Big fires require many coincidences, or what Maclean in his crusty woodsman's persona called screwups. The day was hot, the air unstable, the fuels ripened over a long summer. The winds of the Missouri gorge met those of the gulch and the plume of the building fire. So, too, tragedy required other screwups that put the wrong number (or right) in the wrong place (or right) at just the wrong (right) time. The crew had to arrive neither too late, nor too early, which meant they had to parachute in, and then they had to find themselves too high up to get below the fire and too far down to outrace it up the slopes. Fire and fire crew had to converge with only one possible outcome.

Yet the same holds for great works of the imagination, those that are not merely clever but that exhibit the fundamentals of the human spirit as big fires do the physics of heat transfer. They, too, involve a convergence of screwups. The place has to fit the story, the story has to fit the theme, the text has to reconcile style with subject, and then the book has to bond with the larger culture. It was Maclean's genius to find the perfect place and story, and then to blend them in an evocation that only the most obtuse, literal, and positivistic could find objectionable. He understood that blowup fires could be tragedies, and that tragedies behaved, as a literary creation, much like big fires. They blow up. It was his triumph to have that work subsequently speak to the American fire community and then to American society in ways no other writing has. Until he jumped on it, Mann Gulch claimed an obscure side-canyon of fire history. until Norman Maclean jumped on it, and oversaw the creation of a literary blowup.

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How this happened is neither obvious nor inevitable. Mann Gulch had been in the chronicles for 28 years before Maclean took up the cause. Prior to 1992, when Young Men and Fire was published, Americans had had a century of forest reserves, on which they fought fires, without creating more than the odd doggerel and Sunday supplement journalism. Until Maclean saw the “It” through the smoke hardly anyone appreciated the literary potential of fires in a Montana mountain. But it is equally true that it took Maclean, who claims to have visited the area while it was still smoking, a long time to appreciate the possibilities. For decades he tried to write what would become the informing themes of Young Men and Fire using the massacre at the Little Bighorn. He couldn't make it work. At Mann Gulch everything—all the little screwups of setting, symbol, and story—converged.

Consider each part in turn. First, the place. Mann Gulch presents a self-contained world, though one inverted from the usual conception of mountain ravines. It is wide at top and narrow at bottom. During the fire no one could get into it from below (the one man who tried passed out); and only two got through openings at the top (for reasons they could not explain). The sweep of rounding ridges along the crest top form a broad amphitheater, and Maclean sketches his jumpers as insouciantly imagining themselves performing for a crowd. Geographically, the Gulch is a perfect microcosm. It contains all the action.

Next, the story. It, too, is a miniature of a life cycle. The jumpers are born out of the sky, leaving the womb of the C-47 and breaking the umbilical cord of their static-line as they descend. They live briefly on the slopes as they move to what they assume is a normal destiny. Then the fire blows up below them. They die, save for three. There is a remarkable unity of place and action, as Aristotle might have put it. The story is as self-contained as the place.

Still, it would have been unusable, as the Custer massacre was, without survivors. The smokejumper corps believe themselves an elite, which Maclean recodes as Calvinist elect. They are set apart from the run-of-the-mill populace who shun fires or find themselves recruited off bar-stools. Two smokejumpers live for reasons that no one can discern other than chance or predestination. The Mann Gulch blowup, as scientists from the Missoula lab prove with mathematical rigor, was a “race that couldn’t be won.” The natural order determined to clean out the Gulch. Firefighters, even those who thought themselves spared from the mundane and the mortal, had no more say than squirrels and deer.

The critical action turns on Wag Dodge and his "escape fire." And an escape it truly is. It allows him to evade the foreordained fates for all those too close to the flames. Through his own hands and wit he saves himself, and it is Maclean’s challenge to show that in saving himself he did not doom others. Dodge is the hinge on which the drama turns. A story of action, however graphic, cannot carry much moral burden. A story without choice or agency is natural history, not literature. Without Dodge's escape fire the saga of Mann Gulch is an accident. With Dodge, it is tragedy.

The text did not write itself, however. Tens of thousands of people have been on firelines, and thousands knew about Mann Gulch. The after-action studies led to reports and anecdotes and a Board of Review. But nothing like literature happened until Maclean did it. He moved from campfire anecdote to parable and then to universal tragedy. He saw in the episode what others did not. He wrote the equivalent of an escape fire.

The rules for nonfiction are simple enough. You can't make stuff up, you can't leave out something that truly matters, you have to match style and subject. Maclean's purpose is story, but narrative of a peculiar sort, because, in the end, the story is about storytelling. There is no formal outcome, tested as true and confirmed, a data set akin to a laboratory experiment. In fact, Maclean tries one form of explanation after another and they all fail except for simple storytelling, of the search as itself a story. So the design wanders, or appears to (Maclean is too savvy for a genuine random walk). What will make or break the tale is the voice of the storyteller.

Shrewdly, Maclean adopts the persona of an old woodsman, a man who knows fire and the countryside and the people who work it. In truth, he hadn't been on a fire since at age 17 he labored on a Forest Service trail crew. So he's not exactly a Tolstoy, narrating omnisciently, but neither is he a laborer who got educated into literary theory. The fancy concepts get buried, as the old woodsman allows Maclean to indulge in plot diversions and slang and a colloquial perspective that keeps the storytelling front and center. The upshot is not the true story of Mann Gulch but a true quest for the storytelling, which is the best someone can hope for. So place and event merge, like a reverse prism in which multiple bands refract into a single white light.

That leaves a bond with the culture because a book does not contain its own meaning but like a fire is a reaction that derives its significance from its setting and whose power lies in the power to propagate. For a blowup book there must be some triggering firewhirl of meaning. Maclean had a leg up because he was already a celebrity writer with a national audience thanks to A River Runs Through It and because his pursuit of the Mann Gulch story was widely known among the cognoscenti. In a perverse way his death before completing the text added piquancy. Like his portrayal of the jumpers who lurched ahead after the flames had overtaken them, Young Men and Fire seemed to carry Maclean's last wishes a final lunge after death had overtaken him. The book became a bestseller and won a National Book Critics Circle award.

Public attention, however, was framed by two events. In 1988 Yellowstone had burned (and burned and burned) and alerted the American public that there might be more to fire than a day or two’s flash of flame, and prepared it to move from fires etched into a celebrity landscape to a fire from a celebrity author. The defining event came two years after publication. The South Canyon fire in Colorado seemed, with unsettling fidelity, to reenact the tragedy at Mann Gulch. For decades fires had burned over crews, and if not indifferent, the culture had little mechanism to interpret those losses beyond a regrettable industrial accident. Other than a spread in Life magazine, little came from Mann Gulch. It shot up a photogenic plume, which then blew away with the next day’s news. Thanks to Young Men and Fire, however, the public had in its hands a Rosetta Stone by which to read the hieroglyphics on the slopes of its successor at Storm King Mountain.

The fire, part of a ruinous season that killed 34 firefighters and burned through nearly a billion dollars in suppression funds, galvanized the fire community. Within a year a new common federal wildland fire policy was announced along with protocols to help ensure the safety of crews. The book and its times bonded, or as Maclean might have put it, the little screwups of the inside world that was the book began to fit with the screwups of the outside world that was American society until they became the same. Without Young Men and Fire the reforms would have come piecemeal and more haltingly. And without a recapitulating fire to confirm it, Young Men and Fire would have passed, not unlike the fire of August 5, 1949, without much purchase. The downside has been the propagation of cloying imitators, like a field of thistle, and the preciousness that has attached to everyone who dons nomex. None of that can be charged to Maclean.

What he can claim is a singular success at changing how Americans thought about wildland fire and firefighters. The fact is, the Mann Gulch fire barely registered beyond the Northern Rockies. It was even possible, until 1992, to write the fire history of the country with hardly a mention beyond including it in the roll call of tragedy fires from 1937 to 1956. The tally of what it did not do is longer than what most partisans believe. It did not redirect fire research. A reorganization was already underway dating from 1948, and what galvanized research into fire behavior was not a blowup fire in a small side-canyon of the Rockies but the explosion two weeks later of an atom bomb by the Soviet Union. (Almost contemptuously the fire claimed the life of Harry Gisborne, the leading regional fire researcher, who collapsed while tramping around the site to investigate what had caused the blowup.) It did not refashion training and fireline operations. That came after two more, larger tragedies in California. It did not implant fire as a plausible theme within the larger culture despite a photoessay in Life magazine and a Hollywood movie, Red Skies of Montana, obviously based on it.

For American society wildland fires remained a curiosity and freak of western violence, like a grizzly bear attack. The impact of Mann Gulch remained stubbornly regional, agency-specific, even personal; the smokejumper corps, Forest Service Region One, and a handful of local oracles kept the memory alive; it inspired no memorial services, it sparked no literary legacy, it came and went like the fire that drove it. There are hints that the Forest Service, at a national level, was content to have it forgotten. Nor did Mann Gulch focus a national reconsideration of how the country ought to engage wildland fire. In 1949 the U.S. had endured a horrific world war, had entered a Cold War, and, though unaware, was poised to enter another war in Korea; and since firefighting was war by other means, casualties would happen. No one wanted them, no one planned for them, they were just part of the business or what the pretentious called battling the red menace.

The fact is, the Mann Gulch fire was trapped in an obscure side-canyon of history until Norman Maclean jumped on it. It was his literary imagination that stirred and scattered the embers into a blowup. Almost single-handedly Young Men and Fire established a literary genre, shouldered its way into the consciousness of the fire community, and more astonishingly bestowed onto American fire what it had never had before, a kind of Tolstoyan saga that gripped the public at large. It gave the literate public a kind of reading glasses with which it could see the 1994 South Canyon fire as something other than yet another blurry entry in a long fuzzy chronicle to the status of cultural catalyst. No other piece of literature in American fire history has come close.

In a story compounded of paradoxes, this may be the most telling: over the course of the fire policy revolution the most significant publication—one of the revolution's decisive moments—did not come from forestry schools or fire labs but from a professor of Renaissance literature at the University of Chicago. Other fire intellectuals knew how to put numbers on the phenomenology of fire. Maclean knew how to create meaning out of it.

Ultimately the Mann Gulch fire did all that its recent chroniclers have claimed for it. Those effects just happened not in 1949 but in 1994, two years after Maclean explained why we might care.

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But why did I come? The Mann Gulch fire occurred almost exactly five months after I was born, and Young Men and Fire had been published twenty years in the past by the time I trekked up the slopes on July 9, 2012. A decade earlier, in Smokechasing, I had published a critical essay on the book as literature, and had little to add. What brought me was the sense that American fire needed a new narrative to explain what was happening on its lands and to its culture. I wanted to know how a narrative became great. I had earlier written about the Big Blowup with that quest partly in mind, and now I wanted to understand better what alchemy had made Young Men and Fire possible.

The issue was not academic. In 2007 the Meriwether fire burned over the entire Gates of the Mountains Wilderness, including Mann Gulch. The river passage to the mouth of Mann Gulch was lined, on its eastern flanks, with burned hillsides and scorched trunks and trees with blackened catfaces along the river's edge. The new fire had reburned not only the scene of the 1949 tragedy but the entire range. In a real way it had also burned over the story of Young Men and Fire; so while scars from the 1949 fire yet remain, the scene has been erased and written over like the ink in a palimpsest. The book endures as art, but the template it added to the narrative cache available to the American fire community may not apply 15 years later.

The Meriwether fire began when lightning kindled a fire on the ridge between Colter and Meriwether canyons on July 17, 2007 as part of a regional bust. There were more compelling starts than one in a wilderness, and the specter of Mann Gulch still haunted the place and the tragedy's host forest was not about to send crews in to fight it. For several days they watched and occasionally drenched the creeping burn with helibuckets while they threw crews and engines at fires scattered like errant comets around Helena. Somehow - it's possible that one of those water dumps or the rotor wash from a Skycrane blew sparks down the mouth of Colter Canyon or roused the slumbering flames to fury—the fire blew up on 23 July, a mechanical recreation of the whirl that had perhaps eddied from the shearing winds between the Missouri’s gorge and Mann Gulch. The flames surged over Cap Mountain, then galloped across the entire Gates of the Mountains wilderness.[1]

This time there were no crews strung out along the slopes and daydreaming or taking photos. Before it ended, the fire blackened 47,000 acres, nearly twice the size of the legal wilderness, and threatened a subdivision along the forest’s south boundary, which was spared in part because fuels work had been completed earlier that spring. But no one died. No one trekked over the ridges pulaski in hand. No one subsequently scrutinized the fire’s behavior. No one wrote up so much as an official narrative. The fire had passed over the Gates with no more cultural consequence than had it been a flock of mountain sheep.

The Meriwether fire is now the dominant ecological story of fire at the Gates of the Mountains and Mann Gulch. But it doesn't fit any of the existing narrative templates. It was not a disaster story, it was not a classic firefight, and it was not a young-men-and-fire tragedy. It is to our times what the 10 o'clock fire was in 1949. If it is to have cultural traction, it will need a narrative that walks with caulk boots up the slopes in ways that matter to everyone outside the fire community.

It won't match Young Men and Fire until it again records what William James called “the sight of the struggle going on,” of "human behavior in extremis," and that will require putting people back into the scene. But the story needn't be tragedy. It just needs to find some way to engage with the larger culture in a morally compelling way and be granted a narrative to carry that meaning. That task will need the right place, the right story, the right imagination, and then the luck of the draw, the right timing to say what the sustaining society wants to hear. The Meriwether fire won't do that, but another fire might, and we can only hope that before too much longer a new Tolstoy will peer through the smoke and find it.

Written on the ridge separating Rescue Gulch from Mann Gulch, July 2012

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Stephen J. Pyne is the author of many books on the history of fire around the world, including America’s Fires: A Historical Context for Policy and Practice, part of the FHS Issues Series. This essay is reprinted from The Northern Rockies: A Fire Survey with the permission of the University of Arizona Press.

Notes

1] I wish to thank Craig Kockler of Helena National Forest for sparing a few minutes at the end of a long day to pass along information regarding the Meriwether fire.