The History of Wildland Firefighting 

Wildfire is an element of nature that humans have had a relationship with for millions of 

years. When Europeans arrived in North America, they sought to exclude fire from the forest 

resources they wished to use. At the beginning of the 20th century, professional foresters 

responsible for managing federally protected lands were divided about whether to use wildfire 

for ecological benefits or to exclude it for fire protection. The debate ended when the great 

fires of August 1910 burned millions of acres, overran communities, and took the lives of over 

90 people, including 78 firefighters trapped in the Northern Rockies mountains. The fires 

galvanized public, scientific, and Congressional support to keep fire out of the woods. Congress 

doubled the U.S. Forest Service budget in 1911 and passed legislation to institutionalize and 

professionalize fire suppression. 

The Forest Service later codified total fire suppression in 1935’s 10 AM Policy, directing 

firefighters to control all wildfire by 10 AM the morning after its first report. The vast amount of 

manpower afforded by the New Deal’s Civilian Conservation Corps provided the human 

resources necessary to implement the new policy. Overall, the suppression effort proved very 

successful in reducing acres burned; the annual average dropped from a peak of 50 million 

acres in 1930 down to roughly 3 million by 1966.i

Firefighters suppress fires by depriving them of fuel. Fire needs heat, oxygen and fuel to 

survive, therefore firefighters perform the laborious, dirty work of starving fires of fuel by 

building “firelines,” a break in vegetation where the organic material is removed down to 

mineral soil. Firefighters on the ground today use roughly the same tools to build firelines as 

their predecessors used a century earlier. Chainsaws (which replaced double-bitted axes), 

shovels, and a combination axe and hoe called a Pulaski, are used to clear organic material. 

Mechanization delivered firefighters faster and further into the backcountry. In the late 

1930s, successful experiments dropping firefighters by parachute to remote fires led to the 

creation of the smokejumper program. Following WWII, large firefighting crews, aided by 

helicopters and all-terrain vehicles, began to specialize and shrink in size. Starting in the 1950s, 

the predecessors of today’s Interagency Hotshot Crews, heli-rappel crews, and dedicated 
The History of Wildland Firefighting 

wildland fire engine teams came into more widespread use. After working for decades as fire 

lookouts and on all-female firefighting crews during WWII, women entered the professional 

ranks slowly but steadily during the 1960s and 70s, earning their way onto the most elite crews. 

Aircraft, both helicopters and fixed-wing planes, delivered firefighters and supported their 

suppression efforts by dropping water and chemical retardants onto fires. 

The emerging sciences of forest and fire ecology questioned the exclusion of fire from 

forests and provided the science to support reintroducing wildfire to improve ecosystem 

health. Removing fire completely did not allow the natural regeneration process in forest 

ecosystems. In the 1970s federal agencies gave fire managers a more flexible policy of 

“appropriate suppression action,” which could range from fully suppressing a fire to confining a 

fire within a certain area under pre-determined conditions. This became known as wildland fire 

management (replacing fire control). Major policy changes in 1995 and 2014 further reinforced 

fire’s appropriate role on the land by embracing a vision of learning to live with wildfire and 

using it in part to restore forest to healthy, resilient landscapes. 

Today tens of thousands of men and women serve on wildland firelines each year. They 

work to protect more than lives and property, they are integral to improving the health and 

resilience of America’s forests and grasslands.

i Earl W. Loveridge, “The Fire Suppression Policy of the U.S. Forest Service,” Journal of Forestry 42 (1944): 552; 

Pyne, Fire in America, 282–86; Stephen J. Pyne, America’s Fires: Management on Wildlands and Forest (Durham, 

NC: Forest History Society, 1997): 25.