in fire management. At no time since the introduction of 

fire suppression in Yellowstone in the 1870s had the national parks led the way to new 

fire policy. Since its inception and especially after the fires of 1910, the Forest Service 

became and remained the agency that defined the federal response to fire. In this 

dominant role, that agency hewed to the vision of total suppression it developed in 

response to its values and the conditions it faced. In the 1960s, the National Park Service 

tentatively began to go its own way. Other federal land management agencies followed. 

In envisioning fire management in a new way, the national parks again mattered in fire 

management – for the first time in almost a century. 

2

 Hal K. Rothman, The Greening of a Nation? Environmentalism in the US Since 1945 (Ft. Worth: 

HarBrace Books, 1997), 161-77; David A. Adams, Renewable Resource Policy: The Legal Institutional 

Foundations (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1993), 158-63; Walter A. Rosenbaum, The Politics of 

Environmental Concern, 2d ed. (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1977), 48-55, 117-23; Samuel P. 

Hays, Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955-1985 

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 1-25. 3

 Boise Interagency Fire Agency, “The History of the Boise Interagency Fire Center,” BIFC 1989, 1-

3; Stephen J. Pyne, Fire in America: A Cultural History of Rural and Wildland Fire (Princeton: Princeton 

University Press, 1982), 289-94; David Carle, Burning Questions: America’s Fight with Nature’s Fire 

(Westport, CT: Praeger Press, 2002), 139-52; Stewart Udall, The Quiet Crisis (New York: Holt, Rinehart, 

and Winston, 1963). 

121 
 

 

 

 

The National Park Service could not entirely claim as its own the revolution in 

thinking that reintroduced fire into its parks. Although science had become more 

important to the NPS, a considerable body of research – much of it from outside the 

federal government – created the important intellectual rationale that underpinned this 

radical policy shift. This science-based foundation for fire use accelerated the 

disintegration of the suppression model. As the Forest Service clung to what increasingly 

seemed a retrograde vision based on suppression, that agency’s dominance of fire 

research waned. Well before the NPS implemented its new administrative policy in 1968, 

articulate challengers to the suppression ethos such as A. Starker Leopold, John S. 

McLaughlin, superintendent of Yellowstone and later Sequoia National Parks, and 

scientist Bruce Kilgore argued for a stronger role for science in determining the fire 

management objectives.4 

Many of these challengers found Tall Timbers Research Station (TTRS), the 

privately endowed research institution north of Tallahassee, Florida, a catalyst for 

spreading their ideas. Tall Timbers played an instrumental role in fire research, 

sponsoring annual fire ecology conferences beginning in 1962. The first such meeting 

advocated a biological role for fire and offered controlled burning as a technique for land 

management – revolutionary ideas at the time that had been applied mostly in the 

Southeast. TTRS was privately funded and not beholden to the Forest Service or any 

other federal agency. The research it sponsored and published provided an alternative to 

the USFS suppression model, which focused on techniques of fire suppression and 

encompassed nearly all federally funded fire research. TTRS research opened the door, 

and others took up the call for scientific research into fire.5 

The National Park Service was more receptive to the new guidelines than its peer 

land management agencies. The NPS was already in the throes of change, and its frontline personnel were being transformed. The old generalists – the people who grew up 

with the national park system– were reaching retirement age, and their successors very 

often were college graduates with a specialization that served NPS goals. Expertise in 

wildlife biology began to supersede training in forestry as a prerequisite for a position in 

natural resource management. The climate in which fire management policies was 

determined also had begun to shift. The 1963 Leopold Report on wildlife in the national 

parks provided important support for the new ethos, a stance that was more committed to 

ecology than to the facilities development that characterized the NPS throughout most of 

its first fifty years. The report recommended that the Service “recognize the enormous 

complexity of ecological communities and the diversity of management procedures 

required to preserve them.” It suggested a need to reinstate fire in the national parks, 

arguing for prescribed burning. Scientific research was to be the basis for all management 

programs. The National Academy of Sciences Robbins Report that same year extended 

that vision, advocating a separate research arm to complement the Service’s distinctive 

mission. It took a long time for the NPS to implement this concept, but its very existence 

spoke volumes about the change in philosophy inside the National Park Service. 6 

4

 Pyne, Fire in America, 292-94; Carle, Burning Questions, 133-43. 5

 Pyne, Fire in America, 490-95. 6

 Richard Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks (New Haven: Yale University Press, 

1997), 214-20; Alfred Runte, Jr., National Parks: The American Experience, 2d ed (Lincoln: University of 

Nebraska Press, 1987), 198-201; Pyne, Fire in America, 301-04. 

122 
 

 

 

 

Espousing a different creed than comparable land management agencies, the NPS 

looked to its own larger natural resource management agenda rather than the Forest 

Service’s vision of fire. Stemming from the two major scientific reports on national parks 

of the era – no less an observer of the resource management scene than NPS historian 

Richard West Sellars has called them “threshold documents” – the scientific use of fire 

fell neatly under the developing rubric of resource management.7 This had an unexpected 

benefit: it separated the new vision of fire from the NPS’s historic practices, allowing 

innovation to take place with a minimum of direct challenge to the status quo. 

Innovation also allowed the National Park Service to stake out specific terrain 

within discussions about fire. Despite the largely defensive response of the NPS to the 

recommendations of the Robbins Report and the desire of some to keep it from public 

distribution, the report’s recommendations did allow the NPS to incorporate the study of 

the biology of fire into its management regime. Such an approach to fire represented an 

important shift away from the standard Forest Service model of exploring solely the 

physical equations of fire behavior.8

 The National Park Service soon came to study the 

impact of fire rather than to assess ways of stopping it. 

The Leopold Report simultaneously served as a structure for maintaining NPS 

prerogative over park management. Although fire had been a side issue in the report, 

ostensibly devoted to the ongoing elk crisis in Yellowstone, the Leopold Report’s vision 

of natural resource management loomed larger as new federal statutes began to affect the 

NPS. In 1964, passage of the Wilderness Act concerned NPS leaders, who saw in the new 

law’s provisions the abrogation of their management prerogative. It complicated NPS 

obligations and offered only expensive mandates that came without funding. The 

National Park Service was at best lukewarm about the bill, lending only nominal support 

to its passage. During the 1960s and early 1970s, NPS officials watched as wilderness 

advocates attacked the Forest Service over questions of sustained timber yield and wild 

land. They recognized their own vulnerability and sought an alternative strategy. The 

Leopold report provided an alternative to imposed wilderness standards that let the NPS 

keep the administrative discretion that formal wilderness designation overrode. Its 

influence on resource management planning offered an avenue to preempt the statutory 

emphasis on wilderness. Faced with two new philosophies about which it was 

ambivalent, the National Park Service embraced the Leopold Report over the Wilderness 

Act.9

 National Park Service discomfort with the restrictions perceived in the wilderness 

designation helped preempt its acceptance of the USFS fire suppression model, and by 

melding resource management and strategic goals, anticipated the direction that most fire 

management soon followed. 

7

 Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks, 214; Pyne Fire in America, 301-02 8

 Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks, 216-17; Pyne, Fire in America, 302. 9

 Paul W. Hirt, A Conspiracy of Optimism: Management of the National Forests Since World War II 

(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 266-84; USDA Forest Service, RARE II: A Quest for Balance in 

Public Lands (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1978); M. Rupert Cutler, “National Forests in the 

Balance,” American Forests (May 1978), 1-5; M. Rupert Cutler, Western Wildlands: A Natural Resource Journal 5 

(Summer 1978); Tim Mahoney, “RARE Draft EIS Sparks Heavy Input from Conservationists,” Wilderness 

Report 15 (September 1978); David Crosson, “RARE Results Final ‘An Acute Disappointment,’” High 

Country News, January 12, 1979; Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks, 217-18; Pyne, Fire in 

America, 303; George B. Hartzog, Jr., Battling for the National Parks (Mt. Kisco, NY: Moyer Bell 

Limited, 1988), 96-107; Ronald A. Foresta, America’s National Parks and Their Keepers (Washington, 

D.C.: Resources for the Future, 1984), 69-70. 

123 
 

 

This shift toward a new vision of fire guaranteed an important change in who 

managed different dimensions of fire. In the model inherited from the Forest Service, 

most fire staff in the NPS had been trained as foresters. After the Leopold Report, 

wildlife biologists – often students of its primary author, A. Starker Leopold – entered the 

NPS, and following the broad outlines of Leopold’s work, began to blend fire with 

wildlife policy. These new professionals drew the National Park Service toward a 

primacy for science for a brief moment that lasted roughly from the unveiling of the 

Leopold Report in 1963 until the aftermath of the Stoneman Meadows incident in 

Yosemite on July 4, 1970, when law enforcement – people management – began to 

dominate NPS horizons. These science-oriented researchers helped create a model for 

intra-agency research and even helped place fire science into the matrix of federal 

research. They communicated easily with peers in other agencies, recognizing that the 

physical boundaries that divided jurisdictions had little to do with ecological reality. 

The influx of wildlife biologists paralleled the gradual departure of foresters from 

the NPS. As fire ecology competed with forestry as the model of fire management, the 

position of forester nearly disappeared from the National Park Service, and along with it, 

ties to colleagues in the USFS and forestry in general. Attrition accounted for a good 

portion of this change. As hiring patterns shifted beginning in the 1950s, NPS foresters as 

a group grew older while their recently trained successors were younger and thought 

differently. Over time, the change in personnel moved fire management and ecology ever 

closer to what would later be called ecosystem management. 

During the brief moment in National Park Service history when the influence of 

science was at its peak, fire research enjoyed a malleability and viability that had never 

before been possible. Even as Tall Timbers challenged the dominant Forest Service 

research vision, the NPS cultivated its own fire management program. This coincided 

with the new enthusiasm for science within the NPS. Mission 66 led to bold requests for 

other kinds of funding. A push to fund scientific research with a line item in the NPS 

budget led to a 250 percent increase in funding in 1964 as well as an increase in the 

number of scientists hired by the Service. Director George B. Hartzog’s support of 

biological and fire research also contributed to the improved climate. In 1968, for only 

the third time in thirty years, NPS research scientists met to review their overall situation, 

to share research and ideas, and to promote a more comprehensive science program in the 

Service. NPS Chief Scientist Robert Linn recruited a group from inside and outside the 

Service, some of whom the NPS promptly sent back to school to do master’s work in 

science. In a typical instance, Jim Larson, who had been an interpretive ranger, was 

recruited to become a science coordinator. Larson returned to the University of 

Washington, where he completed an MA in science, before returning and continuing a 

long NPS career. These “retread rangers,” as one of their contemporaries recalled them 

with a smile, helped transform NPS’s science programs. With Linn leading the effort, 

science, in particular fire research, found new prominence in the National Park System.10 

NPS fire research, built from the Everglades studies of the early 1950s, expanded 

to the national parks in California. The critical experiments in the Golden State started at 

10 Lowell Sumner, “A History of the Office of Natural Science Studies,” 1-6; Robert Linn, 

“Postscript: Current Happenings,” in Proceedings of the Meeting of Research Scientists and Management 

Biologists of the National Park Service, Horace M. Albright Training Center, Grand Canyon National Park, 

April 6-8, 1968, copy provided by Robert Linn; James Agee, interview by Hal K. Rothman, June 10, 2004. 

124 
 

 

Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park, where researchers examined the indispensable 

role of fire in sequoia regeneration and the threats posed by fuel buildup to the mature 

“Big Trees.”11 In essence, the rationale that underpinned the start of fire research in the 

Southeast easily transferred to California. The need for fire to protect a specific and 

desirable species of tree– the longleaf pine in the Southeast and the sequoia on the West 

Coast – had contributed to the development of fire research, which in turn, led to the 

implementation of the first NPS research program. 

Despite the NPS’s interest in such programs, the emphasis on specific needs of 

individual tree species detracted from overall implementation of fire research. The desire 

to protect the sequoia hardly translated into an overall argument for the general use of 

fire, even if policy articulated such a stance. The result was slow program development. 

Although the Robbins Report argued vociferously for a separate NPS research arm, 

despite valuable research conducted inside the agency, this idea did not come to fruition 

quickly. In the National Park Service, scientists commenced a range of studies, staff 

members with training in science assumed roles under the new rubric of “resource 

management,” and cooperative arrangements with universities brought a broader range of 

expertise to the parks. Fire research inside the NPS became part of resource management, 

valued as a practice for its ability to alter landscapes. Its ability to limit the damage from 

fires was not yet a primary consideration. 

Leadership in thinking about uses of fire came from the highest levels of the 

National Park Service. Located in the Washington office as a senior staff person in the 

Natural Resources Branch, Lyle McDowell played an instrumental role in creating the 

context in which fire became a tool for resource management. In charge of the 

development of resource management plans throughout the park system, McDowell 

embraced a new vision of the role of fire and resource management. “Lyle deserves a lot 

of the credit,” observed Robert Barbee, who rose through resource management to 

become superintendent of Yellowstone. “He was sort of the taskmaster for the 

Washington office who was pretty much directing things over all.” McDowell “bought 

the Leopold report philosophically and he was trying to translate it into practical action,” 

Barbee recalled. McDowell championed the “return to school” program that sent Barbee 

and countless others back for specialized post-graduate training; “he was a loquacious 

fellow,” Barbee remembered. “He used to come out to the college out there [at Colorado 

State University] and we’d sit in his motel room and he’d lecture us about the things we 

needed to be lectured about.” His resource management plan was the first to 

conceptualize fire as a useful tool for management, creating the context in which 

researchers such as Biswell and Richard Hartesveldt of San Jose State College could 

conduct experiments.12 

The resulting changes accelerated the interest in fire research. The National Park 

Service could legitimately regard itself as a leader in process when in 1970, the National 

Science Foundation (NSF) sponsored special research on fire ecology. The NSF, the 

leading funding agency for research, had never before funded work that studied fire 

ecology. Academic research now included the kind of work the National Park Service 

11 Harold H. Biswell, Prescribed Burning in California Wildlands Vegetation Management 

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 58-59; Pyne, Fire in America, 302. 12 James Agee, interview by Hal Rothman, June 10, 2004; Robert Barbee, interview by Hal K. 

Rothman, Part 1, November 12, 2004. 

125 
 

 

played a major role in initiating. With the introduction of fire as a new tool, the NPS had 

changed the terms of the discussion. New values were applied to the question of fire. The 

NSF affirmed the shift that took fire policy from the Forest Service emphasis on research 

into fire behavior that was considered vital to better control wildfires and into ecological 

studies that emphasized the value of fire in many ecosystems. Acceptance of this 

perspective meant that the use of fire as a serious management tool was only a short step 

away. Although science played an important role in the planning and policy of federal 

agencies, such policies followed a shift in values. Scientific research substantiated that 

shift, leading to a convergence of new ideas, empirical demonstration, and a change in 

perception. 

** 

When the National Park Service ceased its efforts to suppress every fire in a 

national park, it upended the rationale and logic that had governed fire for more than onehalf century. The path to the 1968 policy change was long and convoluted, for it 

represented a substantial change not only in the way the Service treated fire, but in the 

explanations NPS officials offered their constituents, Congress, and the press. NPS 

representatives argued that the National Park Service’s obligations were different from 

those of other federal agencies, including the Forest Service and Bureau of Land 

Management lands, and other categories of federal land holdings. The influential Leopold 

and Robbins reports advocated a science-based approach to management that powerful 

constituencies embraced. Bruce Kilgore served as editor of National Parks magazine and 

later became editor of the Sierra Club Bulletin, where he published the Leopold report in 

its entirety. The Sierra Club “thought, as an entity, that [the Leopold Report] was one of 

the most outstanding contributions to the management of parks,” he recalled. Kilgore 

believed that Leopold had “total support” from Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall for 

the report, a circumstance Kilgore regarded as a determining factor in the report’s 

implementation.13 

Devising a new policy raised questions that the National Park Service 

Washington, D.C., office quickly tried to address. As momentum for the introduction of 

fire as a management tool increased, advocates of the traditional suppression policy 

forcefully reminded everyone that until a formal administrative change took place, 

suppression remained NPS policy. Talk of a new vision of fire management would not 

end suppression, Assistant Director Harthon Bill instructed NPS staff in 1967 in an effort 

to quell concerns about the impending change. He focused on one section of the NPS 

administrative manual that offered rationale for continuation of suppression: “all fires 

threatening the natural and cultural resources of a natural (historical, recreational) area 

shall be controlled and extinguished.” Bill pointed out that “historically fire suppression 

has taken precedence over all other park activities except the safeguarding or saving of 

human life. This interpretation shall apply to the [use of fire] policy. . . . the word 

‘threatening’ does not constitute authority for allowing natural fires to burn or to engage 

in prescribed or controlled burning.”14 Even as plans for a new policy moved through the 

13 Bruce Kilgore interview by Hal Rothman, February 16, 2004; Jan van Wagtendonk, interview by 

Lesley Argo, June 13, 2002. 14 Assistant Director to Washington Office and All Field Offices, Resources Management, Fire 

Control Policy Interpretation, February 13, 1967, Everglades National Park, Forest Fires. 

126 
 

 

 

 

NPS bureaucracy, the importance of suppression as a strategy and a belief system could 

not be discounted. 

For the National Park Service, the Leopold report had been the catalyst for 

rethinking fire, but the real energy that underpinned this sea change in philosophy 

emanated from Biswell’s research. Students gravitated to him. One, Jan van Wagtendonk, 

had worked as a firefighter and a smokejumper in Oregon and Alaska. “It seemed silly to 

me,” he recalled almost four decades later, “to be putting fires out in the tundra.” 15 After 

an undergraduate degree and time in the military, he arrived in Berkeley to study fire 

ecology. 

 Biswell played an instrumental role in the shift from theory to the practice of 

introducing fire. In 1964, Biswell himself received permission to begin Giant Sequoia 

restoration studies on a 320-acre University of California experimental tract, Whitaker’s 

Forest, just west of Kings Canyon National Park. The Redwood Mountain grove of the 

Big Trees extended into the forest from the national park, providing an unparalleled 

opportunity to study the impact on precisely the tree species and forest composition that 

existed within park boundaries. 

Biswell found an environment that reflected a century of suppression. His 

estimates reported more than 22 tons of combustible material per acre. Beneath the 

largest trees, he found competition from more than 500 dead and standing small trees per 

acre, which Biswell determined resulted from the human suppression regime. He found 

an additional 900 living white firs and incense cedars, mostly between one and eleven 

feet in height. Wildlife was absent from the area because the dense material on the forest 

floor eliminated most underbrush and food plants. The fuel load was so great that 4-H 

Clubs had ceased to camp in the region for fear of wildfire.16 

As Biswell’s research showed, burning had a positive impact on the Big Trees. In 

a comprehensive program that began in 1964 and continued until 1975, Biswell, Richard 

Hartesveldt, Howard Shellhammer, Tom Harvey, and Ron Stecker studied the impacts of 

prescribed fire. Their work demonstrated that giant sequoias depended on fire for 

germination and early survival. The research supported “fire as a tool to sterilize the soil 

so the seedlings get back in the ground and rejuvenate,” recalled William Briggle, who 

served as a ranger at Sequoia National Park during this era. Hartesveldt trenchantly 

observed that without fire, giant sequoias would become an endangered species.17 

Biswell’s efforts guided the NPS program at Yosemite as well. Robert Barbee, 

who considered the Leopold Report a “manifesto,” visited Biswell at Berkeley “to lay 

some philosophical groundwork, some scientific expertise, for my resource management 

plan.” Biswell agreed to see him and Barbee “figured I would get maybe fifteen or twenty 

minutes. So I got down there, and he was in his office, and he said ‘well, let’s go,’” 

Barbee recalled. “And I said ‘where we going to go?’ He said ‘we can’t sit here and talk 

about fire, we are going up to the experimental forest’” at Yosemite. The men spent the 

next two days at Yosemite exploring the prospects for introducing fire.18 

15 Jan van Wagtendonk interview, June 13, 2002. 

16 Carle, Burning Questions, 121-22. 17 William Briggle, Historical Interview, by Jennifer Bottomly, September 4, 2001, Glacier National 

Park Archives, Oral History Collection; Harold H. Biswell, “The Role of Fire in Maintaining Forest 

Wilderness Quality,” unpublished paper, presented at the Second Annual California Plant and Soil 

Conference, American Society of Agronomy, California Chapter, Davis, CA, February 1, 1973, 7. 18 Robert Barbee interview, Part I, November 12, 2004. 

127 
 

Over a period of a little less than a decade, Biswell’s fire experiments transformed 

Whitaker’s Forest. By 1973, Biswell observed that burning had created a condition that 

more resembled historic time: Whitaker’s Forest was more open and park-like, with 

fewer small trees. Shrubs and wildflowers returned and “the forest is becoming scenic,” 

Biswell told a meeting of the American Society of Agronomy in 1973. Biswell saw this 

as validation of his vision. Even more telling, he held demonstration burns in August of 

that year, when much of the rest of the state endured withering wildfire or lived in 

constant fear of the next outbreak. His prescribed fires did not burn out of control, further 

substantiation of the viability of a pattern of controlled burning that limited the amount of 

available fuel during the most dangerous fire seasons. The use of fire, Biswell believed he 

had conclusively shown, allowed for better management of timber, a more “natural” 

environment, and significantly less intense wildfire if one erupted.19 

Whitaker’s Forest was just outside the boundary of Kings Canyon National Park, 

but crossing that arbitrary line on a map meant more than simply transversing physical 

space. The national parks, the nation’s sacred spaces, remained inviolable from more than 

the encroachment of most human development. Fire remained an equally large taboo in 

the parks, and securing permission to burn within them was an elaborate and drawn-out 

process. After a National Parks Advisory Board visit to Kings Canyon in conjunction 

with the preparation of the National Academy of Sciences report, many of the obstacles 

against burning in the park diminished. Hartesveldt received a grant from the National 

Park Service for a five-year research study of controlled burning. He planned to begin 

with controlled burns on a number of two-acre plots in August 1964, but the initial burns 

were delayed until 1965 as he waited for ideal weather and climate conditions. Still, 

Hartesveldt insisted, “careful use of fire and cutting constitute a much more realistic 

approach than does a policy of ‘hands off.’”20 

The addition of Bruce Kilgore as a research biologist at Sequoia and Kings 

Canyon National Park in March 1968 accelerated the burning program. Kilgore served in 

an unusual position. Although he was duty-stationed at Sequoia, Kilgore reported to 

Starker Leopold, who had taken a special appointment in Natural Resource Management 

from NPS Director George B. Hartzog, Jr. When Leopold hired Kilgore, the professor 

was “semi-kind of my boss. He was more of my philosophical boss.” At Sequoia, Kilgore 

met another prominent fire researcher, Harry Schimke, who worked at the Stanislaus 

National Forest and was affiliated with the Pacific Southwest Forest and Range 

Experiment Station at Berkeley. An expert in fire behavior, Schimke served as a 

combination conscience and advisor for those who contemplated changing the way the 

National Park Service addressed fire. 21 

The initial experiment in Sequoia and Kings Canyon began a revolution in the 

national parks. While most of the National Park Service’s prescribed burning acreage was 

in Everglades National Park, the California parks engendered more controversy. The 

intensity of debate had begun in the turn-of-the-twentieth century light burning 

controversy in the California forests and continued largely outside the federal land 

19 Biswell, “The Role of Fire in Maintaining Forest Wilderness Quality,” 7; Biswell, Prescribed 

Burning, 109-11; James Agee interview, June 10, 2004. 20 Richard J. Hartesveldt, “Fire Ecology of the Giant Sequoias,” Natural History (December 1964), 

12-19; James Agee interview, June 10, 2004. 21 Bruce Kilgore interview, February 16, 2004; Carle, Burning Questions, 123, 139. 

128 
 

management system. The insistence of the Forest Service on suppression and that 

agency’s predominance in the West also fueled greater interest. In California and 

elsewhere west of the Rocky Mountains, allowing fire to burn was big news. 

Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park instituted a policy that allowed 

lightning fires to burn in areas designated as appropriate for wildfire. When the first 

lightning-ignited fire allowed to burn in any national park occurred on Kennedy Ridge in 

1968, Schimke was among those who watched. His sense of the fire’s potential reach and 

the park’s ability to control it made this difficult experience easier for park staff. The 

term “let burn” was assigned to such fires, but was soon changed. The idea of letting fires 

burn seemed too casual for public consumption and such fires were designated with the 

more palatable term, “prescribed natural fire.” Even that term was controversial; in May 

1971, Superintendent John McLaughlin of Sequoia and Kings Canyon, described by 

Robert Barbee as “a thinker and really quite an admirable character,” instructed his staff 

to avoid the term “prescribed burn.” Instead, he advocated the phrase “putting the role of 

fire back in the environment.” Typically the selected burn areas were far from homes, 

roads, and visitor services. Natural fires in them were reported and watched, usually by 

airplane, but allowed to burn as long as they did not exceed the boundaries of the 

designated area or threaten facilities. Some areas were so remote that one observer noted 

that if a fire got away, “no one would ever notice.”22 

Intentionally set fires were far more controversial for the National Park Service. 

Despite much confusion over the meaning of terms – with loose definitions prevailing, 

prescribed burning described activities as different as burning sawgrass in Everglades or 

burning small trees and brush beneath sequoias in California – prescribed burning grew 

in importance. It also was terribly difficult to implement. Heavily traveled or developed 

areas were not suitable for the idea of “letting fire run its course.” The risks were too 

great: lives and property were at stake, even when lightning fires were allowed to burn. 

So before fire could be introduced as a tool in sensitive areas such as the Giant Sequoia 

groves or in similar places, considerable education and preparation had to take place. 

Initially, no clear separation of the ideas of prescribed fire and natural prescribed fire – 

natural fire that was allowed to burn because it served NPS purposes – had yet been 

devised. As a result, the NPS prepared lands for natural fire with the idea that they might 

be prescribed burned if nature did not cooperate. In an early experiment in 1969, along 

the western boundary of the Redwood Mountain grove of giant sequoias, hand-built fire 

lines were used to reduce fuel in anticipation of allowing natural fires to burn in a 

particular zone. Workers felled dead standing trees and cleared away underbrush and 

saplings around some of the big trees. Powerful hoses were kept near the fire lines in case 

fire moved outside those designated areas.23 It seemed to some that securing conditions 

under which a controlled burn could take place required more effort than the burn itself. 

Creating a reduced fuel zone demanded considerable effort. Typically, NPS crews 

burned a narrow strip to create a fuel break, usually near the top of a ridge. Workers then 

would drop down the side of the ridge about fifteen feet and use drip torches, ignition 

devices used to back burn or start prescribed fires, to burn upslope, and the fire would go 

22 Carle, Burning Questions, 140-41; John S. McLaughlin, Memorandum from the Superintendent, 

May 18, 1971, Sequoia National Park Archives, Fire Records, Box 191 F1; Robert Barbee interview, Part I, 

November 12, 2004. 23 Bruce Kilgore interview, February 16, 2004. 

129 
 

 

 

 

out when it reached the burned area above. The process would be repeated another fifteen 

feet down the slope. This was tedious, time-consuming, and difficult work, and everyone 

who engaged in it thought of ways to make it easier; few succeeded. In one effort to 

speed up the process on an August 1969 burn, Fire Control Officer John Bowdler allowed 

a crew to burn a larger section as a single strip instead of dividing it up into smaller 

sections. The fire started slowly, but gained speed and intensity as it charged uphill. 

Beneath some giant sequoias, the flames jumped as high as three times their previous 

height, with the heat damaging some of the tree’s lowest branches. The experience of 

what came to be known as the “Bowdler Burn” reminded everyone of the difficulty of 

managing fire even in controlled circumstances.24 

The creation of the new policy neither included resources nor supported a system 

of implementation; nor did it clearly describe parameters. The policy was an objective, 

the articulation of a larger ideal with little practical instruction for its execution. Little 

Service-wide coordination of the new policy ensued, for the combination of resources, 

leadership, and acceptance of the values it embodied were not found in the NPS in 1968. 

“It was just one of those things that developed topsy-turvy,” James Agee recalled.25 Park 

units proceeded with fire planning in an individualized manner, simultaneously an 

advantage and a drawback in instituting the new policy across the NPS. The immediate 

response was to consign the use of fire as a tool to resource management, effectively 

separating its use from traditional activities such as its prevention. 

The change in the Green Book scrapped the centralized control of fire that 

stemmed from Coffman and the New Deal era, replacing it with something that more 

closely fit the 1960s. The regional offices and park units received little guidance about 

what the new policy demanded of them. Implementation fell most often to 

superintendents; their varying commitment to the idea of fire as a tool played an 

enormous role in the ways in which fire was introduced to national parks. 

Superintendents and their staffs could design fire programs that fit the specific needs of 

their park without much intervention from the national level or they could choose to 

ignore the new policy. The variety of types of units in the national park system further 

complicated any standardization of the response. The use of fire appeared in each of three 

NPS books of administrative policies, but the differences in types of areas created 

considerable variety in application. While recreational areas were governed by a policy 

that reflected the standards of the natural areas, historical areas functioned under more 

complex guidelines that emphasized extinguishing fires that threatened cultural resources, 

but encouraged prescribed burning. As a result, the revolution in fire management left 

cultural resources entirely out of the picture. It was as if National Park Service leaders 

believed that wildfires only occurred in natural areas. 26 

The justification for promoting fire was that it was “natural,” a construction that 

became problematic. Some critics and internal advocates accepted prescribed natural 

fires, not their intentionally ignited equivalent, because they often regarded fire in 

24 Carle, Burning Questions, 140-41. 25 James Agee interview, June 10, 2004. 

26 Richard Rogers Summer, “The Administration of Fire Management within the National Park 

Service,” (MA thesis, California State University, Fullerton, 1978), 1-3; National Park Service, 

Administrative Policies for Natural Areas of the National Park System, 17; National Park Service, 

Administrative Policies for Recreation Areas of the National Park System, 20; National Park Service, 

Administrative Policies for Historic Areas of the National Park System, 36. 

130 
 

 

absolute terms: natural fires were good; human caused-fires were bad. This set of 

suppositions created problems, especially in the management of cultural landscapes and 

in natural areas that were in fact sculpted by fire. The era’s proliferating fire conferences 

brought this question to the fore, and it was debated endlessly.27 

The idea of using fire challenged not only existing policy, but the core values of 

many seasoned National Park Service officials and staff. The use of fire as a tool 

represented a change not only in what they did, but in the value system that underpinned 

the Service. Such people “had a difficult time,” Research Forester Jan van Wagtendonk 

noted in 2002. “Their entire career and belief system [had been] based on putting fires out 

and a bunch of hippie Ph.D.s from Berkeley come along and say ‘you got to let it burn.’ 

It [was] hard for them to grapple with that idea.” The absence of a comprehensive 

structure to support the new policy made this transition even more difficult. Not only was 

the policy hard to fathom and respect, no clear guidelines to make it palatable 

accompanied it.28 

The dual emphasis reflected an important tension created by the new policies. 

Fires that started by natural means were assigned to resource management units, 

effectively creating two distinct modes of addressing fire. Resource management framed 

its intellectual structure from wildlife biology, which regarded fire as an asset. Fire 

suppression had been managed by foresters in the National Park Service, the intellectual 

heirs to the suppression tradition John Coffman established. Coffman himself staunchly 

opposed prescribed burning in any form. “I was considered a no-burn man,” Coffman 

proudly remembered in a 1973 interview. “Let nature take its course without fire.” The 

wildlife biologists in resource management brought a different perspective, but the 

ongoing power of the suppression model and its many adherents limited the opportunity 

to apply new ideas. For controlled burning to play a prominent role in the National Park 

Service, a greater impetus than words on a page was essential.29 

The new fire policy demanded that the National Park Service’s administrative 

structure accommodate a new vision of responsibility. The NPS’s existing fire 

organization still derived from its New Deal roots. The Division of Forestry, headed by 

Forester Lawrence E. Cook, Coffman’s successor, handled all fire operations and it 

shared in the culture of suppression and the accompanying ideas of fire protection and 

control. “The rumor was that Larry Cook said ‘over my dead body’ when he heard about 

any natural burning or prescribed burning,” Kilgore recalled. An impasse resulted. The 

pressure for introducing fire had come from elsewhere in and outside the National Park 

Service, but the people who administered fire in the NPS remained staunch suppression 

advocates. Their opponents mainly were the wildlife biologists who had become 

prominent in resource management. A chaotic situation in which different entities within 

the NPS advocated different responses proved a dramatic shortcoming as officials sought 

to implement new ideas about fire. “There was a lot of friction,” Kilgore remembered.30 

27 These questions dominated the Tall Timbers fire research conferences in the mid-1960s and early 

1970s; see Tall Timbers Fire Ecology Conference Proceedings (Tallahassee, FL: Tall Timbers Research 

Station, 1966-1976). 28 Jan van Wagtendonk interview, June 13, 2002. 

29 John D. Coffman, “Forest Protection in the National Parks,” interview by Amelia R. Fry, 1973 

(Berkeley, CA, The Bancroft Library, 1973), 77-78. 30 Bruce Kilgore interview, February 16, 2004. 

131 
 

 

The devolution of responsibility to the park level meant tremendous variation in 

implementation and unusual categories of reporting. Conventional fire management 

continued, implemented in the same way as it had always been: education, prevention, 

and response. Presuppression activities continued, and parks reported fires in the same 

classes of size – A, B, and C – that had been standard for a generation. The most notable 

addition to the many annual fire reports was a new category, “Use of Fire in Resources 

Management,” that reflected the new Green Book policy. “Fire was not used as a 

resource management tool this year” became a standard line in the annual fire report for 

many parks.31 It allowed the NPS to continue to function as it always had, as a fire 

suppression agency, while at the same time paying lip service to the new prescribed burn 

policy. The division between resource management and fire control provided ample 

distance between the two philosophies. The result was a complicated management 

structure that invested much of its resources in conventional modes of fire control while 

its intellectual energy, in the form of new researchers, was relegated to what seemed an 

exotic form of management. Fire as a tool for resource management remained something 

entirely different and much less significant than overall fire control. 

The beginning of a Service-wide system resulted, but it was far from the ideal 

toward which the National Park Service strove. The NPS’s forestry division maintained 

responsibility for suppression and retained the funds allocated for that purpose. The use 

of fire as a management tool became a park-level prerogative that superintendents usually 

had to fund within their existing budgets. NPS culture long emphasized a strong line of 

central leadership that made policy but willingly delegated operations to the park level, 

creating clear precedent for leaving such decisions to the discretion of superintendents. 

Control of this prerogative followed an important trend in NPS history. For much of the 

early history of the Service, superintendents communicated directly with the Washington 

office and even with the director. By the 1960s, regional offices were well established as 

intermediaries, but park superintendents still wielded considerable power. In this respect, 

the implementation of fire policy at the park level was consistent with patterns of NPS 

management. At the same time, it represented a major shift: fire required vast resources 

and in the 1960s, individual parks had no more resources than they did three decades 

before. With the almost complete autonomy of implementation, fire policy created a 

transfer of power from the regions to the parks, a trend that ran against the general tenor 

of consolidation that marked the National Park Service during the late 1960s. 

The parks faced a complicated, multi-faceted mission when it came to the new 

fire policy. In effect, suppression remained entrenched as NPS policy and the goals of the 

1968 policy did little to entirely replace that strategy. Instead, most parks continued to 

maintain an active suppression program even as they grappled with the implications of 

prescribed burning. At Yellowstone in 1968, even after the change in the Green Book, the 

approach to fire remained largely unchanged. The park reported only sixteen fires, four of 

which resulted from human action. The park approached these fires in the same manner 

31 Annual Fire Summary and Analysis, January 28, 1969, Grand Teton National Park; Annual Fire 

Summary and Analysis, January 14, 1970, Y2623, Fire Records, Box 1, (located in Law Enforcement 

Evidence Room), Grand Teton National Park; Annual Fire Summary and Analysis, Yellowstone National 

Park, January 25, 1970, Yellowstone National Park Archives, Y-214. 

132 
 

 

 

 

as it always had; prevention, education and training, and suppression of actual fire 

remained primary objectives.32 

The mechanisms that had long driven fire response remained primary at the park 

level. At Yellowstone, the emphasis on technological support for suppression remained 

the focus. Smokejumpers were seen as a viable response, with the West Yellowstone 

Interagency Air Operations Center activated on July 2, 1968. Smokejumpers made a total 

of fourteen jumps on five individual fires in the park in 1968. It was as if suppression 

adherents believed that new technology would allow them to overcome a policy they 

found noxious. Older resources such as fire lookouts continued to be used, with lookouts 

serving as the source of initial information for eleven of the park’s sixteen fires. Despite 

the small number of fires in 1968, Yellowstone’s numbers diverged from reporting trends 

at Yosemite National Park. At Yosemite, human-caused fires, both intentional and 

accidental, slightly outnumbered natural fires in 1968. Visitor reporting accounted for 

most of the sightings of fire, with lookouts and aircrafts playing a lesser role. But at 

Yosemite, the model remained as it had before the Green Book offered new guidelines, 

and little in its annual fire reports reflected any vision of the policy change.33 

At the regional and national levels, the new policy earned closer attention. The 

admonition to implement an ecologically based policy came from above the regional 

offices and was used to remind and even chastise superintendents. “While the Service 

continues to be vitally interested in the reduction of man-made fires, the value of natural 

fire as an ecological factor must be recognized,” observed Merle E. Stitt, assistant 

regional director for operations in the Western Region in 1968 and an advocate of the use 

of fire. In the context of the annual fire report for the National Park Service, his statement 

represented a major shift in emphasis. Stitt modified the vision of suppression, limiting it 

to human-caused fires, explaining that the National Park Service policy encouraged 

natural fires for their reinvigorating effect on the natural environment. Noted Arizona 

State University fire historian and scholar Stephen J. Pyne, who as a young firefighter 

heard Stitt offer this prohibition at the Grand Canyon, observed that the change was 

confined to words. “Almost nothing happened on the ground,” he recalled more than 

thirty years later. Whether this statement accurately reflected the actions at Grand 

Canyon, it did suggest that some of those intimately involved with fire felt the need for 

faster implementation of the revised policy.34 

Resource management plans soon reflected the new ethos. As statements of goals 

and objectives, they offered an ideal terrain to define new approaches to problems. The 

role of fire as a tool quickly cropped up in some of the most prominent parks. At 

Yellowstone, the 1970 resource management plan halfheartedly embraced the new ideals. 

The authors recognized that the existing principles by which the NPS managed fire were 

“developed in areas where timber is managed as a crop,” a clear articulation of the 

differences between the National Park Service and the Forest Service. Yet fire posed a 

32 “Annual Forestry Report, Yellowstone National Park, 1968,” Yellowstone National Park Archives, 

Y-214, 1-3. 33 Ibid., “Summary 1968 Fire Season, Yosemite National Park, California,” Yosemite National Park 

Archives, Y 14, Fire Season Summary 1968, 1-4. 34 Assistant Regional Director, Operations Western Region to Superintendents, Western Region, 

March 24, 1969, Subject: Forest Fires, 1968, Yosemite National Park Archives, Y 14, Fire Season 

Summary 1968, 1-4; Bruce Kilgore interview, February 16, 2004; Steve Pyne, email correspondence with 

Hal K. Rothman, June 11, 2004, in possession of author. 

133 
 

conundrum. “Since we lack the fire control skills to stop fire at will,” the plan continued, 

“we can not fully adopt a program of allowable natural fires.” Some fires could be 

allowed to burn, the report proclaimed; others would have to be addressed in the 

conventional manner.35 

This bifurcation helped ease acceptance of the new policy. Fire was so deeply 

ingrained as an enemy that it was nearly impossible to expect NPS veterans to accept it as 

a tool, even in a limited way. The division worked equally well in that it separated people 

by their affinity. The wildlife biologists who began to take precedence worked in close 

concert with one another. At the same time, the National Park Service’s aging forestry 

cohort was as close-knit a group of professionals as any in the Service. Innovation could 

occur – within limits – even as traditional policies continued to be implemented. 

The parks that took the lead in implementing the new policy typically had been 

influenced by Harold Biswell and his students. Sequoia, Kings Canyon, Yosemite, and 

other California parks were prominent in this picture. Sequoia had been central to fire 

management throughout most of the twentieth century. In 1955, the McGee fire just 

outside and around Grant Grove burned across 18,000 acres in the foothills. In 1960 and 

1961, severe fires in the park and its vicinity spurred interest in new strategies. The 

Tunnel Rock fire near park headquarters in June and July 1960 raged over 4,960 acres, 

and its suppression cost $884,931. In 1961, the Harlow fire, in the foothills of the Sierra 

Nevada just beyond Yosemite park boundaries, cost more than $1 million and burned 

more than 43,000 acres of vegetation. In one two-hour period, the fire burned across 

20,000 acres, caused two fatalities, and destroyed 105 structures. “This caused us to take 

another look,” Peter H. Schuft, who served as chief ranger at Sequoia and Kings Canyon, 

observed. “Maybe we should be spending more on planning ways to stop [fires] from 

starting or putting in fuel breaks (prepared during the off season) at which we could stop 

wild fires from spreading.” The expansion of fuel breaks in Sequoia and Kings Canyon 

followed. In 1965 and 1966, the parks received the funds to build 100-foot wide fuel 

breaks, cleared of debris and other matter to a height of nine feet around Grant Grove and 

at the approach to Cedar Grove in Fresno County.36 

The Service’s move toward a wider acceptance of prescribed burning gathered 

momentum. “We needed to know how to reduce the fuel [and] fire under the sequoias,” 

Schuft remembered, “and how much actual manipulation was needed to burn safely.” 

According to his contemporaries, Schuft was well known for his aggressive campaign to 

promote fire. Harry Schimke had developed a controlled prescription for burning, and the 

park sought a strategy for utilizing it. Starker Leopold played an instrumental role. In 

October 1967, McLaughlin, recently arrived from Yellowstone, traveled to Berkeley for a 

meeting Leopold held with the Forest Service at the Forest Service Experiment Station. 

“We were trying to brainstorm how we would begin this prescribed burn program 

outlined in the Leopold report,” Kilgore remembered. “There was a lot of skepticism 

shown, a lot of questions.” Leopold took charge, telling the assembled foresters: “We 

came to this meeting to get ideas on where and how to go. We are not asking your 

opinion on whether we should go. We want to know what the best program is.” 

35 Resource Management Plan, Yellowstone National Park, 1970, Box W-105, Yellowstone National 

Park Archives. 36 Peter H. Schuft, “A Prescribed Burning Program for Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks,” 

Proceedings, Annual Tall Timbers Fire Ecology Conference, June 8-9, 1972, 380-82. 

134 
 

Leopold’s demeanor became bolder. “In fact, he said we are going to prescribe burn,” 

Kilgore remembered. “The meeting turned around a fair bit.” 37 

The results were dramatic. With Leopold’s support and Biswell’s experience, an 

attempt at intentionally starting a fire in pursuit of resource management goals seemed 

viable. Superintendent McLaughlin had been at Sequoia and Kings Canyon for almost a 

full year and knew the political terrain. He determined that a program involving both 

natural fires and prescribed burns should go forward. The area of the park chosen for both 

parts of the program in 1968 was the Middle Fork of the Kings River drainage. Prior to 

that summer, McLaughlin approved the first prescribed natural fire program (allowing 

lightning-induced fires to burn under prescribed conditions) in the National Park Service. 

For that first summer, fires ignited above 8,000-foot elevation were allowed to burn 

(there were a total of two). In addition, a 1,100-acre unit on Rattlesnake Creek in the 

Middle Fork drainage was selected for a prescribed burn, the first authorized under the 

new policy. The location had been carefully chosen to minimize the chances of a fire 

getting out of control. Surrounded on three sides by rocks, the area was “basically a fir 

stand,” Schuft recalled. “Schimke gave us a prescription to burn within, and we actually 

burned out the basin in 300-foot wide burns starting at the top and burning down.38 

Both phases of the project were deemed a success and the park planned more 

burning. In 1969, Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks designated an area of 

129,331 acres, almost 15 percent of the two parks, as “let burn” areas, where fires would 

be allowed to run their course unless they affected park facilities. Most of these lands 

were above 8,000 feet in elevation; some were above the timberline. In addition, the 

parks intentionally burned 6,186 acres. Planners soon raised the elevation at which 

lightning fires were allowed to burn to 9,000 feet, engaged in prescribed burns in high 

country meadows, and initiated a 100-acre prescribed burn at the Redwood Mountain 

Grove of giant sequoias in Kings Canyon National Park that took place between August 

and October 1969. To initiate each burn, fire specialists picked a one-mile long, 300-footwide area atop a ridge and began to burn it in 1,000-foot sections. Crews first trimmed 

the fir and cedar foliage, cutting down trees that were less than nine feet tall. Then, a twofoot wide fire break was built, dug down to “mineral soil,” and fire hoses were located 

around each entire section. “We waited for each section to burn itself out before we 

started the [next] one,” Schuft recalled. Crews progressed from the top of the ridge to the 

bottom.39

 At the North Fork, Crystal Cave, and Marble Fork areas, the park undertook a 

larger and less closely monitored project. Beginning on October 29 and continuing until 

the snows came in mid-December, Kings Canyon crews initiated a 6,140-acre burn that 

occurred “without intensive preparation,” Assistant Superintendent Jerry House noted. 

Pesticides, including 2,4-T, were sprayed on brush, and existing roads and trails served as 

37 Schuft, “A Prescribed Burning Program for Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks,” 383; 

Bruce Kilgore interview, February 16, 2004; James Agee interview, June 10, 2004. 38 Schuft, “A Prescribed Burning Program for Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks,” 383; 

Larry Bancroft, Thomas Nichols, David Parsons, David Graber, Boyd Evison and Jan Wagtendonk, 

“Evolution of the Natural Fire Management Program at Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks,” 

Proceedings of the Wilderness Fire Symposium, Missoula, Montana, November 15-18, 1983, 176; Bruce 

M. Kilgore and George S. Briggs, “Restoring Fire to High Elevation Forests in California,” Journal of 

Forestry (May 1972, 266-271). 

39 Schuft, “A Prescribed Burning Program for Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks,” 380-82. 

135 
 

 

 

 

 

firebreaks. When the fires came close to crossing park boundaries, bulldozers created 

new fire breaks that prevented its spread. The burn reduced fuels around some of the 

park’s most important places and also cleared a number of existing fire breaks of 

combustible material.40 

House assessed the information gained in the burns, weighing the benefits against 

the concerns such a program raised. Questions clearly remained. Kings Canyon lacked 

appropriate prescriptions and sufficient fire weather data. “Much time was wasted trying 

to burn without results because of a lack of fire weather data,” he observed. The park also 

needed to refine its prescriptions, aiming the type and heat of the prescribed fire directly 

at the desired result. Even more troublesome, House noted, was the expense. Although he 

was able to allot $33,984 on the prescribed burning program from the park’s general 

operating fund, he believed that “to do the job right and get on a scheduled basis, we 

would need $100,000 a year for 10 years.” Such a sum would give Kings Canyon a tenperson crew and a foreman throughout the year dedicated to the prescribed burn 

41 program.

Another concern vexed House and other administrators who allowed some fires 

inside their boundaries to burn. If lightning fires that went loose posed one kind of public 

relations problem, nothing was more damaging to the idea of controlled burning than an 

intentionally set fire that exceeded its boundaries. Control remained an enormous issue; 

the public could barely understand letting wild fire alone, much less starting an 

intentional fire that eluded control. If such an endeavor went awry, the consequences 

could be enormous. House recognized that supporting a program of prescribed fire might 

be almost as expensive as suppression, and possibly damaging not only to the park’s 

facilities but to its reputation as well. 

By the early 1970s, the programs at Sequoia and Kings Canyon had begun to 

show measurable results. Between 1968 and 1971, fifty-three fires had been allowed to 

burn themselves out under the let burn program before the NPS changed the name; only 

one such fire, in 1970, had to be extinguished. Most of the fires took place inside 

designated “let burn” zones; nine outside its boundaries were allowed to burn themselves 

out. McLaughlin felt confident that this experience showed that “natural fires under 

conditions pertaining in the southern Sierra burn out after spreading over a relatively 

small area.” He felt certain that the experience at Sequoia and Kings Canyon showed that 

“resource managers could restore fire to its natural role in parks and wilderness . . . in a 

way that is acceptable to the public.”42 

McLaughlin’s support for the fire program was a crucial dimension in its 

continuation. He used the power of his office to support the program even when it might 

have been politically more viable to back away. In one instance, “one of the fires got 

away and burned up some stuff. There was a big review down in Sequoia which [Lyle] 

McDowell came out for,” Barbee recounted. “It was a kind of billed as a public hanging, 

40 Ibid., 384; Acting Superintendent, Sequoia and Kings Canyon to Director, Western Region, April 

10, 1970, Sequoia National Park Archives, FR 68-76, Redwood Mountain Man U Box 34, F1; John S. 

McLaughlin, “Restoring Fire to the Environment in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks,” 

Proceedings, Annual Tall Timbers Fire Ecology Conference, June 8-9, 1972, 391-3. 41 Acting Superintendent, Sequoia and Kings Canyon to Director, Western Region, April 10, 1970, 

Sequoia National Park Archives, FR 68-76, Redwood Mountain Man U Box 34, F1. 42 McLaughlin, “Restoring Fire to the Environment in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks,” 

393-94. 

136 
 

 

 

and I went.” Yosemite Superintendent Larry Hadley told Barbee: “I don’t want any of 

these goddamn fiascos taking place up here in Yosemite.” Hadley “knew where I was 

headed, and he didn’t want his own fiasco,” Barbee remembered. “He said, ‘you get 

down there and see what you can learn from it.’ So, I did.” Barbee was impressed with 

McLaughlin’s commitment to the burn program and his dexterity in handling criticism of 

the practice. “McLaughlin defused it immediately,” Barbee observed with admiration. 

“He stood up and said that this is such an important program that we can’t jeopardize it, 

and he took full responsibility for what has occurred. That just stopped [the critics] in 

their tracks.”43 

McLaughlin retained concerns about the implementation of fire regimes in 

national parks. Although he was an advocate of allowing natural fires to burn, he was not 

certain of the viability of prescribed fire. He recognized the value of the program, but 

feared that the financial resources upon which implementation depended would be 

impossible to secure. This, he believed, was a dangerous scenario. New air quality 

standards that stemmed from the Clean Air Act of 1970 also seemed to McLaughlin to 

impede the use of fire. Such rules were “being interpreted to imply that the environment 

can not stand any more smoke of any sort or that all smoke is bad,” he suggested. 

“Smoke from natural fires has been in our environment since time immemorial, and it 

may well be an essential part of it.”44 

By 1971, McLaughlin had become comfortable not only with the park’s new burn 

policy, but with the terms under which he as a superintendent could implement it. Late in 

the summer season in 1971, he issued a management directive that underpinned Kings 

Canyon’s strategy for addressing high-elevation natural fire. Using the language of the 

Green Book, he linked his park’s resource management goals with the natural fire 

directive, establishing a rationale for the park’s program. The plan took shape around the 

goal of “perpetuating animal and plant habitats in the management unit,” leading to the 

guideline of letting fires burn, with careful monitoring when they were above 9,000 feet 

in elevation. McLaughlin reserved the right of his wildfire committee, the park fire chief 

or acting fire chief to order suppression of a fire that threatened to spread beyond 

designated boundaries. He carefully delineated the areas covered in the program, 

producing the clearest articulation to that time of the superintendent’s power in 

implementing the use of fire.45 

McLaughlin embraced fire as a tool at his parks, implementing programs that 

helped his resource managers and met with public approval. Despite concerns about the 

efficacy of prescribed burning, which still seemed diffuse and without concrete 

objectives, the program flourished. Where it was implemented, it achieved a primary 

goal. It reduced the dangerously high fuel loads that led to intense fires that damaged 

sequoias. Other parks experimented with fire programs, often looking to Sequoia and 

Kings Canyon for examples. They continued to grapple with the consequences. They 

were reassured by researchers who worked closely with the parks. Richard Hartesveldt 

was the leader of the San Jose State College research at Sequoia and Kings Canyon 

43 Robert Barbee interview, part I, November 12, 2004. 

44 McLaughlin, “Restoring Fire to the Environment in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks,” 

393-94., 394; Rothman, Saving the Planet, 125-30. 45 Superintendent to the Park Staff, Memorandum, September 7, 1971, Sequoia National Park, Fire 

Records, Box 191, F1. 

137 
 

 

 

 

National Parks. He worked with park personnel to devise a better strategy to protect the 

sequoias. Hartesveldt suggested burning around the base of the trees prior to a prescribed 

burn, removing the fuel sources that caused so much damage to the big trees. Harold 

Biswell and his proteges – Jan van Wagtendonk, James Agee, and Bruce Kilgore– also 

helped persuade park superintendents of the efficacy of their strategies. The scientific 

basis for decision-making became a strategy to justify the fire programs. As the scientists 

played a larger role with each passing season and every positive result, the parks’ shift 

toward the use of fire began to solidify.46 

The growing emphasis on outside research brought Yosemite National Park to the 

forefront. Despite its proximity to the research at Sequoia and Kings Canyon and its 

historic position as an important fire park, Yosemite had been a backwater of fire 

research. “When the Park Service has had controversy” associated with fire, Jan van 

Wagtendonk observed, “Yosemite has usually escaped.” The transformation from 

backwater to forefront happened quickly. Yosemite “had some really hot shot natural 

resource management people,” Agee remembered. By the mid 1960s, Yosemite’s 

leadership showed interest in using fire as a tool. In January 1966, Superintendent John 

C. Preston invited Harold Biswell to speak on controlled burning, bringing the man still 

widely seen as a heretic in to describe his work to the park’s staff. The charismatic 

Biswell could command an audience and his reputation preceded him. Within a few 

years, Biswell had become a fixture at Yosemite, and his students conducted a variety of 

research projects there. By the early 1970s, he began teaching an extension course on 

forest fire ecology at the park. His presence encouraged further experimentation. In time, 

Agee believed, the Yosemite program “became on par with that of Sequoia.” 47 

As a result of Biswell’s work and his overarching presence, controlled burning in 

Yosemite proceeded in a systematic and organized fashion. The scientific basis for such 

activity was clear, and despite strong resistance from the suppression advocates inside the 

park, experiments in controlled burning proliferated. In 1968, Robert Barbee returned to 

Yosemite after graduate training at the “ranger factory” at Colorado State University to 

serve as “the resource management guy there,” he remembered. “I was brand new, with 

an entrenched cadre of people who were parks forester and the whole traditional scene.” 

Many were not receptive to Barbee’s program. “They did not embrace me with open 

arms,” he smiled from a distance of thirty years. “I didn’t even have an office at first. 

Bryan Harry, the chief naturalist, let me have a little desk in the library over in the 

museum. He was the most sympathetic guy of all for what I was trying to do.” Barbee 

was assigned to write Yosemite’s first natural resource management plan. “The chief 

ranger I worked for said: ‘your job is to develop this plan, but don’t think you are going 

to do anything,’” he recalled. “I am not wired that way. And so anyway I sat there for six 

months, did a lot of research and started to write the plan.”48 

Writing a report and implementing it were very different kinds of objectives, and 

Barbee had to negotiate the distance between them. “I soon realized what we had to do. 

46 John S. McLaughlin to Richard Hartesveldt, February 10, 1970, Sequoia National Park Archives, 

FR 69-72, Man U, Box 11, F 92; Bancroft, Nichols, Parsons, Graber, Evison and van Wagtendonk, 

“Evolution of the Natural Fire Management Program ay Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks,” 176-

77. 47 James Agee interview, June 10, 2004; Carle, Burning Questions, 124; Biswell, Prescribed Burning, 

112. 48 Robert Barbee interview, Part I, November 12, 2004. 

138 
 

 

 

 

There was not a technical problem,” he recalled. “The technical part was easy. I [had] to 

be an advocate, but I [had] to do it carefully so I [did not] get identified as some sort of a 

nut.” He faced considerable resistance and moved cautiously. “I was aware that any new 

administrator or new breakthrough, [any] new program manager can become a casualty 

quickly,” he mused. “So I had to kind of employ whatever charisma I had to deal with it. 

That was the problem.” He soon was assigned an office in the headquarters building, “in 

the attic,” he remembered with a smile. “Then I got an office downstairs with a window, 

and then they reorganized the park and I ended up with what used to be the foresters and 

the big guys on my staff. They were Indians and they were big on this whole notion of 

prescribed burning.” Barbee’s program gained momentum.49 

He prepared to reintroduce surface fire at a variety of locations in Yosemite, 

including the ponderosa pine-bear clover fuels near Wawona Hotel, the eleven-mile road 

region in the park’s northwest quadrant, Yosemite Valley, and the Foresta Village. At the 

Mariposa Grove and the Tuolumne Grove of giant sequoias and sugar pines, “there was 

no way you could set a fire,” Barbee recalled. “The white fir was over your head, and you 

would have a holocaust there if you did not watch out. So what we did in the sequoia 

groves is try and simulate the fire by cutting, burning, piling the white fir and incensecedar. The Sequoia groves [were] just too valuable a resource and we could not take a 

chance. The vegetative shift had taken place so long ago that there were no sequoias, no 

seedlings or anything, it was just solid white fir.”50 

Despite such a bold plan, without adequate resources, the chances of its 

comprehensive implementation were slim. The introduction of prescribed fire began in 

fits and starts. The first prescribed burns took place in fall 1969 at Foresta Village, and by 

summer 1970, a rudimentary prescribed burning program was in place. Biswell, Harry 

Schimke, and Barbee all were instrumental in its design and implementation. The BIA’s 

Harold Weaver, another of the progenitors of prescribed burning, visited Yosemite to 

assess the work. Biswell and James Agee, working on his Ph.D. with Biswell, joined him 

on a trip to Mariposa Grove. Weaver was impressed with the park’s accomplishments. 

“Improvement by clearing, piling, and burning of the dense white fir understory and the 

accumulated flammable debris of the forest floor is an excellent project,” he informed 

Yosemite Superintendent Lawrence Hadley.”51 

Weaver continued his tour, visiting prescribed burns at the El Capitan Picnic 

Area, El Capitan Meadow, the El Capitan Vista area, Wawona, Foresta, and at the 

Tuolomne Grove of Sequoia. Weaver saw tremendous value in the project, for in each 

locale it reduced the understory and the attendant fire hazard, brought back long 

suppressed flowering plants, ferns, and grass-like plants, and eliminated accumulated 

debris and weak trees. “I like the work at Yosemite very much,” he concluded. “It has 

been skillfully accomplished by men who understand fire ecology and fire behavior and 

who know how to use fire.”52 No higher compliment could come from a leader of the 

discipline. 

49 Ibid. 

50 “U.C. Foresters Aid Fire Ecology Program at Yosemite National Park,” California Agriculture 25 

2 (February 1971), 3; Robert Barbee interview, Part I, November 12, 2004. 51 Harold Weaver to Lawrence C. Hadley, Superintendent, Yosemite, August 4, 1970, Yosemite 

National Park Archives, Central Files, Y 14, Forest Fire Control, 1970. 52 Ibid. 

139 
 

 

 

Supported by such praise, the move to introduce fire became more aggressive. A 

new environmental restoration plan authored by Barbee and approved in 1970 brought 

Biswell’s ideas to Yosemite in a formal way. Prior to human arrival, the plan stated, 

“surface fires were one of the most important natural agents controlling the distribution 

of trees and meadow vegetation.” Fire had been critical; many areas of Yosemite revealed 

natural fires about every two years over an extended period. Suppression had 

significantly altered the landscape and “active management,” the combination of 

introduced fire, natural fire, and other efforts to reduce fuel load, had become an essential 

step in achieving resource management goals. “Solving Yosemite’s ecological problems 

must certainly include the use of planned fire as a management technique,” Barbee 

believed. He selected five regions in the park for initial restoration, regarding the effort as 

the “initial step in re-establishing park ecosystems that have been altered by fire 

exclusion.”53 

The idea of an environmental restoration program melded a number of important 

trends in federal conservation. Barbee recognized the growing emphasis on meeting the 

requirements of federal statute stemming from the passage of the National Environmental 

Policy Act in 1970. That Nixon-era law became the basis for the entire regime of federal 

action on public lands, a process that the National Park Service came to call 

“compliance.” A natural resource specialist, he embraced the science that had become the 

intellectual basis of his profession, another of the many results of the Leopold Report and 

the shift in NPS direction it heralded. At the same time, Barbee built on the growing 

interest in the work of Biswell and his peers, bringing fire science inside the NPS loop in 

important ways. Barbee “kept pushing and Bob kept burning,” Agee remembered, 

keeping prescribed burning in the forefront.54 The result was a program that almost 

perfectly reflected the national mood about the environment, the new emphasis on 

science in the National Park Service, and the growing trend in the federal government 

toward statutory regulation of environmental issues. 

The burning already undertaken at Yosemite National Park was such a success 

that a significant percentage of its staff embraced the new ethos. “It is our contention that 

the time has come when Yosemite should break the ground for some research of our own 

in the ecological manipulation of resources of the park,” Yosemite Fire Control Officer 

Jim Olson announced in September 1970. He proposed a fifty-acre burn on the Eleven 

Mile area of the Wawona District, which he wanted to undertake before the fall rains 

arrived. Olson needed the heat that dryness would generate to accomplish his 

management goals. White firs were the target; only intense heat could kill the species. 

Olson planned control lines to surround the fire, and located the burn far from roads to 

limit any potential consequences. “Strict adherence to prescription levels and weather 

forecasts will preclude uncontrolled fire out of the area,” he predicted. “Research along 

these lines will enable us to answer some of the questions unanswered for Yosemite fuels 

and conditions.”55 

53 Robert Barbee, in collaboration with Harold Biswell, “Environmental Restoration Program for 

Yosemite National Park, 1970,” Yosemite National Park Archives, NPS, Protection Division, Fire, 

Prescribed Fire, 4 14 1969-1985, 1-6. 54 James Agee interview, June 10, 2004; Rosenbaum, The Politics of Environmental Concern, 117-

23. 55 Fire Control Officer Jim Olson to Wawona District Ranger, September 22, 1970, Yosemite 

National Park Archives, Y14. 

140 
 

 

 

 

 

In plans such as the Tuolumne Meadows Experimental Burn in 1970, an 

addendum to the park’s environmental restoration program of the same year, Yosemite 

proposed an orderly set of small controlled burns within the meadow. Barbee designated 

ten five-acre plots, with a scientific rationale for each. Lodgepole pine had been 

encroaching on Yosemite’s high meadows for most of the century and the park sought 

remedies to the problem. Barbee proposed a comprehensive prescription for conducting 

the burns, with close observation of weather and a spot forecast from the Fresno weather 

station to validate the prescription and sustain it throughout the burn.56 

After the implementation of such plans, the idea of using prescribed fire gained 

momentum. Fire management fit nicely into the value system of early 1970s America, an 

era in which many came to see the earth as an organism rather than a canvas for human 

endeavor. On some levels, this new approach suggested arrogance: humans believed that 

they could control fire, a conceit long harbored. Science contributed to this impression, 

for Americans remained firm in their belief that technological solutions existed for all 

classes of problems. The National Park Service drank from this heady brew, but with a 

little more caution than those farther from the front lines. As McLaughlin at Sequoia and 

Barbee at Yosemite noted, the advantages of fire were many as long as adequate 

resources supported the endeavors. The Sierra Nevada parks benefited from the proximity 

of the University of California, Berkeley and a growing variety of research that emanated 

from there. When Yosemite developed a new master plan in 1971, Biswell presented a 

statement in favor of the park’s use of fire. Prescribed fire was “the best and most 

desirable way to correct the undesirable situations now existing,” he asserted. Biswell 

regarded the use of fire as the way to prevent catastrophic wildfire, an idea that had 

currency mostly among the scientific community.57 

Opponents of prescribed burns remained, some prominent in the California 

natural resource bureaucracy. Shandon Valley rancher Ian McMillan, a member of the 

California State Parks Commission, adamantly opposed the use of fire. He regarded the 

NPS’s program at Yosemite as a vanguard for a similar program in the state park system, 

and he opposed it with everything at his disposal. McMillan peppered California’s 

legislative representatives with letters detailing his objections. He informed U.S. Senator 

Alan Cranston, D-Ca., that the burned park landscapes appeared to him as “an artificial 

manmade spectacle, entirely unnatural, incongruous, extremely unpleasant to view, and a 

flagrant violation of the concept of nature preservation on which the park was founded.” 

He told Yosemite Superintendent Lynn Thompson that he regarded burning as “artificial 

landscaping” and suggested that the use of fire showed an emphasis on “game 

management and habitat manipulation,” what he called an “alien philosophy that 

overturned the ‘basic park ethic.’”58 Hyperbolic and overzealous, McMillan could be 

easily dismissed, but he represented a powerful sentiment against prescribed burning. 

When Horace Albright, eighty years old in 1970, inserted himself into the 

conflict, burning advocates no longer could pretend that opponents of the use of fire were 

inconsequential. When he heard of plans to allow lightning fires to burn in Yellowstone 

56 Robert D. Barbee, “Experimental Use of Prescribed Fire to Control Lodgepole Pine 

Encroachment,” October 9, 1970, Yosemite National Park, Y16. 57 Carle, Burning Questions, 147-48; Jan van Wagtendonk interview, June 13, 2002. 58 Horace M. Albright to George B. Hartzog, Jr., July 12, 1971, DPR, quoted in Carle, Burning 

Questions, 151. 

141 
 

 

National Park in 1972, Albright went straight to NPS Director Hartzog. An “old -school 

greenery is scenery” type, as Jan van Wagtendonk labeled him, Albright insisted that fire 

had no place in an ecosystem. “George, I say this with the utmost devotion to you,” 

Albright finished. “If you do not stop this fire policy, at least for 1972, I’ll have to enter 

the defense of Yellowstone.” Two years later, Albright was present at the Star King Fire 

at Yosemite. Angered by the smoke, he grabbed van Wagtendonk by his lapels and said: 

“I understand you’re responsible for all this smoke.” Two years into his career with the 

NPS, van Wagtendonk was unwilling to engage the Service’s avuncular grandfather. “I 

said, ‘not me!’ I pointed to the [Yosemite] Resource Manager Dick Riegelhuth,” van 

Wagtendonk recalled with a smile. “Dick handled it just fine.”59 

Albright’s vehement opposition illustrated how much and how little had changed 

concerning prescribed fires. By the middle of the 1970s, the National Park Service 

engaged in much more than an experiment with natural and prescribed fire. Most of the 

major national parks – including Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Teton – had established 

programs. The NPS approved Yellowstone’s first fire management plan in spring 1972. It 

included only two prescribed natural fire zones. A 1975 revision reversed the vision, 

accentuating the importance of fire; it designated the entire park as a prescribed natural 

fire zone except for the developed areas. The onus had shifted; burning took precedence 

except in developed areas.60 The use of fire became an integral part of the NPS approach 

to preventing fire. In his day, Horace Albright could have terminated a natural or 

controlled burn policy with a wave of his hand. But even the reverence in which he was 

held and his still significant political powers could not affect fire’s status in the mid1970s. 

Major conservation figures such as David Brower and Edgar Wayburn of the 

Sierra Club did not like the results of fire any better than did Albright. Jan van 

Wagtendonk took Brower into the Mariposa Grove at Yosemite to show him new 

seedlings that sprouted in the wake of a prescribed burn. “I understand, philosophically, 

what you are saying to me, but emotionally, I just can’t handle the black trees,” Brower 

told the scientist. Brower was perhaps the leading figure in American conservation – the 

individual who put wilderness into the national lexicon, architect of the demise of the 

Echo Park Dam and the most outspoken proponent of nature protection of his day. 

Brower’s sentiments were telling. For all the good fire did for ecological systems, its 

damage to aesthetic qualities ran hard against the vision of pristine nature that bolstered 

the American sense of self in the early 1970s.61 

Nor was the sentiment confined to those outside the National Park Service. The 

generations raised on fire as an enemy still permeated the NPS, and they grappled with 

the implication of the new policy. “Old habits die hard,” observed Director Hartzog, “and 

many a fine park ranger and superintendent did not jump with joy to embrace the new 

policy.”62 Yet, momentum favored change. Hartzog’s support, Lyle McDowell’s 

59 Jan van Wagtendonk interview, June 13, 2002; Carle, Burning Questions, 150-51; Hartzog, 

Battling for the National Parks, 105. 60 Yellowstone Fire Management Plan, 1972; Resource Management Plan, 1975, Y-218; Robert E. 

Sellers and Don G. DeSpain, “Fire Management in Yellowstone National Park,” Proceedings, Annual Tall 

Timbers Fire Ecology Conference, V 14 (1976), 102-08. 61 Jan van Wagtendonk interview, June 13, 2002; David R. Brower, For Earth’s Sake: The Life and 

Times of David Brower (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 1990), 328-34. 62 Hartzog, Battling for the National Parks, 105. 

142 
 

 

prominent role in developing a management structure for implementing the use of fire, 

and the acceptance of the idea of ecology meant that the NPS could craft a structure 

within in which the use of fire would become a normal part of Service practice. 

By the mid-1970s, the National Park Service had reached an initial point of 

maturity in its fire management program. The use of fire as a resource tool had begun 

with the Leopold Report, migrated to the Green Book, and then continued into 

application through people in the Washington office and the regional offices in the field. 

It centered in Yosemite, which had become central to the NPS’s vision of addressing fire, 

and had spread to more than two dozen parks. When superintendents wanted to consider 

initiating controlled burning, they often turned to Yosemite. Kilgore, by then associate 

regional director for resource management and planning in the Western Region, had 

become one of the Service’s leading thinkers on the subject, and he recognized the need 

for a more comprehensive vision. Fire and its use – and increasingly its suppression – 

remained episodic. Kilgore had come to believe in a three-part total fire program. 

“Allowing fires was part of it, suppression was part of it, and prescribed burns [were] a 

part of it,” he stated – a policy that respected local authority by basing decisions on each 

park’s fire planning documents. In an article published in Transactions of North 

American Wildlife and Natural Resources Conferences, Kilgore called for a change in 

thinking about fire that he described as a transition from fire control to fire management 

that would let the National Park Service manage its units on an ecological basis. He 

envisioned the resource management and fire management units in the regional offices 

supporting their counterparts in the parks, by encouraging implementation of plans and 

securing the funding to carry out burn programs.63 

The early years of the program that recognized fire as an ecological asset also had 

begun a transformation of National Park Service procedures. The acreage initially burned 

was not enormous, but given the sincerity and severity of opposition to the very idea of 

burning, it spoke volumes about the magnitude of change. Through 1974, ten parks had 

allowed only 27,000 acres of timber to burn as a result of natural fire and five parks had 

burned 37,000 acres under prescribed conditions. Of that, 33,000 acres had been burned 

at Everglades National Park, where fire had been a staple of management for almost two 

decades and where the most comprehensive program in the national park system took 

place. Yet the philosophical underpinning belied the limited application. Kilgore loudly 

asserted that the NPS could not “gamble with a force as potent as fire – either we should 

have it under full control at all time or we shouldn’t use it at all.” But the use of fire was 

imperative: allowing fuel loads to accumulate simply passed a more difficult problem to a 

future manager.64 

As late as 1974, the NPS fire program had yet to encounter significant public 

opposition. Because the program remained small – even though considerable acreage was 

included in areas where fires were allowed to run their course – there had been few 

circumstances in which fire impacted visitors or nearby communities. Until such an event 

63 Bruce Kilgore, “From Fire Control to Fire Management: An Ecological Basis for Policies,” 

Transactions North American Wildlife and Natural Resources Conferences 41 (1976), 473-77; Bruce 

Kilgore interview, February 16, 2004; Superintendent, Crater Lake National Park to Superintendent, 

Yosemite National Park, April 15, 1976, YNP 57. 64 Bruce Kilgore interview, February 16, 2004; Bruce Kilgore, “Fire Management in the National 

Parks: An Overview,” in E. V. Komarek, ed., Tall Timbers Fire Ecology Conference Proceedings 

(Tallahassee, FL: Tall Timbers Research Station, 1976), 45-57. 

143 
 

 

 

occurred, the NPS was operating in a Petri dish – conducting an experiment that tested 

neither the Service’s commitment to the program nor its ability to address pressure from 

the public. The summer of 1974 changed that equation. A significant public relations 

backlash against NPS policy and procedure resulted from the management of a small fire 

at Grand Teton National Park. The Waterfalls Canyon Fire was a slow-burning and 

generally visible fire that burned for more than three months before rain and snow 

extinguished it. It provided a pivotal test of NPS commitment and a barometer of the 

issues that could have easily derailed the use of fire in the national park system. 

Before 1974, Grand Teton National Park had joined the small group of parks that 

aggressively implemented a natural and prescribed burning regime. Almost from the 

moment of the publication of the 1968 Green Book, park officials planned for the use of 

fire. Implementation took longer than park leadership anticipated. The weather had been 

ideal for burning in 1970 and 1971, but Grand Teton managers demurred because of a 

lack of research data. By 1972, they decided enough research had been completed to 

begin and NPS Biologist Lloyd Loope and George Gruell of the Forest Service began 

planning the burn. Press releases in the Jackson Hole News in June and August 1972 

explained the program and its goals. The park prepared a fire-vegetation management 

plan in 1972, specifying 125,000 acres on which lightning fires would be allowed to 

burn. When the Midwest Regional Office evaluated the plan, officials rejected it as too 

dangerous, ordering the park to redesign the parameters of its program.65 

Even before Grand Teton and NPS staff redesigned the plan, the first prescribed 

burns in the park took place under previously approved conditions. The 1973 program 

called for two prescribed burns in Grand Teton National Park. The first, a scheduled 

twenty-acre burn on Blacktail Butte was delayed for the year when wet conditions slowed 

the drying of the understory. Crews ignited the second planned fire – a 100-acre burn on 

Uhl Hill – on August 28. The conditions were difficult, for the fine fuel moisture (FFM), 

temperature, relative humidity (RH), and wind speed were not within the optimum range 

of the burning prescription. To compensate for the less than optimal conditions, the park 

instituted a series of additional protective measures. A more than one mile-long fire line 

had been cleared previously, crews removed surface vegetation, and the park widened 

another existing fire line and extended it. A total of fifty-six people worked the fire line, 

including a crew with a D-7 Caterpillar earthmover standing by in case of a need for 

rapid response. Smoke dispersal conditions approached excellent. “The forecast was 

favorable, manpower present, and burning commenced at 1300” hours, the official report 

of burn recorded.66 

The weather conditions did not cooperate with the burn program. Smoke from the 

fire drifted east and then southeast toward the Mt. Leidy Highlands, large sedimentary 

mountains east of Jackson and north of the Gros Ventre River. Only a small amount of 

smoke settled in the Buffalo Valley, but any amount there had been one of the fears of 

planners. They expected the smoke to inspire local resentment. The fire consumed nearly 

thirty acres of sagebrush that surrounded a stand of aspen, but it lost its impetus in the 

green and moist aspen understory. Only a few small areas burned at all, and most did not 

65 N.A., “Fire Management in Grand Teton National Park;” no title, Jackson Hole News, June 22, 

1972; Jackson Hole News, August 10, 1972. 66 “1973 Prescribed Burning Statement,” Fire Records, Box 1, (located in Law Enforcement Evidence 

Room), Grand Teton National Park. 

144 
 

 

 

 

 

burn thoroughly. Staff members patrolled the fire area for three days, engaging in only a 

little additional work. On September 1, rain and snow extinguished the fires.67 

Despite some negative results, the Uhl Hill fire gave the park confidence in the 

prescribed burning program. In the most basic of terms, Grand Teton had started a fire, 

monitored it, and achieved some resource management goals without incurring the ire of 

the community. While less acreage than intended was consumed, the fact that the burn 

came off without significant problems was a major achievement for supporters of the use 

of fire. It showed that if undertaken carefully, intentional burning did not have to affect 

community-park relations. Nor did it have a negative effect on natural resources. Even if 

the Uhl Hill burn did not accomplish everything its planners expected, Grand Teton saw 

it as an important starting point for continuing the possibility of implementing a regime 

that used fire to shape the natural environment. 

Devising an acceptable plan to govern the overall burning process proved more 

complicated. In July 1974, Grand Teton National Park circulated a revised draft 

environmental assessment of its proposed fire-vegetation management plan. When the 

park held hearings on the proposal, it received an array of comments. The majority of the 

negative comments focused on the oldest of national parks issues: as seasonal research 

biologist Dale Taylor expressed it, the question was “when are things natural and when 

are we gardening?” A range of figures, including the prominent wilderness advocate 

Adolph Murie, believed that the use of fire in the national parks was overzealous 

tampering. “We should be guardians not gardeners,” Murie had written in a critique of 

the Leopold Report in 1963, a sentiment echoed by Howard Zahniser of the Wilderness 

Society, and in 1974, Murie remained unconvinced of the efficacy of the report and the 

controlled burning it recommended. University of Wyoming Zoology Professor Oscar 

Paris supported natural fire but urged that “any program of prescribed burns in the park 

be dropped forthwith . . . [it would] serve only as blemishes on the land.” Louise Mardy 

observed that the many spot fires constituted more than the “minimum of management” 

that was consistent with park policy. The less numerous positive comments came from 

those with some background in natural resource or fire management. U.S. Forest Service 

retiree Richard E. Baldwin believed that the idea of a burning program was a good one, 

but that the NPS needed more fire suppression and fire behavior expertise on its fire 

management team. Such specialized commentary amounted to refinement of NPS 

practices rather than opposition.68 

Nine days later, on July 17, 1974, lightning kindled the Waterfalls Canyon Fire. 

That summer around Grant Teton National Park had been extraordinarily dry, with 

successive months of below-normal precipitation. When the fire started in the area of a 

five-acre burn from the previous year, the park staff’s initial reaction was to let it go and 

monitor it. With other natural fires burning in both Grand Teton and Yellowstone 

national parks, the Waterfalls Canyon fire did not seem exceptional. It spread “slowly, 

67 Ibid. 

68 Gary Everhardt, “To Whom it May Concern,” June 28, 1974; “Testimony Presented at the Public 

Hearing on the Draft Environmental Impact Assessment of Grand Teton National Park’s Fire-Vegetation 

Management Plan held in Jackson, Wyoming on July 8, 1974;” Richard E. Baldwin to Gary Everhardt, July 

10, 1974; Dale Taylor to Richard E. Baldwin, July 17, 1974; Louise G. Murie to Gary Everhardt, July 18, 

1974; Philip M. Hocker to Gary Everhardt, July 19, 1974; Adolph Murie to Gary Everhardt, July 18, 1974, 

Fire Records, Box 1, (located in Law Enforcement Evidence Room), Grand Teton National Park. 

145 
 

sometimes invisibly, sometimes with billows of smoke. . . . At no time was the fire’s 

behavior unpredictable or was the fire uncontrollable,” chroniclers noted. In an attempt to 

soften the public's response to seeing the fire be allowed to burn, park interpreters 

explained the Service’s natural fire policy to visitors. The fire continued to smolder, 

growing to only 200 acres in the first six weeks. On September 10, almost two months 

after it began, the fire reached 500 acres in size and was moving upslope. After that, it 

grew rapidly. On September 18, it reached 1,500 acres. The next day, the fire topped 

1,900 acres. Its smoke filled the town of Jackson, Wyoming, prompting negative 

responses from the community.69 

Jackson had been uneasy before mid-September. The blaze was two months old 

and following it had become local sport. But no one in town could recall a fire that lasted 

as long. Whatever support existed for the policy of allowing natural fire to burn 

diminished daily. The “smoky pall,” as one local newspaper called it crystallized negative 

sentiment. “Has Smokey the Bear Become Smokey the Firebug?” a September 19 paid 

advertisement from Concerned Citizens of Teton County in the Jackson Hole Guide 

screamed at the townspeople.70 The town did not object to natural fire per se; what 

residents said they disliked was what they perceived as a cavalier attitude on the part of 

the National Park Service. From the town’s perspective, Grand Teton seemed content to 

let the fire burn itself out no matter how it inconvenienced locals. An eventuality that 

many in the NPS recognized occurred: Two very different dimensions of the National 

Park Service’s obligations – resource management and community relations – collided 

head-on. 

The controversy bubbled over, and soon attained national dimensions. The Rocky 

Mountain regional NPS office issued a press release that explained fire policy while 

dexterously avoiding the words “let burn.” Service officials had decided the term 

connoted a lack of monitoring when the hallmark of the NPS program was close attention 

as any fire burned. The September 20 press release was widely circulated in an effort to 

explain the NPS reaction to fire to the public. In early October, the Denver Post ran a 

major story on the Waterfalls Canyon fire, and its Empire Edition, which covered the 

northern Rockies, featured a photograph of the fire on its cover. CBS and NBC showed 

filmed reports later in October, and Time magazine also covered the story.71 

The National Park Service recognized that the traveling public had witnessed the 

fire in large numbers. By one count, at least 100,000 visitors saw at least smoke from the 

fire. Despite explanatory efforts, most people could not fathom letting a fire burn, and 

many expressed concern about the aesthetic impact of the fire. Others questioned its 

impact on wildlife, air and water quality, and vegetation. The emotions that accompanied 

their observations were powerful; most people truly could not comprehend allowing the 

fire to burn. 

Waterfalls Canyon illustrated a problem with which the National Park Service had 

yet to grapple. While the NPS burn program had genuine empirical grounding, the 

emotional response of the public had nothing to do with the efficacy of the science that 

69 “Narrative – Waterfalls Canyon Fire,” 76; Lloyd Loope, “Report on Uh Hill Burn of 8/28/73, Fire 

Records, Box 1, (located in Law Enforcement Evidence Room), Grand Teton National Park. 70 “Has Smokey the Bear Become Smokey the Firebug?” Jackson Hole Guide, September 19, 1974. 71 “The Anatomy of a Public Issue: The Waterfalls Canyon Fire, Grand Teton NP,” (rough draft), Fire 

Records, Box 1, (located in Law Enforcement Evidence Room), Grand Teton National Park. 

146 
 

underpinned the decision to let burn. The American public feared fire; it had been raised 

on Smokey Bear and Bambi, and typically thought of national parks as beautiful vacation 

lands. Most members of the public simply could not comprehend the need to allow fire. 

In an age of quality of life environmentalism, when Americans saw in their affection for 

the environment a measure of the grace and power of their society, they could not 

understand how their aesthetic consciousness could be intentionally intruded upon with 

the tacit acceptance of the federal agency they trusted to guard the nation’s natural 

treasures. In a time marked by a public energized with questions pertaining to the 

environment, the National Park Service found its friends to be its greatest critics when it 

came to using fire to shape the parks’ physical environment. 

Waterfalls Canyon had another important impact. It taught the NPS the value of 

communicating its science policy to the public. As did most scientists, those working for 

the National Park Service tended to rely on their specialized knowledge and expertise and 

to dismiss those who disagreed with them. Often, large segments of the general public 

either did not understand this scientific message or did not trust the message they 

received. This circumstance had more to do with the decline of the position of science in 

society than it did with anything the National Park Service said or did, but the result was 

the same. The public felt uncomfortable with the decision to use fire as a tool. Little 

anyone in the NPS said could change that reality. 

Ultimately, the idea of controlled burning received a powerful boost from the 

Waterfalls Canyon Fire. An article on the fire in Time magazine perfectly reflected the 

new NPS fire policy. Smokey Bear was “no ecologist,” the article asserted. “He is not 

aware that natural – as opposed to man-made – fires are good for forests.” Even as it 

acknowledged opposition to the policy, in a careful synopsis of the work of Kilgore and 

the other ecologists in the Service, the magazine embraced the use of fire. “It is ridiculous 

that we have been fighting natural fires for 100 years,” observed Yosemite Resource 

Management chief Dick Reigelhuth in the same article.72 The coverage refuted the local 

critique of the fire, a major triumph for advocates of the use of fire in the National Park 

Service. 

In the aftermath of Waterfalls Canyon, the NPS built on this triumph with an 

extensive campaign to educate the public about its use of fire. “We’ve got a major 

problem in explaining our position to the public,” Bruce Kilgore told Time, but buoyed 

by the magazine’s positive coverage, the NPS formulated a public education campaign. 

Kilgore identified the single most complex problem – convincing people that fire could 

be a valuable tool for protecting, not destroying their national parks. No one thought 

changing such attitudes would be easy. If no less an environmentalist than David Brower 

could not come to grips with the changes, NPS personnel believed, it was difficult to 

expect people less versed in the value of ecology to understand. The story of Bambi and 

the icon of Smokey Bear did not help; both symbols showed fire as a threat to all that was 

good, albeit in Smokey’s case, the emphasis was on the careless manner of humans and 

the fires they caused. The NPS learned that bringing science to the public was a 

challenging and difficult task.73 

The National Park Service continued its campaign. Press releases, public 

statements, educational and interpretive programs in the national parks, and other forms 

72 “Let ‘Em Burn,” Time 104 18 (October 28, 1974), 57. 73 Ibid, 57. 

147 
 

 

of communication made up the effort. In December 1974, the NPS took an important step 

in bringing this issue in front of the public. A three-page press release – more a 

newspaper article than a conventional public relations missive – spearheaded the 

campaign. “National Park Service Studies Show How Forest Fires May Help Preserve the 

Parks,” the headline announced with certainty. The release attempted to dispel what it 

called the dominant “fires-are-bad” construct. Recounting the history of natural and 

prescribed burning from Everglades through Sequoia and Kings Canyon and Yosemite, 

the NPS document highlighted the ways that fire served as a positive force and as an 

ecological balance system for land. 

Kilgore’s three-part fire program had become policy, and had been put into effect 

in twelve national park areas – Everglades, Sequoia and Kings Canyon, Yosemite, Grand 

Teton, Yellowstone, Rocky Mountain, Wind Cave, Carlsbad Caverns, Guadalupe 

Mountains, North Cascades, and Saguaro. With the exception of Everglades, these parks 

were in the desert Southwest or the mountains of the West. Guadalupe Mountains and 

North Cascades were both new additions to the park system; conceived as smaller latterday versions of nineteenth-century national parks and lacking the long history of 

firefighting so common in the park system, they were easy candidates for implementation 

of the new NPS strategy. Carlsbad Caverns, Wind Cave, and Saguaro shared a different 

set of attributes: all had plenty of easily combustible resources and significant histories of 

suppression. They too offered the Service a good place to experiment with its new policy. 

Additions to the program in the near future included Glacier, Grand Canyon, Isle Royale, 

Redwood, Lava Beds, and Point Reyes. The Service designated more than 3 million acres 

where natural fires were allowed to burn as long as they did not threaten human life or 

developed areas.74 

At its core, the decision to burn remained driven by the management objectives of 

individual parks, as superintendents chose whether to participate. The factors that 

influenced them varied. An aggressive prescribed fire policy only made sense at certain 

types of parks, accounting for the preponderance of western parks where the influence of 

fire ecology was at its greatest. At most historical parks and most eastern parks, fire did 

not present as severe a threat as at large natural parks with their long histories of 

suppression. In a system that left participation to local management, many parks opted 

not to be involved. Other superintendents did not embrace the use of fire, instead 

deciding to continue existing practices. 

Despite the fact that the burn program was more than six years old in 1974, the 

press release was the first example of a full-fledged announcement of the program as well 

as a push for its acceptance by the public. The National Park Service was committed to 

the new program, and it expressed its commitment in public in a more concerted and 

consistent manner. Press releases and other communications sought to carry the message 

forward. For the first time, the fire management program had the public and direct 

support of the National Park Service director. Gary Everhardt, who ascended to the 

NPS’s highest post upon the unceremonious departure of Ronald Walker in early 1975, 

had been superintendent of Grand Teton, the scene of the Waterfalls Canyon fire the 

previous summer. Everhardt had stood by the burn program despite its negative publicity, 

and he carried that commitment with him to the top NPS job. In a March 13, 1975 

74 National Park Service, “National Park Service Studies Show Forest Fires May Help Preserve 

Parks,” Sequoia National Park Archive, Box 192 (Let Burn 1974). 

148 
 

 

 

 

memorandum, issued less than a month after he took office, Everhardt informed the 

Service of his “personal interest and involvement in the fire management program.” He 

offered a schedule for parks preparing to introduce fire shaped by recommendations that 

Biswell, Kilgore, and others had long suggested. When challenged by congressional 

representatives on the burn policy, Everhardt stood his ground on fire, a stance that gave 

fire use advocates heart. Other directors, including the politically adroit George Hartzog, 

had given tacit support to fire management, leaving it to the local level rather than setting 

a direction to follow. In this, as in many other dimensions of National Park Service 

management, Walker, a political appointee with almost no prior park experience, had 

little background. Everhardt’s public support spoke volumes about the importance of the 

burn program and the backing it now enjoyed from the highest levels of the NPS.75 

The National Park Service had been struggling for models from which to develop 

a Service-wide structure for fire management. In this process, Yosemite’s transformation 

from backwater fire park to fire policy template continued. With the hiring of Jan van 

Wagtendonk in 1972, Yosemite acquired a highly trained young scholar who quickly 

became a premier fire ecologist. In concert with Robert Barbee, van Wagtendonk helped 

make Yosemite a model of fire management. Sequoia and Kings Canyon retained an 

important position as a leader in the development of new ideas and practices. Yosemite 

developed one of the first and most successful structures to manage fire, most clearly 

articulated in a 1975 “Role and Function” statement. The document described 

responsibilities, assigned authority, and divided tasks and responsibilities. Even more 

sophisticated, this role and function statement made distinctions between prescribed 

burning and natural, conditional, and loose-herding fire. This division was evident in fire 

scholarship, but had not been applied even episodically in national parks until this 

point.76 

Other parks contributed to the development of a larger NPS model of fire 

management. At Glacier National Park, Fire Control Officer William Colony took advice 

from the Rocky Mountain Regional Office in designing a template for a fire management 

plan. In 1975, Yellowstone completed an environmental assessment, a preliminary step in 

expanding the natural fire program to nearly the entire park. A new resource management 

plan, with a comprehensive section on fire management, followed in March 1975. This 

draft represented the fullest development of a rationale and strategy for Yellowstone’s 

use of fire to that point. Throughout the National Park Service, the momentum for 

Service-wide organization of fire management accelerated.77 

75 Memorandum, Director to All Regional Directors and Director, National Capital Parks, March 13, 

1975; Director to U.S. Harold T. Johnson, March 13, 1975; Regional Director, Western Region to 

Superintendents, Western Region, State Director, Hawaii, Chief, Arizona Archaeological Center, 

Directorate, Western Regional Office, Yosemite National Park Archives, Y 14 Forest Fire Control, 1914-

1975; Foresta, America’s National Parks and Their Keepers, 39-55. 76 Dick Reigelhuth, “Role and Function Statement: Fire Management, Yosemite National Park,” 

January 20, 1975, Yosemite National Park Archives. 77 Fire Control Officer to Superintendent and Chief Ranger, GLAC, January 10, 1975, Glacier 

National Park Archives, 1910-1984 Collection, 306-5; Fire-Related Biological Fact Sheet,” National Park 

Service, April 1975, Yellowstone National Park Archives, Y-218; Draft, Fire Management Section, 

3/31/75, Yellowstone National Park Archives, Y-218; Sellers and DeSpain, “Fire Management in 

Yellowstone National Park,” 108-12. 

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A national process was codified in 1976. Staff Directive 76-12 set out to clarify 

terminology and procedure for the burn program. “The use of fire is coming into its own 

across the Nation,” the document read. “Once considered a tool for habitat management, 

it is now acknowledged as vital to perpetuating certain natural systems.” The document 

articulated the NPS’s newfound primacy in fire management, saying “The incorporation 

of natural ignitions from lightning into management programs has been led by this 

Service.” The NPS had become the innovator; with no precedent technology, it must 

develop its own. The directive explained the change in terminology from “fire control” to 

“fire management,” a semantic redefinition that “more accurately reflect[ed] the 

increasing complexity of the Service-wide program,” and formally linked fire 

management to the emerging field of resource management. This shift reflected a shift in 

the meaning of NPS fire terminology. It described suppression activities in a new light, as 

situations where “sophisticated technology is joined by trained qualified fire managers to 

minimize loss of resources.”78 

Staff Directive 76-12 took its cues from the tripartite strategy that Bruce Kilgore 

designed more than five years before. The National Park Service sought to blend fire 

suppression, management use of fire, and research into “a cohesive program to perpetuate 

the resources entrusted to park management.” With its set of standardized definitions, the 

document outlined NPS formats and procedures for fire reports, articulated different 

funding sources that could be used to pay for fire management, mandated fire 

management plans for every area in the system and presented a skeletal outline of how 

they should be organized. It also developed qualifications and staffing protocols, and 

outlined fire research programs at the individual park level.79 

Even as the National Park Service was developing Staff Directive 76-12, an effort 

to codify standards and qualifications for everyone engaged in prescribed fire sought to 

add to the general upgrading of policies and procedures. The National Park Service had 

an agreement with the Forest Service to include its staff in the Interagency Fire 

Qualifications System, a rating system that allowed for standardized evaluation of 

personnel from different agencies, but the NPS also needed its own standards specific to 

its mission. Based on the work of rangers Art Partin and Larry Bancroft and others at 

Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, the proposal identified nine distinct jobs with 

specific duties; the attributes necessary to qualify included physical fitness, experience, 

and subjective traits such as good judgment and observational ability. Courses of study 

necessary to qualify also were outlined. The program had been designed expressly for 

Sequoia National Park. Expanding it to a national program that worked in the sixty-eight 

parks the NPS had already identified as needing such personnel required careful 

analysis.80 

The National Park Service had reached an initial plateau in its pursuit of fire 

management. Until Staff Directive 76-12, the NPS had permitted a decentralized fire 

78 Associate Director, Park System Management to Directorate, WASO Division Chiefs and All Park 

Superintendents, Subject: Fire Management, July 22, 1976; Interim Fire Management Program, Staff 

Directive 76-12, Yellowstone National Park Archives, Y-218. 79 Interim Fire Management Program, Staff Directive 76-12, July 22, 1976, Yellowstone National 

Park Archives, Y-218. 80 Associate Director to All Regional Directors, July 18, 1976; W. A. Partin, “Green Card,” Glacier 

National Park Archives, 1910-1984 Collection, 306-8; Regional Director, Western Region to 

Superintendents, Western Region, May 13, 1976, YNP 32. 

150 
 

management policy. The document finally created a national structure to supercede local 

autonomy, signaling that the moment in which fire management depended solely on the 

interest of superintendents was coming to a close. In turn, this new policy demanded 

consistent attention from higher levels in the NPS, as well as a full-fledged commitment 

of Service resources. Fire management had reached a first stage of maturity. 

The maturation process led to continued assessment and refinement of NPS fire 

management policies. A task directive signed by Director Gary Everhardt on November 

1, 1976, commanded an assessment of past and current practice, consideration of 

alternatives, and the development of a recommended course of action and a schedule for 

an efficient Service-wide fire management program. It announced an additional $1 

million in annual emergency funding to supplement the existing program, which 

expended more than $1.3 million annually for prevention and presuppression. The 

directive anticipated a reformulation of the fire management program during the 

subsequent fire years to allow it to account for the differences among the 287 national 

park units. It created a task force to design a comprehensive operational program that 

included many of the leaders in NPS fire management – including David Butts, John 

Bowdler, Robert Sellers, William Colony, Larry Bancroft, and others. They were 

expected to use their expertise and knowledge to develop specific recommendations. The 

group was given five months to achieve this enormous goal, a relatively short period to 

develop the complete structure requested.81 

Early in 1977, a new staff directive, 77-1, further elaborated on the structure of 

fire management and the division of responsibilities associated with it. As a result of the 

task force created under the earlier staff directive, the NPS took two major steps. The 

Service created a direct line for fire management in the administrative structure, and 

interagency cooperation became a primary concern. Neal Guse, division chief of natural 

resource management in the NPS Washington office, was designated as coordinator of 

the program. David Butts, also of the Washington office Natural Resource Management 

staff, was selected to oversee team leader Robert Sellers. John Bowdler was assigned to 

the Boise Interagency Fire Center (BIFC), the interagency endeavor begun in 1965 to 

centralize resources and strategies for addressing fire, to develop NPS-BIFC, coordinate 

NPS training, and serve as liaison to other federal agencies. These steps were a prelude to 

better integration of the fire management program in overall NPS management.82 

These effects at standardization led to efforts to tighten nomenclature. In any 

discussion of fire, the NPS realized, the chance of being misunderstood loomed large. “It 

is important we choose our words and phrases carefully when discussing our fire policy 

and fire management program with anyone, including conversations among ourselves,” 

Western Regional Director Howard Chapman told his staff early in 1975, more than four 

years after Sequoia and Kings Canyon Superintendent McLaughlin cautioned his parks 

about their choice of language. “We must not use words or phrases in a careless ‘because 

everyone knows what I mean’ manner,” Chapman said. The Forest Service and the NPS 

81 “Task Directive for Fire Management, October 1976,” Yellowstone National Park Archives, Y225; Regional Chief Scientist, Operations, Midwest Region to Research Scientist, Grand Teton National 

Park, December 16, 1976, 82 Associate Director, Management and Operations to Directorate and Field Directorate, Fire 

Management Program Responsibilities: WASO and NPS-BIFC, Staff Directive 77-1, February 24, 1977, 

Y14-550, National Park Service Historical Collection, Harpers Ferry, W.V. 

151 
 

 

worked to develop a shared nomenclature as interagency cooperation became 

increasingly crucial, but the language they used was exclusive to people in their field. In 

most circumstances, only specialists understood the difference between natural fire, 

prescribed fire, prescribed natural fire, and the other listed categories.83 

Staff Directive 77-1 promoted two important goals for the National Park Service. 

It served as the culmination of efforts to standardize training and make it cohere with the 

programs in other federal agencies, and it created a context in which fire management 

plans could be developed and implemented. In addition, it also established chains of 

command and authority to govern emergency fire situations, and placed BIFC, with its 

greater capabilities, at the center of NPS response. The directive continued the 

standardization of fire management, pulling it further from its decentralized roots and 

closer not only to a standardized Service structure, but also to the interagency coalition at 

BIFC that was increasingly central to federal fire response. Directive 77-1 represented 

further maturity of the NPS fire management program as well as the first comprehensive 

effort to bring it in line with other Service programs. 

Such efforts ultimately led to NPS-18, the National Park Service Fire Policy 

Directive, which in 1977 became the dominant document for fire management in the 

National Park Service, superseding every existing directive and policy. NPS-18 

represented a full-fledged reinvention of policy, a compendium of the ideas and strategies 

learned in the decade since the 1968 Green Book included the use of fire. The new 

document was complex, for it covered a vast array of contingencies. NPS leaders 

recognized that a combination of management strategies and implementation procedures 

were necessary to create policy for almost 300 disparate units. The policy reiterated clear 

principles: as in 1968, NPS priorities were to protect lives, facilities, and cultural 

properties, and to preserve natural resources and habitat. It articulated clear guidelines for 

prescribed burning. It also separated fires into two categories: management fires, which 

were allowed to burn, and wildfires, which were to be suppressed.84 The NPS terms had 

changed, but the rules were consistent. The Service would determine which fires it would 

allow to burn. 

The prescriptions in NPS-18 were clear and direct. The document standardized 

terminology, so that throughout the NPS, descriptions and procedures would be defined 

in the same ways. “Fire control” was removed from the NPS lexicon and replaced by 

“fire management.” “Control is but one of the many appropriate parts of fire 

management,” the policy intoned. It also located fire management inside the national 

resource management administrative structure. Even though such a transfer was never 

carried out in a systematic fashion at the park, regional, or national level, the concept 

represented a major shift from the individualized and idiosyncratic practices that had 

been implemented by superintendents in each park. NPS-18 also compelled each park to 

evaluate its fire situation and create a fire management plan. No longer could a 

83 Regional Director, Western Region to Superintendents, Western Region, State Director, Hawaii, 

Chief, Arizona Archaeological Center, Directorate, Western Regional Office, Yosemite National Park 

Archives, Y 14 Forest Fire Control, 1914-1975 Regional Director, Western Region to Superintendents, 

Western Region, State Director, Hawaii, Chief, Arizona Archaeological Center, Directorate, Western 

Regional Office, Yosemite National Park Archives, Y 14 Forest Fire Control, 1914-1975. 84 National Park Service, “Fire Management Policy, NPS-18, 1977,” Glacier National Park Archives, 

1910-1984 Collection, 306-8; Summers, “The Administration of Fire Management Within the National 

Park Service,” 13-17. 

152 
 

 

recalcitrant superintendent simply ignore fire issues. Even small historical units were 

required to develop such plans, albeit not always with the speed or scope that was 

expected of parks with long histories of fire. Even parks with what NPS-18 described as 

“100 percent landscaped vegetation” were required to complete a fire plan. The only 

parks exempted were those with no vegetation – typically small urban memorials.85 

NPS-18 created a national structure for fire management, and it represented the 

first comprehensive attempt to bring the disparate practices that had grown up since 1968 

under some form of central control. This evolution reflected both the growing recognition 

that fire was a crucial factor in national park management and the need for centralized 

procedures to govern its use and management. NPS-18 fit the National Park Service 

firmly into the Department of the Interior’s organizational structure for fire, for the 

addition of the NPS to BIFC brought the Service in line with the rest of the department. 

The result was a powerful shift in Interior fire operations, including a sea change in 

Forest Service policy. That agency, long committed to suppression, accepted fire 

management and the use of fire in the 1978 National Forest Manual. Fire management, 

NPS style, became the dominant mode of federal fire response. 

With NPS-18, the National Park Service had divided fire into three distinct 

categories – human-induced, natural, and prescribed. A management system had been 

established for each, with checks and balances and objectives to be obtained. It seemed 

an ideal system, clearly defined and focused, that would allow the NPS and other federal 

agencies to maintain control of fire. Fire managers could be forgiven if they believed that 

they had triumphed not only over arcane policy, but over nature itself. They firmly 

believed that they had the science right; that they understood fire and its circumstances, 

and had devised strategies to make it work for all the national parks. As with any policy, 

a test would come, most likely when the reality of specific fires challenged the structure 

the National Park Service created. 

85 National Park Service, “Fire Management Policy, NPS-18, Release 1, August 23, 1979,” National 

Park Service Historical Collection, Harpers Ferry, W.V, 1-2. 

153 
 

Chapter 6: 

Institutionalizing a Structure for Fire Management 

During the late 1970s, the National Park Service experienced significant upheaval 

that refocused its mission in new ways. Changes at the top that began with the 

appointment of Ronald Walker as NPS director in 1973 continued, with a rapid 

succession of directors following throughout the decade. Gary Everhardt, an engineer by 

training and former Superintendent of Grand Teton National Park, succeeded Walker 

early in 1975. A genial, calm, and cautious man, Everhardt found the director’s post to be 

more intense than any previous management he had experienced. He left within two 

years, succeeded in 1977 by William Whalen, the superintendent of one of the premier 

urban national parks areas, Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Whalen himself was 

replaced not three years later, in May 1980. In this span of eight years, three directors led 

the NPS. No prior director, with the exception of Arthur E. Demaray, a long-time 

associate director who was appointed as director for nine months prior to his retirement in 

1953 in a gesture of appreciation for his long service, served less than eight years. In the 

view of much of the NPS line staff and many observers, the top post in the NPS had 

become politicized, a demoralizing turn of events that dramatically altered more than a 

half century of apolitical leadership of the National Park Service.1

 This lack of continuity 

at the top hurt fire management at precisely the moment it moved toward 

institutionalization within the Service. 

The turbulence that existed within the fire program stemmed from a number of 

structural issues. Despite the passage of NPS-18, the original NPS fire policy, the Service 

lacked a unifying presence. Implementation of NPS-18 lagged behind its philosophical 

statement, as experimentation continued to proliferate throughout the system, as energetic 

and enthusiastic fire managers applied their ideas to individual parks. Many surprises 

resulted, both from planned fires and natural ones. The NPS discovered that when every 

park needed a fire management plan, the question of applicability loomed large in many 

settings. The instability at the top of the National Park Service reflected a parallel 

instability in fire management. Despite valiant efforts to design and implement fire policy 

for the entire park system, the efficacy of the newly designed process remained tenuous. 

Enactment of NPS-18 did create a new confidence among those who advocated 

the use of fire, for adoption of the policy signified the passage of their ideas from 

outlying vision to core NPS value. It built a structure for the use of fire that took the 

practice from the fringe and brought it into the center of NPS management policy. NPS18 became the center of the process of institutionalizing fire management in the National 

Park Service. A series of management protocols developed, many in response to specific 

park situations. The emphasis on planning grew dramatically, and the NPS could feel that 

it had outlined patterns of fire management that made sense and reflected Service values 

and the growing body of science that supported them. Yet a vast difference remained 

1

 Ronald Foresta, America’s National Parks and Their Keepers (Washington, D.C.: Resources for the 

Future, 1984), 89-91; William Everhart, The National Park Service (Westport, CT: Greenview Press, 

1985), 153-54. 

154 
 

between the embrace of policy as a philosophy and its outline of implementation and the 

ability to apply it on the ground. 

Even as NPS-18 was enacted, congressional action provided support for the major 

transformations in NPS management that followed the Leopold Report. The Redwood 

National Park Expansion Act in 1978 placed a new premium on resource management. 

Once resource management had housed fire management, the rubric under which the 

prescription to use fire hid in an era when suppression advocates still dominated NPS 

policy. The new set of ideas contained in resource management competed for 

predominance with the traditional concept of complete suppression within the NPS, but 

without the comparatively large base of resources then devoted to fire control. In the 

fifteen years that followed the Leopold Report, fire management won out over complete 

suppression as a philosophy, even as suppression remained a viable response in many 

types of situations. The National Park Service followed a vision that dictated a new 

change in strategy. Done properly over time, in an ideal world, natural and prescribed fire 

would, it was believed, obviate the need for most suppression activity. 

This change furthered the centrality of the use of fire in NPS management. From 

roots in resource management, natural and prescribed fire became a primary tool of the 

NPS’s effort to manage fire on its lands. The shift in emphasis was significant. Fire 

management superceded fire control – the ideal of complete suppression – as the main 

avenue of response to blazes. The use of fire and resource management became 

uncoupled, allowing a broader vision of the applicability of fire than could have been 

conceived as a resource management tool. As resource management ascended as a goal of 

the NPS mission in 1978, this new significance meant much less to fire management than 

it might have a decade before. The terms of the battle about the virtues of fire control 

shifted inside the NPS: Suppression proponents diminished both in number and influence, 

leaving the way for fire management to move to center stage in NPS fire policy. 

Yet conditions were rife for change in the National Park Service. The fact that a 

piece of congressional legislation instructed the NPS on its mission was a telling sign of a 

government agency that had lost its direction. Those who saw disarray in the NPS 

pointed to the turnover at the top and to greater congressional interest in the Service 

mandate as evidence of a weakening federal agency. The new mandate ordered the NPS 

to redefine approaches to its management obligations. Fire had been a catalytic factor in 

that process since the change in the Green Book in 1968. The institutional transformation 

of the Service furthered changes in fire management and cemented the context in which 

they occurred. 

The National Park Service faced a different set of constraints than did its peer 

federal agencies. The NPS had embraced fire management ahead of agencies such as the 

Forest Service, which followed a more circuitous path to fire management. The USFS hid 

its shifting emphasis toward fire under the loose category of wilderness management, 

using the mandate of the Wilderness Act as a way to institute a revolution in policy. “I 

had clearly in mind in 1971 that we needed to get fire into all of our ecosystems,” Orville 

Daniels, USFS supervisor of the Bitterroot National Forest, recalled in 2000, “and that 

the best place to start was wilderness.”2

 In effect, the Forest Service acquiesced to the 

2

 Quoted in David Carle, Burning Questions: America’s Fight with Nature’s Fire (Westport, CT: 

Praeger Press, 2002), 177; Stephen J. Pyne, Fire in America: A Cultural History of Rural and Wildland 

Fire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 293-94. 

155 
 

 

ideals the National Park Service first put forward in 1968. Long the leader in fire 

suppression, it now ceded the lead philosophical position in fire management to 

Department of the Interior agencies, chief among them the National Park Service. The 

actual rise of the NPS and the Forest Service slide was a much longer process. 

The idea of the national parks as “vignettes of primitive America” and the 

emerging effort to define designated wilderness under the Roadless Area Review and 

Evaluation process, colloquially referred to as RARE I and RARE II, accentuated the 

changes and made the NPS’s position even more tenable.3 The shift was called “process 

preservation” – protecting the ecological processes, not the scenery. This was an 

important shift on several counts that directly clashed with the Service’s concern about 

visitor experience, as it posed a particular threat to the vistas visitors craved. The 

widespread preoccupation with the idea of “natural” lands – as a social construct rather 

than an environmental condition – easily included the use of fire. As a “natural” element, 

fire readily fit prevailing sentiments. Its inclusion as a force that shaped nature mirrored 

scientific and popular ideas about how to best manage precious national lands and 

resources. 

In the choice among types of fire, “prescribed natural fire” – fire ignited by 

lightning in areas the Service designated as zones in which fire was allowed to burn – 

was widely seen as the most desirable. Natural in origin, such fire expressed the values of 

the era: that national parks were products of natural processes and human intervention 

only muddled their ecological purity. Wilderness provided the template for “natural.” 

This perception was of a piece with the times, idealistic rather than pragmatic, yet it had 

powerful influence on policy. The emphasis on “natural” changed the National Park 

Service; it contributed greatly to acceptance of the idea of natural fire inside the NPS and 

in the larger conservation community. 

During the rush to embrace natural fire, National Park Service efforts to keep 

control of this process relied on the developing management structure. NPS-18 became 

the baseline policy document that served as the best hedge against idiosyncratic use of 

fire. It reversed the trend toward local autonomy that had been the hallmark of the Green 

Book, effectively reinstating a centralized management style reminiscent of the era of the 

NPS’s first fire professional, John Coffman. Even with the new rules, NPS 

superintendents retained the autonomy that had characterized the Service since its 

founding. “A superintendent, particularly if he is some distance away from [the regional 

office] and is somewhat isolated, he really runs that place and can do as he damn [well] 

pleases and usually does,” observed long-time NPS veteran Roy Appleman in a succinct 

assessment of the office’s power.4 In most circumstances, such power translated into 

effective local management. In the case of fire, local management could not only be 

insufficient to grapple with the issue’s potential dimensions, lack of centralized control 

could be dangerous, extraordinarily expensive, and transformitively destructive as well. 

3

 USDA Forest Service, RARE II: A Quest for Balance in Public Lands (Washington, D.C.: U.S. 

Government Printing Office, 1978); M. Rupert Cutler, “National Forests in the Balance,” American Forests 

(May 1978), 1-5; M. Rupert Cutler, Western Wildlands: A Natural Resource Journal 5 (Summer 1978); 

Tim Mahoney, “RARE Draft EIS Sparks Heavy Input from Conservationists,” Wilderness Report 15 

(September 1978); David Crosson, “RARE Results Final ‘An Acute Disappointment,’” High Country 

News, January 12, 1979. 

4

 Roy Appleman, interview by S. Herbert Evison, February 10, 1971, S. Herbert Evison Papers, 

CONS31, FF5, Denver Public Library, Denver, CO, 30. 

156 
 

 

Following the NPS policy manual, the creation of the Service’s Branch of Fire 

Management, located at the Boise Interagency Fire Center, and enforcement of the 

requirement that each park develop a fire management plan showed a new intensity in the 

approach to fire. If local autonomy was going to survive, it would do so under specific 

strictures and in accordance with plans and programs that had been reviewed and 

accepted up the chain of command. 

A certain amount of tension arose between the local and national levels. It 

centered on the planning process and the amount of land that was to be burned. Into the 

early 1980s, most intentional burning on NPS lands took place in Florida at Everglades 

National Park, and after its establishment, at Big Cypress National Preserve, established 

on October 11, 1974. These Florida parks moved into the mainstream as ecological 

values came to dominate the management of nature preserves. As two of the most heavily 

burned park areas in the national system, Everglades and Big Cypress shared the most 

comprehensive experience with fire. In 1982, Big Cypress staff completed an 

environmental assessment that allowed human-induced and natural fires to burn under 

predetermined conditions and initiated burning to meet management objectives under 

specified described circumstances. The plan extended historic practice at Everglades and 

reflected a decade of experience at Big Cypress. The conditions in Florida and regional 

cultural history made the use of fire a common and accepted practice, fraught with none 

of the baggage of the drier western parks. The practice was so common in the region that 

the state’s regulatory process seemed to encourage rather than restrict burning. By the 

end of the 1980s, the State of Florida certified burn managers – some of them private 

citizens – to conduct prescribed burns; these people were not liable for damage caused by 

a prescribed fire as long as they followed state guidelines.5 

Elsewhere, prescribed burning remained problematic. In many instances, 

prescriptions – the predefined conditions under which fire was allowed to burn – were 

loosely or poorly defined. Despite the Service’s emphasis on planning, there were no 

national standards or models on which superintendents could rely. As a result, prescribed 

burning programs proliferated with too little planning and without clearly defined 

parameters. The circumstances sometimes made chaos of policy. 

The challenge of fire continued to defy bureaucratic definition, and during the late 

1970s, examples illustrated the problems that could stem from the transition to the new 

policy and the consequences of long-time suppression. Even advocates such as Bruce 

Kilgore, who was honored in 1974 by USFS Chief John McGuire for his contribution to 

fire ecology and “bridg[ing] the gap between fire research and the application of research 

findings to on-the-ground management,” were tested by the circumstances. Controlled 

fire was one dimension; it was easy to argue that the public would accept fire if it was 

explained to them wholly and openly, as Kilgore argued in 1974.6

 It was much harder to 

achieve that goal when fire threatened not only national parks but the areas surrounding 

them. 

Across the national park system, fire management planning moved to the 

forefront. Even before NPS-18, new fire management plans flourished. In response to 

Special Directive 79-5, an astonishing number of plans were written in late the 1970s and 

5

 Environmental Assessment: Fire Management, Big Cypress National Preserve, March 1982, 

Technical Information Center, Denver Service Center, D-21A, 4-8; Carle, Burning Questions, 216-17. 6

 Carle, Burning Questions, 180-81. 

157 
 

 

early 1980s at all manner of park areas. Parks as diverse as Mammoth Cave National 

Park and Antietam National Battlefield constructed fire plans. George Rogers Clark 

National Memorial, a 24.3-acre manicured greenspace around a 1920s memorial in 

downtown Vincennes, Indiana, produced a one-page fire management plan, “with reasons 

for its brevity clearly stated,” observed Superintendent Robert Lagemann. “The potential 

for wildfires at this park is minimal,” the plan’s author, Park Ranger Robert Holden, 

noted. “A fire of any consequence occurring on the grounds would be responded to by the 

City of Vincennes Fire Department.”7 Despite such truncated responses, NPS officials 

devoted a considerable array of resources to complying with NPS-18 at parks with little 

in the way of a history of fire. Critics suggested this was a one-size-fits-all model, the 

result of a struggle for control of the fire management process. A harsh and perhaps 

overwrought judgment, this perspective correctly pointed to the investment of resources 

in fire plans at parks with insignificant resources as a cause of a shortage of resources for 

fire at parks with long and complicated histories. 

The new emphasis on fire plans produced a higher caliber of document than had 

ever before been possible in the National Park Service. Leading scholars played an 

instrumental role; in many ways, the concepts in the plans stemmed from their research 

and articulated the objectives their work fostered. A reciprocal energy linked the scholars 

to the Service in the new fire management plans. In some cases, scholars took the lead in 

developing the plans. At Pinnacles National Monument, James K. Agee and Harold H. 

Biswell coauthored the park’s first comprehensive fire management plan. The two 

presented the plan at the first Conference on Scientific Research in the National Parks in 

New Orleans, Louisiana, in November 1976. Their document assessed the evolution of 

fire practices at the 14,500-acre monument, showing the ecological consequences of 

suppression and the need for a program that used fire as a tool. Sophisticated in approach 

and cognizant of contingencies, Agee and Biswell’s plan set the standard for the NPS. 

Agee continued research there for more than two decades.8

 Following the lead of scholars such as Biswell, Agee, and Jan van Wagtendonk, 

the parks with the most difficult fire histories developed fire management plans of 

remarkable flexibility and versatility. Glacier National Park’s document revealed a 

complicated evolution of its fire planning. The 1977 fire management assessment 

provided the most comprehensive analysis of conditions in the park’s history. Embracing 

the idea that fire was a natural force, the park sought strategies that would “perpetuate 

Glacier’s wilderness, with the greatest safety for residents, visitors, and non-park 

property.”9

 Following the organizational model that developed in response to the 

7

 Superintendent to Regional Director, October 18, 1979; “Fire Management Plan,” (George Rogers 

Clark National Memorial) n.d., Denver Service Center, Technical Information Center, 440/D-20; Leon 

Liscomb, “Draft: Fire Management Plan, Mammoth Cave National Park, June 1978, Denver Service 

Center, Technical Information Center, 135/D-79; Gordon Olson, “Draft: Fire Management Plan, Antietam 

National Battlefield, Sharpsburg, Maryland, FY 1984,” Denver Service Center, Technical Information 

Center, 302/D-26, 1-3. 8

 James K. Agee and Harold H. Biswell, “The Fire Management Plan for Pinnacles National 

Monument,” presented to the First Conference on Scientific Research in the National Parks, New Orleans, 

Louisiana, November 9-14, 1976, Denver Service Center, Technical Information Center, Denver CO, 

114/D-38, 9-13; James Agee interview, June 10, 2004. 9

 Jane E. Kapler, “Glacier National Park, Assessment: Fire Management, February 1977, Denver 

Service Center, Technical Information Center, Denver, CO, 11/ D-1143, sections 110-130, 271-345.2. The 

document is not paginated. 

158 
 

 

requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970, especially the 

environmental impact statement process, fire management plans expressed the 

preferences of managers in the language of alternatives. After describing the problem and 

the conditions under which management took place, parks offered alternative 

management plans and their expected consequences. 

At Glacier in 1977, the park proposed four alternatives: continuing total fire 

suppression, allowing all fires that did not threaten human safety to burn, allowing 

selected lightning-induced fires to burn, and introducing fire by artificial ignition. The 

first two alternatives were clearly extreme. In the almost seventy years of history at 

Glacier National Park, total suppression had never successfully been achieved under any 

circumstances. “Although it seems very unlikely to us now, fire suppression techniques 

may become effective enough to eliminate large fires even in times of severe drought,” 

Forest Technician Jane Kapler, the report’s author, conceded. This prospect remained so 

remote that the NPS did not consider total suppression to be a viable alternative. The idea 

of allowing all fires that did not threaten human safety to burn was a dangerous 

possibility that returned fire into a bureaucratic category. Again, the model suggested 

administrative dominance of fire, a prospect that defied experience. The inability to allow 

human-induced fire to burn near developed parts of Glacier and the lack of data about 

historic natural fire patterns made this alternative unappealing.10 

The caliber of alternative management plans varied. While Glacier National Park 

produced a remarkably sophisticated and comprehensive analysis of its fire situation, 

many other parks lacked the combination of resources and sense of necessity to invest as 

completely in designing a fire program. The plan that resulted from the Glacier 

assessment, approved in June 1978, articulated conditions under which prescribed natural 

fire and artificial ignition would be utilized as part of the park’s regime. The four 

alternatives were reviewed and rated. Allowing every fire to burn was clearly impossible, 

if for no other reason than the inordinately high frequency of fires that would result. 

Complete suppression was beyond the park’s reach; it was also counterproductive to 

offering visitors a glimpse of the landscapes they might have encountered as early 

American pioneers. The only alternatives that provided answers to Glacier’s fire 

problems permitted both the use of natural fire and ignited fire along with suppression. 

The plan targeted “certain critical sites” such as ponderosa pine stands for prescribed fire 

as a component of “maintaining a sound, natural ecosystem.” It permitted natural fire 

where “values at risk [were] minimal.” Yet the plan carefully deferred to the expectations 

of its neighbors. “Any action other than total suppression,” the report read, “requires a 

review and endorsement by a Fire Management Review Team.” This effort to assuage 

public concern reflected the realities under which the National Park Service operated and 

that some park plans failed to address.11 

The planning process triumphed at Glacier National Park. With the acceptance of 

the fire management plan, one of the most difficult fire parks in the system had a flexible 

administrative structure for addressing fires. The plan allowed park officials a 

tremendous amount of leeway in decision-making, with the powerful emphasis on those 

decisions that had become the hallmark of fire management. The new values – those of 

10 Ibid., 312.5, 323.4. 

11 Glacier National Park, “Forest Fire Management, Glacier National Park, West Glacier,” Montana, 

June 2, 1978, Denver Service Center, Technical Information Center, 117/D-298, 1-3. 

159 
 

 

the use of fire – became the rule rather than the exception. A new era indeed had arrived. 

The National Park Service had developed a fire management structure that seemed as 

able as suppression had once been to address the problems of fire at a major park. 

Yet planning was only half the equation. Even after two University of Montana 

professors, James R. Haback and Robert W. Steele, received a $49,943 grant for a threeyear fire ecology study in 1980, Glacier National Park was unable to undertake any 

proposed prescribed burns. The possible season for burning was always extremely short 

at Glacier, and in 1980, the ground cover was only dry enough to carry fire during one 

week. “Unfortunately we were thwarted by a series of crises over which we had no 

control,” acting superintendent Joe Shellenberger told Haback. The park endured a 

grizzly bear crisis that year that required the deployment of all available park personnel. 

Three fatal maulings were reported inside the park, the last just prior to the scheduled 

burn. Two female grizzlies were trapped inside Glacier; another was caught outside its 

boundaries. Nine grizzlies were counted in the West Glacier-Apgar area. “There was 

simply no one available to conduct a fire management burn,” Shellenberger informed the 

disappointed professor. Even though the research was “of some urgency,” the project was 

temporarily derailed by the situation and other management issues. Two years later, 

supported by the research of Ron Wakimoto at the University of Montana, Missoula, and 

Bruce Kilgore, during a four-year stint as Research Project Leader at the U.S. Forest 

Service Northern Forest Fire Laboratory in Missoula, Glacier National Park did finally 

prescribe-burn a ponderosa pine forest in the North Fork of the Flathead drainage in 

September 1983.12 

Yosemite, which had become the Service’s premier fire management park as a 

result of the efforts of van Wagtendonk and others, also developed preeminent fire 

planning. By the late 1970s, van Wagtendonk’s work had laid the basis for a revolution in 

the park’s planning. In papers such as “Fire Management in the Yosemite Mixed-Conifer 

Ecosystem,” he outlined the achievements and the consequences of fire management, 

showing how Yosemite had measured its prescriptions for fire and how science changed 

the parameters of such planning. This work was reflected in the park’s 1979 fire 

management document, “Natural, Conditional, and Prescribed Fire Management Plan.” 

“The forest has become increasingly susceptible to catastrophic wildfire as both living 

and dead fuel loads continue to increase,” the plan stated. “The absence of the open parklike forest described by early explorers in the Yosemite region has resulted in the visual 

impairment of the natural scene, and consequently has decreased the value of the Park 

experience for many visitors.” This statement of the problem nicely summarized the need 

for scientific management, merging it with the visitor experience.13 

12 Acting Superintendent to Jim Haback, January 2, 1981; MAB Coordinator, WASO to Regional 

Chief Scientist, Rocky Mountain Region, March 31, 1981, Glacier National Park, Fire Collection 1910-

1984, 306-11; Bruce Kilgore, “Evaluating Direct Response to Understory Burning in a Pine-fire-larch 

Forest in Glacier National Park,” Robert C. Lucas, compiler, Proceedings – National Wilderness Research 

Conference: Current Research USDA Forest Service General Technical Report INT-212 (Missoula: USDA 

Forest Service, 1986), 26-34. 13 Jan W. van Wagtendonk, “Fire Management in the Yosemite Mixed-Conifer Ecosystem,” 

Symposium on Environmental Consequences of Fire and Fuel Management in Mediterranean Ecosystems, 

Palo Alto, California, August 1-5, 1977, 459-63;Yosemite National Park, “Natural, Conditional, and 

Prescribed Fire Management Plan, 1979,” Denver Service Center, Technical Service Center, 104/D-845, 3. 

160 
 

The idea of conditional fire management – seasonal adjustment of which areas 

would be allowed to burn – allowed a new dimension in fire planning. At Yosemite, the 

fall months allowed greater management leeway, and under clearly described conditions, 

measured against a score of 50 on the Burning Index after September 1, conditional units 

that encompassed lower and upper mixed-conifer and red fir would be allowed to burn. 

Conditional fire management would terminate on December 31 each year to eliminate 

fires that carried over to the following spring. The plan allowed park officials to institute 

prescribed burns in the conditional areas under the same conditions.14 

The Yosemite plan devoted a tremendous amount of energy to clearly defining the 

boundaries between conditional and natural fire. Prescribed burning units were already 

common in the NPS and their boundaries were clear. The innovation supporting the idea 

of a conditional zone – when it was precisely that boundary between allowing a burn and 

suppression upon which the board of review focused as the source of mismanagement at 

the Ouzel fire in Rocky Mountain National Park in 1979 – became even bolder in this 

context. The description of the boundaries, so precise that it seemed like a metes and 

bounds survey for measuring land, contained a detailed and accurate assessment of fire 

boundaries that exceeded the norms previously established for prescribed burns.15 The 

plan attempted to introduce a level of planning supported by science that had not yet been 

seen elsewhere in the park system. 

This strategy affirmed complete confidence in the management of fire by science. 

At Yosemite, managers did not doubt the efficacy of fire management. Increasingly at the 

center of the fire management revolution, Yosemite showed the most direct influence of 

Biswell and his students. Its plan was unambiguous, articulate about the science behind 

fire, but seemingly purposefully tone deaf to the larger issues that concerned fire 

management. Yosemite planners produced one of the most advanced documents in the 

system, but it contained little recognition of the problems of managing fire in a public 

context. 

Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks also had been at the center of the 

revolution in fire practice, and the parks produced one of the most comprehensive and 

sophisticated studies of the first generation of fire plans. Divided into three parts, the plan 

defined and described the park’s natural resources, fire management zones, and the role 

of fire in the park’s history; described the fire management program; and articulated the 

operating plan for implementation. Sequoia and Kings Canyon’s complicated fire history 

and the long history of record-keeping provided some of the best information in the NPS 

for evaluating the role of fire. Few other parks could produce a chart that showed fiftyfive years of fire history, with the frequency of fire categorized by origin: natural or 

human. The decade-long history of prescribed natural fire provided another dimension 

that many parks lacked. By 1979, the park had started 155 fires, which together burned 

across 19,730 acres. While the total paled in comparison to Everglades, it far surpassed 

any other park in the system.16 

Sequoia and Kings Canyon’s plan developed the most revolutionary dimension in 

National Park Service fire policy: the idea of introducing fire to areas where suppression 

14 Ibid., 21-22. 

15 Ibid., 41-43. 

16 “Fire Management Plan, Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, February, 1979,” Denver 

Service Center, Technical Information Center, 102/D-300, I-1-3; IV-5-9. 

161 
 

 

 

had altered the natural fuel load and the composition of vegetation. The plan considered 

the option of allowing some human-caused fires to burn, a perspective easily regarded as 

a contravention of NPS-18, which required human-induced fires to be controlled to 

protect parks from unnatural ecosystem change and to prevent damage to property and 

lives.17 Sequoia and Kings Canyon had always been at the forefront of introduced fire, 

but the new plan increased its emphasis on allowing all kinds of fire to burn. 

The most powerful claim in the plan for innovation stemmed from the vast base of 

prescribed burn research that underpinned its contentions. No park had ever produced the 

level of research presented in the Sequoia and Kings Canyon plan. It offered a twelveyear controlled burning plan, designated by area and size, with proposed burned areas 

total acreage ranging from highs of 19,758 acres to lows of 4,471 acres. The research was 

persuasive; the park’s explanations were thorough and based in science. The work of the 

first generation of fire ecologists came to fruition in the 1979 Sequoia and Kings Canyon 

fire plan.18 

But in an unusual way, the model it created was not applicable to all parks. The 

fire problems of major fire parks such as Sequoia and Kings Canyon were enormous and 

merited the immense investment in resources they received, but their situation did not 

mirror most of the parks in the system. The NPS found itself in what was a 

characteristically uncomfortable situation: investing vast quantities of national funding in 

particular parks that were extreme examples of one problem. This approach was entirely 

necessary, for it would not do to allow huge fires to devour the nation’s treasured parks. 

But it also created policy on the basis of atypical examples and as a result focused on 

issues that usually pertained to a small but significant number of parks. 

Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks continued to serve as the model park 

for fire management plans. In 1982, the two parks put forward another fire management 

plan, again a state-of-the-art plan based in science and the park’s experiences. It took the 

level of detail a step beyond the 1979 plan, adding an implementation structure that 

defined precisely the ways in which fire information would be collected and 

disseminated. In a philosophical statement that seemed to reflect the experience of the 

Ouzel fire, the plan articulated a stance that made caution a primary strategy: “No fire 

should ever be considered too small or harmless for monitoring and as a result ignored.”19 

The plan resulted in a controversy that stretched throughout the rest of the 1980s. 

As Sequoia and Kings Canyon permitted fire, they experimented in myriad ways. One of 

the boldest programs was burning around a number of Big Trees, a symbolic statement of 

immense proportions. A resident of nearby Three Rivers, California, Eric Barnes was 

outraged by the char left by prescribed fire on the Big Trees and complained to Senator 

Alan Cranston, D-Ca. Bruce Kilgore drafted the response, explaining the ecological 

advantages of such fire, and helped empanel a seven-scientist committee headed by 

Norman Christensen of Duke University. The park suspended prescribed burning while 

the committee studied the program. In 1987, Christensen’s committee released its report, 

generally supporting the controlled burning program. In the committee’s assessment, the 

17 Superintendent, Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks to Regional Director, Western Region, 

May 24, 1979, Denver Service Center, Technical Information Center, 102/D-330. 18 “Fire Management Plan, Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park,” February 1979, V-1-V-30. 

19 “Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, Fire Management Plan,” June 1982, Denver Service 

Center, Technical Information Center, 102/D-330A, 119. 

162 
 

ecological value of fire superseded aesthetic considerations. The committee 

recommended two types of prescribed burns – restoration fires to reduce fuel load, and 

simulated natural fires, to mimic historic natural fire patterns.20 Yet despite the 

affirmation of the parks’ ideas, the experience taught NPS personnel an important lesson: 

public involvement was necessary if the Service was to find public support for its 

policies. Sequoia and Kings Canyon had engaged the public and explained what it was 

doing and why in open forums. Despite the example, too few national parks followed this 

lead. 

These new demands reflected the exuberance of the previous decade, tempered by 

the experience of fire management. Despite Bruce Kilgore’s optimistic predictions that 

information and clarity would sway the public, any time fire threatened any park facility 

or town, the public, the press, and elected officials reverted to suppression as the 

preferred approach. The Service realized that fire science and strategy had to be tempered 

by living in the real world, and throughout the NPS, superintendents, regional directors, 

public relations people, and everyone else finally understood this. Fire managers had little 

choice but to address the realities faced by the NPS and every other federal land 

management agency in the 1980s. 

But most parks could not invest resources in the level of planning engaged in by 

Glacier and Sequoia and Kings Canyon. In some circumstances, such a decision made 

sense. Urban parks, historic homes, and other similar parks had more to fear from 

building fires than wildfire; suppression of a lightning fire was a given in city 

environments, and some such parks lacked anything more than a front lawn. The socalled “park of the month club,” the remarkable array of areas added during the 1970s at 

the behest of U.S. Representative Philip Burton of California, a great friend of the 

National Park Service but also a zealous manipulator of legislation to achieve his ends, 

created dozens of parks that differed greatly from earlier national parks areas.21 Parks 

such as the Thomas Stone National Historic Site in Maryland, the Edgar Allen Poe 

National Historic Site in Pennsylvania, and the Tuskegee Institute National Historic Site 

in Alabama had neither the need nor the structure to produce a fire management plan of 

the caliber of Glacier National Park. Immediate suppression was necessary and expected 

at such parks; there was nothing to gain from allowing natural fires to burn and 

intentional ignition bordered on prosecutable pyromania. 

Some parks produced surprisingly cavalier responses to the dictate to produce a 

fire management plan. A prominent example was the Custer Battlefield National 

Monument, later designated as Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument. Where 

Agee and Biswell developed a seventy-page document for Pinnacles, and Glacier 

National Park expended more than 200 pages on a mere assessment, a prelude to a fire 

plan, Custer Battlefield assembled a four-page plan that showed no understanding or 

comprehension of the idea of fire management, the use of fire as a resource management 

tool, or any of the other innovations that had followed the revolution in NPS thinking 

about fire. In essence, the park submitted a plan that advocated suppression. It listed 

resources, fire equipment, details of a training program, explanation of its reliance on the 

20 Carle, Burning Questions, 184. 21 John Jacobs, A Rage for Justice: The Passion and Politics of Phillip Burton (Berkeley: University 

of California Press, 1995), 300-07; Barry Mackintosh, The National Parks: Shaping the System 

(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of the Interior, 1991), 86-89. 

163 
 

 

 

 

BLM, and a description of the fire crews available both winter and summer.22 Whether 

Superintendent Richard T. Hart simply did not track the changes in fire policy or whether 

Custer Battlefield’s unique circumstances – its position as a cultural site and de facto 

cemetery – dictated a different vision, the fact remained: the fire management plan 

submitted in 1977 was more reminiscent of the era of suppression than of the decade 

since the introduction of prescribed fire. 

Yet Custer Battlefield became a test case of the impact of fire on park cultural 

resources. In 1983, a fire swept up Deep Ravine and burned the park’s grasslands. The 

1876 battlefield had experienced fire suppression for a very long time – some accounts 

suggested it had not burned since the battle– and the complete burn of the historic section 

of the park provided the first opportunity to use modern archaeological techniques to 

reassess the battle’s historic scene. NPS archaeologists spent the 1984 season on the 

newly cleared field, uncovering bullets, skeletal remains, metal fragments, and other 

remnants of the battle that redefined the historical understanding of what transpired. 

Their work developed a new scenario of the battle, one that more closely coincided with 

the accounts of Lakota and Cheyenne people than with the mythmaking of the moment 

and its subsequent popularization by Hollywood. A different understanding of Indians’ 

use of weapons, of the flow of the battle, and of other dimensions of the story resulted.23 

The Custer Battlefield fire and its impact on historical knowledge opened another 

area in which fire could be transformative. Although Mesa Verde National Park had 

experienced archaeological discoveries as a result of fires, the idea that fire could 

contribute to resource management had not been in the forefront of NPS thinking. The 

conceptualization of the value of fire had come almost exclusively from natural scientists. 

Despite the obvious advantages of fire for preservation, cultural resources had been an 

afterthought. The situation at Custer Battlefield provided a new appreciation for the role 

of fire in other types of NPS management situations. 

In December 1981, NPS Director Russell Dickenson committed the Service to 

FIREPRO – an operations analysis and budget management process modeled on similar 

programs in other Department of the Interior agencies and in the Forest Service. It 

utilized a common process to enable land managers to systematically analyze and 

quantify fire management needs. This information provided a baseline for appropriate 

levels of personnel, training, equipment, and supplies to achieve resource management 

goals.24 FIREPRO was the first National Park Service effort to address the financial 

demands of the new fire management structure. 

FIREPRO sought to protect cultural and natural resources by assessing the level 

of risk to each and deploying resources based on that risk. It built on existing efforts such 

as the use of Activity Standards in the early 1970s and Zero Based Budgeting of the end 

of the decade to move the National Park Service toward management by objectives. The 

program treated the potential for wildland fire in proportion to its historic rate of 

occurrence, shifting the focus away from the ongoing development of fire plans for urban 

22 Superintendent, Custer Battlefield National Monument, July 7, 1977; “Fire Plan,” Denver Service, 

Technical Information Center, 381-D-31, 1-4. 23 Douglas D. Scott and Richard A. Fox, Archeological Insights into the Custer Battlefield (Norman: 

University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), xi, 108-26. 24 Memorandum, Director to Directorate and All Regional Directors, Subject: FIREPRO, NPS 

Normal Year Programming, December 22, 1981, Glacier National Park, Fire Collection 1910-1984, 306-

11; Director to Park Managers, October 7, 1982, copy provided by Stephen J. Pyne. 

164 
 

parks and other places where NPS resources were not likely to play a major role in fire 

planning and response. FIREPRO established three levels of response, with level III 

denoting the highest level of occurrence and danger of repeated fires. The National Fire 

Danger Rating System Burning Index served as the measurement for assessing the levels. 

In essence, FIREPRO attempted to balance response through the division of resources 

ahead of a blaze rather than in its aftermath. This simultaneously stabilized the NPS fire 

budget and let parks plan for emergency situations without depleting their ordinary 

operations budgets.25 

In the larger picture of federal fire management, FIREPRO helped the NPS catch 

up to the funding mechanisms and structures of other agencies. The Forest Service had 

been the leader in the movement, creating the perception that it could quantify the 

economic value of the lands it protected. FIREPRO let the NPS out of the box of the 

perennial lack of funding; at the same time, it redefined fire as a national phenomenon 

rather than a local or regional one. Partly FIREPRO was an attempt to create something 

like a national system where none existed, particularly useful as the NPS responded to the 

conceptual transformation of management embodied in the Leopold Report. 

Simultaneously, it was an attempt to secure more funds for NPS fire management and to 

explain and make significant such expenditures. The core account, called PWE 342, was 

designed to be used only for emergency funding, but the efforts of adept administrators 

created a situation in which national parks used these funds in lieu of their regular 

budgets. FIREPRO gave NPS fire management access to a new level of resources. 

Fires continued to thwart the best efforts of planners, for the emergencies often 

fell well outside of the categories that the NPS could devise to contain them. In the 

summer of 1977, a fire at Bandelier National Monument, outside Los Alamos, New 

Mexico, called the question. In many ways, the situation at Bandelier was reminiscent of 

the Waterfalls Canyon Fire in Jackson, Wyoming, in 1974, but with an important 

difference. The nearby Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory (LASL), where the atomic 

bomb had been developed in the 1940s, remained a primary scientific research facility for 

the U.S. Department of Energy. Significant scientific laboratories, weapons development 

facilities, and hazardous materials abounded near the national park on the Pajarito 

Plateau, about thirty miles due northwest of Santa Fe, New Mexico. If residents of 

Jackson were disturbed by plumes of smoke in 1974, the health risks from a severe fire 

near Los Alamos were significantly greater. 

A suppression regime had been in force in northern New Mexico since the New 

Deal. The combination of agriculture, development of the Los Alamos facility, and postwar growth of the region contributed to suppression of all fires on the plateau. By the 

1970s, fuel loads were elevated throughout the area, triggering precisely the kind of 

situation Kilgore feared when he observed that a delay in addressing questions 

concerning fire created a situation where “in the long run, fuel accumulates and another 

manager at a later time faces an even tougher decision.” The vast increase in density of 

groundcover and the almost total halt of the natural cycle of ecological replacement that 

natural fire had long prompted increased the likelihood of a major fire at Bandelier or 

elsewhere in the Jemez Mountains. Testing at LASL compounded the general uneasiness 

25 FIREPRO, n.d., provided by Stephen J. Pyne, I-1, II-1-3. 

165 
 

 

 

of the people of Los Alamos and the rest of the plateau. The possibility of an accident at 

the Lab igniting a serious fire remained very real.26 

While federal agencies did an excellent job of suppressing fires on the plateau, the 

region’s fire history suggested that such successes could not last forever. NPS fire 

managers experienced dozens of similar situations that preceded difficult fires and they 

awaited any outbreak with dread. It arrived late on the afternoon of June 16, 1977, a 

spark from a cigarette or a motorcycle engine smoldered in a pile of leaves on the Mesa 

del Rito in the Santa Fe National Forest. “The fire was started by a couple of kids on 

motorcycles back up in the woods one day,” NPS Fire Specialist John Lissoway recalled. 

“The wind was blowing, it was hot, in the middle of June. I think they were out there 

without a spark arrestor or smoking cigarettes.”27 It grew into the largest fire on the 

Pajarito Plateau in the twentieth century. 

Known as the La Mesa Fire, this blaze illustrated the problems of the new NPS 

fire regime. Human-induced, the fire met the conditions for suppression, but it spread so 

quickly that the response became a valiant effort at containment. Hot, dry, windy weather 

and dense fuel loads near the ignition point quickly fed the fire. Within ninety minutes of 

the initial sighting at about 4 p.m., the fire covered more than fifty acres. It spread from 

the Mesa del Rito area into the national monument by midnight on June 17, and by noon 

the next day, the fire crossed State Highway 4, headed toward Los Alamos. It grew in 

concentric circles each day, spreading on the east to within about three miles of 

Bandelier’s headquarters at Frijoles Canyon. Weather worsened the situation for the next 

few days, as winds revived the fire a number of times just as it seemed to lose intensity. 

By June 21, intermittent thunderstorms slowed the fire, and officials declared it contained 

in what was conservatively estimated at 15,000 acres at 3 p.m. Two days later, after 

continuing heavy rain and cool temperatures, the fire was considered under control at 4 

p.m.. Only the most vigorous efforts and complete commitment of resources prevented 

the fire from reaching the LASL technical areas southeast of Los Alamos, and for at least 

a day, the town itself was in danger.28 

The damage was devastating. Raging for more than a week, the fire burned across 

more than 23,000 acres, including more than 10,000 acres of timber in the northwestern 

portion of Bandelier, and an additional 5,000 acres in the adjacent national forest and on 

LASL land. The NPS evacuated families at the park headquarters at Frijoles Canyon 

early in the fire. Cinders and burning ash fell in the nearby town of White Rock, about 

seven miles from Los Alamos. Wood-shingled roofs there were hosed down constantly in 

the effort to prevent them from igniting. 

The fire demanded every available human resource. Fire fighting crews from the 

Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, the NPS, the Forest Service, and other federal, state, 

and local agencies threw in together to face the threat. The effort enlisted 1,370 people to 

stop the fire’s progress, and nine bulldozers, twenty-three ground tankers, five 

helicopters, and five air tankers provided support. Firefighters swung their Pulaskis in 

26 Bruce Kilgore, “Introduction – Fire Management Section,” in E. V. Komarek, ed., Tall Timbers 

Fire Ecology Conference Proceedings (Tallahassee, FL: Tall Timbers Research Station, 1976), 7-9; Hal K. 

Rothman, On Rims and Ridges: The Los Alamos Area Since 1880 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 

1992), 273-77. 27 John Lissoway interview, by Lincoln Bramwell, August 15, 2002. 

28 Rothman, On Rims and Ridges, 275. 

166 
 

 

two twelve-hour shifts around the clock in the heavy smoke; many slumped exhausted at 

the end of their shift, to rise again in the morning and repeat the battle.29 

One of the fire’s most dangerous dimensions was its possible interaction with the 

Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory. The National Park Service had never faced a fire in 

proximity to a scientific research facility; in the rare cases an NPS fire had intruded on 

the activities of the military-industrial complex, Department of Defense and military fire 

crews had handled the fires. Los Alamos was peculiar. A subsidiary of the University of 

California system, it lacked the personnel to respond to such a blaze and was forced to 

rely on the NPS and the Forest Service. Many of its technical facilities were close to the 

burn area, and due to national security concerns, no one outside of LASL knew what they 

contained. As the fire penetrated the park and approached LASL facilities, NPS officials 

had two major worries: LASL was politically powerful and secretive, leading the NPS to 

act gingerly, and there were real constraints in any strategy. LASL was loaded with 

combustible and toxic material and its officials could not provide what the NPS regarded 

as essential information. John Lissoway remembered that officials at LASL “did not 

know how much heat it would take to blow” up stored explosives and the NPS was not 

privy to the location, quantity, and character of such stockpiles.30 Managing this fire 

required even greater political skill and calm than any of its predecessors. 

The La Mesa Fire became an important test of the multi-faceted mission of 

resource management. Along with the evolution of the use of fire as a tool, fire 

management included cultural resource management. The burned area was filled with 

subsurface prehistoric ruins, and quick thinking by NPS officials allowed scrutiny by 

archaeologists who preceded the fire-fighting bulldozers. Although preservation of 

cultural resources had been an ongoing theme in fires at places such as Mesa Verde, they 

had never received the attention directed at natural resource management during and in 

the aftermath of fires. This new level of engagement came about serendipitously. On his 

way to visit an archaeologist friend at the NPS regional office in Santa Fe, Regional 

Scientist Milford R. Fletcher, the head scientist for the NPS in the Southwest, looked up 

and saw the smoke of the La Mesa Fire. He told Cal Cummings, an NPS official 

responsible for cultural resources, that the situation demanded archaeologists ahead of the 

construction of fire lines. Archaeologists could locate buried sites and direct the 

bulldozers away from them, the always adamant Fletcher insisted. Cummings, 

Superintendent John D. Hunter of Bandelier, and Santa Fe National Forest Supervisor 

Cristobal Zamora agreed; Cummings found and scheduled volunteers, and Fletcher 

provided supervision. Nearly forty archaeologists worked in front of bulldozers during 

the La Mesa fire, establishing the primacy of cultural resource management even in a 

particularly dangerous fire.31 

The fire promoted new cooperation and awareness, but there were tense moments. 

In one case, Fletcher turned off a USFS bulldozer, telling its driver: “We don't care if the 

trees burn. They'll grow back. Ruins won’t.” Although managers made every effort to let 

archaeologists record sites and guide fire fighters away from ruins during the initial 

29 Teralene Foxx, ed., Los Alamos Fire Symposium, Los Alamos, New Mexico, October 6-7, 1981 

(Los Alamos: Los Alamos National Laboratory, 1984), 3-6. 30 John Lissoway interview, August 15, 2002. 

31 Dr Milford R. Fletcher, conversation with the author, August 21, 1986; Senior Archeologist Cal 

Cummings to Chief Anthropologist, WASO, January 24, 1986, copies in possession of the author.. 

167 
 

construction of fire lines, they often were not present during any subsequent widening. 

More than 40 percent of archaeological sites surveyed in the aftermath showed signs of 

damage. The remainder were unaffected, a measure of the success of the improvised 

program, and veterans of the fire remembered that shared objectives superseded 

occasional conflicts. After the fire, archaeology became one component of fire 

management in the Bandelier area.32 

La Mesa illustrated the changes in the National Park Service as a fire management 

organization. It showed that the success of fire management depended on an array of 

values to guide decisions. The NPS had modest credibility as a fire suppression 

organization prior to the change in policy reflected in the Green Book in 1968. The new 

policy changed weak suppression capabilities into a far-sighted approach to management. 

The NPS considered an overblown suppression organization an expensive liability. By La 

Mesa, other agencies, most notably the USFS, had begun efforts to rein in their fire 

programs and go in new directions. But as common as a weakened suppression 

organization became, it did not necessarily assure a strong overall fire management 

structure. Even as it pioneered fire management, the NPS was seen as strong in theory 

and rhetoric, but limited in its on-the-ground response. La Mesa illustrated this difficulty 

with some clarity. 

The fire near Bandelier National Monument offered a test to the National Park 

Service, and the Service weathered it. Although the fire was neither prescribed nor 

natural – it was more typical of suppressed fires in that it resulted from human 

carelessness – it provided an important challenge to the policy of allowing some fires to 

burn. La Mesa further illustrated the shortcomings of suppression as a dominant strategy. 

It did more than all the press releases in the world to remind the public of the danger fire 

presented. During a major fire year in the West, with California already aflame, La Mesa 

was a smaller, specialized blaze that highlighted the NPS’s concerns more clearly than it 

spoke to larger issues of fire management. La Mesa made the pronouncements of the 

value of fire sound hollow. The fire garnered publicity and threatened a community; 

suppression seemed the natural and the only response. It became a reality check for NPS 

fire managers. 

In the aftermath of La Mesa, Bandelier National Monument developed a new fire 

management plan that took into account the lessons learned on the Pajarito Plateau. The 

long years of suppression had created a fuel load so heavy and so dry that it altered the 

composition of the soil beneath and the patterns of regeneration that followed the fire. 

The new fire plan responded to these realties, clearly recognizing that cyclic burning did 

more to bring the park closer to the ideal of a pristine environment than suppression and 

concomitant catastrophic fire. The objective of the Bandelier fire plan was to “where 

possible, re-establish the role of fire as a natural process necessary for the perpetuation of 

fire-dependent ecosystems.” The plan proposed prescribed burns for research purposes, 

keeping the plots small to keep smoke releases minimal. A rigid schedule of conditions 

under which fire was allowed was designed, coupled with a careful schedule for 

preparation of the land and protection of surrounding resources. Such a plan was far from 

32 Dr. Milford R Fletcher, conversation with the author, August 21, 1986; Diane Traylor, “Effects of 

La Mesa Fire on Bandolier’s cultural resources,” in Foxx, Los Alamos Symposium, 97. 

168 
 

 

the model of suppression that characterized the plateau through much of the twentieth 

century.33 

La Mesa also altered the terrain in which fire and cultural resource management 

interacted. NPS-18 made suppression of fires that threatened cultural resources an 

objective of policy, complicating management at many parks with significant cultural 

resources. Fuel accumulation and stand density on 338,000 unsurveyed acres in Grand 

Canyon created a management problem. It served resource management purposes to let 

such areas burn if they ignited, yet NPS policy dictated that suppression was in order on 

land that had not been surveyed for cultural resources. The park faced the dilemma in 

1981, seeking authority to allow natural fires within prescription conditions to burn, even 

if the area had not been surveyed for cultural resources as required under the amended 

National Historic Preservation Act.34 Still, even after La Mesa, cultural resources 

remained a largely unexplored theme in the redefinition of the role of fire in national 

parks. 

Highlighting the problems with prescribed natural fires – letting natural fires burn 

– the Ouzel fire at Rocky Mountain National Park even more clearly illustrated the gap 

between ideas about fire management and the realities on the ground. Ouzel began on 

August 9, 1978, and when National Park Service lookouts discovered the fire a few days 

later, park officials decided simply to monitor it. This decision was in accord with the 

park’s wildfire management plan, revised in 1977 after its initial adoption in 1973 and an 

earlier revision in 1974. The wildfire plan followed the dictates of the revised Green 

Book and NPS-18, creating a zone in which fire would be allowed to burn and detailing 

the conditions under which the NPS would monitor it. It also clearly stated that Rocky 

Mountain’s fire prevention program would “eliminate as completely as possible all mancaused fires,” accentuating the difference in response to various kinds of ignition. The 

1977 plan defined three zones – low, moderate, and high risk – with different variables to 

mark them. In the low-risk zone, mostly above 10,000 feet in elevation, lightning fires 

were to be monitored and allowed to burn; in the moderate risk zone, below 10,000 feet 

in elevation but excluding developed zones, natural fires were allowed to burn when the 

National Fire Danger Rating System index remained under 14. In the high risks zone, 

which included the park’s developed areas, suppression remained the sole response to 

fire.35 

This complex method of response made good sense. By 1977, the National Park 

Service had developed a complicated vision of fire, combining a burgeoning respect for 

the value of fire with pragmatic objectives such as the protection of life and property. 

Even more, the National Park Service operated in the domain of public opinion. Even if 

allowing fire everywhere had been a desired goal, political and cultural constraints made 

such a strategy unwise at best. The Rocky Mountain National Park wildfire plan served 

33 Bandelier National Monument, “Interim Fire Management Plan for Bandelier National 

Monument,” August 8, 1980, Denver Service Center, Technical Information Center 315/D-76, 5-6. 22-23. 34 Memorandum, Superintendent, Grand Canyon to Regional Director, Western Region, July 20, 

1981, Grand Canyon National Park. 35 Rocky Mountain National Park and Shadow Mountain National Recreation Area, Wildfire Fire 

Management Plan Part I – Fire Control, 1-2; Rocky Mountain National Park and Shadow Mountain 

National Recreation Area, Wildfire Fire Management Plan Part II Natural Fires, 1977, Denver Service 

Center, Technical Information Center, Denver, CO, D-201, 1-2. 

169 
 

 

 

as a model, a delicate but judicious attempt to balance the various forces pulling at NPS 

fire policy. 

For more than a month, the National Park Service limited its response to the highaltitude Ouzel fire to monitoring, with park officials deciding daily whether the fire 

remained within management objectives. During most of the month, the fire remained 

within the low-risk zone defined in the fire management plan, the area above 10,000 feet 

in elevation largely composed of Engelmann spruce-subalpine fire forests below the 

timber line and of grasslands, meadows, and rock fields above it. Rocky Mountain 

occasionally introduced suppression tactics, but only to keep the fire within the 

designated low-risk zone. The ongoing effort to assure that the fire remained consistent 

with the objectives of park management taxed its resources, but largely avoided public 

rancor.36 From a management perspective, Ouzel at this point seemed no worse than the 

Waterfalls Canyon fire, a public relations problem attached to the application of sound 

science to the question of fire. 

The sense of a controllable problem changed as high winds swept the park on the 

afternoon of September 15 and again on September 16. They caused the fire to make 

substantial runs outside the management zone, threatening the town of Allenspark, 

Colorado, just beyond the park border. The NPS reacted too slowly to the wind change. 

At about 11:30 a.m. on September 15, Rocky Mountain staff predicted that the fire would 

escape into the moderate risk zone. This prospect triggered suppression activity, but 

before serious efforts could begin, the high winds created a crisis, putting the town in 

immediate danger. NPS and local response began in earnest, but it was not sufficient to 

halt the fire’s spread. The town was saved by a fluke of geography. A small ridge 

deflected the chinook wind up and over the town, sparing it. As the fire spread, the 

National Park Service requested outside help. A Department of the Interior Class I fire 

team, the most highly trained specialists in the agency, from the Boise Interagency Fire 

Center headed to the scene. When the team arrived on September 16, professional 

suppression efforts began with new intensity. More than 600 people battled the fire. High 

winds dogged suppression efforts for two weeks, until on September 30, 1978, the fire 

was declared under control. It was finally extinguished on December 4, 1978.37 

Ouzel was the first time a prescribed natural fire had genuinely threatened a 

community. Waterfalls Canyon at Grand Teton in 1974 served as a precedent for the 

National Park Service, but because it was both slow-moving and far from the town of 

Jackson, its only direct impact was the unpleasantness of smoke. The people of 

Allenspark felt the real threat of a wildfire that had been permitted to continue to burn by 

a public agency. As was any such fire, Ouzel was a significant public relations and 

constituency problem for the National Park Service. It reprised an older split between 

national and local constituencies about the western environment. While Time magazine 

might espouse the NPS perspective on natural prescribed burning, as it had at Waterfalls 

Canyon in 1974, many people in north central Colorado perceived only a threat to their 

homes due to the irresponsibility of a federal agency. Persuading the public of the value 

36 Ibid., 2-4; Richard D. Laven, “Natural Fire Management in Rocky Mountain National Park: A Case 

Study of the Ouzel Fire,” in Conference on Scientific Research in the National Parks, Proceedings of the 

Second Conference on Science in the National Parks (San Francisco, CA, Sept. 26-30, 1979), 37. 37 Laven, “Natural Fire Management in Rocky Mountain National Park: A Case Study of the Ouzel 

Fire,” 39-41. 

170 
 

of fire was a difficult task made worse when it threatened their homes. In a loud 

statement of the belief that federal fire management had failed, Boulder County actually 

fined Rocky Mountain for violation of local air quality statutes. 

The Ouzel fire assaulted National Park Service management on two levels. It 

challenged the orderly structure the NPS developed to manage fire, illustrating what the 

emphasis on process seemed to overlook: that fire would not easily conform to 

administrative dictates. The NPS followed its fire management plan at Rocky Mountain; 

the results were not what officials intended. In addition, the Ouzel fire cost the NPS the 

trust of its neighbors at Rocky Mountain National Park, and by implication, the neighbors 

of any park where fire ran the risk of escaping its human monitors. To those outside the 

government, NPS policy seemed to place nature above people, a prospect that galled 

residents of the gateway communities that surround national park areas across the 

country. Earning back the confidence of local communities was crucial, but it would be 

an extremely difficult process for the National Park Service. 

Pressure from the communities surrounding Rocky Mountain compelled the NPS 

to explain its choices and suggest new remedies and strategies even while the fire still 

burned. On October 3, 1978, days after the fire was declared under control, but well 

before it was extinguished, Superintendent Chester L. Brooks called for a board of review 

to investigate the fire. Kenneth Ashley, associate regional director for the Rocky 

Mountain Region, was selected as chair. Herman Ball, a fire management specialist from 

Region 2 of the Forest Service, Ron Gosnell, the Boulder County district forester for the 

Colorado State Forest Service, Richard D. Laven, assistant professor of forest fire 

ecology at Colorado State University, and Robert Sellers, an NPS fire specialist at the 

Boise Interagency Fire Center, comprised the committee. They received three charges: to 

assess the adequacy of Rocky Mountain’s fire plan, especially its provisions for natural 

fire management; to determine whether the implementation of that plan was sufficient; 

and to review the park’s suppression efforts once Ouzel was determined to be a 

wildfire.38 

With stunning candor, the review board offered an indictment of the application 

of existing policy. The park’s wildfire management plan provided one target. The board 

found that deficiencies in the plan “may have conspired to prevent users of the plan from 

making proper decisions.” The reviewers regarded the plan as a statement of philosophy, 

not an operational directive, exposing a glaring hole in NPS preparation. Rocky Mountain 

had an exemplary fire plan, written by David Butts, the future head of the Branch of Fire 

Management. The critique strongly suggested the need for internal rethinking of the 

park’s fire management procedures and practices. The report pointed to a lack of 

information about the park’s fire history, inadequate emphasis on external considerations 

such as air quality, adjoining development, and the increasingly urban character of 

surrounding lands as causative factors in the park’s unfortunate situation. The three 

concerns encapsulated the history of NPS fire management issues: too few resources, too 

little scientific information, and a public that did not understand NPS objectives with 

regard to fire. The review pointed out that Rocky Mountain’s plan did not “pinpoint 

responsibility for decision making,” nor did it establish qualifications for personnel to 

38 Laven, “Natural Fire Management in Rocky Mountain National Park: A Case Study of the Ouzel 

Fire,” 41; “Board of Review Report for the Ouzel Fire, Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado, 

November 8-9, 1978,” Glacier National Park, Fire Collection 1910-1984, 306-11. 

171 
 

 

 

implement the plan. Existing park planning did not contain available alternative measures 

to account for contingencies such as when fire exceeded a prescription, nor did it include 

a “precise and separate” action plan. Its criteria for prescriptions to manage natural fire 

were unclear and insufficient, the reviewers noted. Simply put, the park needed more than 

Burning Index guides. All in all, the report was an indictment of existing fire policy at 

Rocky Mountain National Park and the National Park Service.39 

Yet the policy at Rocky Mountain National Park in 1978 was more than typical of 

national park areas at the time. It reflected a stage in the evolution of the Service’s fire 

management, for it was more a philosophical statement than a way to actually implement 

fire management. The enthusiasm that NPS personnel showed after 1968 led to the rapid 

introduction of fire management objectives, sometimes without enough science or 

planning to adequately support their objectives. The situation at Rocky Mountain 

National Park was not unique; it could have happened at any of a number of parks. The 

problems reviewers found were by no means specific to the Front Range of the Rocky 

Mountains: they reflected the evolution of NPS fire policy to that time. 

The board of review offered a number of ways to improve Rocky Mountain 

National Park’s response in future fire episodes. The report stated that the natural fire 

management plan should clearly describe contingencies under which suppression would 

become necessary, pointing to situations where resources were not sufficient to support 

the existing natural fire plan as a primary source of situations of confusion. The reviewers 

pointed to a tendency of park personnel to wait until after the fact to assess deficiencies, a 

strategy they regarded as detrimental to the planning process. Instead, the report insisted 

that the NPS needed to bring the best expertise to the planning process, not reserve it for 

the aftermath of fires. The development of better fire management units, more clearly 

delineated by fire history, vegetation types, fuel loading, elevation, and other factors 

would improve planning and encourage better decision making. The authors advocated 

considering prescribed fire – the intentional setting of fires – as an additional 

management tool for the park. More public comment was necessary, not only because of 

legislation such as the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976 (RCRA) that 

made public input a requirement but also because such interaction built support for NPS 

programs and created a constituency that would support the Service during difficult 

times.40 

The report also found fault with the implementation of the park’s plan. Although 

the board of review found that Rocky Mountain’s monitoring procedure met NPS 

standards and functioned well, implementing them proved to be a far more difficult task. 

Observations of the Ouzel fire were sporadic and incomplete, the review found, and park 

personnel lacked appropriate information. Spot weather forecasts were not requested in a 

consistent manner, and as a result, even though meteorologists anticipated the change in 

conditions, the park did not have sufficient warning about the conditions that erupted on 

September 15. Fire monitors had not always received clear and comprehensive 

instructions about their duties. The review board discovered that field notes were almost 

39 “Board of Review Report for the Ouzel Fire, Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado, November 

8-9, 1978,” Glacier National Park Archive, Fire 1910-1984, Box 306-11. 40 “Board of Review Report for the Ouzel Fire, Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado, November 

8-9, 1978,” Glacier National Park, Fire Collection 1910-1984, 306-11; Resource Conservation and 

Recovery Act of 1976 42 USC 6962, October 21, 1976. 

172 
 

 

nonexistent; most monitors relayed information by the airwaves. Radio logs comprised 

the sole written record. “It appears to the Board that the opportunity to gather important 

data was lost,” the report sternly stated.41 

The critique was harsh, but it articulated widespread problems in the NPS fire 

management process. Some observers saw the review as a face-saving gesture, an attempt 

to cover the inadequacies of policy by blaming the process of implementation. Yet such a 

charge was premature. At Ouzel, the NPS learned that letting fire burn was not 

necessarily an ecological and political solution to fire management issues. The fire 

illustrated the ways in which the National Park Service fire management apparatus had 

not yet reached maturity. The NPS fire management program remained idiosyncratic, 

subject to the predisposition of superintendents as well as being perennially short of the 

resources necessary for implementation. Again, the problems at Rocky Mountain 

National Park reflected the larger issues of the park system as a whole. 

The reviewers constructed their own version of the path that took the Ouzel fire 

out of control. In this iteration, the blaze went beyond prescription boundaries on 

September 5, at which time the park’s fire committee opted to continue to let the fire 

burn. This declaration of culpability could easily be regarded as perfect hindsight, but as 

part of its after-the-fact assessment, the board pointed to a number of factors that 

contributed to its determination. One part of the fire dipped below 10,000 feet in 

elevation, entering the moderate risk zone, where fires were only allowed to burn if the 

Burning Index was below 14. The higher number of the index that day should have 

triggered suppression, the reviewers said. The organized local and regional fire response 

crews that should have been available to Rocky Mountain were busy at other fires, an 

absence that should have warned park leaders to be cautious. Spotting and crowning 

combined with the higher Burning Index to create erratic behavior, another trigger for 

suppression. 

The review of the Ouzel fire pinpointed some of the most important problems 

associated with new strategies of fire management. First and foremost, funding was 

essential if parks were to achieve their management goals. One of the review board’s 

most significant criticisms was that Rocky Mountain’s plan, wholly adequate as a 

response to fire, was not appropriately implemented. Between the lines, the reviewers 

intimated that successful application of the management plan would have prevented the 

problems that arose. This assessment was simultaneously far-sighted and disingenuous. It 

accurately described a crucial issue that dated from the beginning of the National Park 

Service, the lack of adequate resources to meet obligations, even as it committed the 

fundamental and base error of treating wildfire as a bureaucratic category subject to the 

dictates of a management plan. 

At about the same time, Congress added new holdings that transformed not only 

the national park system, but also its response to fire. As a result of the first serious 

attempt to adjudicate the land claims of Alaskan natives, the National Park Service 

acquired what in effect became an another national park system in Alaska. The Alaska 

Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971 (ANCSA) allowed the Secretary of the Interior to 

set aside as much as 80 million acres of public land in Alaska for inclusion in federal land 

reservations. A seven-year dispute ensued, and when no resolution appeared likely prior 

41 “Board of Review Report for the Ouzel Fire,” 306-11. 

173 
 

 

 

to the December 18, 1978 date on which withdrawn lands reverted to public domain, 

President Jimmy Carter proclaimed fifteen new national monuments and expanded two 

others under the terms of the Antiquities Act of 1906, eleven of which the NPS was 

slated to administer. Two years later, the staunchly anti-environmental Ronald Reagan 

won the 1980 presidential election. Before he took office, Congress offered the nation a 

lame-duck conservation gift, the Alaskan National Interest Lands Conservation Act 

(ANILCA). Under its terms, many of the national monuments established in 1978 

became national parks or preserves, and the national park system gained more than 51 

million acres in Alaska.42 

The new Alaskan parks presented an enormous challenge for fire managers. The 

acreage added in 1978 was significantly larger than the entire national park system in the 

lower forty-eight states and Hawaii. Although the NPS remained focused on the crown 

jewels of its system – Yellowstone, Yosemite, and their peers – the burned areas in 

Alaska and in Everglades National Park and Big Cypress National Preserve dwarfed the 

burned area in those premier parks. Fire response in Alaska compelled cooperation with 

federal, state, and Native Alaskan entities. The boreal forest burned in an episodic 

fashion, making it impossible to build up and maintain a large fire-response force year 

after year, simply waiting for the one that brought the big fire season. 

Alaska reprised an earlier kind of fire landscape, one in which the nature of fire 

overwhelmed the human ability to respond. This reality, combined with the dictates of 

wilderness management – so fundamentally contrary to the ideals of suppression – 

encouraged the practice of allowing prescribed natural fire. Suppression had not been a 

characteristic feature of the Alaskan landscape as it had in the lower forty-eight states. 

Suppression in Alaska only really began with statehood in 1959, and developed in the 

late 1960s. This obviated many of the problems of heavy fuel load that so dogged parks 

with suppression histories. Even more, the size of the new parks guaranteed that fire 

would be a constant presence. Lightning fires far from human eyes were endemic in the 

new Alaskan parks. In most instances, these fires burned beyond the reach of park staff. 

When they were aware of such distant fires, they often lacked the resources to respond. 

In Alaska, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the agency created from the 

1946 merger of the Grazing Service and the General Land Office, served as the dominant 

federal land management agency. Prior to ANCSA, BLM holdings in Alaska comprised 

most of the state at more than 130 million acres. BLM was an unwieldy entity that 

included the Alaska Fire Control Service and it had a strong desire to compete with the 

Forest Service as the toughest of fire-fighting agencies. This basis for fire protection left 

the BLM to struggle in Alaska. Its bureaus and agencies were poorly prepared for 

managing the vast Alaska land mass. After 1949, BLM received special firefighting 

appropriations for its Alaska operations, allowing the agency to control its own fire 

suppression machinery. In turn, this began a process of nationalizing fire response in the 

42 Hal K. Rothman, Preserving Different Pasts: The American National Monuments (Urbana: 

University of Illinois Press, 1989), 226-30; Donald Craig Mitchell, Take My Land, Take My Life: The Story 

of Congress’s Historic Settlement of Alaska Native Land Claims, 1960-1971 (Fairbanks: University of 

Alaska Press, 2001), 337-542; David S. Case, Alaska Native and American Laws (Fairbanks: University of 

Alaska Press, 1984), 14-20. 

174 
 

 

 

 

 

state. In the way that the NPS challenged USFS fire policy, the BLM challenged the 

mechanics of Forest Service fire response.43 

National park areas had been an important part of Alaskan history throughout the 

twentieth century, but the National Park Service rarely enjoyed the largesse of resources 

to devote to its far north assets. Only Mt. McKinley National Park, later re-designated 

Denali National Park, received substantial funding; other park areas, from Sitka National 

Monument to Glacier Bay National Monument, languished without comprehensive 

investment by the NPS. Many national park areas in the state were served by volunteer 

custodians; others were staffed on a seasonal basis.44 This resulted in a glaring absence of 

NPS staff in Alaska long after the same condition had been resolved in the lower fortyeight states. The NPS needed peer agencies to help with its Alaska parks. Its relationship 

with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) far exceeded any ties to the Forest Service 

throughout the 1950s, and as parallel entities in the same department, NPS and BLM 

found many areas in which to cooperate. BLM had the most highly developed fire 

response system on public lands in the nation’s northernmost state, a direct product of its 

desire to show the firefighting world that it was as competent as the Forest Service. The 

National Park Service valued the support it received in the north. 

The shift of lands to the National Park Service in 1978 did not include large sums 

for their management. Use of the Antiquities Act of 1906, the primary tool available to 

presidents for rapid protection of federal land, did not carry the power to allocate funds. 

Since the Jackson Hole proclamation in 1943, which led to a lawsuit against the U.S. 

government, presidents had been reticent about invoking the Act without prior 

congressional approval. A tacit agreement between the executive and legislative branches 

existed; presidents could proclaim any national monuments they wanted, but Congress 

only would fund the ones it approved in advance. The Carter-era national monument 

proclamations caught the National Park Service in a conundrum. While Service officials 

were pleased to have the new lands, they had to cobble together resources for their 

management.45 The vast quantity of land included in the 1978 proclamations forced the 

NPS to extend its long pattern of reliance on the BLM in Alaska. 

Under the provisions of the 1978 national monument proclamations, BLM 

provided protection for the lands the National Park Service managed. This delegation 

made sense to managers; the NPS received an enormous largesse, but in a fashion 

reminiscent of the early twentieth century, the resources to manage it were absent from 

the legislation. BLM’s dominant role in Alaska made it the logical choice for short-term 

management. Its fire expertise, experience, and machinery were also a compelling asset. 

BLM had long provided fire suppression on NPS holdings in much of Alaska, and the 

NPS looked to the BLM in the aftermath of the 1978 proclamation.46 

43 Pyne, Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire, 308-09. 44 Frank Norris, Alaska Subsistence: A National Park Service Management History (Anchorage: 

NPS, 2002), 46-161; Theodore Catton, Land Reborn: A History of Administration and Visitor Use in 

Glacier Bay NP and Preserve (Anchorage, AK: National Park Service, 1992), 173-90. 253-72. 45 Rothman, Preserving Different Pasts, 230-31; Robert Righter, Crucible for Conservation: The 

Creation of Grand Teton National Park (Niwot, CO: Colorado Associated University Press, 1982), 103-25; 

William Everhart, The National Park Service (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1985). 46 Cooperative Fire Control Agreement Between the Bureau of Land Management/Alaska and the 

National Park Service/Alaska, April 10, 1979, National Archives, Pacific Alaska Region, RG 79, Box 1, 

79-01-A1103 File: A 40 ACGP Fire Management Committee, 1-2; Cooperative Fire Control Agreement 

175 
 

 

The new Alaskan national monuments required the NPS and BLM to redefine 

their management arrangements. Although the National Park Service had long relied on 

the BLM for fire protection in Alaska, the NPS operated under the aegis of NPS-18, 

while BLM retained an older suppression standard that only had been modified as a result 

of fires between 1970 and 1972. Yet the BLM remained uncomfortable with policies that 

encouraged the use of fire. As BLM fire specialist William Adams observed in 1974, the 

Bureau did not have a blueprint for coordinating such activities over the immense spaces 

of Alaska. Nor did Adams believe that BLM had enough research to develop a viable 

program. Observed Stephen Pyne, “BLM suppression strategy was challenged, its 

objectives redefined, and its land base eroded” in the 1970s. These realities led to a 

redefinition of BLM objectives. “Our philosophy has generally been to hit ‘em all, hard 

and fast, modifying on a fire-by-fire basis,” BLM State Associate Director Clair Whitlock 

explained in 1979. “Now we are coming up with protection standards for the whole area 

and parcels within it. Those standards will tell the fire men how and when to attack.” 

When the two agencies worked together, the NPS accepted the BLM protection standard 

on its new holdings. An NPS-designed modified suppression plan was given precedence 

over the general BLM protection standard on national park lands. 

The BLM assumed responsibility for fire detection and suppression on NPS lands 

with the exception of Alaska Railroad and Parks Highway rights-of-way in Mt. McKinley 

National Park. BLM officials agreed to train NPS fire staff if space was available, to 

assist on NPS prescription burns if BLM was reimbursed for its costs, to undertake 

preliminary investigation of fires where human causes were suspected, and to provide a 

daily situation report. In return, the National Park Service promised to provide fire 

prevention programs for national park lands, to rehabilitate its own lands, to report all 

fires detected on NPS lands to the BLM district office, to collect fire weather data for the 

parks, and to identify lands that needed protection.47 

BLM’s growing position in fire management was an asset for the NPS that 

continued the ongoing transformation of the federal response to fire. It furthered the 

development of a strong Department of the Interior presence in fire management that 

countered the Department of Agriculture’s USFS. In 1978, a decade after the NPS 

initiated fire management and with an array of internal struggles over the question, the 

Forest Service finally embraced the use of fire as an ecological value. The 10 a.m. policy 

and the parallel 10-Acre policy were finally replaced with a program that promoted fire 

by prescription. By 1978, the revolution in fire practice was complete.48 Not only had fire 

management replaced suppression in the Department of the Interior, the Forest Service, 

where the allegiance to suppression bordered on religion, had finally thrown in with the 

new approach. 

The pressure for greater cooperation among federal agencies in Alaska grew, in 

part because the structure to support such a goal was already in place. The National 

Wildfire Coordinating Group, formed in 1973, provided an avenue for different agencies 

Between National Park Service and Bureau of Land Management, Effective April 11, 1972, National 

Archives, Pacific Alaska Region, RG 79, Box 1, 79-01-A1103 National Archives, Pacific Alaska Region, 

RG 79, Box 1, 79-01-A1103. 47 Ibid., 4; William Adams, “The Role of Fire in the Alaska Taiga: An Unsolved Problem;” “A Fresh 

Look at Fire,” News Release, Bureau of Land Management, April 3, 1979; Pyne, Fire in America, 509. 48 Pyne, Fire in America, 303-04; William R. Moore, “From Fire Control to Fire Management,” 

Western Wildlands 1 3 (Summer 1974): 11-16. 

176 
 

 

 

to work together in a constructive fashion. The Boise Interagency Fire Center (BIFC) 

offered another avenue for cooperation. In 1978, federal agencies combined in an 

important experiment in Fortymile, a 12 million-acre section of east-central Alaska. A 

study team comprised of personnel from the National Park Service, BLM, Forest Service, 

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Alaska forestry and fish and 

game departments, and the Doyon Regional Corporation, an Alaskan Native corporation, 

assessed the many approaches to fire and assembled a fire management plan. The 

Fortymile effort was the first of its kind, a harbinger of greater cooperation in the lower 

forty-eight states as well as in Alaska. “If it can work here, where land plans are as 

complicated as anyplace in the United States, it can work anywhere,” the BLM’s 

Whitlock insisted. “And it will work. You’ll see.”49 

The Fortymile effort created the context for cooperation. David Kellyhouse of the 

Alaska Department of Fish and Game, the leading proponent of the value of fire for 

wildlife habitat in the state, championed the Fortymile project and proposed its use as 

pilot area for the development of revised management standards for Alaska. A dynamic 

program that paved the way for future management reform ensued. Even with the state’s 

acceptance of the Fortymile project, the federal agencies had to learn to respect each 

other’s policies and strategies. “I’m sure you appreciate our desire to avoid dividing 

individual [national] monuments into too many planning units,” NPS Fire Management 

Officer William Paleck reminded Whitlock in September 1979. “We, in turn, appreciate 

the need to follow natural boundaries and maintain the integrity of fire zones within the 

state.” By early October, the Fortymile fire plan was complete, and the Alaska Land 

Managers Cooperative Task Force selected two new areas, the Kenai Peninsula and 

Tanana-Minchumina, as candidates for the immediate development of fire management 

plans. An interagency public information program was planned as well.50 

The new relationship was not perfect, for the line between fire suppression and 

management often was hard to distinguish. Along this fulcrum, NPS and BLM’s vision 

diverged and their philosophies contrasted in ways that the NPS found detrimental to its 

objectives. In 1980, Paleck notified the Fire Organization Working Group that the 

Service favored a single suppression support organization, but would retain control of fire 

management planning on NPS lands. David Butts of the Branch of Fire Management 

summarized the differences that prompted Paleck’s plans. The BLM regarded fire 

suppression as something apart from resource management, a perspective that did not 

work for the NPS. National Park Service officials in Alaska saw fire management as a 

complete process that included prevention, presuppression, suppression, and prescribed 

fire, all in the service of larger resource management goals. By 1981, Butts saw BLM 

leaving the NPS out of the decision-making process, and he saw a “high potential for 

confusing or possibly even contradictory actions” by BLM. The difference between the 

two perspectives meant that the NPS had to accept direct management responsibility for a 

number of functions for which it had long relied on BLM. “The National Park Service 

will pursue a fire management program in Alaska that addresses the resource 

49 “A Fresh Look at Fire.” 

50 David Kellyhouse, “Presentation to the Fire Management Subcommittee of the Alaska Land 

Manager’s Cooperative Task Force, November 1978; William Paleck to Claire Whitlock, September 28, 

1979, Alaska 6; Alaska Land Managers Cooperative Task Force, Fire Subcommittee Status Report, 

10/2/79, Alaska 15. 

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management needs of its areas,” Butts said. “This in general will mean the development 

of prescribed fire management capabilities in those areas.”51 

Alaska presented among the most demanding operational fire situations ever 

faced by the Service. As Butts predicted, the Service would have to handle prescribed 

natural fire alone. The amount of work was immense, the demand for resources 

insatiable, the possibilities frightening, and everything had to be decided immediately. In 

Alaska, “one of the fun things was the fact that we didn’t have time to think,” recalled 

John E. Cook, who served as director of the Alaska Area Office beginning in 1979 and 

became regional director on December 2, 1980, when the Alaskan national monuments 

became national parks and the Alaska Regional Office was created. Cook remained in the 

north until 1983.52 

Cook understood the pace of work and the need for dramatic and bold action. In 

1980, before the 1982 agreement that solidified the relationship, the NPS had assumed 

responsibility for suppression on its Alaska lands from the BLM, but found itself 

unprepared for the responsibility. Under the arrangement, the BLM agreed to provide 

basic suppression services for the immediate future. The NPS was to provide the Land 

Manager’s Representative (LMR), which Cook described as the surrogate for the 

superintendent in fire situations. The fire boss of any specific blaze would report to the 

LMR. “This is an important step which can not be delayed due to the breadth and scope 

of the environmental and economic impacts of fire suppression within the State as well as 

changing agency roles and relationships in Alaska,” he informed other regional directors. 

“We need your help.”53 

Cook’s dilemma was simultaneously simple but insoluble. In Alaska, the NPS 

lacked enough people who could serve as LMRs in the case of a significant fire year. The 

BLM, already in transition as a result of the fire circumstances of Alaska, was generous 

in its willingness to support the NPS; Cook needed to be able to match its peer agency’s 

support with NPS resources. “I am asking the Regional Directors to assist us by 

providing the nomination of any qualified individuals for detail assignments as Land 

Manager’s Representative,” Cook beseeched his colleagues. “No one looks forward to 

the day when we in Alaska can supply as much assistance to other regions as we have 

received, more than I. Until then, I hope that you will continue to support high priority 

concerns such as this as graciously as you have in the past.” 54 

With the debut of the BLM Level I draft plan in March 1981, the BLM emphasis 

shifted toward suppression on the newly designated Native lands. This change and the 

ongoing focus on suppression as NPS fire managers pursued different paths, limited 

BLM’s effectiveness for the broader-based NPS management policy. By October 1981, 

differences had overwhelmed the cooperative ethos and the relationship had crumbled 

over the wording of a BLM departmental manual. Each time NPS officials felt they had 

acceptable language, BLM offered further revisions. The situation has been “time 

51 William Paleck, “Memo to Fire Organization Working Group,” February 8, 1980; “Briefing 

Statement: Fire Management, Area of Interest: Departmental,” February 19, 1981, David Butts, Issue: 

NPS/BLM Interaction on Fire, National Archives, Pacific Alaska Region, RG 79, Box 1, 79-01-A1103. 52 “A National Park Service Career: A Conversation with John E. Cook,” interviewed by Richard W. 

Sellars, January 11-12 and April 4, 2000, 63. 53 Director, Alaska to Director, Rocky Mountain Regional Office, February 13, 1980, Yellowstone 

National Park Archives, Y-248, Yellowstone National Park. 54 Ibid.; Pyne, Fire In America, 509-13. 

178 
 

 

consuming and frustrating on the part of both of these staffs,” Butts asserted. “The role of 

Alaska BLM to provide logistical support, retardant aircraft, smokejumpers, etc., is not 

challenged by us,” he continued. “But the Bureau of Land Management can not and is not 

in a position to provide monitoring of prescribed natural fires” that occurred on national 

park lands. The BLM had sought to prove it was as good at suppression and firefighting 

as the USFS, so it adopted a hardcore suppression approach based heavily on 

smokejumping. This did not last, but it complicated discussions between the two Interior 

agencies. The BLM behaved like the old USFS and Butts felt that the situation intruded 

on the authority of the National Park Service. If BLM handled fire suppression on Fish 

and Wildlife Service lands as well as on Native lands, the pressure on the NPS to allow 

suppression would be enormous. He proposed maintaining the ongoing suppression 

arrangement, but writing a revised “fire management program, which will be the primary 

tool in resource management for Alaskan natural area parks.” This translated into a 

different vision of policy: “The National Park Service does not intend duplicating BLM 

suppression capabilities or forces, but does intend to complement them in order to 

accomplish full spectrum fire management programs within the national parks.”55 

Different in its needs, the NPS decided it would have to go it alone – with all the 

responsibility that departure from the cooperation arrangement entailed. 

Pressure from the highest levels of the Department of the Interior helped the 

National Park Service clarify its position and responsibilities. NPS Director Russell 

Dickenson strongly and successfully argued for an articulation of the difference in the 

Service’s mission. Dickenson persuaded Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Fish and 

Wildlife and Parks G. Ray Arnett to advance the NPS perspective. Arnett informed his 

counterpart, Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Land and Water Resources Garrey E. 

Carruthers that the Department of the Interior “should pursue a course of action that 

accommodates the necessary variation among the bureaus as long as they are not 

redundant.” During the Reagan administration, under Secretary of the Interior James 

Watt –who challenged conventional conservation at every opportunity and promised the 

press that he would “use the budget system to be the excuse to make major policy 

decisions” that strangled programs he did not like – this stance reflected a broader vision 

of the NPS mission than was typical among senior Department of the Interior officials at 

the time.56 

A new interagency agreement quickly resulted. A temporary secretarial order had 

been issued in December 1981, and the agencies formalized a new policy over the winter, 

before the summer fire season started. Under it, BLM’s role changed dramatically. It 

relinquished administrative responsibility for more than 200 million acres of Alaska, but 

retained its primary leadership role in fire suppression even as those lands turned over to 

the state of Alaska, Alaska Native corporations, and Department of the Interior agencies. 

The result was a forced compromise, essential to management of the far north. The NPS 

entered into the fire management program that became the “primary tool in resource 

55 “Briefing Statement: Alaska-Fire, Area of Interest: Departmental,” October 19, 1981, Background; 

National Park Service, Alaska Region, Issue Statement: Fire Management on National Park Service Lands 

in Alaska, October 22, 1981, National Archives, Pacific Alaska Region, RG 79, Box 1, 79-01-A1103. 56 Memorandum, Assistant Secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Park to Assistant Secretary, Land and 

Water Resources, January 7, 1982, National Archives, Pacific Alaska Region, RG 79, Box 1, 79-01-A1103; 

Lance Gay, “Environmentalists Enlist Andrus in War Against Watt,” Washington Star, June 7, 1981, 3. 

179 
 

 

 

 

management for Alaskan natural area parks.” The BLM established the Alaska 

Interagency Fire Command in Fairbanks as the central fire response facility. This sole 

statewide fire suppression organization served as the “initial strike force against 

wildfires” on almost 300 million acres of Department of the Interior lands. The BLM’s 

arrangement with the NPS was formalized with a new interagency agreement in May 

1982.57 Even in an era when the Secretary of the Interior was an unabashed opponent of 

conservation, fire was too threatening and its management too important to be left in 

chaos to hew to the anti-federal line common in the Reagan administration. 

The problem in Alaska was a reprise of an historic NPS condition. The 

combination of limited resources and vast acreage made complete suppression a tactical 

impossibility. It was as if Alaska in 1980 replicated 1920s conditions in the national 

parks. Suppression required full-out deployment of available resources and the Alaska 

office did not have enough at its disposal in the case of extreme circumstances. 

Suppression could be undertaken on BLM’s terms – when it was close to transportation 

corridors and population centers. The circumstances put Cook and the Alaska NPS office 

in the position of supplicants. 

The NPS’s resources for fire suppression remained vastly limited in comparison 

with the BLM, and to earn credibility, the Service had to contribute to the national pool 

from which it drew so often. In 1981, the NPS Office of Fire Management announced a 

pilot program to create three crews to “assist all land managers with their fire problems.” 

Known as Arrowhead No. 1, No. 2, and No. 3, the crews were designed to meet the 

specifications for full-service Class I teams. The NPS crews were comprised of nineteen 

people, including a crew boss and three squad bosses. They were expected to provide 

support for the initial response of parks and to contribute the NPS’s share of the 

interagency fire crews.58 

This was the situation in which Brad Cella found himself when he arrived at 

Wrangell – St. Elias National Park in 1982. A veteran of Yosemite and the resource 

management training program so critical to developing resource management expertise in 

the NPS, Cella said he shook his head thinking, “I know they could have got someone 

better than me to be the first resource manager at the largest national park in the nation.” 

When he arrived, region/area wide fire planning in Alaska had just begun. William 

Paleck who had formerly been the regional fire management officer, had become chief 

ranger at the park. Cella was reporting to one of the most experienced fire management 

people in Alaska. Paleck “was willing to let me run with fire because he could watch 

what I was doing,” Cella recalled, and he became the National Park Service 

representative to the Copper Basin fire planning effort.59 

57 National Park Service, Alaska Region, Issue Statement: Fire Management on National Park Service 

Lands in Alaska,” October 22, 1981; Bureau of Land Management Press Release, “BLM Establishes 

Interagency Firefighting Command in Fairbanks, Alaska,” January 22, 1982, National Archives, Pacific 

Alaska Region, RG 79, Y-14; “Interagency Fire Suppression Agreement between the Bureau of Land 

Management (Alaska) and the National Park Service (Alaska), May 19, 1982, National Archives, Pacific 

Alaska Region, RG 79, Box 1, 79-01-A1103. 

58 Memorandum, Chief, Fire Management to All Regional Directors, attn: Fire Coordinators, April 

14, 1981, Glacier National Park, Fire Collection 1910-1984, 306-11. 

59 Brad Cella, interview by Hal Rothman, September 27, 2002. 

180 
 

 

 

 

Fire management in Alaska evolved into the most integrated and comprehensive 

interagency cooperation in federal land management. When representatives of the land 

management agencies sat down to discuss their options, each proposed its vision of the 

situation. Then the negotiations began. “The attempt was to try to ignore agency 

boundaries and look at the fire environment and look at the values to be protected,” Cella 

recalled. “I think the absolute key was that we talked about values, not each others 

values. I didn’t try to tell the Forest Service what was important to them or the BLM what 

was important to them. And they, by and large, didn’t try to tell me what was important 

to the National Park Service.” The negotiations focused on “how we could draw a line on 

a map,” Cella observed, “but it wasn’t over our values. I think it really kept us out of a lot 

of sticky stuff.” 60 

The combination of agency programs and experience yielded significant results at 

all levels. The National Park Service became an important component of the Boise 

Interagency Fire Center, which became the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) in 

1993. In no small part, the intensive cooperation that led to NIFC grew out of the 

cooperative experience of Alaska. Long a debtor to other federal agencies when it came 

to fire resources, the NPS became a significant contributor to interagency fire efforts. In 

1986, the Service participated in 159 mutual aid dispatches, in which 28,761 acres of 

other agencies’ land burned. The NPS participated in the national mobilization of firefighters in August, 1986, the second year in a row that such action had been necessary. 

Five-hundred and twenty-eight NPS firefighters and staff personnel were dispatched to 

western fires, and engines from the Western Region and a helicopter from the Rocky 

Mountain Region contributed to suppression efforts. In Alaska, an NPS fixed-wing 

aircraft played an integral role in interagency suppression efforts. In turn, several NPS 

fires also required outside assistance. Five “project fires,” as such blazes were labeled, 

required 1,050 firefighters and staff from other agencies as well as the use of twenty 

aircraft. The NPS had a net gain in 1986. It received more help from other agencies than 

it provided even during the mobilization in August.61 

Throughout the NPS, the goals of fire management were implemented in a 

systematic fashion. The change was palpable; from 224 acres in ten prescribed burns in 

1977, the National Park Service engaged in 108 burns that covered 36,024 acres in 1986. 

Wildfires remained more random. 1981 and 1986 were brutal years, with fires covering 

95,055 acres in 1981 and 119,976 acres in 1986, but they were aberrations. According to 

the NPS, a more typical year saw wildfires burning around 20,000 acres. More telling, 

145 prescribed natural fires covered 75,491 acres in 1986, but this resulted in no small 

part from the increased fire throughout the park system that year. More typical was a 

prescribed natural fire total annual burn in the 20,000-acre range.62 

1986 also served as a harbinger of a more dangerous and difficult future. Around 

1985, what has become a 20-year drought cycle began, interrupted by a wet period 

between 1989 and 1992. From the mid-1980s, federal agencies had to impose their 

policies against the pressure of the long drought. This confluence provided a partial 

explanation for why more has not happened. 1986 became the worst year in National 

60 Ibid. 

61 Judi Zuckert, “National Park Service, Wildland Fire Report, 1986,” (Boise, ID: Branch of Fire 

Management, 1987), 1-2. 62 Ibid., 9-10. 

181 
 

 

 

Park Service fire history; the 195,467 acres that burned in wildfires and prescribed burns 

was the highest total in recorded NPS fire history up to that time. This total followed a 

difficult previous year, in which fires burned across more than 2.8 million acres of public 

land throughout the country.63 Although the fire’s impact on the National Park Service in 

1985 had been muted, the overall trend and the increasing interdependency of 

interagency fire response gave NPS fire personnel concern about the future. 

The following year was even worse. The 1987 fire season required the largest 

mobilization of personnel and resources to fight fire the history of the federal 

government. Every federal agency in the West contributed a higher level of resources 

than ever before. Nearly 2.5 million acres burned in 71,300 fires nationally. The NPS 

experienced a heavy year as well, with 704 wildfires suppressed after burning on almost 

39,000 acres. Prescribed natural fires were also significant; 129 such fires burned 12,761 

acres. The NPS continued its prescribed fire program as well, with 111 prescribed fires 

burning on 28,893 acres. During the first half of the year, fires in the Southeast and 

Southwest confronted the NPS, but the greatest demand on Service resources followed 

outbreaks of fire at the end of August. As California and Oregon burned – in one 

California fire, 580,000 acres burned in less than two weeks – the NPS contributed to 

interagency efforts. More NPS fire personnel assisted other agencies in 1987 than in any 

previous year. The Service dispatched more than 1,100 NPS firefighters to the West 

Coast blazes, also contributing to fire-fighting efforts in Washington and Idaho and 

taking all kinds of labor from their home parks. The system required trade-offs and had 

serious long-term costs.64 

The fires forced nearby national parks to respond with emergency measures. Near 

the worst of the Oregon fires in the Siskiyou National Forest, Oregon Caves National 

Monument readied evacuation plans; at Yosemite, during the Labor Day holiday, one of 

the busiest weekends of the year, the fires in the Stanislaus National Forest spread into 

the northwestern part of the park, threatening the Merced and Tuolumne groves of giant 

sequoias as well as nearby communities of Hodgdon Meadows, Crane Flat, and El Portal. 

The park closed roads and campgrounds as a precaution and some NPS employees were 

evacuated from the communities.65 Such disruption was uncommon, but not 

unprecedented. It further underscored the ever-present threat of fire to the national park 

system. 

Threats from fires outside national parks posed significant management problems 

at Sequoia and Kings Canyon, but in one major instance, earlier prescribed burning 

obviated what otherwise might have been dire consequences. The Pierce fire, which 

started on the Sequoia National Forest, showed extreme behavior, crowning and burning 

giant sequoias outside the park boundary. When it swept into the park, into a section of 

the Redwood Mountain grove, the scene of one of the first prescribed burning programs 

in the system, the reduced fuel load could not sustain the fire, and it was controlled with 

handlines. The park’s sequoias were not damaged, solid evidence of the efficacy and 

long-term value of prescribed burn programs.66 

63 Ibid., 1. 

64 Judi Zuckert, “National Park Service, Wildland Fire Report, 1987,” (Boise, ID: Branch of Fire 

Management, 1988), 1-2. 65 Ibid., 2. 

66 Ibid., 2. 

182 
The 1987 fire season further illustrated one of the ongoing problems of fire 

management. The transition to using fire to control fire had not happened quickly 

enough. Much of the land touched by fire had been subject to suppression for a long time, 

analysts recognized, creating the conditions that caused the worst fires. NPS fire 

personnel could take heart; the most severe and the most dangerous fires were not on 

NPS lands. It was easy to embrace the limited burning programs on NPS lands and point 

to them as proof of success of the theory of controlled burning. Yet, millions of acres that 

had been subjected to suppression remained adjacent to or near national park lands, 

dramatically increasing the threat to national park lands throughout the country. The three 

years of 1985, 1986, and 1987 suggested that the bill for suppression was coming due. In 

each successive year, fires worsened and managers viewed the situation with growing 

trepidation. From their perspective, the successes were small in scale, the threats 

enormous and growing. Even worse, the faith in prescribed burning and prescribed 

natural burning had not been matched by action, and NPS lands themselves contained 

millions of acres that had been subject to suppression for a long time and had not yet 

been reached by fire management efforts. While the tendency was to regard such lands as 

one of the consequences of the huge expansion of Alaskan national park lands, the 

problem was more widespread. 

On another level, the fundamental fight was one of values. Once it understood the 

advantages of wilderness, the NPS was in a position to utilize the values of the growing 

wilderness and ecology movements as part of its intellectual rationale for the use of 

prescribed fire. This convergence granted a considerable grace period and created enough 

public goodwill to allow the NPS to experiment. The Forest Service lacked such leeway; 

its mission and history cast its objectives in a clear way. The public regarded the USFS 

more narrowly; once again the NPS’s role as the preserver of American heritage allowed 

it the room to change while its peers were stymied. Yet the conundrum illustrated how 

the argument for a science-based solution was always about values and politics. When 

changes occurred often meant as much as what those changes were. 

Another issue was the ever-growing gap between the ideas about fire management 

and the ability to implement them. The NPS had begun to solve resource problems with 

FIREPRO and other programs, and the interagency cooperation embodied in the National 

Interagency Fire Center provided a crucial assist. But theory and practical 

implementation remained far apart. In theory, with enough resources and an ideal 

political climate, fire managers could remove the threat of conflagration from national 

park lands. In reality, this faith was a dangerous proposition, an idea that while true, 

contributed to obscuring larger structural problems that dogged NPS fire management 

from top to bottom. The mechanisms that had been developed were state-of-the-art 

science, backed by clear and at their peak, sophisticated management programs. What 

they could not do was guarantee implementation of such plans, locate and deliver enough 

resources to control unruly fire when it occurred, and accurately predict where such fires 

would come from. Despite a decade of fire management, the process remained a hit-ormiss endeavor. The NPS had what it needed. It simply could not predict where the fire 

would come from or whether all of its resources would be enough to battle a substantial 

blaze. 

By the late 1980s, a tremendous amount had been accomplished. The decade 

since the implementation of NPS-18 had been revolutionary. “Fire control,” the 

183 
overarching philosophy of suppression for its own sake, had been eliminated, replaced 

with an infinitely more sophisticated balance of the use of fire, its introduction, and 

suppression. The NPS weathered disasters such as the Ouzel fire, which conversely 

strengthened management by leading to the establishment of the Branch of Fire 

Management. After all the confusion of a decade of transition, the NPS had much to its 

credit. It was becoming professional in fire management, and as the USFS continued to 

slide, it rose to the forefront among the federal agencies. 

Yet the premises these changes hinged upon were subject to challenge by fire 

itself. The fantasy that fire was simple, and that planning, science, and organization could 

bring it to heel had been shattered in reality, but not yet accepted on the ground. The 

destruction of the ideal had begun at Ouzel, but the lesson did not take very well. The 

enthusiasm and vigor with which fire management had been born continued. The 

emphasis on science and planning, two important watchwords in the post-1960s National 

Park Service, made experienced professionals less cautious about the realities they knew 

than they could have been. Fire planning blossomed but, without a comprehensive review 

process, varied in quality. The best park fire plans were remarkable for their clarity and 

depth, their foresight and comprehensiveness. Others remained idiosyncratic; they 

strongly reflected local sensibilities but ran the risk of not comprehending, much less 

achieving national objectives. The successes of the decade – the interagency cooperation, 

a nomenclature change that reflected the growing interdependence of Department of the 

Interior agencies and their independence from the Forest Service – signaled notable 

transformations. They pointed to a new beginning, a step beyond the possibilities a mere 

decade before. 

Fire management remained an uneven proposition in the NPS. Yosemite, Sequoia 

and Kings Canyon, Glacier, and Everglades led the way. Differences in management 

policy did not keep the new parks in Alaska from the forefront of interagency 

cooperation. Yet despite its long fire history, Yellowstone did not stand in the front rank 

of fire management planning. As the spring of 1988 approached, the nation’s first 

national park had an approved fire plan that dated from 1972 and reflected the concerns 

of that era. This seemed innocuous, but it proved ominous, a portent of an explosion of 

nature and an implosion of policy that rocked the foundations on which fire management 

in the National Park Service rested. 

184 
185 
Chapter 7: 

Yellowstone and the Politics of Disaster 

During the decade following the large, high-intensity Yellowstone fires of 1988, 

the National Park Service had to reinvent its approaches to fire and fire management. 

From the authorization of NPS-18 in the late 1970s, the NPS had faced fire as an 

operational assignment. Its responses reflected a powerful sense that the NPS could 

deploy resources in such a way as to make fire conform to management objectives. 

Professional fire planners and managers believed that by adhering to scientific principles 

derived from research, they could create a system that controlled fire and even turned it to 

the Service’s advantage. The belief was reasonable, but it failed to take into account the 

unusual instance – the once-in-a-generation event that could not be planned for. The 

Yellowstone fires were that event: a giant fire in a place so important to Americans that it 

shattered the fire management program as it had been conceived, illustrating not only the 

boundaries inherent in the implementation of policy, but the fundamental impossibility 

that existing strategies could meet the challenge presented by large-scale, out-of-control 

fires. 

In essence, major fires such as the ones that occurred at Yellowstone in 1988 

transformed fire policy from a science-based response to a political issue. As long as fire 

remained a threat but did not present an immediate and insurmountable danger, scientists 

and park managers controlled the terms of debate. They could frame the underlying 

science in practical and abstract forms to buttress their arguments for policy 

implementation. Against such a carefully reasoned, science-based strategy, those who 

opposed NPS fire policy sounded shrill, unreasonable and self-interested. Under such 

circumstances, professionals had the upper hand, supported by the growing body of 

research that seemed to illustrate the value of fire management. 

But the convergence of events in 1988 challenged the entire fire management 

model of the National Park Service as well as its administration of the parks themselves. 

In the summer of 1988, 1,427,902 acres in the Greater Yellowstone area burned during 

almost four months of fire. That total included 793,880 acres in Yellowstone itself, 

almost one-third of the park. When a November snowfall finally put an end to the blazes, 

the nation’s first park, symbol for many of the country’s relationship to nature and its 

wisdom in preserving even a small part of it, had burned uncontrollably. In that fire, the 

National Park Service found its image singed, its mantel as the most beloved federal 

agency seriously tarnished by the public’s sense of betrayal over a circumstance beyond 

the Service’s control. The mission of the National Park Service was to protect nature; the 

“devastation” that the public saw on television seemed to belie their trust. 

There was nothing new about political grandstanding associated with the national 

parks, but the swirls around Yellowstone reached new heights. The symbolic power – the 

world’s first national park in flames as seemingly ineffective firefighters and 

administrators responded with little success – provided powerful ammunition for outright 

assaults on the NPS and its programs. The fires and the inability to restrain them in any 

186 
 

 

 

 

meaningful way made the public question NPS fire management policy as it never had 

before. The resulting transition from science to politics was costly for the park system 

and for its managing agency. 

** 

During the summer of 1988, the event that the National Park Service long dreaded 

finally occurred. Following a difficult trio of fire years nationally, Yellowstone National 

Park, the pivotal symbol of the idea of national parks in the United States, burned out of 

control. That summer served as the NPS equivalent of the fires of 1910 for the Forest 

Service – the exception that proved the rule and that altered all that followed. The events 

at Yellowstone and the responses to them disrupted every institution in the Service, and 

indeed, in the federal government that dealt with fire, challenged existing knowledge and 

all the new ideas put in place since 1968, and threw fire management as a concept and a 

practice into unprecedented disarray. If the National Park Service earned its stature in fire 

management in the California parks, it found the limits of its knowledge, experience, and 

resource base at Yellowstone. 

The NPS long had been the most beloved federal agency, providing park visitors 

with their most positive encounters with the face of national authority.1

 Fire management 

in general had caused some friction with the public, leading to diminishing loyalty to the 

Service in some quarters, but the public still generally beamed when it looked at the 

national parks, and it retained real fondness for the people who protected these treasures. 

The Yellowstone fires accelerated existing tensions and added new dimensions that led to 

outright condemnation of the NPS, its policies, and even individuals in the Service by the 

media and the public. 

The summer of 1988 was the driest on record at Yellowstone National Park. 

Although the spring had been wet, with 155 percent of normal rainfall in April and 181 

percent of normal amounts recorded in May, very little precipitation fell in the park 

during June, July, or August. Early in the summer, when Yellowstone was still wet, park 

staff elected to let about twenty lightning fires burn in accordance with policy. Each fire 

was evaluated on its own merits, the decision to monitor or suppress dependent on 

conditions.2

 As always, the fire situation demanded close scrutiny. As the summer 

progressed, conditions for fire to start and spread became common, and the National Park 

Service and every other land management agency in the region – at federal, state, or local 

levels – was prepared for the eventuality. NPS officials at the park and the regional office 

carefully monitored Yellowstone’s situation, making decisions based on constantly 

changing circumstances. 

In early June, the situation became threatening, but the risk appeared to fall within 

acceptable parameters. Fire managers had no reason to believe that any fires that occurred 

during the summer could not be controlled. Even though the region quickly dried out and 

rainfall appeared unlikely in the short term, the overall year had been wet to date and the 

1

 Ronald A. Foresta, America’s National Parks and Their Keepers (Washington, D.C.: Resources for 

the Future, 1984), 1-6. 2 No author, “The Yellowstone Fires: A Primer on the 1988 Fire Season, October 1, 1988,” 

Yellowstone Y-198, 6-7; Jim Carrier, Season of Fire (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 1989), 16; Rocky 

Barker, Scorched Earth: How Fires in Yellowstone Changed America (Washington, DC: Island Press, 

2005), 185-87; David Carle, Burning Questions: America’s Fight with Nature’s Fire (Westport, CT: 

Praeger Press, 2001), 192; Douglas Gantenbein, A Season of Fire: Four Months on the Firelines of the 

American West (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2003), 128-30. 

187 
 

 

weather pattern of recent years suggested that summer rainfall soon would follow. Fire 

managers had overcome very difficult summers in each of the three previous years, 

handling record levels of fire on federal lands in each successive summer. Confidence ran 

high among fire managers throughout the federal land management system; prescribed 

natural burning and prescribed burning had lowered fuel loads where implementation had 

taken place, and plans for more comprehensive introduction of fire permeated the 

National Park System. Interagency cooperation modeled on Alaska had taken root at the 

BIFC in Idaho, and programs such as FIREPRO in the NPS and equivalent programs in 

other agencies inspired a level of confidence in planning and deployment of fire 

resources that had not been possible a decade before. Yellowstone Superintendent Robert 

Barbee, who had come to the park in 1983 at the request of Director Russell Dickenson, 

was an old fire hand, with experience that dated back to the introduction of prescribed 

fire in the park system in 1968.3

 Fire was always a tough opponent, but in 1988, most 

federal land managers believed that the tools they had to manage and combat it were 

equal to the task. 

The Yellowstone region began to burn on June 14, when lightning started a fire in 

the Custer National Forest, north of Cooke City, Montana, the entrance in the 

northeastern corner of Yellowstone National Park. Called the Storm Creek fire, it began 

in Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness and eventually spread over 95,000 acres. New fires 

continued to start, most induced by lightning. On June 23, lightning struck near Shoshone 

Lake, a remote area about ten miles from Grant Village. The initial blaze was small, 

about seventy acres. On June 25, another fire began in the northwestern corner of the 

park about thirty-one miles west of the north entrance. On July 1, yet another fire ignited 

east of Yellowstone’s southern entrance. The fires multiplied, with new ones ignited on 

July 5 and July 9.4 A management nightmare for the National Park Service had begun. 

Natural fires proliferated, and the NPS had to make quick decisions. 

The Service initially remained committed to its complicated mix of allowing 

some fires to burn, suppressing others, and in some cases, initiating prescribed burns in 

well-defined areas for management purposes. The more sophisticated programs that 

began in the 1980s had not yet been developed for the park and Yellowstone’s fire plans 

remained rooted in the philosophical statements of the early 1970s. The park had begun 

to contemplate revisions, but had not progressed to the point of public review. In the 

spring of 1988, a plan that that had been drafted three years before had not yet been sent 

through the approval process. It offered four objectives for fire management. It would 

permit as many lightning-started fires as possible to burn; protect human life and 

property, natural features, endangered species, and historic and cultural sites from 

damage or destruction; suppress wildfire in a safe and cost-effective fashion; and utilize 

prescribed burning to reduce fuel loads. Between 1972 and 1986, fires had burned across 

34,175 acres in Yellowstone under the prescriptions that allowed natural fire. The largest 

single burn was about 7,400 acres. The largest natural burn in the park’s history, at Heart 

Lake in 1931, had been only 18,000 acres. Given the scope and scale of NPS experience, 

3

 Robert Barbee, interview by Hal Rothman, Part I, November 12, 2004. 

4

 Ross W. Simpson, The Fires of 1988: Yellowstone Park and Montana in Flames (Helena, MT: 

American Geographic Publishing, 1989), 20-22; Carrier, Season of Fire, 11-17; Barker, Scorched Earth, 

187-91. 

188 
 

 

 

 

 

the Service’s actions when the fires started followed policy and reflected the 

predispositions of NPS experience with fire.5 

Park managers viewed early fires in 1988 through the lens of recent experience. In 

the 1980s, Yellowstone experienced a series of abnormally wet summers. Only once 

between 1977 and 1987 did the park fail to achieve average July rainfall. In four of the 

five years beginning in 1983, the park experienced more than twice the average monthly 

rainfall for July. In 1987, the most anomalous year, Yellowstone received three times the 

annual average in July. With six consecutive years of above average rainfall in July, park 

managers and fire behavior specialists decided to continue established practice with what 

they defined as a natural prescribed fire, and simply monitor the lightning fires.6 

But 1988 did not conform to recent history and eventually the shortfall of rain in 

June and July led to dangerous conditions. During June, the park recorded only 20 

percent of the average rainfall for the month; July reached 79 percent of the monthly 

average. Moisture content in Yellowstone fell precipitously. By the end of July, fuel 

moisture levels in plants and tree branches were at astonishing lows. In grasses and small 

branches, moisture levels had dropped to as low as 2-3 percent, well beneath the 15 

percent that signaled danger. Dead trees were measured at 7 percent moisture. NPS 

records showed that when timber was between 8-12 percent moisture, lightning served as 

an effective ignition for fires that burned freely. Even worse, unusually high winds 

associated with the dry fronts passing through the region spread any flames widely, much 

more than would have occurred as a result of the dryness alone.7 

The result was a rapid change in policy that elevated suppression to the primary 

response in Yellowstone. On July 15, the park no longer allowed new natural fires to 

burn. When the decision was made, fires inside the park topped 8,600 acres. By July 21, 

fires covered 17,000 acres, prompting an even more aggressive response. As of that date, 

every fire in the park was to be fought, making suppression the singular objective of NPS 

policy at Yellowstone. An extensive interagency fire response effort began in mid-July. 

Experienced firefighters found that the combination of extreme weather and dense and 

dry fuel load posed conditions rarely encountered. Conventional firefighting techniques 

such as burning to create fuel breaks and backfiring proved ineffective. New fires started 

when winds blew embers from the tops of enormously high trees far ahead of the main 

fire – and almost always beyond a fuel break or a backfire – thwarting most efforts to 

contain the fires. Called spotting, this phenomenon made ineffectual even the widest of 

bulldozer lines. Fires started by spotting crossed the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone 

River and routinely jumped roads and streams. As a result, the speed with which the fires 

moved was stunning. In many instances fires traveled between five and ten miles per day, 

with instances of a two-mile jump in one hour not uncommon. The tremendous heat 

generated by the huge fires contributed to their spread, for it let the fires consume even 

the heaviest of fuels that would not have been likely to burn in a more normal fire season. 

Everything about the Yellowstone fires seemed designed to demonstrate that fire could 

exceed human control.8 

5

 No author, “The Yellowstone Fires,” 4-5; Robert Barbee interview, Part I, November 12, 2004; 

Stephen J. Pyne to Hal K. Rothman, August 8, 2004. 6 No author, “The Yellowstone Fires,” 6-7; Robert Barbee interview, Part I, November 12, 2004. 

7

 Ibid., 6; Simpson, The Fires of 1988, 21-23; Robert Barbee interview, Part I, November 12, 2004. 8

 No author, “The Yellowstone Fires,” 7-8. 

189 
 

 

 

Secretary of the Interior Donald Hodel toured the area on July 27, confirming 

suppression as the Service’s primary objective in battling Yellowstone’s fires and 

reminding everyone that the natural fire program had been suspended. The public and 

congressional representatives expected to see the results of suppression, to see fires 

extinguished, and to watch as the dramatic fires of 1988 came to an end. Such a result 

was simply beyond human capability. Firefighters could not attack the fires from the 

front, as spotting and the high winds made the risk too great to bear. Crews could be 

overrun or trapped between the spot fires out front and the main fire behind. As a result, 

firefighting took place from the flanks except when lives or property were in the direct 

path of an oncoming fire.9 

Experienced firefighters were shocked at the fires’ power and at the 

ineffectiveness of all responses. Even those with as many as twenty years in fire response 

had never seen anything like Yellowstone in 1988. Most agreed that the only solution to 

fires of this magnitude was help from the weather. Rain or snow could alleviate the 

condition, but no technology, strategy, or amount of labor could overcome the flames. 

“We threw everything at that fire from Day One,” observed Denny Bungarz, a USFS 

incident commander from the Mendocino National Forest in California who served on the 

robust North Fork Fire. “We tried everything we knew of or could think of, and that fire 

kicked our ass from one end of the park to the other.” Bungarz’s sentiments reflected not 

only the magnitude of the problem, but the way in which this fire shattered expectations 

about fire management. 

Throughout the grueling months of the fire, the commitment of fire crews and 

their professionalism exceeded even the highest expectations. Because of the pressure 

and danger in the work, crews turned over with great frequency. Superintendent Robert 

Barbee met with a “constant parade of fire commanders,” and as he became comfortable 

with them, “they served their time, they cycled out, a new team came in, and you had to 

get used to them,” he recalled. Barbee recalled the turnovers as a disruption to 

Yellowstone’s ability to respond. 10 

“You got somebody, there was a guy named Dave Poncin who was an incident 

commander Type I, who was just beyond outstanding. So was his whole team,” Barbee 

remembered. “When you lose somebody like that, you really feel the loss.” Barbee felt 

the same toward Richard T. (Rick) Gale, who served as the unified area commander later 

in the fire. “He was a star in my opinion,” Barbee recalled. “There is a guy who is smart, 

whose synapses fired cleanly, no carbon buildup. He did a wonderful job.” The turnovers 

led to changes at about the time the working relationships coalesced. “Then you get a 

complete change and it is disruptive,” Barbee insisted. “No question in my mind. Now, I 

don’t know what you do about it, because you can’t have those guys in harm’s way all 

the time. They get [too] tired.”11 With mandated turnover in personnel, continuity was 

hard to achieve. 

New fires continued to start across Yellowstone, with existing, separate fires 

joining together to create even more dangerous, powerful, and threatening conglomerates. 

By August 2, the Clover-Mist fire topped 73,754 acres as it spread into the heavily 

9

 Ibid., 8; Barker, Scorched Earth, 194-202; Simpson, The Fires of 1988, 22-24 10 No author, “The Yellowstone Fires, 8; Robert Barbee, interview by Hal K. Rothman, Part III, 

November 14, 2004; Carrier, Summer of Fire, 38. 11 Robert Barbee interview, Part III, November 14, 2004. 

190 
 

timbered Shoshone National Forest. On August 10, the more than 20,000-acre Red Fire 

joined with the 25,200-acre Shoshone Fire. Burning in the southern end of the park, the 

Red Shoshone Fire grew rapidly, burning across another 10,000 acres over the next five 

days. Other fires continued to spread, with the Clover-Mist fire reaching 95,000 acres on 

August 14 and the North Fork Fire at 52,960 on the same day. August 20, called “Black 

Saturday,” set new records, with fires burning over 165,000 acres of timber, the highest 

daily total ever recorded at Yellowstone. “Giant mushroom clouds rose into the 

atmosphere,” observed reporter Rocky Barker, “making it seem like the park was under 

nuclear attack.” Silver Gate and Cooke City, two of the northeastern gateway 

communities to Yellowstone soon were in danger. The fire exploded in response to dry 

cold weather fronts that produced winds as high as sixty miles per hour. A backburn 

reduced fuel loads enough to keep the fire from the two towns, but the situation was 

serious enough that someone added a letter to the Cooke City sign and made the town 

“Cooked City.”12 It was a fitting modification, given the difficulty of containing the 

blaze. Still, saving the two towns affirmed the confidence that had been the hallmark of 

interagency fire management. 

The national policy response to the fires was rapid but symbolic. On August 23, 

1988, in the midst of the Yellowstone fires, NPS Director William Penn Mott declared a 

freeze on all prescribed burns in the national park system.13 Mott’s decision was a 

throwback to an earlier era. The suppression order introduced at Yellowstone a month 

before became a system-wide standard for the first time in twenty years. While such a 

decision revealed elements of clear and precise after-the-fact decision-making, it also 

demonstrated a heightened sensitivity to public criticism of the Service and its practices. 

Even while firefighting efforts continued, the NPS had returned to trying to prove its 

worth as a scientific manager and as a steward of the public resources. 

On September 7, high winds brought the North Fork Fire blaze to the Old Faithful 

complex, the first time fire had threatened the area in the 116-year history of the park. An 

aerial suppression assault attempted to slow the fire’s progress, but those efforts failed. 

Early in the morning, the National Park Service evacuated the complex. Between 500 and 

600 people left by the 10 a.m. deadline, although visitors traveling by car still were 

allowed to visit the geyser as late as mid-afternoon, some arriving just minutes before the 

firestorm struck. The fire eventually encircled the Old Faithful area, and firefighters 

successfully battled to save the Old Faithful Inn as well as the electrical substation 

nearby. The fire burned so hot that it melted the rubber off the wheels of cars and a truck, 

shattered vehicle windshields, and scorched their paint. As many as nineteen buildings in 

the area burned to the ground, and the old dormitory building suffered damage. No one 

was hurt in defense of Old Faithful, although two deaths were associated with the North 

Fork Fire in the Greater Yellowstone Area. 

The North Fork Fire was the classic fire that the National Park Service had always 

combated: a human-caused fire that resulted from the carelessness of individuals who 

used the woods for their own purposes. It began on July 22 in the Targhee National 

12 Simpson, The Fires of 1988, 20-21, 25-37; Carrier, Season of Fire, 54-68; Barker, Scorched Earth, 

187-91; Carle, Burning Questions, 191-95. 13 Acting Director to Directorate, Field Directorate, WASO Division Chiefs, and Park 

Superintendents, Subject: Fire Management Policy Review Team, July 12, 1989, Yellowstone Y-198 

“Coordination and Management Review: 1988 Fires,” Yellowstone National Park Archives. 

191 
 

 

 

Forest, managed by the USFS, the result of a cigarette dropped into dry leaves by one of 

four woodcutters who were taking a smoke break.14 The NPS and other agencies acted 

quickly to suppress the fire. But while the fire was typical of those the NPS and other 

federal agencies had aggressively battled over the years, the conditions under which it 

occurred were rare. Weather conditions, including high winds and a lack of precipitation, 

made the situation volatile. It was an ordinary event made extraordinary by its 

circumstances. The media could never quite grasp that critical piece of information.15 In 

the end, the North Fork Fire burned across more than 56,000 acres on September 7.16 

The threat to Old Faithful Geyser highlighted a major public relations issue for 

the NPS. As the fire swept toward this potent symbol, it accentuated the inaccurate 

perception that the Service was ill-prepared to protect its resources. In turn, this 

contributed to further erosion of any sense that the NPS was special, an entity worthy of 

the public’s affection. Even worse was the inaccurate presumption that the National Park 

Service stood by and intentionally permitted this beloved park to burn. Nothing could 

have been further from the truth. 

Yet the park and its staff were rightly frightened by the spread of the fire and its 

spiral out of control. Chief Ranger Dan Sholly recalled that “not so many weeks ago, I 

thought the 4,700-acre fire sweeping toward the Calfee Creek cabin was a major blaze. 

What was it now? I looked at the fire summaries. It was the first one listed: Clover-Mist 

fire – 238,000 acres.” Fire again proved more powerful than even the most professional 

planning and modeling, destroying all the assumptions specialists had made about its 

behavior. Park Ecologist Don Despain had played an instrumental role in designing 

Yellowstone’s natural fire policy and earlier in the summer had predicted that the fires 

would grow no larger than 40,000 acres. As they approached 1 million acres, he 

evacuated his family from the park. Despain’s research had been the standard on which 

most modeling had been based, and following his data, leading fire behaviorists predicted 

that any fire in Yellowstone would consume available fuel or be doused by rain before 

August ended.17 Once again, fire proved that its behavior defied prediction. 

The Yellowstone fires were the worst in a year that saw brutal fires throughout the 

West and Alaska. More than 72,000 fires were reported on federal lands in twenty-two 

states – 299 of these were classified as major. This designation meant that more than 300 

acres burned or Class I or Class II teams were dispatched. Ultimately, fire burned across 

more than 4.3 million acres, enhancing the sense of apocalypse that was widespread in 

summer and fall of 1988. NIFC dispatched more than 41,000 fire personnel, including 

4,000 temporary firefighters, in response. Between the middle of July and late September, 

35,000 people actively fought fires. Almost 6,000 soldiers were deployed. The bills for 

fighting these fires were staggering. The USFS spent $384.3 million, while the 

Department of the Interior reported adding $200 million to the total. The final count 

14 Simpson, The Fires of ’88, 24; Carle, Burning Questions, 191; Gantenbein, A Season of Fire, 129-

30. 15 “Yellowstone in the News: What Went Wrong in the Fires of 1988?” Yellowstone Science 2 2 

(Winter 1994), 9. 16 Ibid., 8-9; National Park Service, “The Yellowstone Fires,” 6-7; Barker, Scorched Earth, 2-8. 17 Dan R. Sholly with Steve M. Newman, Guardians of Yellowstone: An Intimate Look at the 

Challenges of Protecting America’s Foremost Wilderness Park (New York: William Morrow and 

Company, 1991), 221-22; Barker, Scorched Earth, 203-10; Carrier, Summer of Fire, 42. 

192 
 

 

 

showed the federal government expended more than $600 million fighting fires 

throughout the region in 1988.18 

An assessment of the impact of the Yellowstone fires revealed stunning 

consequences for the park and its environs. Fires raged across more than 1.4 million acres 

in the Greater Yellowstone Area; funds in excess of $120 million were spent on 

firefighting and management. Almost one-third of the burned acreage, 566,608 acres, was 

inside the Targhee, Custer, Gallatin, Bridger-Teton, and Shoshone national forests 

surrounding the park. The rest, slightly less than 1 million acres, was inside 

Yellowstone.19 This total, nearly 36 percent of the park’s 2.2 million acres, represented 

the most visible evidence of the fire’s power and the fundamental ineffectiveness of all 

human countermeasures. 

The outcry about the NPS response started in August, well before the worst of the 

fires. The media became a constant presence at Yellowstone. “It was an incredible 

episode,” Superintendent Robert Barbee remembered. “I kept waiting for Quadafi or 

somebody to do something outrageous, because we were the only game in town all 

summer long.” The national spotlight focused on Yellowstone never wavered. “We had 

unbelievable media focus,” Barbee recalled. “We were not really prepared for that kind 

of media triage,” Barbee said in a candid assessment. “I got to the point were I was 

having press conferences with a whole room of media. Our Washington office was not all 

that equipped to deal with it. I don’t think anybody is really. The media piece was no 

small part of the whole thing.” Media coverage of the event was “superficial and 

stereotypical,” observed Ohio State University Journalism Professor Conrad Smith, who 

studied the press response to the fire. He believed that urban reporters brought a set of 

preconceptions derived from city structure fires that colored their perception of the 

Yellowstone fires. The media’s cameras shaped the view of the experiences of the 

Yellowstone fires, contributing to their political consequences.20 

Attempts to manage the fire took place in full view of the public. Barbee found 

himself at the center of a maelstrom. “I personally became a lightning rod,” he 

grimaced.” By August it was beginning “to take a bit of a toll on me,” he recalled. His 

superiors “kept saying ‘well gee, maybe we ought to let someone else come in, and let 

you take a breather’. And I said no. I argued strongly against that; it would have caused 

all sorts of problems.” Barbee had become what he described as the agent provocateur, 

the focal point of animosity about the fires. “The worst thing that could have happened 

would have been for me to step back, and them to bring somebody else in, some other 

senior person to take over,” he insisted. “It would have sent all kinds of bad signals.” 

Abdication or removal both conveyed a sense that the park was admitting that it had done 

something wrong. As Barbee noted, it also placed some other unfortunate, less 

completely identified with the park, at the epicenter of an enormous maelstrom. Barbee 

believed strongly that as superintendent, he should weather the storm of anger and 

questioning that accompanied the fire.21 

18 Facts Summary of 1988, October 14, 1988, Yellowstone National Park archives, K-112. 

19 Ibid. 

20 Robert Barbee interview, Part III, November 14, 2004; Conrad Smith, Media and Apocalypse: 

News Coverage of the Yellowstone Forest Fires, the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill, and the Loma Prieta 

Earthquake (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Company, 1992), 37-76; John Dodge, “Does National 

Media Coverage Represent the West Accurately?” The Olympian, December 15, 2002. 21 Ibid. 

193 
 

National Park Service Director William Penn Mott sought to help Barbee by 

explaining the NPS position and its mission. Almost three weeks after the NPS declared 

that it would suppress all fires in Yellowstone, Mott informed Senator Malcolm Wallop, 

R-Wyoming, of the Service’s fire planning objectives. “The flexibility to suppress 

naturally ignited fires when conditions become extreme, or facilities and adjacent land 

are threatened is unequivocally part of our policy,” Mott assured Wallop. He attributed 

the difficult fire situation at the time to a combination of high fuel loads and dry weather. 

“I am pleased to report that with the help of some 2,000-plus fire fighters and 

professional staff, all Yellowstone area fires are under control,” Mott trumpeted a little 

prematurely on August 11. “Unless extreme weather, such as continuous high winds, 

occurs, we expect them to remain so.”22 

This letter was identical to ones sent to the governors, U.S. senators, and 

congressional representatives from Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho. All three states relied 

on tourism and the dollars generated by Yellowstone National Park, giving each a 

particular vision of the NPS fire response. While Mott attempted to persuade each that 

there was “a positive and pragmatic side of the fires we see today,” his argument fell on 

unsympathetic ears. No matter how he couched the fires – as a “rebirth” or a “renewal of 

the park ecosystems” – leaders of states that depended on visitors did not accept the 

Service’s argument.23 In their view, the fires were a short-term economic and ecological 

disaster. Their budgets depended on potential visitors, but they were watching 

Yellowstone burning every night on the evening news. Most tourists decided to travel 

somewhere else that summer, costing every state around Yellowstone enormous revenue. 

State leaders – and many others in the West and in the nation – sought to affix blame for 

what political leaders from surrounding states framed as a disastrous situation. 

By early September, the cries against what was perceived as a defective NPS 

policy reached a crescendo. Even though the Service had reverted to suppression in midJuly, a collection of western congressmen and senators, mainly Republicans, approached 

President Ronald Reagan in protest. “We strongly feel the National Park Service policy 

of ‘let it burn’ is wrong, especially with the drought and weather conditions in the west,” 

stated a petition by Representative Ron Marlenee of Montana that also was signed by 

Don Young of Alaska, Jim Hansen of Utah, Larry E. Craig of Idaho, Bob Dornan of 

California, and by Representative Byron L. Dorgan of North Dakota, the lone Democrat 

to sign. “Ask anyone from the area and they will tell you that this is the wrong time and 

the wrong year to a let a fire burn. The National Park Service did not heed these signs or 

the advice from many sources of the gravity of this year’s fire conditions,” the petition 

charged. The representatives demanded a change in what they inaccurately perceived to 

be the NPS policy of allowing fires to burn.24 

This accusatory stance was consistent with the negative feelings such 

representatives held toward the NPS. Most were “Sagebrush Rebels” from the decade 

before, vocal proponents for the transfer of federal land to the states. Many had bought 

into the larger vision of the “Wise Use Movement,” an appropriation of Gifford Pinchot’s 

22 William Penn Mott, Jr., to Sen. Malcolm Wallop, August 11, 1988, Yellowstone National Park, K1112, L57(170), Yellowstone National Park archives. (YELL-II 57). 23 Ibid. 

24 Petition to Ronald Reagan, September 7, 1988, Yellowstone K-112, Yellowstone National Park 

Archives (YELL-II 58). 

194 
 

language for the idea of the greatest good for the greatest number for the longest time. 

Despite a changing regional and world economy, a new and overwhelming emphasis on 

outdoor recreation and leisure that made the National Park Service even more important 

to their states, and the growing and progressively denser urbanism in every western state, 

the Sagebrush Rebels sought fewer restrictions on the uses of public land. These latter 

day states-rights activists resented federal agencies’ stringent policies about grazing, 

timber cutting, and other forms of extractive economic endeavor. The NPS had become a 

particular focus of the property rights movement, with one of its gurus, an angry but 

articulate Ron Arnold, preposterously calling the NPS “an empire designed to eliminate 

all private property in the United States.”25 The fires perfectly fit an anti-federal agenda. 

Framed as the result of bureaucratic indecision and incompetence, they lent credence to 

the charges of the Sagebrush Rebels. With a sympathetic president in the White House, 

one who had proven himself hostile to the environmental movement and its goals not 

only through his actions, but as a result of his Cabinet-level appointments, Western 

congressmen attacking NPS policies counted on a friendly reception for their charges. 

The NPS responded as powerfully as it could to what its staff perceived as an 

unjust and inaccurate set of charges. In a response to the Phase II Yellowstone Fire 

Report in early 1989, Superintendent Barbee offered the most direct counter to the 

specific charges that the NPS let prescribed fires continue to burn after the July 27, 1988 

confirmation of Yellowstone’s decision to reinstate suppression. Barbee insisted that the 

park consciously chose not to invest resources in stopping smaller fires that were in the 

path of larger ones if they did not threaten developed areas. Under suppression strategy, 

such fires fell into the “confine” category; Barbee wanted them classified as wildfires 

with no response taken rather than as prescribed natural fires. He told Regional Director 

Lorraine Mintzmeyer, “Strategically, it was decided by Area Command and agency 

administrators to assign all available suppression resources to those fires that posed 

threats to developed areas or neighboring national forest land.” Even if resources had 

been available, Barbee assured her, “direct suppression would have made no sense and 

would not have been committed” to such fires. “I personally find the suggestion that 

Yellowstone was promoting or allowing “prescribed natural fire” throughout late July, 

August, and September incredulous,” he concluded. “The Yellowstone staff wants, in the 

strongest possible terms, this misperception corrected.”26 

There were supporters of the NPS, some from surprising quarters. In a powerful 

commentary in Rod & Reel, noted conservation writer Ted Williams supported NPS 

goals and objectives with his characteristic clear logic and incisive prose. “All the 

superstition about the Yellowstone fires has provided an opportunity for those who yearn 

to loot wild land,” he told his audience. A trout advocate, he saw in the Yellowstone fires 

a renewing of trout habitat, a principle he extended to the rest of wild land. Yellowstone’s 

environmental health was better as a result of the fires, Williams told his readers in a 

message many of them, schooled in the conventional idea that fire was hazard, surely 

25 David Helvarg, The War Against the Greens: The ‘Wise Use’ Movement, the New Right, and AntiEnvironmental Violence (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1994), 131; William Riebsame, Hannah 

Gosnell, and David Theobald, Atlas of the New West: Portrait of a Changing Region (New York: W. W. 

Norton, 1997), 103-11. 26 Superintendent, Yellowstone National Park to Regional Director, Rocky Mountain Region, May 8, 

1989, Yellowstone Y-198 “Phase II Evaluation.” 

195 
 

 

found counterintuitive. He extended his argument to the NPS. “The federal government 

isn’t perfect,” he finished, “every now and then one of its agencies takes its mission 

seriously and proceeds with courage, intelligence, and foresight.” Williams’ nominee for 

that status in 1988 was the National Park Service.27 

Buoyed by such support, Director William Penn Mott appeared before a joint 

meeting of the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on National Parks and 

Public Lands of the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs and the Subcommittee on 

Forests, Family Farms, and Energy of the Committee on Agriculture on January 31, 1989 

to explain how the fires occurred and how the NPS would change its response as a result. 

“We must re-examine the events which led up to these fires and the fires themselves to 

learn all we can from them,” Mott told the congressional representatives. “We can do 

better in similar situations in the future.” Mott outlined a program of recovery that 

focused on fire line rehabilitation, reconstruction of burned cabins, and other 

infrastructure replacement and repair for Yellowstone, Grand Teton, and Glacier. The 

efforts would pump $23 million into the three parks over five years, in addition to $9.1 

million of emergency money for 1989. He intended to follow the recommendations of the 

interagency fire policy management review team comprised of members from both the 

departments of the Interior and Agriculture, which had recently delivered a draft report 

and was compiling the public comments that derived from it. The public review of the 

report began in February 1989, with a final report expected soon after. Mott pointed to 

other changes in Service policy and procedure that he said would help with the response 

to fire, standardize practices, and create clearer reporting and greater accountability.28 

Outside observers felt uneasy about both Mott’s remedies and the status of 

Yellowstone's fire management program. Some believed the park had mistakenly ignored 

NPS-18, which incorporated the best institutional thinking about how to make fire 

management happen on the ground. In the eyes of some, managers at Yellowstone 

seemed to have determined that their park was different. Yellowstone refused even to 

characterize its forests in the same language that the rest of the fire community used, 

preferring to invent its own idiom for describing its resources. After the 1981 season, the 

National Park Service convened a committee to review the park fire program; it gently 

urged Yellowstone to join the rest of the park system. In 1985, the regional office 

arranged for an experienced fire planner to spend the summer at Yellowstone in the hope 

that a modern document might evolve. Although the planner closely followed NPS-18, 

the outcome was openly flawed because the park refused to allow any written 

prescriptions or decision triggers that would limit the park managers’ discretion and 

because it never submitted the revised document for public or even full agency review. 

Yellowstone's plan remained a 1970s-style statement of philosophy, not the manual of 

operations that characterized 1980s fire plans throughout the rest of the system. 

After the fires of 1988, some fire scholars made trenchant critiques of NPS policy. 

Professor Thomas Bonnicksen, head of the Department of Recreation and Parks at Texas 

A&M University and a student of Edward C. Stone, was particularly harsh. 

“The tragic wildfires in Yellowstone National Park have marked 

1988 as the year the national park and wilderness frontier came to a close. 

27 Ted Williams, “The Park Service and its Burn Policy,” Rod & Reel (March 1989), 19-22. 28 Statement of William Penn Mott, Jr., Director, National Park Service, January 31, 1989, National 

Interagency Fire Center, Yellowstone Box 2, D-131, 6639, National Interagency Fire Center, Boise, ID. 

196 
 

 

Simply stated, shifting the responsibility or the blame to nature for the 

Yellowstone disaster is not an acceptable excuse. The [National] Park 

Service and the Forest Service are in control and they are solely 

responsible for their decisions. . . . The ‘great experiment’ was the last 

attempt by [National] Park Service purists to retain the fantasy of a wild 

untamed frontier in our national parks.”29 

This characterization of the NPS as the bastion of purists defied the reality of 

1988. Since the 1916 inception of the Service, it had been pulled between the two 

different dimensions of its mandate – protection of natural resources and accommodation 

of the public, with accommodation the easy victor in most circumstances. Directors such 

as Conrad L. Wirth had been unabashed accommodators, and with Secretary of the 

Interior Donald P. Hodel following the prescription established by President Reagan’s 

first Secretary of the Interior James Watt, the idea that the NPS was going to let nature 

take its course was patently absurd. If fire policy had escaped the efforts of the Reaganera Department of the Interior to accommodate visitors everywhere, it was only because 

the mantra of small government forced choices among programs. 

While ideological and emotional, Bonnicksen’s comments reflected a particular 

strain of the post-fire critique of the NPS. Despite the fact that his characterization of the 

Yellowstone situation was demonstrably false, he insisted that “wildwest management 

techniques [such] as letting fires burn unchecked” would have to change. National park 

lands had been altered by nearly a full century of management, he said, and were not 

wild, no matter how they appeared to the public. According to Bonnicksen, the National 

“Park Service in particular [was] unwilling to accept the reality that national park and 

wilderness areas must be managed now and forever.”30 Of course, the NPS had been 

managing its lands since its birth in 1916, and fire programs were always central to its 

efforts. Once again, the Service faced the problem of trying to explain a complicated 

situation in a manner that those who did not understand the basic premises of fire 

management could understand. That such an attack came from a fire scientist highlighted 

both the man’s ego and the difficulty of communicating a scientific program in an age 

when most simply did not understand the subject. 

Bonnicksen clearly did not understand the constraints on the National Park 

Service. Quoting the Leopold report, Bonnicksen claimed the NPS did not recognize that 

park areas where suppression had been common might require “careful advance 

treatment” prior to the introduction of fire, although in reality the NPS had engaged in 

exactly that practice before every prescribed burn. In addition, at the most basic level, 

natural prescribed burns served almost precisely that advance treatment function for an 

agency that never had sufficient resources to implement a full-fledged program. Such a 

strategy was risky without a doubt, but it was the best available to the NPS. 

Bonnicksen continued his tirade in American Forests, where in 1989 he published 

“Fire Gods and Federal Policy,” essentially a distillation of his earlier arguments. 

Management of national parks was possible and viable, Bonnicksen insisted, but the NPS 

relied “instead on Mother Nature and God. In the future, managing a Park or a 

Wilderness will only require that rangers stand on mountaintops making incantations to 

29 Thomas M. Bonnicksen, “Yellowstone Fire Information Update, Monday September 12, 1988,” 

Yellowstone K-112, (YELL-II 59). 30 Ibid., 2. 

197 
 

 

the Greek God Zeus. Who needs science when you believe that the gods are managing 

your forests?”31 

The subject of brutal criticism, Yellowstone Superintendent Robert Barbee and a 

number of scientists fashioned their responses. As a natural resource specialist, Barbee 

had been one of the first fire managers at Yosemite more than two decades before, and he 

retained a powerful commitment to the principles of fire management. Excoriated during 

and after the Yellowstone fires, he was tagged with a nickname, “Barbee-Que Bob,” and 

faced considerable pressure to resign from the superintendency. “They had a big thing 

over there in West Yellowstone at one of the hotels, ‘Welcome to West Yellowstone and 

the Barbee-que,’” he remembered. In a tempered and measured response, Barbee 

defended NPS fire management and its goals, reiterated the value of science, and 

challenged Bonnicksen’s judgment, values, and even his competence. In scientific terms, 

Barbee and his co-authors wrote, Bonnicksen lacked the clear-eyed perspective necessary 

to evaluate the policies and actions of the NPS.32 

Barbee’s response pleased many within the National Park Service. But because 

Barbee argued in the terms of science, his response could only resolve part of the 

problem. Despite Bonnicksen’s peculiar attacks, few others believed the NPS departed 

from scientific models in its management. What they disputed was the fundamental 

policy, the idea that some fires should be allowed to burn even if – as it seemed after 

Yellowstone – NPS officials were not sure they could stop any blaze once it got started. 

This was a more mundane question, one that had little to do with either Bonnicksen or 

Barbee’s pointed response. 

More temperate observers offered more substantive and powerful criticisms of 

NPS policies and actions at Yellowstone. In the estimation of Stephen J. Pyne, the park 

had unconscionably delayed developing a meaningful fire plan. Pyne found the lack of 

planning crucial. The park still operated under the terms of its 1972 fire management 

plan, one of the earliest in the system. “The 1972 document was a statement of 

philosophy, not a working plan,” Pyne insisted. Preceding NPS-18, it showed none of the 

influence of the new model. In the 1980s, when it seemed every park in the system 

worked on a fire plan with strong operational characteristics such as how to respond to 

different types of fires, Yellowstone seemed content to follow its earlier general model. 

Units as diverse as Pinnacles National Monument and Glacier National Park, a park that 

in many ways was the closest parallel to Yellowstone in the system, implemented 

sophisticated plans; Yellowstone did not. Barbee gracefully accepted this criticism: “The 

plan had been developed, but had not gone through the development process,” he 

admitted. “I think that probably it was taking a back seat to other resource issues.” 

Yellowstone had not been a problematic park for fire for a long time, and other pressures 

and concerns drew Barbee’s attention away. “Fire was out there, but not stage center,” 

Barbee concluded. “In fact, it was hardly making an appearance.”33 

31 Thomas Bonnicksen, “Fire Gods and Federal Policy,” American Forests (July/August 1989), 14-

16. 32 Robert D. Barbee, Nathan L. Stephenson, David J. Parsons, and Howard T. Nichols, “Replies from 

the Fire Gods,” American Forests (March/April 1990), 34-5, 70; Robert Barbee interview, Part II, 

November 12, 2004. 33 Stephen J. Pyne to Hal Rothman, August 8, 2004; Robert Barbee interview, Part I, November 12, 

2004. 

198 
 

The reasons were clear. Between 1972 and 1988, fire simply had not been a major 

problem at Yellowstone. In that fifteen-year period, 235 lightning fires burned 34,000 

acres in the park. Only fifteen such fires grew to more than 100 acres in size, and the 

largest was only 7,400 acres. The park’s response had usually been swift and 

comprehensive. During 1979, the park experienced twenty-nine lightning fires, eleven of 

which were suppressed when they threatened facilities or property. Thirteen of the other 

eighteen lightning fires burned less than one acre. Even the most severe year, 1981, 

offered little reason to doubt the existing strategy. The fifty-seven lightning fires nearly 

equaled the highest annual total since the New Deal. Nor were they threatening in any 

meaningful way. That year, 20,240 acres burned, an area that comprised roughly one 

percent of the 2.2 million acre park.34 

Barbee faced a range of other issues between 1983 and 1988. The controversy 

over the Craighead brothers’ research on grizzly bears continued, concerns about the 

removal of female bears attracted his attention, deferred maintenance issues loomed 

large, the NPS had recently purchased concession operations throughout the park, and as 

Barbee recalled, “grizzly bears, grizzly bears, grizzly bears, buffalo, buffalo, buffalo,” 

dominated the park’s horizons. In 1986, scientist Alston Chase published Playing God in 

Yellowstone, with its acerbic critique of park natural resource management, further 

pulling Barbee away from issues related to fire. Yellowstone was the most visible 

management post in the National Park Service and one of the most complicated. Barbee 

and both his predecessors and successors tended to focus on the hot issue of the moment. 

In the mid-1980s, that list contained everything but fire.35 

These and many other comments illustrated the degree to which the Yellowstone 

fires affected the public perception of the National Park Service. More than twenty years 

before, observers had pitied the NPS for its friends rather than its enemies.36 Pulled 

between constituencies during those years, the Service had engaged in a political 

balancing act, throughout it all maintaining the affection of the general public. By the late 

1980s, the Service sometimes could not tell the difference between its friends and its 

adversaries. After the constant media reports throughout the summer, no matter how 

wrong-headed, the presumption that the NPS did the right thing seemed to disappear. 

Two commissions evaluated the Yellowstone fires, producing two very different 

kinds of reports. Comprised of ten people from the departments of Interior and 

Agriculture, the Interagency Fire Management Policy Review Team was established on 

September 28, 1988, to review national policies and their application to fire management 

in national parks and wilderness and to recommend responses to the problems of the 1988 

season. The team quickly submitted a draft report to the secretaries of Interior and of 

Agriculture, delivering it on December 15, 1988. A two-month public comment period 

began on December 20, and on May 5, 1989, the team produced a final report that 

prompted the creation of new guidelines for NPS fire management. The objectives of the 

service’s fire management program – reduction of fuel load, the use of fire as a tool to 

34 Robert E. Sellers and Donald G. Despain, “Fire Management in Yellowstone National Park,” in 

Proceedings of the Tall Timbers Fire Ecology Conference and Intermountain Fire Research Council and 

Land Management Symposium. (Missoula, MT. Tallahassee, FL. Tall Timbers Research Station, 1976), 

108; Barker, Scorched Earth, 168-73. 35 Robert Barbee interview, Part I, November 12, 2004; Alston Chase, Playing God in Yellowstone: 

The Destruction of America’s First National Park (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986). 36 Foresta, America’s National Parks and Their Keepers, 8. 

199 
 

 

shape landscape and create a more historic ecosystem – were solid, it ruled. However, the 

report did find that the policies to reach such objectives required refinement and 

additional thinking and planning. 

The Service had to reaffirm and strengthen its prescribed natural fire policies. The 

report reiterated Pyne’s observations: “many current fire management plans do not meet 

current policies. The prescriptions in them are inadequate and decision-making needs to 

be tightened,” the summary observed. Further review of the plans was essential. Better 

dissemination of information about natural prescribed fire was a necessity, the report 

said, adding better interagency planning as another goal. Of the existing fire models, 

Alaska provided the most successful example, but even its remarkable degree of 

cooperation could be improved. In particular, regional planning had to be created to allow 

for contingency planning in extreme circumstances. A region-wide fire emergency such 

as occurred in Yellowstone in 1988 drew suppression crews away from home base, 

leaving what the review team regarded as inadequate coverage of the home areas. Internal 

NPS communication needed to improve. Many Americans still believed the NPS let the 

Yellowstone fires burn to serve biological purposes, when the record showed that the 

NPS initiated total suppression in mid-July, a full week before woodcutters inadvertently 

started the North Fork fire that eventually swept through the Old Faithful complex.37 

New fire recommendations resulted from the review team’s work. On June 1, 

1989, Secretary of the Interior Manuel Lujan, Jr., and Secretary of Agriculture Clayton 

Yeutter directed their agencies to suppress all natural fires in national parks and 

wilderness areas until fire management plans that conformed to new federal standards 

could be developed. In addition, all fires were to be classified as either prescribed fires or 

wildfires, with wildfires fought by appropriate suppression methods and personnel. The 

responsible line officer was required to certify daily that prescribed fires were within 

their prescription, and that resources to keep such fires within their prescription area 

during the next twenty-four hours were available. Other longer term recommendations 

were included. These decisions affected not only the NPS, but the Bureau of Land 

Management, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the Forest 

Service.38 The default of the pre-1968 era had returned with a vengeance, in no small part 

as a result of the recommendations of a team of professionals. While it was easy to 

impugn the motives of the commission and to chastise the secretaries of Interior and 

Agriculture for following politics rather than science, their decision to shut down natural 

prescribed fire made sense in the political climate that followed Yellowstone in 1988. 

A second review panel, assembled by the Greater Yellowstone Coordinating 

Committee, brought together scientists with backgrounds in natural disturbances. Chaired 

by Norman Christensen of Duke University, who had led the earlier review of fire policy 

at Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, the committee ranged freely among the 

many questions that surrounded the fire. “My group and my panel were given a wide 

mandate,” Christensen recalled. “We were sort of free to go where we wanted, and we 

37 U.S. Departments of Agriculture and the Interior, “Recommendations of the Fire Management 

Policy Review Team,” Federal Register 53 no. 244 (December 20, 1988), 51,196-51,205; “Interagency 

Final Report on Fire Management Policy, May 5, 1989,” in Lary Dilsaver, ed., America’s National Park 

System: The Critical Documents (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1994), 418-19. 38 Department of the Interior, “New U.S. Fire Recommendations Approved by Secretaries of Interior 

and Agriculture,” June 1, 1989, National Archives, Pacific Alaska Region, RG 79, Box 1, 79-01-A1103. 

200 
 

 

 

 

 

 

did, I think at times with a little bit of concern on the part of the Yellowstone staff 

people,” who feared an assault on themselves, their decisions, and their policies.39 

The science that underpinned the review process was never in question. Fire 

specialists such as William Romme, Dennis Knight, and Don Despain had established a 

historic basis for high-intensity crown fires in Yellowstone, allowing the panels to see the 

fires of 1988 as being part of a natural or even normal process of ecological change. This 

finding simultaneously provided a scientific rationale for the fires and obviated the debate 

about NPS policy. In effect, existing research answered a salient question about fire in 

general and the fires of 1988 in particular: it was appropriate in Yellowstone and it did 

belong in the park.40 The importance of the research and the acceptance of its data set the 

terms of the discussion. 

While the federal review team focused on government policy, the committee of 

scientists reiterated a commitment to nature. “The group was always mindful of being in 

a situation of not wanting to create a public sense that Yellowstone as an ecosystem was 

in great trouble, that great ecological harm had been done by the 1988 fire,” Christensen 

recalled. Members asserted the importance of fire as a force in maintaining a natural 

landscape, memorably insisting that the “only way to eliminate wildland fires is to 

eliminate wildlands.” Fire was an “essential component” in nature and its removal would 

alter ecosystems in so dramatic a fashion as to belie the idea of natural systems, the 

committee declared.41 

The commission’s most compelling recommendations showed an inherent flaw in 

the structure of Yellowstone’s fire management. Christensen believed that a “widely 

shared naiveté of what it is to have a natural prescribed fire program” provided a practical 

flaw in planning that contributed to the Yellowstone situation. Scientists had believed 

that Yellowstone National Park was large enough to comprise its own ecosystem. “If you 

would have asked me prior to those fires if it there was any place that we might allow 

nature to run its course, Yellowstone National Park might be the place to do it,” 

Christensen speculated. Fifteen years of research and management showed that fire 

played an important and critical role in the Yellowstone forest, particularly the highelevation lodgepole pine. The experience with the prescribed fire program in the same 

time period, in Christensen’s view “suggested that the landscape could contain that 

activity.” Most fires in the park during the era in which prescribed burning and prescribed 

natural burning had been utilized were relatively small, resuscitating an earlier myth that 

Yellowstone did not have big fires. Later research showed that lodgepole pine 

experienced fire of the magnitude of 1988 about every 300 years, with the last 

identifiable episode taking place in a period of high winds and extended drought in the 

early 1700s. The prevailing climatic conditions during most of the twentieth century 

seemed conducive to fires burning for short periods in small areas and then extinguishing 

39 Norman Christensen, interview by Hal Rothman, Part II, August 17-18, 2004, 1. 

40 William H. Romme and Don G. Despain. “The Yellowstone Fires” Scientific American 261 

(November 1989), 36-44; William H. Romme, “Fire and Landscape Diversity in Subalpine Forests of 

Yellowstone National Park. Ecological Monographs 1982 52(2): 199-221; William H. Romme and Dennis 

H. Knight, “Landscape Diversity: The Concept Applied to Yellowstone Park,” BioScience 1982 32(8): 664-

669; William H. Romme and Don G. Despain, “Historical Perspective on the Yellowstone Fires of 1988,” 

BioScience 39(10) 1989: 695-699. 41 Norman Christensen interview, August 17-18, 2004, 1. 

201 
 

 

 

 

themselves. “So, the idea that you could do this was supported by the thirteen years of 

data up to that point,” Christensen indicated.42 

From the comfortable vantage point after the fires, it was “easy to diagnose in 

hindsight,” Christensen conceded, “but in retrospect there should have been a few things 

that caused us some alarm.” The rate of burning in the Yellowstone ecosystem was very 

slow. Based on the thirteen years of scientific research, it would have taken millennia for 

the Yellowstone plateau to undergo a complete fire cycle. “We did not have on that 

landscape in 1987 really, really old forests,” Christensen observed. “It is pretty clear that 

they had all experienced fire in the last hundreds of years. I suppose that that might have 

tipped us off that maybe the experience from 1972 to 1987 was not exactly typical, or 

was not giving us a complete picture.” But the management program for prescribed and 

natural prescribed fire had not been developed with this reality in mind. As a result, what 

Christensen called “shut-off criteria,” the terms under which the NPS would begin 

suppression of natural fires, were not clearly defined.43 

The lack of definition stemmed from the presumption that natural prescribed fire, 

those started by nature, was inherently good in a national park landscape. The only 

difference between natural prescribed fire and prescribed fire was supposed to be a matter 

of policy: when nature started the fire, one set of management precepts were invoked. 

The NPS did not accept ignitions that came from accidents or people in a natural 

prescribed fire program – a fire started from a tossed cigarette or a camp fire was 

automatically disqualified. Lightning fires met the qualifications, but once they began, 

they were subject to same rules as any other prescribed fire. All of the issues going into 

the development of a prescribed fire plan for a regular burn control unit would then come 

into play. “But in fact they did not,” Christensen observed. “What in actuality happened 

was that very qualified people would monitor these fires and on a day-to-day basis would 

change in their view whether or not they were burning within prescription.” 44 

This method left fire control decisions in local hands, once a goal of NPS fire 

management policy, but one superseded with the approval of NPS-18. Effectively 

Yellowstone followed a policy from the 1970s as the rest of the Service moved toward a 

more integrated model. From the perspective of the Regional Office, this was not an 

optimal situation. In 1985, Pyne was hired to accomplish the task of updating 

Yellowstone’s plan. “Once I got the numbers,” he recalled, “it took about five minutes to 

prepare a legitimate step-up plan.”45 

Pyne’s presuppression work was a prelude to the Regional Office’s real goal for 

the park, a new fire management plan. Pyne was expected “to nudge Yellowstone into a 

genuine fire plan,” he recalled. “I spent ten weeks at the task and drafted a lengthy 

document along the lines of NPS-18,” but encountered resistance from park staff. The 

draft plan had two critical flaws. Although it accepted “prescribed natural fires” inside 

park boundaries, it listed no prescriptions. “None,” Pyne vehemently insisted. “The park 

simply would not allow anything that would limit its own discretion.” Nor did 

Yellowstone take the plan through formal review channels. In 1988, neither public 

42 Ibid., 2-3; Romme and Despain, “Historical Perspective on the Yellowstone Fires of 1988,” 695-

99. 43 Norman Christensen interview, August 17-18, 2004, 3. 44 Ibid., 4. 

45 Stephen J. Pyne to Hal K. Rothman, August 8, 2004, copy in possession of the author. 

202 
 

 

review, which was required under the National Environmental Policy Act and the 

Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976, nor review by the NPS Branch of Fire 

Management had taken place. Nor did the park follow the plan. Instead, Pyne observed, 

Yellowstone “simply used the fact of the document to get everyone off their case.”46 

The park did not agree with or appreciate Pyne’s perspective. “I ended my tour 

with a presentation to the park fire committee and Superintendent [Robert] Barbee,” Pyne 

recalled. He argued for another scheme, circulated in a memo to the park and to the 

Branch of Fire Management. It called for a rechartering of the entire Yellowstone fire 

program, on the grounds that the existing structure couldn't fight wildfires and was not 

suited to monitor prescribed natural fires. “The NPS was not happy. I was never invited 

back for another bout of planning,” he said. Barbee did not recall attending the meeting, 

but accepted the character of Pyne’s assessment, if not necessarily the specifics. 47 From 

Pyne’s point of view, Yellowstone actively resisted the implementation of NPS fire 

management objectives. 

From a later vantage point, some Yellowstone staff members disputed Pyne’s 

account. His perspective was only one version, a fact he acknowledged at a later date. 

“There is no justification for my insisting that I and I alone am right,” Pyne admitted in 

2004, a perspective roundly seconded by the people who experienced the fire at 

Yellowstone. According to noted Yellowstone historian Paul Schullery, “Pyne had a 

philosophical preference just as individual and forceful as the one held by the National 

Park Service managers and researchers in Yellowstone. It was just a different preference 

from those of park researchers.”48 The difference in opinions illustrated the gulf in 

possible responses and the genesis of subsequent debates about future direction. 

Christensen’s evaluation of the Yellowstone situation was more generous. “I 

sensed working with the staff, all of them from Superintendent Barbee on down, there 

remained a degree of defensiveness and paranoia about the program,” he remembered 

from the vantage point of fifteen years past the events in question. The park’s 

defensiveness was compounded by Yellowstone’s position as the first and premier 

national park in a varied and diverse system. Yellowstone staff believed that their issues 

were unique, and that models elsewhere in the park system were not necessarily relevant 

to their circumstances. The combination of “all of those things led to a kind of hubris in 

the staff,” Christensen believed, “if not certainly a defensiveness in the program.”49 To 

managers at Yellowstone, maintaining their discretion and prerogative was a paramount 

value that affected the development of park fire management policy. 

Yellowstone staff saw this issue from a very different perspective. “It was more 

basic than that,” one staffer recalled. “Park staff simply were tired – of breathing smoke, 

of answering hysterical phone calls and snide media questions, of being accused of 

‘destroying’ the very place they lived and devoted their professional lives to—and by 

people who mostly were not there to see that, in the eyes of local beholders, that 

Yellowstone was not ‘gone.’ No one, from the superintendent down, was immune to that 

46 Ibid. 

47 Ibid. 

48 Stephen J. Pyne to Hal Rothman, December 18, 2004; Paul Schullery to Roberta D’Amico, 

October 13, 2004; Paul Schullery and Don G. Despain, “Prescribed Burning in Yellowstone National Park: 

A Doubtful Proposition,” Western Wildlands 15 2 (Summer 1989): 30-34. 

49 Norman Christensen interview, August 17-18, 2004. 

203 
 

 

 

personal defensiveness – which doesn’t make it all wrong headed.”50 In the crosshairs of 

public and media expectation, in a situation they did not create, under assault for 

circumstances largely beyond their control, park personnel could be forgiven any 

measure of defensiveness that manifested itself. 

The degree of discretion meant that Yellowstone local-level monitoring to 

regulate the response to fire continued without the benefit of reviewed processes and 

prescriptions. As a result, the monitoring program took precedence; individual fire 

managers made the decisions. “The crux of the issue is fires get bigger regardless of all 

other circumstances,” Christensen observed. “They just become harder to put out because 

the amount of perimeter that you have to deal with increases geometrically as the fire 

increases in time and size. So, there was this other problem [of response], and the 

problem of coming up with an operational definition of what a natural prescribed fire 

would be.” There was little basis for decisions about what was acceptable and what was 

not. The guidelines were not sufficiently substantive. “The hope had been that fire started 

by natural causes would simply be allowed to burn,” Christensen remembered, but the 

lack of real definition of parameters made decisions about what would burn and what 

would be suppressed into arbitrary local ones. In “certain circumstances that might be 

natural,” Christensen observed, “because of other risk factors you would put the fire out.” 

The lack of clear definition simply left too much leeway in the process.51 

“Knowing what I know now, what would I have done?” Barbee rhetorically 

queried in 2004. “I would have probably taken action on the Fan Fire; I would have 

snuffed out, if I could, the Clover-Mist fires. These were all lightning fires. We didn’t 

have any [fires] that we started, and I don’t think I would have done anything different on 

the North Fork at all.” Barbee did not believe such actions would have significantly 

altered the results. “Had we taken action on all these things, full suppression, there is no 

question in my mind the configuration would have been somewhat different, but we 

would have had great fires in Yellowstone. No question about it.” The conditions were 

simply too severe, he maintained. “When you get all those variables coming out on the 

stage, the single digit relative humidity, and the explosively dry fuels, and then 

choreographed by the wind, the wind, the wind, the wind. That wind was incredible that 

summer,” he remembered. “There is nothing that can be done.”52 

Barbee recognized that he had faced a conundrum, a set of forces not only beyond 

his control, but equally beyond those of any institution established to address fire 

management. “I would have argued that let’s just pull back, let’s stop this nonsense of 

trying to draw lines around everything, let’s go in and button-up values at risk, utility 

corridors, neighboring ranches, that sort of thing and just let [the fire] go. Because it 

became pretty obvious that we built lines, put in lines, worked hard, and then there were 

spots two to three miles ahead that burned out of control. The effort was heroic,” he 

concluded, “but it was of little consequence. The joke over in West Yellowstone was 

‘what is brown in the middle and black on both sides? A bulldozer line!’”53 

50 Sue Consolo-Murphy, review comments, “National Park Service Wildland Fire History,” 

December 5, 2004. Consolo-Murphy served as a resource management specialist at Yellowstone in 1988. 51 Norman Christensen interview, August 17-18, 2004. 

52 Robert Barbee interview, Part III, November 14, 2004. 

53 Robert Barbee interview, Part II, November 12, 2004. 

204 
 

 

 

 

 

Christensen agreed with Barbee’s assessment, but with a cautionary coda. He was 

convinced that policy changes would have had little effect on the course of events in 

1988. From a larger climatic perspective, 1988 was a remarkable year. Huge fires burned 

across the U.S., not just in the Yellowstone basin. “That does not excuse us from these 

management issues,” he cautioned. The fires might “have burned different[ly], they might 

have burned less. Who knows? From there we really focused our attention on the 

consequence side of things, and maybe on the future in terms of what this might mean in 

a revised fire management program.”54 

Yellowstone proved that fire management was not only a scientific process, it was 

equally a political exercise. Although the relationship between the two dimensions of the 

fire was obvious, the peculiar nature of western fire management created the illusion of 

their separation. The scope and scale of the 1988 fires shattered the presumption that fire 

was a scientific issue managed by ecological precepts. Natural prescribed fires and 

natural fires were ecological applications of scientific principles, generally managed by 

intense advance preparation and other methods that kept them under control. As long as 

those fires stayed within their bounds, they did not rise to the level of national policy 

attention. But a human-caused fire of this scale, of precisely the kind against which 

Smokey Bear had long warned the public, took the science experiment and placed it on a 

national stage, subject to new levels of review. The scale of commentary was exactly 

what might have been expected out of a society in which everyone grappled for their 

fifteen minutes of fame. Although the NPS certainly deserved criticism at Yellowstone 

for the state of planning in 1988, the motivations that underpinned critiques of its 

performance had a great deal more to do with political positioning than with the events of 

the summer of 1988. 

The result was a wholesale change in fire management practice, not only in the 

NPS but throughout the entire federal land management system. The greatest initial 

consequence was the effective end of prescribed natural fire and its replacement with 

greater emphasis on prescribed burning. Between 1983 and 1988, the National Park 

Service intentionally burned an annual average of 32,135 acres. In 1989, NPS-prescribed 

burns totaled 56,889 acres, indicative of rising emphasis on prescribed burning that 

continued into the 1990s. An average of 62,843 acres was burned under prescription 

between 1990 and 1994. The suppression order that followed the Yellowstone fires 

severely constrained the amount of prescribed natural fire. The acreage of prescribed 

natural fires decreased from 17,944 per year from 1983-1988 to an average of 3,708 acres 

between 1990 and 1994. Simply put, the risk of the consequences of an escaped natural 

fire so outweighed any ecological or scientific advantages that might be derived from it 

that any reasonable park or regional office administrator eschewed the option except 

under circumstances that could not be disputed.55 

At the same time, the NPS stepped up its strategic response to fire. In 1989, the 

acreage burned in national parks decreased by 82 percent while the number of fires in the 

park system diminished by less than 1 percent. A combination of more aggressive 

suppression and sheer good fortune accounted for the difference, but it was not clear that 

54 Norm Christensen interview, August 17-18, 2004. 

55 Judi Zuckert, National Park Service Wildland Fire Report, 1989 (Boise, ID: Branch of Fire 

Management, 1990), 8; Rodney Norum, “Natural Fire Management in the National Park Service After 

1988,” Renewable Resources Journal 11 1 (1993): 18. 

205 
 

the change was a portent of either a more secure future or a more ecologically sound 

national park system. Wildfires continued in characteristic fashion, with the largest 

typically burning in Florida in the southeastern United States. In 1989, the year after 

Yellowstone, 135,494 acres burned in wildfires in the Southeast, more than 80 percent of 

the national park system total. Neither the prevalence of wildfires nor the 47,910 acres in 

prescribed burns in the Southeast excited much interest from the national press or anyone 

else still in an uproar about the Yellowstone fires the year before. The difference in 

activity, with only 10,240 acres burned in 287 wildfires and 4,993 acres in prescribed 

burns in the Western Region, suggested the full impact of the Yellowstone fires.56 In 

effect, at least in the drier western United States, the National Park Service returned much 

closer to the suppression regime that had prevailed prior to 1968. 

The pressure on the National Park Service to justify its fire policy did not abate. 

By May 1990, the NPS was preparing its final report on implementation of the changes 

recommended by the interagency fire management policy review team. In front of the 

House Subcommittee on Energy and Natural Resources, NPS Associate Director John 

Morehead conceded that “a much needed tightening” of policy and procedure was 

necessary and “perhaps could not have been accomplished without the impetus generated 

by the national attention” that stemmed from Yellowstone. Yet, Morehead insisted, the 

possibility to overreact was great. “We must exercise caution lest we move too far toward 

total suppression,” he reminded the subcommittee. “It is important to remember the role 

of fire in ecological dynamics and to ensure [that] our prescriptions maintain that natural 

role.”57 

Changes to prescribed burning led the implementation list. In the aftermath of the 

review team’s recommendations, NPS Special Directive 89-7, issued July 12, 1989, 

accepted the team report and ordered a complete review of NPS-18. The Service detailed 

a team of NPS field and regional fire experts to the National Interagency Fire Center in 

Boise to review the fire plans for each national park.58 By that date, the NPS had been 

scrutinized completely; park- and Washington office-level officials had begun to rethink 

and revise policy and the Service had compiled a five-page list of corrective actions that 

were already under way. Most stringent was the continuation of a new suppression 

policy, introduced on June 1, 1989 that was to remain in force for national parks and 

wilderness areas until the Service judged the fire management plans for individual areas 

to be in compliance with the new federal recommendations. 

Soon after, the Branch of Fire Management exercised the authority granted it 

under Special Directive 89-7 and offered new guidelines for policy. Finding “common 

management intent” with the Forest Service, the NPS developed new prescribed fire 

management guidelines. “A park may implement a prescribed natural fire program,” the 

new policy stated, “only if it has an approved fire management plan” that met the criteria 

established for prescribed natural fire; established contingency plans for personnel and 

56 Zuckert, National Park Service Wildland Fire Report, 1989, 11-12. 57 “Statement of John M. Morehead, Associate Director, National Park Service, Department of the 

Interior, before the Subcommittee on Energy and Natural Resources, House Committee on Government 

Operations, on the implementation of the newly established fire management policy for federal land 

management agencies,” May 24, 1990, NIFC 39. 58 Acting Director to Directorate, Field Directorate, WASO Division Chiefs, and Park 

Superintendents, Subject: Fire Management Policy Review Team, July 12, 1989, Yellowstone Y-14, 

Yellowstone National Park Archives. 

206 
 

 

 

 

material with cooperating entities; had an approved quantified defined prescription and 

monitoring procedures; detailed the availability of adequate fire management resources, 

and contained a process designed to outline and analyze management alternatives during 

a fire. This was a high standard, an effort to codify NPS fire procedures at a level never 

before attempted.59 

Yellowstone was subject to the most intense scrutiny in this process. One of the 

first to have its fire plan assessed, Yellowstone received concentrated review. The Branch 

of Fire Management determined that the unreviewed draft plan of 1987 did in fact 

sufficiently update the 1976 plan that had been the source of much consternation in the 

aftermath of the 1988 fire. It required some further consideration before it could be 

approved and any prescribed burning in the park could resume. These technical and 

procedural steps were crucial, as were other reforms in practice and procedure before the 

plan was ready for implementation. Acting NPS Fire Director Douglas D. Erskine was 

too circumspect to point out that the lack of implementation was exactly what critics 

focused on in the Yellowstone debacle in 1988. Work on a new plan continued, with a 

scoping statement under public review in August and September 1990 and ongoing 

internal critiques. The Yellowstone plan final debuted in June 1991, with questions about 

its practices and procedures continuing.60 

Prescribed burning at Yellowstone remained a controversial topic. Even some 

quarters in the NPS derided its prospects. Don G. Despain, one of the leading fire 

researchers at the park, called prescribed burning at Yellowstone “a doubtful 

proposition.” Prescribed burning could not be “justified as ecologically necessary in most 

of the park,” he concluded in a piece co-authored with Historian Paul Schullery. “Even an 

aggressive program of prescribed burning launched many years ago would not have 

significantly reduced the acreage burned in and near Yellowstone in 1988. . . . 

Yellowstone’s only real problem with fire is that once, every century or two, fire 

conditions allow more fires to burn than humans would like.” Others at the park echoed 

such sentiments. “No plan would have altered what happened in 1998,” observed 

Yellowstone Chief of Research John Varley, “and no plan will change what will happen 

in the future.”61 

Critics might charge that such commentary was part of an elaborate National Park 

Service effort to shift the culpability for the fire away from the Service, but Despain, 

Schullery and Varley accentuated an important and easily overlooked part of the 

discussion. The 1988 fires begged the question of management, a fact that NPS officials 

pointed out over and again to no avail. History showed that the Yellowstone environment 

burned at fairly regular intervals. From this perspective, it was human tolerance for such 

episodes that caused the uproar. Such a perspective might be scientifically accurate, but it 

59 Director to Directorate, Field Directorate, WASO Division Chiefs, and Park Superintendents, 

January 27, 1990, Revised, Wildland Fire Management, NPS-18 Prescribed Fire, 12-40, January 1990. 60 Acting NPS Fire Director, BIFC to Regional Director, Rocky Mountain Region, Attention: Fire 

Coordinator, May 9, 1989, Yellowstone Y-198 “Review of Fire Management Plan;” Richard H. Bahr, 

Assistant Fire Management Officer to Bob Barbee, Superintendent, November 13, 1991, Yellowstone Y14, Yellowstone National Park Archives; “Yellowstone National Park Wildfire Management Plan, June 

1991,” (Yellowstone: Yellowstone National Park, 1991). 61 Schullery and Despain, “Prescribed Burning in Yellowstone: A Doubtful Proposition,” 30-34; John 

Varley, “The Status of Yellowstone’s New Fire Plan,” Renewable Resources Journal, Spring 1993: 20-21. 

207 
 

 

did not mesh well with the political realities of western land, resource extraction, 

dependence on tourism, and fire management. 

The fires also highlighted a different dilemma for the National Park Service. It 

wanted to use science to benefit ecosystems, but politicians operated in another arena, 

with very different goals. Western politicians used the fires as backdrops for their various 

complaints about federal power and action. During the peak of the fire, Democratic 

presidential candidate Michael Dukakis came to Yellowstone. He arrived with more than 

200 media in tow, and Yellowstone had a “big thing out there at Madison Junction.” 

Barbee remembered. “I asked him, ‘what do you want here, what are you trying to do? 

What do you expect from me?’ He said: ‘I don’t want to give you a bad time.’” Barbee 

responded: “I appreciate that.” Dukakis continued: “I will be honest with you. This is the 

only game in town. This is where the action is and I want some visibility and that is why I 

am here. I want to demonstrate my concern for the West.” While Dukakis did the park no 

damage, his visit illustrated the difference between science and politics. “Politicians want 

to run things from their own perspective,” observed long-time Yellowstone staff member 

Lee Whittlesey, “and often without regard for science, and the NPS has to listen to 

politicians.” Most politicians neither appreciated nor understood the role of fire in an 

ecosystem and “that made the (NPS) task more difficult,” Whittlesey concluded.62 

Bruce Kilgore, by then chief of the Division of Natural Resources and Research 

for the NPS’s Western Region, observed that “everyone realizes [that] there are 

limitations to what any fire management program can accomplish when extremely dry 

and windy conditions occur in forests with the heavy fuel loads found in Yellowstone and 

similar forest types in 1988.”63 While Kilgore appreciated the impetus for policy 

rethinking that the situation provided, he stated what everyone close to fire management 

recognized: catastrophic fire was not subject to policy constraints. Any program of 

management faced circumstances in which its planning, resource allocation, and 

procedure would be inaccurate and insufficient. Yellowstone in 1988 had been one such 

instance. Making policy from such an unusual circumstance was a risky proposition, but 

one that federal fire managers had no choice but to embrace. 

By the time Morehead addressed the subcommittee nearly a year later, a new 

prescribed burning program had been approved for a one-year test implementation 

period. The revision of NPS-18 also carefully defined the prescriptions under which 

natural prescribed fires would be allowed to burn. In the aftermath of Yellowstone, all 

prescribed natural fire programs had been suspended. The plans at the twenty-six parks 

with active natural prescribed fire programs were reviewed and revised to assure that they 

complied with the recommendations of both the review team and the commission headed 

by Norman Christensen as well as the new NPS-18 guidelines. When Morehead 

addressed the subcommittee, three parks – Yosemite, Sequoia and Kings Canyon, and 

Voyageurs – had met all the requirements and were in the process of reinstating their 

programs. The remaining parks were expected to follow the same process.64 The parks 

62 Robert Barbee interview, Part II, November 14, 2004; Lee Whittlesey to Roberta D’Amico, email 

of November 22, 2004, provided to the author. 63 Bruce M. Kilgore, “Review Team Finds Fire Policy Sound But ‘Application Needs Changing,’” 

Yellowstone Vertical File, n.d ca. 1989. 64 “Statement of John M. Morehead, Associate Director, National Park Service, Department of the 

Interior, before the Subcommittee on Energy and Natural Resources, House Committee on Government 

208 
 

 

 

 

 

 

were charged with strengthening fire management plans and improving command and 

control structures. Each would develop a comprehensive set of criteria to govern the 

conditions under which natural ignition fires would be allowed to burn and were expected 

to achieve significant progress in establishing regional and national contingency plans as 

well as procedures for curtailing prescribed fire if necessary.65 

The acreage that burned in 1990 reflected the new strategies. Wildfires in the NPS 

Western Region were prevalent, with 245 fires burning across 17,732 acres during a 

summer when more than 225,000 acres in California burned during August alone. In 

contrast, 135 fires in the Southeast Region burned on 23,341 acres, accentuating the ways 

in which the issues of the post-Yellowstone era were largely in the West. Prescribed 

burns illustrated the ongoing caution. The program proceeded tentatively and as the fire 

year worsened, the Service brought its prescribed fire program to a halt. “At this time,” 

Acting NPS Fire Director Richard T. Gale told his regional and park staff on June 29, 

1990, “all fire management officers should reconsider any and all prescribed burn plans, 

giving special attention to the limits on prescriptions that could pose control problems.” 

The care that Gale encouraged was reflected in the program’s execution. The forty-one 

such burns in the Western Region burned 2,026 acres, a minuscule total compared to the 

pre-1988 efforts. Comparison with the Southeast Region provided stark relief. The thirty 

prescribed fires in the Southeast, largely in Big Cypress National Preserve and 

Everglades National Park, burned 70,396 acres. By 1992, 111 small fires in thirteen 

national parks comprise the prescribed natural fire total in the park system. Ninety-five 

percent of the acreage burned came from Sequoia and Kings Canyon and Yosemite 

national parks, where experiments in prescribed burning started almost twenty-five years 

before. Only seventeen of the twenty-six parks that had a prescribed burning program 

before 1988 had reinstated it by 1992.66 

In the end, one consequence of the Yellowstone fires was a less aggressive 

approach to prescribed natural fire in the NPS. “The revised management policies,” 

Kilgore observed, “appear to have toned down the apparent substantial commitment to 

allowing natural fires to burn whenever possible.”67 Kilgore’s observation reflected the 

dismay current among specialists who administered fire at the grassroots who were 

forced to abide by the post-1988 rules. For many in the fire management structure, it was 

hard to see the change in goals as an advancement of NPS principles. The default to 

suppression flew in the face of twenty years of experience. 

The greatest challenge to the renewed ethic of suppression took place in Alaska. 

After a number of unusual years in which the Alaskan parks experienced little or no fire, 

Operations, on the implementation of the newly established fire management policy for federal land 

management agencies,” May 24, 1990, NIFC 3, 3-4. 65 Ibid., 3; U.S. Departments of Agriculture and the Interior, “Recommendations of the Fire 

Management Policy Review Team.” 66 Dean Berg, National Park Service Wildland Fire Report, 1990 (Boise, ID: Branch of Fire 

Management, 1991), 12-13; NPS Western Region, “Yosemite Fires, 1990,” (San Francisco: National Park 

Service, 1991), 1-7; Acting NPS Fire Director, BIFC to All National Park Service Regional and Park Fire 

Management Officers, Jun 29, 1990, Y14 (Fire), National Interagency Fire Center; Bruce M. Kilgore and 

Tom Nichols, “National Park Service Fire Policies and Programs,” in James K. Brown, Robert W. Mutch, 

Charles W. Spoon, and Ronald H. Wakimoto, “Proceedings: Symposium on Fire in Wilderness and Park 

Management,” (Missoula: USDA Forest Service, General Technical Report, INT-GTR-320, 1995), 24-27. 67 Kilgore and Nichols, “National Park Service Fire Policies and Programs,” 24. 

209 
 

 

 

blazes returned in 1990. Two years earlier, when fires were rife in the interior Rocky 

Mountain West, only 303 acres burned in the Alaskan parks. In 1989, only twenty-eight 

acres burned. Since Alaska did not routinely engage in any prescribed burning, it 

remained almost entirely free of fire during 1988, the worst fire year in national park 

history. Nor did the massive prescriptive changes have any immediate affect. The rules of 

cooperation from the early 1980s persisted until 1990. That year, seven large fires in 

Alaska burned more than 108,722 acres, hardly a record in the nation’s northernmost 

state, but a harbinger of management issues that challenged the NPS’s vision of what it 

could do with fire in the far north and elsewhere. When the total acres burned in Alaska 

in 1991 reached 86,651, the NPS was forced to address the substantial differences 

between the forty-ninth state and the situation in the western part of the lower fortyeight.68 

The Alaskan response to the review team’s recommendations had been outrage. 

Both state and federal land management agencies had recognized the efficacy of natural 

prescribed fire and were committed to its continued use. NPS officials could say little 

after the public outcry around the Yellowstone fires, but state officials loudly highlighted 

the differences between the lower forty-eight and the north. “The state of Alaska takes 

objection to the review team’s recommendation that it is ‘unprofessional and impractical 

for fires to be allowed to burn free of prescriptions or appropriate suppression action,’” 

the official response of the Division of Forestry of the Alaska Department of Natural 

Resource intoned. “We must express that there are regional differences across the nation 

in natural resource management goals and natural fire regimes. Alaska is a fire dependent 

ecosystem. There are vast areas of Alaska where fire does not pose a threat to people, 

property, or valued resources. In these places, fire is viewed as a natural event.” Alaska 

State Forester M.R. “Bob” Dick, Jr., asked NPS Regional Director Boyd Evison to 

“carefully review any change in national fire policy that would compromise the ability of 

Alaska-based federal agencies to continue with current fire management plan 

arrangements. Put bluntly,” Dick concluded, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”69 

Dick’s trenchant observations illustrated that the NPS grappled with wildland fire 

in two and even possibly three dramatically different situations. Alaska shared many 

parallels with Everglades, Big Cypress, and the Southeast Region, themselves 

significantly different from the western fire parks, but in the end, the forty-ninth state was 

substantially dissimilar from even the closest examples in the lower forty-eight. Fire in 

Alaska was perceived by land managers as an irresistible force that could overwhelm 

resources to battle it at any time. Alaskan fire, in the view of the conglomeration of state 

officials and federal agency managers who administered the vast estate of the north, was 

68 Ibid., 12-14; Dale Haggstrom, “Fire and Forest Management Policies on the Boreal Forest and 

Wildlife of Interior Alaska,” Wildfire, December 1994: 31-36, ALK29; Zuckert, National Park Service 

Wildland Fire Report, 1989, 11-13; Zuckert, National Park Service Wildland Fire Report, 1989, 12-13; 

Dean Berg, National Park Service Wildland Fire Report, 1994 (Boise, ID: Branch of Fire Management, 

1995), 43-45. 

69 M.R. Dick, Jr., to Boyd Evison, February 3, 1989, National Interagency Fire Center, Yellowstone 

Box 2, D-131, 6639, National Interagency Fire Center, Boise, ID; Alaska Department of Natural 

Resources, Forestry Division, “National Fire Management Policy Review,” January 1989, 3-5, National 

Interagency Fire Center, Yellowstone Box 2, D-131, 6639, National Interagency Fire Center, Boise, ID. 

210 
 

natural fire at its most distinct, a clearly defined natural force that humans could not 

genuinely conquer or even trifle with, except at great peril and greater cost. 

The result was a strategy simultaneously more open and more defensive than the 

one the NPS applied at Yellowstone. The openness stemmed from the acceptance of 

natural fire’s value as a primary ecological tool, as well from the tacit admission that 

there was little that could be done about most Alaskan fires anyway: they would burn and 

that was an ecological and social good. The defensiveness resulted from the peculiar 

governmental circumstances in Alaska – the multiple layers of federal, state, Native, and 

regional agencies and their varying missions that combined to make allowing natural fire 

into a complicated bureaucratic exercise that seemed in and of itself to belie the very 

force of natural fire. In Alaska, federal agencies could not genuinely expect to implement 

a comprehensive suppression policy and no one associated with Alaskan fire believed 

that they could. As a result, the Christensen commission’s findings did more to upset the 

existing strategies in Alaska than to reign in any tendencies toward idiosyncratic 

approaches. The Alaskan joint fire plan “allows substantial savings by fighting fire only 

where it needs suppression,” Dick noted in his letter to Evison.70 It was the determination 

of where suppression was necessary that placed significant boundaries around the 

process. 

In a 1991 response to such concerns, the NPS dispatched a team to discuss longrange fire management objectives for Alaska. NPS Fire Director Douglas Erskine and 

Fire Management Specialists Richard T. Gale and Rod Norum reviewed a proposal from 

Regional Fire Management Officer Steve Holder and Regional Prescribed Fire Specialist 

Brad Cella to establish an Alaska Wildfire Coordination Group. The reviewers 

discovered “a renewed and vigorous interest in the use of management ignited prescribed 

fires” among land management agencies in Alaska, and advocated enhanced planning, 

programming, and interagency cooperation. Their work affirmed a principle that 

resonated in Alaska and that the NPS embraced in the Far North. Suppression decisions 

“will remain with the local land manager,” Erskine informed Deputy Commissioner Ron 

Somerville of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. “Because the DOI agencies 

manage their lands on multiple use principles, we have received favorable interpretations 

that wildfire surveillance is an appropriate response if it is allowed in an approved plan 

and determined to be the most cost effective action. . . . The DOI agencies have elected to 

use their Alaska fire management personnel to implement this fire policy for Alaska 

rather than accept a very narrow national definition.” By articulating the differences 

between the Alaskan experience and the rest of the nation, the NPS built stronger ties 

with state and local agencies and interests.71 

After the early 1990s, fires in Alaska diminished enough that its issues were no 

longer in the forefront of national policy discussions. After 40,035 acres burned in 

twenty-six fires in Alaska in 1993, the acreage diminished to a low of twenty-one acres in 

70 Dick to Evison, February 3, 1989. 71 NPS Fire Director BIFC to Chief, Branch of Fire and Aviation Management, July 1, 1991, National 

Interagency Fire Center, miscellaneous files; Ron Somerville, Deputy Commissioner, Alaska Fish and 

Game to Edward F. Spang, Boyd Evison, Walt Steiglitz, and Niles Caesar, April 2, 1991 NIFC 

miscellaneous files; Steve Holder to Russ Hansen, May 14, 1991, Evison to Somerville, May 14, 1991, 

draft, NIFC miscellaneous files. 

211 
 

 

1998. Only in 1999, when fourteen fires burned across 164,397 acres did Alaska again 

attract policy attention.72 

During 1990, as large fires burned in Alaska, the NPS faced the first real 

challenge to its reconstituted fire management in the lower forty-eight states at Yosemite. 

1990 became a brutal fire year in California, affecting the Service’s ability to battle fires 

and all but eliminating any efforts to reintroduce prescribed fire in the western parks. As 

Yosemite prepared for the centennial of its establishment, the park was closed for the first 

time in its history. Lightning storms ignited fires in the park between August 7 and 10. 

Suppression efforts ensued, but failed to halt the spread. By August 10, more than 12,000 

acres were aflame. Yosemite Valley and El Portal were evacuated that day, and the 

Merced Grove of Big Trees was threatened. Although the fires continued, they were 

brought under control later in the month, and the episode seemed likely to pass without 

renewing the controversy that dogged Yellowstone.73 

Later observers noted that the situation at Yosemite in 1990 roughly paralleled 

Yellowstone in 1988. In both fires, severe drought contributed to the accelerating danger. 

In both instances, high temperatures and low humidity combined with thunderstorms to 

intensify the fire risks. But the two parks were different both in their ecology and their 

vision of the role of fire. The prescribed natural fire zone boundaries had not been 

restricted at Yosemite in response to the Yellowstone events, making it an anomaly; in 

fact, they had remained stable for many years. All of the damaging fires at Yosemite 

occurred outside of prescribed natural fire zones, and were automatically subjected to 

suppression. Yosemite had long recognized that fuel conditions in the mixed conifer 

forest and chaparral zones were not within the natural range of variability, and that 

lightning fires would not be ecologically beneficial. Park managers decided that those 

fires could not be managed safely until more natural conditions could be restored. In 

Yellowstone, managers believed that conditions allowed virtually the entire park to be 

included in a prescribed natural fire zone. At Yosemite, those realities combined with the 

caution inherent in the National Park Service following the summer of 1988, and the 

1990 suppression response began immediately. NPS responders were initially 

overmatched, but the arrival of Class I and Class II teams gave pivotal assistance. 

Another Class I team was ordered. The relatively small size of the fire –between 12,000 

and 15,000 acres – and the combination of skilled personnel and changing weather helped 

bring the fires under control.74 

Yosemite’s response showed how much the political climate had changed. For the 

previous twenty years in most circumstances, the National Park Service allowed lightning 

fires – the quintessential natural prescribed fire – to burn until they threatened life or 

property. In contrast, at Yosemite in 1990, the Service began urgent efforts to suppress 

immediately, setting a different management standard as a direct result of the NPS 

experience at Yellowstone. 

Widespread media attention added to the Service’s caution at Yosemite. NBC, 

CBS, ABC, and CNN were all present; Good Morning America, the Today Show, 

Newsweek, and Time all covered the fire, and countless local, regional, and national 

72 National Park Service, National Park Service Wildland Fire Report, 1999 (Boise, ID: Branch of 

Fire Management, 2000), 45. 73 NPS Western Region, “Yosemite Fires, 1990,” 4, 17, 81. 

74 Ibid., 5. 

212 
 

 

newspapers tracked the NPS’s response.75 Park officials could be forgiven if they felt as 

if the media was checking up on the NPS to see how different the Service’s response 

would be in the aftermath of Yellowstone. 

By 1990, fire management had become national news, and the National Park 

Service found itself at the center of a public debate about how to respond. Yellowstone 

and Yosemite both experienced significant fires at a time when policies and public 

perception did not coincide. This brought the national parks further scrutiny. Even more, 

changing patterns of living and a callous ignorance of fire patterns had brought growing 

populations into potentially threatening environments, sometimes near or adjacent to 

national park areas. It only remained a matter of time until hillside suburbs around arid 

western communities faced the brunt of fires of their own. 

In the early 1990s, the West turned mildly wet for a few years. The result was a 

clear decline in acreage burned by wildfires. The Intermountain Region of the NPS 

recorded fires on 30,750 acres in 1990, 7,776 acres the next year, 3,744 acres in 1992, 

and 14,400 acres in 1993. Fire damages in the Pacific West region decreased from 20,616 

acres burned in 1990 to 6,342 acres in 1991, 11,468 acres in 1992, and 8,788 acres in 

1993.76 As a result, national park fires fell from the forefront of fire concerns. The fires 

that drew attention took place on the lands of other agencies. 

The West’s dramatic and brutal fire year of 1994 drew the issue of fire 

management even further from the National Park Service. In the first bad year in the 

region in five years, considerable NPS lands burned – 52,502 acres in the Intermountain 

region and another 20,565 acres in the Pacific West. The real story of 1994 became the 

horrific human toll of firefighting: thirty-four firefighters died in the line of duty and 

$965 million was spent on suppression as fires burned on 3.5 million acres. In one tragic 

afternoon on July 6, 1994, in the South Canyon fire on Bureau of Land Management land 

outside of Glenwood Springs, Colorado, twelve firefighters and two helicopter crew 

members, trapped as a fire swept upslope, burned to death. Stephen Pyne opined that “the 

firefighters lost at the South Canyon fire were, for the fire community, the equivalent of 

the Army Rangers killed at Mogadishu.” Those tragic human losses inexorably altered 

both policy and procedure.77 

In the aftermath of the tragic summer of 1994, the National Park Service again 

reassessed its fire management strategies and goals. A study team of Stephen J. Botti, G. 

Thomas Zimmerman, Howard T. (Tom) Nichols, and Jan van Wagtendonk, all respected 

fire researchers or managers, analyzed NPS fire problems. They advocated increasing the 

amount of park acreage that functioned as natural ecosystems; reducing the risk of severe 

wildfire in developed areas in national parks and along boundaries by clearing and the 

use of prescribed burning; enhancing efforts to provide information about the role of fire 

in parks to the public and to decision makers; increasing interagency planning; and 

75 Ibid., 85-89; Smith, Media and Apocalypse, 75-77. 76 National Park Service, National Park Service Wildland Fire Report, 1999, 46-47, 58-60. 77 National Interagency Fire Center, “South Canyon Fire Investigation: Report of the South Canyon 

Fire Investigation Accident Team, August 17, 1994,” (Boise, ID: National Interagency Fire Center, 1994), 

1-4; Bret W. Butler; Roberta A. Bartlette; Larry S. Bradshaw; Jack D. Cohen, Patricia L. Andrews; Ted 

Putnam; Richard J. Mangan, “Fire Behavior Associated With the 1994 South Canyon Fire on Storm King 

Mountain, Colorado,” Research Paper RMRS-RP-9, (Ogden, UT: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest 

Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station, 1998), 1-7; Carle, Burning Questions, 225; Stephen J. Pyne 

email to Hal Rothman, September 15, 2004, copy possession of the author. 

213 
 

 

 

 

increasing the capability to analyze data and integrate fire management into general 

planning and management throughout the park system.78 The recommendations reflected 

the set of goals the NPS developed prior to Yellowstone, with a strong dose of the 

programmatic changes that followed the 1988 fires. Yet what made the report significant 

was its willingness to assert the value of natural fire in the aftermath of the summer of 

1994. The NPS continued to embrace the role of natural fire even as such a stance 

became politically more difficult. 

During the summer of 1994, two initially small fires at Glacier National Park 

attracted regional attention because the NPS was willing to let them burn. “In a year 

when firefighters are scrambling throughout the West, Glacier National Park managers 

are carefully tending a small 6-week-old fire that could potentially burn a whopping 

43,000 acres, maybe twice that much,” wrote Don Schwennesen of the Missoulan in an 

overstatement of the potential impact of the fire. Such media attention could easily 

impede a fire manager’s desire to support prescribed burning. Even Glacier 

Superintendent Dave Mihalic seemed to vacillate, noting the enormous difference 

between a policy and its implementation. “While the public may support prescribed 

natural fire in theory, such discussions typically occur outside the fire season,” Mihalic 

told the Billings Gazette. Actual fire made such support tenuous at best. Nor was the park 

helped by a flippant comment from Flathead National Forest spokesman J.D. Coleman, 

who told reporters that the Forest Service “was not screwing around with prescribed fires 

right now.” The internal and external struggle over the fire continued into the middle of 

August, with the NPS closely monitoring the fire even as local and regional reporters 

queried locals about the policy. Rain on August 18 slowed the fire and snow and rain in 

early October finally removed the threat.79 

In the end, one of the two fires, the Howling Fire, proved a triumph for prescribed 

natural fire. Although the fire was routinely termed “controversial” by regional media, 

the pressure on the National Park Service was not sufficient to compel suppression 

action. The Service stuck to principle despite the discomfort it caused local managers. “If 

we would have put the fires out just because of the (fire) activity around us and political 

developments,” observed Glacier National Park Fire Management Officer Fred Vanhorn, 

“we, in effect, (would be) saying that we were not going to allow significant prescribed 

natural fires to occur in Glacier.” NPS staff felt that the Howling Fire provided an 

important lesson that could be used as a model elsewhere in the park system. By holding 

firm to established policy even under political pressure, Glacier National Park proved that 

prescribed fire could take place, even when at the time fire was a severe problem 

elsewhere in the region or in the park system.80 This was a step toward the more 

comprehensive vision of the role of prescribed natural fire held by most fire scientists and 

ecologists inside and outside of the national park system. 

The National Park Service continued to develop and support its prescribed natural 

fire program. In an important workshop in San Francisco early in 1995, the NPS 

78 Stephen J. Botti, G. Thomas Zimmerman, Howard T. Nichols, and Jan van Wagtendonk, “Fire 

Management and Ecosystem Health in the National Park System: Problem Analysis,” (Boise, ID: NPS 

Branch of Fire and Aviation Management, 1994), 1-4. 79 “Let it Burn?” Billings Gazette, August 4, 1994; Don Schwennesen, “Glacier Goes for the Burn,” 

The Missoulan, August 7, 1994, B-6; “GNP Managers Consider Their Options,” Glacier Reporter, August 

11, 1994; David Carkhuff, “The Howling Fire,” Hungry Horse News, August 18, 1994, 80 “Howling Fire,” Hungry Horse News, October 6, 1994, 5. 

214 
 

reaffirmed its commitment to the concept. The period following 1988 had been marked 

by an aversion to the risk of an escaped prescribed natural fire. With the minimization of 

risk as a goal, the burn program could be scored a success. But if the goal was to 

implement prescribed natural fire programs that were ecologically significant, “pretty 

disappointing” was a better description of the situation. “We need to find a way for 

prescribed fire and wildfire programs to coexist during the normal fire season,” the 

meeting summary recorded. Such a strategy would require expanding prescribed natural 

fire while maintaining an acceptable level of risk.81 This was as difficult as the NPS 

agency mission: to preserve for the future while accommodating the present. 

On the ground, new innovations revealed new approaches to fire. In 1995, the 

NPS introduced its new Prescribed Fire Support Module (PFSM) program. The PFSM 

program provided mobile tactical support nationally for parks with prescribed fire 

programs. Because they were specifically unavailable for wildfire response, the NPS 

teams, initially consisting of four groups of five members, guaranteed experienced 

professional attention for prescribed fire. This new emphasis reflected the internal push 

toward the embrace of prescribed fire that characterized NPS thinking after Yellowstone. 

Subsequently similar teams designed to manage prescribed natural fire were introduced. 

When the NPS lifted the budgetary ceiling on prescribed natural fire, it effectively 

removed the rationale for converting fires from the prescribed natural fire category into 

the wildfire category as a way to access resources. This development further contributed 

to the growing role for natural prescribed fire in the NPS.82 

The idea that the National Park Service would risk potential political pressure in 

the name of a clear ecological and resource management goal spoke volumes about the 

commitment of the Service’s fire apparatus to the goals of the previous twenty-five years. 

Despite the enormous negative publicity associated with the Yellowstone fires and the 

intense scrutiny and micromanaging that the NPS experienced in its aftermath, the 

Service had a vision of appropriate strategy and was willing – within reason – to take 

risks to implement it. At a time when morale was low throughout the National Park 

Service, due in large part to Director Roger Kennedy’s 1995 reorganization of the service 

and the way in which it transferred authority and influence from central offices to the 

field, this firm stand on principle proved an inspiration to many in the NPS. 

By this time, the NPS had become a premier fire management organization in the 

federal land management system. Despite the scrutiny that the Service experienced in the 

aftermath of Yellowstone, two decades of planning and implementation designed to 

support clear and distinct goals and objectives had propelled the NPS forward. The 

Service had responded to a variety of challenges, putting its most creative thinkers into 

the process of fashioning response. Its practices and procedures had become models for 

changes in other agencies.83 The National Park Service’s initial recognition of the value 

of fire as a tool for landscape management led the other agencies; over time its models 

81 Prescribed Natural Fire Workshop, San Francisco, California, January 3-5, 1995, Meeting 

Summary,” NIFC, miscellaneous files. 82 Ben Jacobs, “NPS Prescribed Fire Support Modules-A Pilot Program,” Fire Management Notes 56 

2 (1996): 4-5; n.a. “Prescribed Fire Support Crew: Pilot Program 1995,” Bandelier National Monument, 

Y14 (PFSC), n.d ca. 1995; Robert Hunter Jones, “National Park Service Prescribed Fire in the Post 

Yellowstone Era,” Wild Earth (Summer 1997), 27-28. 83 NPS Fire Director, NIFC to Regional Directors, November 1, 1994, NIFC A56 (Fire) Y 1421; 

Associate Director Operations to Regional Director, Western Region, December 5, 1994. 

215 
 

were picked up and implemented as suppression-oriented agencies such as the Forest 

Service and the Bureau of Land Management first watched cautiously and then joined in. 

When the NPS started down this road, the set of ideas that included managed fire – most 

prominently, that fire was a productive force in ecological management – was hardly 

standard thinking. By the early 1990s, the NPS’s rationale had become the standard for 

management. Its programs had been extremely successful in changing the way fire was 

used throughout the federal land management system, and its ideas had permeated 

national fire management. Combined with thoughtful leadership and astute planners and 

implementation teams, the money and attention the Service invested in its fire programs 

had paid significant dividends. 

Success bred some vexing consequences as well. It led to an ideological 

commitment to fire’s restoration in land management, the sometimes blind goal to 

introduce fire without clear definitions of appropriate circumstances. Using fire as a tool 

superseded management as a goal in some circumstances, leading to questions about NPS 

decisions and goals. Compounded by the reorganization of 1995, erosion of agency 

experience through early retirement and attrition hit fire management as well as every 

other dimension of NPS operations. Other agencies recognized the value of the Service’s 

experience and recruited its personnel. In a testament to the value of the fire program, 

many members, despite strong loyalty to the NPS, felt an equally powerful drive to 

spread their message to peer agencies. 

In 1995, a revised national fire policy was completed. The NPS played an 

important role in shaping the document. A direct result of the 1994 fire season and the 

South Canyon tragedy, the new document articulated nine management principles that 

sounded much like the NPS’s goals. Under this document, public and firefighter safety 

remained the top priority. Wildland fire was seen as an essential ecological process and 

agent of natural change that had to be incorporated into planning. Fire management plans 

were required for every federally administered area with vegetation that could burn and 

fire planning had to be designed to support land and resource management planning. Risk 

management became a foundation for fire management. Fire management programs had 

to be economically feasible and had to be based on the best available science. The plans 

had to incorporate environmental quality and public health considerations. Cooperation 

with other governmental and non-governmental entities was essential and the 

standardization of policy among federal agencies was to be an ongoing objective. The 

plan emphasized indirect attacks on fire, the sort of response that had characterized the 

response to the Yellowstone fires in 1988, as a safer strategy than the direct confrontation 

of firefighting lore. A full range of responses was permitted, allowing a measure of 

flexibility than had never before existed across the full spectrum of federal agencies. Any 

approach, from basic monitoring to full-scale suppression, could be implemented under 

the right circumstances, a substantial shift in the way federal agencies approached fire. In 

effect, the federal system changed from looking at the origin of a fire to looking at its 

circumstances as the basis for decision making.84 

The new policy led to greater coordination and cooperation among federal land 

management agencies. An implementation plan in 1996 translated the vision into a series 

84 U.S. Department of the Interior, U.S. Department of Agriculture, “Federal Wildland Fire 

Management: Policy and Program Review, Final Report, December 18, 1995,” (Boise, ID: National 

Interagency Fire Center, 1995), 3-9; Carle, Burning Questions, 225. 

216 
 

 

of programs, dividing the initial recommendations into geographic concerns and longterm commitments. The difference suggested the enormity of the task that confronted 

federal fire managers, as well as the need for clear signposts – not only to gauge progress 

but to remind everyone of the direction in which fire management planning was going. 

Ongoing policy reviews and innovation led to further planning and new goals. A new 

resource allocation strategy in 1998 sought to develop an interagency process to 

distribute fire management resources while efforts continued to move fire management 

policy toward implementation throughout the national park system.85 

The new policies accelerated the implementation of the fire management 

strategies that originated in the National Park Service across the federal land management 

system. Between 1995 and 1999, federal agencies more than doubled the acreage treated 

with prescribed burning, reaching 2.2 million acres as the new century began. The NPS 

had been a small portion of that new emphasis, burning 59,495 acres in 1995, 42,511 

acres in 1996, 69,481 acres in 1997, and 82,413 acres in 1998, finally topping the 

100,000-acre total in 1999 with a total acreage burned of 132,665. With the exception of 

1999, the second half of the 1990s showed no significant difference from NPS prescribed 

burning during the first half of the decade. The shift in national emphasis had little impact 

on NPS practice, leading to questions about whether the bold promises of the mid-1990s 

amounted to significant changes in practice.86 

The national fire policy codified Service values but it further shifted the emphasis 

of federal fire management away from the NPS. Beginning in 1994, difficult fire seasons 

followed on a two-year cycle, in 1996 and 1998, coinciding with the national election 

schedule and becoming a political issue. Most of the fires occurred on Forest Service or 

BLM land, with the NPS contribution mainly resources to fight the fires. The attention 

went away from NPS programs and ideas as wildfires on federal land became staples on 

the evening news and part of a larger national discussion about the role of government in 

the aftermath of Congress’s failed “Contract with America,” an effort to shape national 

priorities with unrealistic and possibly harmful policy promises from elected officials, in 

1994 and the shutdown of the federal government late in 1995. In an age when questions 

about the size and function of government were part of the national dialogue despite a 

vibrant economy, the image of fires burning out of control suggested inefficiency in the 

eyes of an uninformed public. 

The National Park Service continued to develop strategies for addressing fire. In 

1996, NPS Fire Director Doug Erskine pointed to a significant improvement in the tools 

available “for expanding the use of fire in national parks.” Prescribed fire modules had 

been thoroughly tested and proven successful, and their use had been expanded. In 1996, 

the NPS established four prescribed natural fire management teams, with a planned 

increase to six in 1997. Dedicated fire specialists were located in the Midwest, 

Intermountain, and Pacific West regions, and the Southeast and Northeast field areas 

shared another team. A significant change in funding allowed further development of the 

85 U.S. Department of the Interior, U.S. Department of Agriculture, “Federal Wildland Fire 

Management: Policy and Program Review, Implementation Action Report, May 23, 1996” (Boise, ID: 

National Interagency Fire Center, 1996), iii; Resource Allocation Task Group, “Implementation of Federal 

Wildland Fire Management Policy: Allocation of Resources, June 15, 1998,” (Boise, ID: National 

Interagency Fire Center, 1998), 4-8. 86 Carle, Burning Questions, 225; National Park Service, “National Park Service 1999 Wildland Fire 

Report,” 41. 

217 
 

NPS response to prescribed natural fires. Congress permitted the NPS to fund the 

operational aspects of prescribed natural fire from the suppression fund. This was in line 

with the 1995 fire policy, which stated that all unplanned ignitions could be managed 

along a spectrum of appropriate management responses from full suppression to 

monitoring. Since all these events were unplanned “emergencies,” they could all be 

managed by tapping emergency suppression funds. Combined with the endorsement of 

the Federal Wildfire Management and Program Review (FWMPR) – designed to cross 

agency boundaries and to be based on the best available science – and of the Secretaries 

of the Interior and of Agriculture, the NPS could claim that its approach to fire had 

shaped federal policies.87 

Throughout the remainder of the 1990s, fire policy remained an important 

component of federal land management that largely embraced the principles the NPS had 

developed since the 1970s. In a perplexing turn of events, national park lands were not 

the focus of the program, something for which the National Park Service could be 

grateful. A truly national system had developed, one focused on firefighter safety, land 

restoration, and federal lands other than the park system. The centrality that the Service 

achieved after 1968 had begun to wane, leaving the NPS with enormous fire management 

issues that increasingly were apart from the issues and direction of national fire policy. 

87 National Park Service, “National Park Service 1996 Wildland Fire Report,” (Boise, ID: National 

Park Service, 1997), 3-4. 

218 
219 
 

Chapter 8: 

The Hazard of New Fortunes: 

Outlet, Cerro Grande, and the Twenty-First Century 

 The National Park Service could be forgiven for thinking that its efforts to 

institute fire management during the last twenty-five years of the twentieth century were 

cursed. After Yellowstone in 1988, NPS efforts to mitigate fire and to plan for its 

management throughout the national park system met with great success during the next 

decade. The Service evaluated its response to fire, designed new mechanisms to bring 

practice and ideology into a coherent relationship, and invested resources in internal 

responses and in interagency planning, resource acquisition, and deployment. By the late 

1990s, fire managers felt they could view their very complex field with a little more ease. 

The development of a national fire planning and management structure – the new 

standards the NPS successfully implemented and the remarkable biological renewal of 

Yellowstone – combined to give the Service’s fire management greater credibility with 

the public than it had ever before enjoyed. 

Ironically, the urban fires of the 1990s, especially the Oakland-Berkeley Hills fire 

in 1991, actually improved the Service’s status. Mike Davis’s Ecology of Fear: Los 

Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster, reached No. 1 on The New York Times 

bestseller list and sparked a controversy over whether communities that built in 

hazardous fire areas merited the response of public services. One chapter, entitled “The 

Case for Letting Malibu Burn,” spurred particular animosity even as it directed much of 

the rancor about fire away from the National Park Service. Davis argued that 

communities that allowed home construction in what were clearly hazardous locations 

deserved to face fire without the deployment of external resources, shifting the debate 

over practice from federal agencies to cities and counties.1

 For a moment, Americans 

seemed poised to enter a dialogue about the responsibility of communities for the fires 

they encountered. 

The phenomenon that historian Lincoln Bramwell called “wilderburbs”– 

communities that emerged at the nexus of rural and wild land and urban expansion to 

enjoy the amenities of each–combined with Davis’s work to ignite a debate about the 

siting of new communities in the post-urban West. Federal agencies removed fallen trees 

and underbrush on more than 2.2 million acres in 1999 alone to limit the chances of fires. 

Still, more than 200 million acres historically prone to frequent fire carried the heavy 

underbrush associated with suppression. The result was dangerous and left not only 

federal land managers, but also officials at the state, county, and even local levels in a 

1

 Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (New York: 

Metropolitan Books, 1998), 93-148. 

220 
 

difficult situation.2 Urban and suburban sprawl had become endemic nation-wide; in the 

West it encroached on national park areas and added a range of new problems for their 

managers. Much of the region lacked adequate mechanisms to regulate suburban 

planning. As a result, communities grew nearly everywhere, adding not only the threat of 

accidental or intentional fires from nearby populations to the problems of park managers, 

but also the possibility that such communities, located without much more than a nod to 

safety from wild fire, might very well serve as conduits for the inevitable fires in a 

region’s drier sections. Even as the National Park Service grappled with urban parks such 

as Golden Gate National Recreation Area, urbanization and its attendant sprawl 

encroached on previously remote or distant national park areas in the West and 

throughout the nation. 

By the mid-1990s, the National Park Service had achieved the respect of the fire 

community as well as many accolades for its approach to fire management. The common 

federal fire policy of 1995 signaled the further ascent of the NPS and its ideas and values 

to a position nearly parallel to that of the Forest Service. The NPS model of fire 

management, begun in the 1960s, had become the currency of federal fire policy. The 

importance of the NPS philosophy became solidified when other federal agencies 

recruited NPS fire personnel for their agencies, a reversal of a 60-year trend of personnel 

movement from the Forest Service to nearly every other federal land management agency 

that had dominated fire management since the NPS hired John Coffman in the late 1920s. 

The desirability of National Park Service personnel to other agencies further illustrated 

the thirty-year leadership of the NPS in fire management. 

At the same time, a long series of drought years in the West that began in the mid1990s contributed to a critical change in regional fire patterns. The growing problem of 

fires that existed near wilderburbs shifted the fire focus back toward conventional 

historical models of suppression. Damage to property and threats to human life remained 

situations where immediate suppression was the sole management alternative. By 2000, 

the Forest Service had regained an important measure of its earlier position. Many of the 

major fires were on its lands, and its holdings included many of the places where wild 

land and urban growth coexisted so uneasily. In effect, the sheer volume of fire pushed 

the Forest Service back toward center stage, where actions superseded ideas for the first 

time in a generation. 

As spring turned to summer in 2000, a pair of nearly simultaneous escaped 

prescribed fires on national park lands illustrated the gravity of the changes occurring in 

fire management, as well as the fundamentally tenuous nature of all existing strategies to 

manage, combat, or regulate fire. The emphasis on prescribed burning that characterized 

the period after the new national fire plan in 1995 yielded tremendous benefits for the 

NPS, but contained parallel risks. The acceleration of prescribed burning programs 

treated considerable acreage, but as always, a great deal of land experienced no such 

management. The reasons varied; in some cases, prescribed burning was deemed too 

dangerous because of the proximity of communities, facilities, and other development. In 

far more instances, the resources were insufficient, the time to undertake such a program 

too short, or the conditions were deemed too unsuitable. The NPS treated as much land as 

2

 Lincoln Bramwell, “Wilderburbs: The Rise of Rural Development in the Rocky Mountain West, 

1960-2000,” (Ph.d. diss., University of New Mexico, Prospectus, 2003); David Carle, Burning Questions: 

America’s Fight with Nature’s Fire (Westport, CT: Praeger Press, 2002), 225-26. 

221 
 

 

 

 

 

it could and planned for more, all the while recognizing the inherent risk in any program 

that allowed fire in any way. With the ongoing drought and some simple bad fortune, risk 

came to the forefront in May 2000. 

On the north rim of the Grand Canyon, where the connection between wild land 

fire and urban expansion was at best remote, the Outlet Fire near North Rim Village on 

the North Rim in April and May 2000 illustrated one of the fundamental problems with 

introducing fire. By 2000, Grand Canyon had engaged in a prescribed burning program 

for almost two decades. A fire management plan, approved in 1992, had been revised in 

1993, 1994, and 1995. These reviews looked at program successes and identified areas of 

concern. A 1997 NPS review team identified a particular long-standing problem in the 

North Rim forests, an accumulation of litter such as fallen trees, branches, and shed 

leaves and needles. Combined with an invasion of spruce and fir thickets that provided 

fuel ladders that could lead to enormously destructive crown fires, this set up a 

potentially dangerous situation. The problem first had been recognized on the North Rim 

in 1981 by Regional Plant/Fire Ecologist Kathleen Davis and reiterated during the 1990s. 

The 1997 review team recommended the development of a landscape-level prescribed 

burning program for the North Rim forests.3 

The team of experienced fire managers who undertook the 1997 review– Steve 

Botti, Jim Douglas, Steve Tryon, and Wally Josephson – recognized the North Rim as an 

example of the problems of fuel load accumulation that vexed so much western wild land 

and remained the subject of powerful debates in the professional and scholarly fire 

community. Its members recognized that the existing prescribed burning program on the 

North Rim had only achieved some of its stated goals. The suppression of two prescribed 

burns that escaped, the Mathes and the Northwest III fires, along with concerns about 

smoke that marred visitors’ experience, led to what the review team described as a 

“conservative approach” to the reintroduction of fire as a management tool at the park. 

Yet, the team found Grand Canyon more willing to be aggressive in its response than it 

had been in the past.4 The review opened the way for a more aggressive prescribed burn 

policy. 

An appropriate strategy for the introduction of prescribed fire provided the park 

with a philosophical choice. The Grand Canyon had been thoroughly studied by a range 

of scientists, and different schools of thought offered their own remedies for the North 

Rim problems. Headed by Professor W. Wallace Covington of Northern Arizona 

University, an experienced fire scholar who focused his research on the Grand Canyon, 

some researchers believed that because of the particular circumstances of the North Rim 

– the heavily loaded Ponderosa Pine-mixed conifer forest – it required mechanical 

thinning of the biomass before introducing prescribed fire. In deference to this research, 

the review team suggested that “testing the truth of this hypothesis should be a central 

component of the park’s fire management program over the next five to ten years.” The 

advantages were obvious: reduced risk to land and people; an opportunity to have a 

3

 Steve Botti, Jim Douglas, Steve Tryon, and Wally Josephson, “Trip Report: North Rim of the Grand 

Canyon Fire Management Program Review, August 12-14, 1997,” Grand Canyon, 1; Regional Plant/Fire 

Ecologist, Division of Natural Resource Management, Western Region to Regional Director, Western 

Region, October 23, 1981, Grand Canyon Fire Collection, Grand Canyon National Park. 4

 Botti, Douglas, Tryon, and Josephson, “Trip Report: North Rim of the Grand Canyon Fire 

Management Program Review, August 12-14, 1997,” 1-2. 

222 
 

 

 

 

prescribed fire regime mirror natural fire as opposed to serve as a replacement for its 

absence, opportunities to assist local residents with timber sales and other economic 

advantages of such cutting; and the avoidance of the social and political fallout that 

typically accompanied smoke emissions. The disadvantages included the social 

consequences of the removal of as much as 90 percent of the North Rim’s forests, with 

visitors in particular expected to balk at what they would certainly see as a denuded 

landscape; the problems such logging might cause for wilderness designation and 

wilderness study areas; the threat of severe wildfire before the thinning could take place 

and the attendant problem of burning the slash that remained; as well as the consequences 

of the many stumps that would be visible to the traveling public that held a decidedly 

different view of what a national park should look like. The review also presented the 

problem of cost. Even with timber sales and slash logging, the expense might be 

prohibitive.5 

After weighing the conditions of the situation and possible solutions, the team 

made clear recommendations for a more aggressive prescribed burn policy. Team 

members wrote in their report, “It appears that a greatly expanded program to use fire as 

a management tool offers the best hope for preventing catastrophic wildfire and restoring 

the natural ecosystem in the long run.” Resources were available for hazardous fuel 

reduction and Grand Canyon had begun to use them to carry out large-scale burns when 

weather and other conditions permitted. The team also recommended using nearly every 

“tool in the toolbox” – mechanical thinning, planned ignitions in key areas, and the ideas 

of Covington and other scholars about the impact of fire on native plants. Broad-based 

and innovative, the park adopted the report’s ideas in a 1998 revision of its fire plan.6 

In accordance with that plan, on April 25, 2000, Grand Canyon ignited the Outlet 

prescribed burn, an area at about 8,400 feet, in a region of mixed conifer and PiñonJuniper complex just west of the developed area on the North Rim. The goals of the 

prescribed burn were to perpetuate natural processes and reduce hazardous fuels. On 

April 27, another fire, on the Tiyo Sub-unit, had an incomplete ignition that resulted in a 

“dirty burn,” but despite predications to the contrary, it remained inside its prescription 

area. On May 8, firing began on the east side of the Widforss Sub-unit on the Outlet Fire. 

The burn proceeded in accordance with expectations until the next day. A wind came up 

on May 9 and an undetected spot fire on the Widforss Sub-unit grew until it exceeded the 

parameters of its prescription. This threatening situation drew scrutiny from park 

officials, and later that day, when weather experts predicted strong winds for the next 

day, Grand Canyon Superintendent Robert L. Arnberger declared both the Tiyo and 

5

 Ibid, 2-4; W. W Covington and M.M. Moore, “Post-Settlement Changes in Natural Disturbance 

Regimes: Implications for Restoration of Old-Growth Ponderosa Pine Ecosystems in Old-Growth Forests 

in the Southwest and Rocky Mountain Region,” Proceedings of the Symposium, March 9-13, 1992, Portal, 

Arizona, USDA Forest Service General Technical Report RM-213 (Rocky Mountain Forest and Range 

Experiment Station, Fort Collins, CO), 81-99; W. W. Covington and M.M. Moore. “Southwestern 

Ponderosa Forest Structure and Resource Conditions: Changes since Euro-American Settlement,” Journal 

of Forestry 92 1 (1994): 39-47; W. W. Covington and S. Sackett, “Soil Mineral Nitrogen Changes 

Following Prescribed Burning in Ponderosa Pine,” Forest Ecology and Management 54 (1994), 175-191; 

W. W. Covington, R.L. Everett, R.W. Steele, L.I. Irwin, T.A. Daer, and A.N.D. Auclair, “Historical and 

Anticipated Changes in Forest Ecosystems of the Inland West of the United States,” Journal of Sustainable 

Forestry, 4 2 (1994). 6 Ibid., 6-9; Outlet Prescribed Fire April 2000, 14-23; Fire Behavior Modeling for Outlet Prescribed 

Fire Project, 41-49, Grand Canyon, Fire Collection, Grand Canyon National Park. 

223 
 

 

 

 

 

 

Outlet as wildfires. He alerted the Type II Northern Arizona Incident Management Team, 

headed by Incident Commander Larry Anderson, and asked it to be ready to take over fire 

suppression efforts.7 

On May 10, the velocity of the winds dramatically rose, changing Grand 

Canyon’s response to the Outlet Fire. Gusts reached sixty miles per hour, and by 2:30 

p.m., the park was evacuating the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. After a difficult night, 

when snags and fallen green trees blocked roads and fire crews were forced to bed down 

in the open to avoid hazards such as falling trees, transfer of command to an incident 

management team began at a 7:00 a.m. meeting. By May 11, the fire was estimated to 

cover between 1,500 and 2,000 acres, but much of the burning land was close to the 

developed areas at North Rim Village. This had potentially severe consequences. At the 

Nankoweap trailhead, visitors were stranded beyond the fire and hemmed in by downed 

trees, adding a search and rescue dimension to the obligations of the incident 

management team when it took charge of the fire.8 

The single largest problem the incident management team faced was a shortage of 

suppression resources at Grand Canyon. Fire-fighting personnel were in short supply, 

with only two Interagency Hotshot Crews and two Type II crews available. “A couple of 

Class 6 engines, 3 prescribed fire modules, and a helicopter that couldn’t fly in the high 

winds” were all the resources available, Al Hendricks of the Northern Arizona Incident 

Team wrote. “Suppression resources on the fire were meager.” The fire had grown much 

larger by the time the Type II team took charge, with aerial observation indicating it had 

reached 7,000 acres. Plans to call in a Type I team gained momentum, with input from 

the Washington office of the National Park Service. The Type II team established a camp 

on the Kaibab National Forest, just outside the park boundary. The winds died down on 

May 12 and 13, and the arrival of the Northern Rockies Type I incident team headed by 

Steve Frye and its personnel helped provide the workpower to initiate suppression. “We 

can fight this fire aggressively,” Frye told the press, “but we first do it safely and with 

sensitivity to the area’s natural and cultural resources.” By Saturday May 13, when the 

Type I team took control of the fire, a full complement of suppression resources became 

available.9 

During the next week, suppression remained the sole mode of response. Stronger 

winds and low humidity aided the fire’s growth on May 14, but 800 firefighters 

continued to dig handlines, providing 20 percent containment. High winds the following 

day contributed to continued erratic fire behavior. Although the blaze did not cross any 

established control lines that day, the park reported containment at 43 percent. On May 

16, the fire grew to 13,350 acres, even as the total force fighting it reached 914. 

Favorable weather conditions on May 17-18 helped crews start to gain control of the fire, 

7

 Al Hendricks, “Outlet Fire Incident Narrative,” May 2000, Grand Canyon, 1; National Park Service 

News Release, “Outlet Fire and Grand Canyon National Park,” May 12, 2000, Grand Canyon Fire 

Collection, Grand Canyon National Park. 8 Al Hendricks, “Outlet Fire Incident Narrative,” May 2000, Grand Canyon National Park, 1; 

National Park Service News Release, “Outlet Fire and Grand Canyon National Park,” May 12, 2000, Grand 

Canyon Fire Collection, Grand Canyon National Park. 9

 Al Hendricks, “Outlet Fire Incident Narrative, May 2000, Grand Canyon, 3-4; National Park 

Service News Release, “Outlet Fire and Grand Canyon National Park,” May 13, 2000; National Park 

Service News Release, “Outlet Fire and Grand Canyon National Park,” May 15, 2000, Grand Canyon, Fire 

Collection, Grand Canyon National Park. 

224 
 

 

 

 

 

and with sixteen miles of handlines completed and as many as six left to dig, the fire was 

reported to be 56 percent contained. Superintendent Arnberger expressed his support and 

gratitude for the work of the fire crews. On May 19, he declared that the North Rim 

would reopen to visitors on Monday, May 22. By Sunday night, Incident Commander 

Steve Frye could report total containment of the Outlet Fire.10 

After the incident, the assessment of the fire showed little culpability on the part 

of Grand Canyon. An investigative team, led by co-chairs William F. Paleck, 

superintendent of North Cascades National Park and Forest Supervisor Rodd Richardson 

of the Bitterroot National Forest and committee members Bill Clark, the Idaho state fire 

management officer of the Bureau of Land Management, Bill Wallis, Colorado state fire 

management officer of the BLM, Ron Hamilton of the Forest Service, Stephen G. Jakala, 

fire management officer at Voyageurs National Park, Greg Harmon of the National 

Weather Service, and Tom Pittenger of Grand Canyon National Park, generally praised 

NPS preparation and handling of the fire. The “overall competence, professionalism, and 

accomplishments” of the Grand Canyon Prescribed Fire program was unassailable in the 

investigation team’s assessment. The problems it identified – that fire leadership was, in 

the words of the report, “spread too thin for too long,” and that the plan did not contain 

enough contingency triggers in case of escalation – were minor. “The prescribed burn 

program at Grand Canyon National Park is fundamentally sound,” the report concluded. 

“Continuation and even expansion of current program levels is absolutely necessary to 

safeguard the park from the effects of nearly 100 years of fire exclusion.”11 

The Outlet Fire was dramatic and its small size and disproportionate impact 

served to illustrate the growing dilemma of the twenty-first century American West, 

where the wide-open spaces were increasingly dotted with people. Using fire in the 

proximity of people – whether visitors to the North Rim, gateway communities, or 

suburban development in general – affected the way in which federal agencies, including 

the National Park Service, could conceive of its use. The effects of ecological restoration 

and the introduction of fire had to be deftly balanced with those of adjacent communities 

and travelers, concessioners, and others. Even the most adroit calculation could spiral out 

of control, as the Outlet Fire on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon showed. 

At the same time, the review of the team’s actions highlighted the ways in which 

the problems with fire were inherent and random. The Outlet Fire could have happened 

anywhere at any time; it resulted not from bad planning or decision-making, the review 

committee concluded, but from changing natural conditions. Unlike earlier fires where 

critics pointed to flawed policy or mistakes in implementation, at Outlet the NPS made 

no significant errors in planning or operations. Fire management included risk; the 

assessment of that risk was more a political and cultural question than an ecological one. 

10 National Park Service News Release, “Suppression Continues on the Outlet Fire,” May 13, 2000; 

National Park Service News Release, “Outlet Fire and Grand Canyon National Park,” May 15, 2000; 

Northern Rockies Incident Management Team, “Predicted High Winds Cause Concern on the Outlet Fire,” 

May 16, 2000; Northern Rockies Incident Management Team, “Outlet Fire Update, May 17, 2000;” 

Northern Rockies Incident Management Team, “Outlet Fire Update, May 18, 2000;” Northern Rockies 

Incident Management Team, “Outlet Fire Update, May 19, 2000;” Northern Rockies Incident Management 

Team, “Outlet Fire Update, May 21, 2000,” Grand Canyon. 11 William F. Paleck, Rodd Richardson, Bill Clark, Bill Wallis, Ron Hamilton, Stephen G. Jakala, 

Greg Harmon, and Tom Pittenger, “Outlet Prescribed Fire Project, Grand Canyon National Park, 

Investigative Report, May 2000,” http://www.nps.gov/grca/fire/outlet/report. 

225 
 

 

Critics might chafe that in an era of constant weather surveillance, such a wind as the one 

that caused the outbreak should be predictable, especially during the late spring, the 

review said. Typically, this was the season of the largest fires in the region, and critics 

reminded the NPS that no one else was conducting burn operations at the time. Still, 

National Park Service officials retorted, any time the NPS introduced fire, no matter how 

valuable that fire might be, the potential for its escape existed as well as an attendant 

array of problems that had little to do with the ecological value of fire. 

At about the same time, a second prescribed fire escaped its control lines. It 

occurred in precisely the kind of area that demanded an answer to the questions that the 

response to the Outlet Fire successfully skirted. Located on the Pajarito Plateau about 

forty miles from Santa Fe, New Mexico, the federal government established Los Alamos 

during World War II as a secret community where research into splitting the atom and the 

development of an atomic bomb took place. In this way and in almost every other social, 

cultural, or economic matrix, Los Alamos was atypical of western communities. Its level 

of education, demography, and economic structure could not be replicated in the interior 

West, nor was there anywhere else as exclusively dependent on Ph.D.-level research 

between the Sierra Nevada and the Mississippi River.12 Despite this tremendous 

difference from the world around it, Los Alamos was entirely typical in other ways. In its 

location amid a stunning environment, urban growth, and proximity to a heavily visited 

national park area, it served as a bellwether of the problems the National Park Service 

faced with the growing number of communities near its parks and the threat of fire. 

The Los Alamos area had been the scene of a number of fires that were 

frightening more because of their impact potential than their size. La Mesa in 1977 had 

been the first of significance since the siting of the Manhattan Project that built the 

atomic bomb in the 1940s; later outbreaks in 1996 and 1998 – the Dome and Oso fires – 

illustrated that the long-standing practice of excluding fire in the vicinity had created a 

terrifying prospect: a heavily fuel-laden region with an urban area at its core. Studies by 

ecologist Craig D. Allen and dendrochronologist Tom Swetnam suggested that the last 

thorough burn on the location of Los Alamos took place in 1881 whereas throughout the 

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, significant fires occurred about every six months. 

When grazing began in earnest in the late nineteenth century, fires had diminished; in the 

aftermath, the practice of exclusion guaranteed dense forest with a great deal of 

understory – conditions ripe for severe fires. What made the situation even more 

dangerous was the proximity of the town of Los Alamos and the Los Alamos National 

Laboratory, where significant experimentation with weaponry still took place and where 

the U.S. government had stored radioactive and explosive materials. Although everyone 

knew that Los Alamos housed weapons research and contained an array of dangerous 

compounds and chemicals, national security constraints restricted information. 

Firefighters had little idea of what they might encounter.13 

12 Hal K. Rothman, On Rims and Ridges: The Los Alamos Area Since 1880 (Lincoln: University of 

Nebraska Press, 1992); James Kunetka, City of Fire: Los Alamos and the Birth of the Atomic Age, 1943-

1945, rev. ed. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1979). 

13 Craig Allen, “Panel Discussion: Cerro Grande Fire,” First National Congress on Fire Ecology, 

Prevention, and Management, San Diego, CA, December 1, 2000; Craig D. Allen, R. Touchan, and 

Thomas Swetnam, “Landscape-Scale Fire History Studies Support Fire Management Action at Bandelier,” 

Park Science, 15 3 (1995), 18-19. 

226 
 

 

 

 

When NPS officials from Bandelier National Monument authorized a prescribed 

fire for Upper Frijoles Creek drainage on April 19, 2000, they could not have anticipated 

that the fire would be the catalyst for another reevaluation of fire in the national park 

system. Park officials selected the Upper Frijoles drainage units 1 and 5 for the burn. An 

earlier effort to burn unit 1 in 1993 had not achieved desired results, but in accordance 

with the park’s fire management plan, efforts to burn these areas continued. The 1993 fire 

had only minimally diminished the load of 34.4 tons per acre before the burn, to 29 tons 

per acre, a 16 percent reduction. The primary purpose of the 2000 burn was to reduce 

hazard fuels in the units. A three-part approach was approved. The park needed dry 

conditions to achieve its goals everywhere but in the high-elevation grasslands. The 

planned first phase was to burn the upper area that included the grasslands; the second 

phase was to burn the timbered areas and the drier, south-facing slopes throughout the 

area. Managers planned to delay the third phase until the wettest areas of the units were 

dry enough to burn.14 

Bandelier’s prescribed fire initially seemed to be an ordinary event. After a May 4 

amendment to the plan, which excluded private property on the Valle Grande from the 

project, the burn boss, Mike Powell, made the appropriate notifications and conducted the 

required briefings. The holding boss called for the spot weather forecast. At 7:20 p.m. on 

May 4, crews ignited a test fire atop Cerro Grande in the Jemez Mountains in the 

westernmost part of the park. By 8 p.m., the test fire was completed and officials deemed 

it within prescribed parameters. By 10 p.m., crews completed the ignition process on the 

northeast edge of the fire area. At 11:15 p.m., ignition of the northwest area began. 15 

By the early morning of May 5, the Cerro Grande Prescribed Fire had begun to 

spread beyond the boundaries of its prescription. At 1 a.m., crews reached the upper 

saddle and spent ninety minutes bringing the fire back into the saddle from the knob. 

Ninety minutes later, the fire seemed under control, and the burn boss and crews stopped 

to rest. At 3 a.m., the burn boss asked for help from a Type III team with a helicopter and 

a twenty-person hand crew, and requested Bandelier Engine 91 to come on duty at 5:30 

am. Although it was not customary to order helicopters for prescribed burns, Bandelier’s 

fire management officer and the zone dispatcher agreed that the resources, ordered for a 

wild fire burning in the Santa Fe National Forest, would be diverted to the prescribed 

burn on national park land.16 Although this was a little unusual, officials believed the 

burn still seemed manageable with little more than typical resources. 

By 10 a.m., conditions seemed more threatening. Wind changes initially created 

some spotting within the designated area, and slopover, firefighting terminology for when 

a wildfire crosses a control line, on the upper east part of the fireline caused some 

concerns. The crew on the northeast side reported difficulty in containing the fire within 

the designated boundaries. Managers requested water drops and extra firefighters. At 

10:30 a.m., a helicopter dropped two people off on the northeast side of the fire and 

departed to pick up the bucket and begin water drops. At 11 a.m., the Type I hand crew 

14 Fire Investigation Team, National Interagency Fire Center, “Cerro Grande Prescribed Fire, May 4-

8, 2000, Investigation Report, May 18, 2000,” (Boise, ID: National Interagency Fire Center, 2000), 9-11. 15 Ibid. 10. 

16 Ibid., 11; State of Florida, Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Forest Service, and White Mountain 

Apache Tribe, Cerro Grande Prescribed Fire: Independent Review Board Report (Washington, D.C.: 

National Park Service, 2000), 1-15; National Park Service, Board of Inquiry, Cerro Grande Prescribed 

Fire, Final Report, February 26, 2001 (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 2001), 42-52. 

227 
 

 

 

 

arrived, with five of its members heading to the west line, while the remaining thirteen 

went to the troubled northeast side. An air tanker was requested for the slopover, and it 

arrived at 12:55 p.m. Five minutes later, Powell converted the prescribed fire to a 

wildland fire, changing his status from burn boss to incident commander.17 

During the subsequent thirty-six hours, the regional fire apparatus responded to 

the new situation. Paul Gleason, an experienced NPS fire manager, took over as Incident 

Commander, and he briefed park management on the renamed Cerro Grande Fire. He, 

Bandelier’s fire management officer, and the chief of resource management designed a 

Wildland Fire Situation Analysis (WFSA), which Superintendent Roy Weaver approved 

on the evening of May 5. Gleason made several critical tactical decisions. He saw the 

problems the hotshot crew faced on the underslung line, when a hand crew or bulldozer 

constructs a fireline horizontally across a slope below a fire, which had to be scraped and 

cut beneath overhead trees, some with dead limbs. He decided that crossing the face of 

the mountain was too dangerous. “I gave to the park superintendent, as my preferred 

alternative, to go indirect, down to Route 4,” he recalled in a panel discussion about the 

fire. Crews improved the existing fire lines and blacklined with drip torches, utilizing a 

portion of burned acreage, “the black,” as part of the fire line they constructed. The 

strategy had been set.18 

At first, it seemed to work. A National Weather Service spot forecast at 11:55 

p.m. on May 5 called for a fire weather watch the following day, but with the resources 

available, Bandelier managers believed preparations seemed an adequate response to the 

rapidly changing situation. Spot fires outside the designated boundary were contained on 

May 6, and blacklining continued. A meeting between the park and representatives of the 

Los Alamos National Laboratory, the U.S. Forest Service, and Los Alamos County 

addressed suppression strategy and tactics in the WFSA.19 

As late as 11:00 a.m. on May 7, most spot fires appeared to be contained and the 

day began with optimism. At 2:30 a.m., the fire was tied to its anchor point at Route 4. 

Bandelier’s next objective was to bring the blacklining fire across from east to west, but 

the wind blew downslope, exactly the wrong direction for such a goal. Even though 

Frijoles Canyon, choked with fuel according to one description, sat across the road, fire 

managers felt compelled to wait. The situation still seemed manageable. Just as officials 

felt that they had contained the fire, west winds dramatically increased and the fire spread 

into the adjacent Santa Fe National Forest. By noon, the fire had spread south of Route 4 

into the Upper Frijoles Canyon drainage, burning with an intensity that made it 

impossible for the crews to attack it. The blaze turned into a crown fire, sending embers 

flying ahead that created spotting and crowning east of the prescribed fire zone. As this 

fire broke containment, a Type I incident management team was ordered. At 12:40 p.m., 

Gleason ordered the evacuation of Graduation Flats and American Springs; shortly after, 

all agencies in the area closed roads on their lands and evacuation procedures began.20 

17 Fire Investigation Team, National Interagency Fire Center, “Cerro Grande Prescribed Fire, May 4-

8, 2000, Investigation Report, May 18, 2000,” 12. 18 Carle, Burning Questions, 229. 

19 Fire Investigation Team, National Interagency Fire Center, “Cerro Grande Prescribed Fire, May 4-

8, 2000, Investigation Report, May 18, 2000,” 12-13. 20 Carle, Burning Questions, 230; Fire Investigation Team, National Interagency Fire Center, “Cerro 

Grande Prescribed Fire,” May 4-8, 2000, Investigation Report, May 18, 2000, 13. 

228 
 

By 3 p.m., the situation had turned even more dangerous. East of the burn, 

watchers reported spot fires with the potential to threaten the town of Los Alamos and the 

laboratory installations. Even as two Type I crews successfully worked to contain the 

fires in Frijoles Canyon, a spot fire to the east of the prescribed burn area had grown to 

100 acres and it had spotted an additional quarter of a mile up the road. In response, fire 

managers decided to burn sections between State Route 501 and the Camp May Road, 

Forest Road 1, in an effort to protect the town and the Los Alamos laboratory. Fire 

conditions were changing and so was the need for the response.

21 

That evening, the fire rapidly spiraled out of control. Even though crews 

contained the Frijoles Canyon spot fire, conditions rapidly worsened. A Type I team took 

charge of the fire at 6 a.m. on May 8, even as the fire ran across the east side of the 

mountain with flames of 100-150 feet in length. On May 9, the Los Alamos Monitor, the 

local newspaper, trumpeted a headline that read: “Wildfire! Worse Fears Become Reality 

for Los Alamos.” As the fire gained momentum, New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson 

ordered the evacuation of Los Alamos. Between 5 p.m. on May 10 and early Thursday 

morning May 11, fires burned across more than 20,000 acres. Two-hundred-and-thirtynine homes were destroyed in Los Alamos. The fire then moved north in the direction of 

the San Ildefonso and Santa Clara Pueblo lands adjacent to the Los Alamos installation. 

Sixty-mile-per-hour winds made the fire devastating and dangerous. Before it was over, it 

destroyed thirty-nine Los Alamos National Laboratory office trailers and sheds. In a 

stroke of fortune, no radiation escaped nor was any toxic material released. By the time 

the fire was brought under control in early June, more than 400 families had been 

displaced, estimated damage costs exceeded $1 billion, and the idea of prescribed burning 

faced another enormous challenge.22 

The Cerro Grande fire was hardly new in the annals of NPS fire management, but 

in terms of impact, it was the worst prescribed burn to go awry. While earlier prescribed 

burns had escaped or caused damage, the scope and scale of Cerro Grande’s damage far 

exceeded any prior escape. Worse, to the public and the press, Cerro Grande looked like a 

mistake in judgment. Sentiments in the nearby communities become intensely negative. 

Many openly excoriated the NPS. A few chose not to place blame. Among those who had 

seen their homes burn either in person or on television, a number remained sanguine 

about the result. Louis Jalbert, a waste handler at the Los Alamos National Laboratory 

who lost not only his family’s home, but lived next door to his in-laws, whose home was 

also destroyed in the fire, felt that the fire was an “act of nature in a tinderbox.” 

Expressing no bitterness as he talked to the Los Alamos Monitor, Jalbert still believed 

that prescribed burns were good policy.23 

Jalbert held a minority view. Most of the people affected by the fire were not so 

charitable toward the National Park Service. They felt that their trust had been abused, 

their safety compromised, and their lives put in danger to serve what they regarded as 

obscure purposes. Their view of the NPS and its fire program was harsh, and even the 

attempts at apology from the NPS were rebuked. “Based on what we knew at the time 

21 Fire Investigation Team, National Interagency Fire Center, “Cerro Grande Prescribed Fire, May 4-

8, 2000, Investigation Report,” May 18, 2000, 13. 22 Carle, Burning Questions, 231-32; Gil Reavill, “Meltdown in Los Alamos,” Maxim (October 

2000). 23 Sarah Meyer, “Victims Return to Scene of Disaster,” Los Alamos Monitor (May 16, 2000), 1. 

229 
 

 

and what we believed needed to be done,” Superintendent Roy Weaver of Bandelier 

National Monument told the Monitor, he made the decision to start the fire. The results 

had been devastating and people “had a right to be frustrated and angry.” The Los 

Alamos public articulated both anger and frustration in myriad ways.24 

The official response came quickly. On May 11, Secretary of the Interior Bruce 

Babbitt and Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman suspended all federal prescribed 

burning west of the 100th meridian, the line running from North Dakota through Texas, 

for thirty days. Babbitt formed an interagency fire team to examine the circumstances of 

the burn. One week later, on May 18, 2000, the investigation report was complete. It was 

devastating to the NPS fire program. Investigators determined that the prescribed fire 

plan was not adequate for the circumstances. The complexity rating process for the Cerro 

Grande area had been flawed. It did not follow the NPS rating system, nor had it been 

accurately rated. Later reports discerned that the fire management rating posted on the 

Internet when the Cerro Grande prescribed burn was planned was incorrect. The danger 

presented by the conditions at the time of the fire was not adequately understood, in the 

estimation of the investigation team, nor was interagency cooperation sufficient to assure 

a useful fire rating system. The investigators recommended that federal agencies should 

jointly develop interagency complexity rating standards by geographic region rather than 

to try to implement agency-wide standards. The review also determined the prescribed 

fire plan did not receive thorough review before approval by Superintendent Roy 

Weaver, and the prescribed fire planner did not receive sufficient support or oversight for 

the task of developing a plan for the prescribed fire.25 

The press response further deepened the problems for the National Park Service. 

The juxtaposition of plutonium and other radioactive materials with an intentionally 

ignited prescribed burn spurred many to the limits of journalistic license. “An out-ofcontrol wildfire. A nuke factory with enough plutonium to wipe out the entire Southwest. 

A handful of exhausted firefighters,” the headline in Maxim magazine read in an 

overstated version of a widely asked question. “Just how close did we come to 

annihilation?”26 

The Cerro Grande fire represented the first time critics could point to clear NPS 

management mistakes as the cause of a major fire. Unlike Yellowstone in 1988 – when 

lightning was the genesis of the fires and the question of the nature of response led to the 

spread of fire, at Cerro Grande – the NPS simply erred. The prescribed fire had been set 

in less than optimal conditions, the Service lacked both adequate procedures and 

protocols for fire management, and the timing of the prescribed burn turned out to be 

poorly chosen. The attendant destruction of homes and Los Alamos National Laboratory 

structures compounded the problem. Not only did the initial decision reflect poorly on 

NPS judgment, the circumstances in which it occurred, near not only a town of more than 

10,000 people, but adjacent to the remarkable and potentially devastating research 

facilities in Los Alamos made what might only have been an untimely decision look 

24 Ibid. 

25 Barry T. Hill, “Fire Management: Lessons Learned From the Cerro Grande (Los Alamos) Fire, 

Statement before the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, United States Senate,” July 20, 2000, 1-

15, Bandelier National Monument Files, Y-14; “Report Opposes Firing Workers for Los Alamos Blaze,” 

USA Today (June 20, 2001). 26 Reavill, “Meltdown in Los Alamos.”. 

230 
 

unwise if not downright irresponsible. The fire represented another watershed, one more 

way that politics and public relations grappled with science as the dominant mode of 

preparation and reaction to fire. 

Cerro Grande set off more than immediate recriminations. The instantaneous 

reintroduction of suppression was the beginning of another rethinking not only of the 

NPS’s fire policy, but of agencies throughout the federal system. Even more, the board of 

inquiry determined that of the four people with primary responsibility who remained in 

the National Park Service after the fire, three required more training. Whether intended as 

an indictment or not, such a judgment had the effect of calling into question NPS 

professionalism. While fire experts could feel that the judgment was easy after the fact, 

ongoing public acknowledgment of shortcomings did little to help NPS morale or solve 

the problems of fire management.27 

The blame mounted until Bandelier Superintendent Roy Weaver spoke out nearly 

one year after the blaze. Although Weaver had been blamed for the fire – vilified, 

castigated, and threatened with the loss of his pension in its aftermath – he was quiet until 

April 2001, when he publicly spoke out in defense of the staff of Bandelier National 

Monument. The board of inquiry’s final report exonerated Weaver, but he believed the 

report did not go far enough. In the former superintendent’s view, Bandelier had been 

“unfairly scapegoated” for the fire, he told reporter Keith Easthouse. Not only had the 

park not been warned of impending high winds on May 7 as had been reported, the 

federal report on the fire was so hastily completed that it did not give a fair accounting of 

the incident or its suppression. “I don’t want to deny our responsibility for igniting the 

prescribed fire,” Weaver avowed. “But we did it with a plan that seemed valid and 

workable. Things happened that we couldn’t or didn’t anticipate. And that we couldn’t 

control.”28 

This admission was as candid as it was clear. Simply put, fire could not easily be 

made to conform to bureaucratic measurements. It was always a risk, always a danger, 

whether it burned or it was suppressed. All the planning in the world could not obviate a 

disastrous change in weather or geographic conditions. Even the board of inquiry, critical 

in its stance toward the fire response team, recognized the limits of human response. 

“While the Board did find errors in judgment,” the report read, “it also finds that the 

planning and implementation actions of the principals were not arbitrary, capricious, or 

unreasonable in light of the information they had prior to the burn and were in 

compliance with DO-18, RM-18, and other applicable sections of the National Wildland 

fire policy.”29 This tacit admission of limits in human response resulted from a century of 

experience. 

By the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century, little had been settled 

about the direction of fire policy in the United States. It was clear that fire had a role in 

the management of national parklands; even more telling, national park lands still 

enjoyed the special treatment they had always been accorded. The Healthy Forest 

Restoration Act of 2003 exempted the NPS from the timber cutting expected to reduce 

the impact of fire on national forest, Bureau of Land Management, and other federal 

27 Board of Inquiry, “Cerro Grande Prescribed Fire Final Report,” 49. 28 Keith Easthouse, “Park Service Unfairly Scapegoated for Los Alamos Fire,” Forest Magazine 

(April 5, 2001); Board of Inquiry, “Cerro Grande Prescribed Fire Final Report,” 46. 

29 Board of Inquiry, “Cerro Grande Prescribed Fire Final Report,” 49. 

231 
 

lands.30 Once again, the National Park Service’s unique mission separated it from other 

federal agencies. While timber cutting could and did take place on NPS lands in limited 

ways, the purpose was decidedly different from the commercial extractive obligations of 

the legislation. As a result, although the new national fire plan in 2000 demanded a 

different response from the NPS, the Service could and did hew to a line more consistent 

with its overall mission and objectives. 

At the same time, fire again took center stage. After Cerro Grande, a series of 

fires on federal lands further illustrated the problems of the existing regime. During 2002, 

two “monster fires,” in Pyne’s words, Hayman and Rodeo-Chediski, were the worst on 

record in Colorado and Arizona. The Biscuit fire in Oregon the same year was easily that 

state’s worst since the nineteenth century. In 2003, southern California’s mountains went 

up in flames. Fires burned across more than 740,000 acres, with twenty-two fatalities and 

more than 3,000 structures consumed. A new era seemed to dawn, what Pyne in a 

dramatic and even overblown phrase called “a crash in nature’s economy as profound as 

in the stock market.” The terms for fire management had to change throughout the federal 

system, but deciding what would replace the existing structure remained a complex 

31 process.

Even in the aftermath of Cerro Grande, the National Park Service carved its own 

course in fire management. Once the NPS had followed other federal agencies; after 

1968, it led. Yet, because of the difference in its mission and its objectives, particularly 

after the importance of resource management that was codified in the Redwood National 

Park Expansion Act of 1978, the NPS retained both the integrity and flexibility to 

administer its lands in accordance with its objectives. The result simultaneously kept the 

NPS within the fold of federal fire management while leaving enough room to manage its 

assets in accordance with the “preserve and make available for public enjoyment” tension 

that existed at the core of the NPS mission statement. 

By the twenty-first century, the National Park Service had come far from its 

origins in fire suppression, reaching a position of respect as a fire management 

organization. A century earlier, fire management at places such as Yellowstone National 

Park had been what the U.S. Cavalry determined it to be – often vain efforts at 

suppression accomplished with whatever resources were at hand. By 2000, a multifaceted bureaucracy oversaw fire management throughout the scattered dominion of the 

National Park Service. The NPS participated in interagency fire efforts, keeping a staff of 

forty-one at the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho. In 2003, the NPS 

invested $123,741,000 in fire management and another $1,564,331,000 in Operation of 

National Park System (ONPS) funding. It managed 53,351,361 acres with the potential to 

burn among its more than 84 million acre domain. It had 434 permanent firefighters, 

seven regional management fire officers, two Type I Hot Shot crews and one 

smokejumping crew, as well as nine fire use modules. The NPS owned 155 fire engines, 

fourteen water/foam tenders, and nine fire helicopters. In 2003, the NPS spent 

$21,191,000 to treat 22,523 acres of Wildland-Urban Interface lands laden with 

hazardous fuels. The Service spent an additional $20,084,000 to treat another 115,104 

30 Congress, House, Healthy Forests Restoration Act of 2003, 108th Cong., 1st sess., HR 1904, 3 

December 2003. 31 Stephen J. Pyne, Tending Fire: Coping with America’s Wildfires,” (Washington, D.C.: Island 

Press, 2004), 1-3. 

232 
 

acres containing hazardous fuels. This remarkable investment of funds and personnel 

created a comprehensive fire management program unequaled in the history of the 

National Park Service.32 

The change in attention paid to fire management reflected not only the changes in 

the National Park Service, but those of the twentieth century as well. The goals and 

standards of early fire suppression evolved into a management process measured by the 

highest scientific standards and aimed at achieving goals that were inconceivable at the 

1916 inception of the NPS. The Army’s initial emphasis on suppression in Yellowstone 

had been replaced by a systematic management structure that reflected improved 

technologies and better communications and the cutting edge of ecological science as 

well as specific NPS values. The greatest issues arose at the intersection of politics and 

scientific management, when either the ideals of policy were not applied with the clarity 

with which they were conceived or when even the best of policy fell short in a situation 

where wind-blown fire overwhelmed the structures and limitations of management. A 

longstanding policy of suppression made much land particularly vulnerable to the high 

fuel loads that drove fire of greater magnitude than would have occurred if a more natural 

regime had continued. Such situations became more common as people encroached on 

land with a propensity to burn even as the NPS and countless other federal agencies 

scrambled to treat the effects of nearly a century of fire suppression. 

Twice national parks have led a national move to manage fires. In the first 

instance, when the U.S. Cavalry arrived at Yellowstone, the national parks became the 

incubator of the idea of national fire management, the place where the experiment to 

attempt to suppress fire in a systematic way took place. In the second instance, in the late 

1960s, the NPS introduced the idea of using fire as tool, an idea that the Forest Service 

had buried in its enthusiasm for suppression early in the century. In this revolution in 

culture and practice, an overturning of an existing value system that paralleled a similar 

larger revolution in the United States, the NPS took the lead among federal agencies. 

Despite the difference in the NPS’s mission, its values spread to its peer agencies and 

rewrote the rules of fire management. 

By the early twenty-first century, the second heroic age of fire management was 

passing. The leaders who devised and instituted policies to use fire and then grappled 

with its consequences began to retire, supplanted by a generation that had never known a 

complete suppression regime or regarded fire as an enemy. As the people who had 

introduced fire to the national parks as a tool left the scene, they ceded the ground to this 

new cadre, who necessarily took the prerogative of using fire for granted. This simple 

change was a manifestation of the triumph of the fire management regime, testimony to 

its ability to overwhelm the model of suppression that preceded it. 

Yet, the National Park Service’s fire issues remained apart from those of other 

federal agencies at a time when interagency cooperation was not only desirable but an 

essential condition for an adequate response to fire. The unique mission of NPS among 

federal agencies, its mandate to preserve as well as use, made the particulars of its fire 

management more difficult. The Service contributed to interagency efforts in the same 

proportions as did other agencies, but used those resources in different and sometimes 

more complex ways. Its ability to implement fires to transform landscapes backward in 

32 NPS Wildland Fire Fact Sheet, April 9, 2004, 

http://www.nps.gov/fire/download/uti_abo_wildlandfirefact.pdf. 

233 
 

time under the aegis of its resource management program allowed the NPS a measure of 

flexibility that advocates of the use of fire in other agencies envied. 

In a larger setting, this advantage was negated. The western fire scene was “the 

sum of all we have done and not done over the past century; not only the logging, the 

grazing, and the road building, but the biosphere reserves, the wilderness areas, the 

recreational sites; the loss of old species, the invasion of new,” Pyne wrote in his 2004 

summary of a career studying fire, Tending Fire. “The fires suppressed, the fires no 

longer set; the whole rearranged biota of the public domain,” he continued. “There is a 

good case to be made that policy of any sort can not function under that legacy.” Under 

such circumstances, the success of any fire policy might demand a faith in it that it did 

not merit. “Fire’s story is not wholly ours to narrate,” Pyne reminded his readers, and 

federal fire managers faced that fact in the early years of the twenty-first century.33 

For the National Park Service, the dilemma remained: how to get the right fires in 

the right places and keep the wrong fires out of the wrong areas. More complicated than 

either all-out suppression or prescribed fire in all its forms as implemented before 2000, 

this concern required even more of the National Park Service than any preceding 

philosophy. The Service’s mission simultaneously complicated its response to fire and 

shielded it from the sometimes narrow constraints in which other federal agencies 

functioned. Yet, after Outlet and Cerro Grande, the world would be different. After more 

than a century of dealing with fire in national parks, another new era began. In the 

twenty-first century, the National Park Service would again have to redefine the 

boundaries of its fire management strategy. 

33 Pyne, Tending Fire, 11-12. 

234 
235 
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Linn, Robert (email) 

Lissoway, John 

McKibben, Kevin 

Pyne, Stephen J. 

Van Wagtendonk, Jan 

Oral interviews can be found at the National Park Service, Harper’s Ferry Center archive. 

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