ASPLUND, Rupert FS 1928-62 09-04-84 03__Corrected

U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service Region Five History Project

Interview with: Rupert Asplund Interviewed by: Bob Cermak Location: Asplund Home near Quincy, California Date: September 4, 1984 Transcribed by: Mim Eisenberg/WordCraft; February 2004 Corrected by: Linda Nunes

BOB CERMAK: Let’s see. You got hired, then, really as a fire prevention man. What happened after that first season?

RUPERT ASPLUND: I worked on the road in the wintertime, and in the spring, they brought in a tanker, the first mobile tanker in the history of the Forest Service. This would have been 1928.

CERMAK: Nineteen twenty-eight. I heard about that.

ASPLUND: And it was made up in Mount Shasta Forest Shop at Mount Shasta, and it was a

Fordson tractor with a six-speed transmission built into the tractor, and a bumper built into the tractor. There were two 500-foot reels, two reels carrying 500 feet of live reel, five hoses on each side of the tank of the Fordson. And there was a 500-gallon tank on the fifth wheel, behind the tractor. I think the idea was that since it was a tractor, you can take it off the road and go along the fireline up the mountain. Of course, as soon as you got it on the sidehill, why, one wheel would start to spin, so I figured out how to lock the brake on one side to get some traction, but I didn’t have too much success. I’d get it off the road occasionally. I drove to 125 fires on the Sierra Forest that summer.

That was the only year that that tractor was used. The Moreland tanker came into existence about the next year, 1929. That fall, I was on a lookout, Shuteye Lookout, a relief job. Rupert Asplund Interview, September 4, 1984, page 2

It was a dry season; 1929 was probably one of the driest periods in the history of the Forest

Service. It didn’t rain until after Christmas, particularly in the north. But I was on a lookout in the fall, and I had to take the ranger’s exam in October sometime, and I had to walk down from the lookout two miles and drive down to get to North Fork at nine o’clock. Earl Morrow came up and relieved me.

I took the ranger exam, which I didn’t want to do, and worked on the road crew again all winter, that winter.

CERMAK: Are those primarily fire roads?

ASPLUND: Yes, I suppose you’d call them fire roads, but there were practically no roads along the ridge tops, and one was up the Merced River, along the ridge above the Merced River. I disked the fire line from the San Joaquin River to the Merced River with a #30 Caterpillar, a regular farm disk, a ten-foot farm disk.

CERMAK: Was that the prototype of the Ponderosa Way?

ASPLUND: Right! John O’Neal was—O’Neal’s place is halfway from the road to the forest boundary. John O’Neal was a fire burner. He would burn his ranch every few years. Then the fire would get on the forest, so Artie Wofford decided that an additional fire line would beat those fires. In fact the Forest Supervisor, Mr. M.A. Benedict sent a bunch of us down there to help him run this fire break.

CERMAK: So you’d know when it was burning.

ASPLUND: When it was burning. So I disked the fireline over the top of the ridge and Artie

Wofford would take me and the equipment to a road, start on the road and dropped me off and then picked me up ten or fifteen miles away, over the top of the Goat Mountain. That was one of Rupert Asplund Interview, September 4, 1984, page 3 the jobs I had. Headley got the idea—that was Roy Headley in Operations in the Washington

Office.

CERMAK: He was in Washington then.

ASPLUND: He got the idea of using a horse and a plow. Well, they were going to try it on the

Sierra, and he had a saddle built for the horse that was a combination of saddle and harness to pull the plow. He could load that horse in the trailer, take the horse to the fire, load the plow on the horse, carry the plow up to the fire, and plow a line around it. Well, Earl Morrow and I were elected to go with him and help him. Earl would stand there, shaking his head.

CERMAK: [Chuckles.]

ASPLUND: We loaded the horse in the trailer and took it up to Bass Lake in the bear clover.

CERMAK: Oh, boy! [Laughs.]

ASPLUND: We hooked up the horse to the plow, and we started building a line up through the bear clover, and it cut a nice line about ten inches wide, and the plow got out about a hundred yards, and the trench broke off and the bear clover flopped right back in the trench. [Laughter.]

Where it was to start with.

CERMAK: It just fell right back in the trench.

ASPLUND: Yes. It was like a rubber tire or a piece of rubber, and it run right back in the trench. We loaded the horse back up, and we loaded the plow back and put it back in the trailer and drove back to North Fork, and the plow and Headley went back to Washington.

CERMAK: [Laughs heartily.] Were there very many of the ranchers that were burning their land?

ASPLUND: No, the only one that I remember was John O’Neal. Rupert Asplund Interview, September 4, 1984, page 4

CERMAK: You had the chance to look at the woods in those days, and this was in the mid- twenties, during which fire had been excluded, more or less, for about twenty years. What did the woods look like?

ASPLUND: After the—the best example I can give you is when I left the ranch and started working for M.A. Benedict—there was a lot of open ground. On the ranch, there was some brush, and it was shaded out pretty well. Some of it was already starting to die back, brush dying underneath the trees. In that era, though, in 1924, nearly the whole country burned in ’24, and the best example of that, an example I wrote for range management, was that it was coming into annual grass and brush. I went through there two years ago, and now the young pines are fifty feet high. Whole hillsides are covered with pine trees.

CERMAK: Pine trees!

ASPLUND: Where there was brush and grass, annual grass about fifty years ago! The brush was all died out, shaded out, pretty much shaded out. And I drove from northwest to Mariposa through the country that I been before. Everywhere was young timber, so this is the best example I have of what pine will do, nature will do. But I went to work as assistant ranger for

Frank Sweeley.

CERMAK: Did you pass the ranger exam?

ASPLUND: I passed the ranger exam. I got 95 on experience. I got the record here somewhere.

Ninety-five on experience, 85 on the oral, and 75 on the written, and I’ve been trying to believe that Ranger Daniels was just giving me a passing grade because one of the questions was, what was the recipe for baking powder biscuits. Well, I had passed that.

CERMAK: [Laughs.]

ASPLUND: Another one was if you had—now, you asked for this. Rupert Asplund Interview, September 4, 1984, page 5

CERMAK: Okay.

ASPLUND: Another question was if you had a barefoot horse and only two horseshoes, what feet would you put them on?

CERMAK: Okay, which feet did you put them on?

ASPLUND: The front feet.

CERMAK: Okay. [Laughs.]

ASPLUND: Another question was on naval stores, and I tried to figure out what a navy had in their store.

CERMAK: [Laughs.]

ASPLUND: Another one is if a limb is twenty feet from the ground, the tree is a hundred years old; if it grows for the next twenty-five years, what will the height of the limb be? I figured on that one for fifteen minutes. I had no luck.

CERMAK: [Laughs.]

ASPLUND: But I got 75 on the oral test. I have a friend that says he got a higher grade than I did, and I got the job. Well...

CERMAK: You went to work for Frank Sweeley.

ASPLUND: Frank Sweeley.

CERMAK: I went to school with Frank’s son, Jack.

ASPLUND: Jack.

CERMAK: He was really a nice person.

ASPLUND: He was about five or six years older than me. Frank, he was something else. Frank was something else from a ranger standpoint. The Ranger Station was built in ‘18. I was up Rupert Asplund Interview, September 4, 1984, page 6 there that year. I was up there in ’18. We were developing campgrounds. Fencing, setting tables, laying out some home sites.

CERMAK: What year was this?

ASPLUND: Nineteen twenty-nine. So I’m assistant ranger in 1929 and ’30, and I moved back to North Fork in the wintertime, and maintained the telephone lines. And Mr. Benedict was quite an individual. He wanted to see what was going on with everything, everything that was going on. I think it’s a pretty good example of the way the Forest Service supervisor at work, but the ranger didn’t like to have a supervisor coming out on the job. So we were building telephone lines in white fir timber—I mean, they were wolf trees that were left after logging.

They were just the white fir with big limbs. The ranger wanted to get rid of [the] supervisor, so he called us together and said, “Now, when I give you the sign, you come down the tree and I’ll tell you where the next one is.” And so he timed it so every time Mr. Benedict came down the tree, the “next one” was a big old wolf tree.

CERMAK: [Chuckles.]

ASPLUND: So it took him I think about an hour and a half to figure out what was going on, and when he came down, the ranger says, “There is the next one.” So then Benedict said, “To hell with you and the next one. I’m going home.”

CERMAK: [Laughs.]

ASPLUND: [Laughs.]

CERMAK: You can fool a supervisor once or twice but not nine or ten times.

ASPLUND: No.

CERMAK: Were you building those telephone lines pretty much along the roads? Did you have a network planned? Rupert Asplund Interview, September 4, 1984, page 7

ASPLUND: Pretty much so, I think. We built one from the North Fork (San Joaquin River) to

Auberry along Highway 49. We used a lot of poles there, just the poles there. And we were building a line from Bass Lake clear up to the Goat Mountain Lookout] or someplace like that.

We were just all over the forest building lines to the ranger station.

CERMAK: You had a ranger station at Auberry?

ASPLUND: Yes. In 1929 they sent me to the ranger school in Quincy.

CERMAK: Out there at the old station?

ASPLUND: Yes, 1929, and in six weeks, and they paired us—an inexperienced kid with an old- time ranger.

CERMAK: I see.

ASPLUND: We laid out some home sites. We went out to Meadow Valley, where the forest was cut over for the wood, I think, the cows had eaten all the grass. There was a week on the range, a week on timber. A week at the mill in Meadow Valley, scaling logs. There’s a pile of logs. I couldn’t tell a pine from a fir by the bark, so of course I had to ask. But the last week was fire. The boss said, “No, we’re not going over there to fight fire. We’re going over there for training, and we’re going over in a real flatbed truck with benches, not even fastened down, over the Bucks Lake Road to French Creek.”

CERMAK: Oh, boy! That must have been quite a trip.

ASPLUND: And I was lucky to have a look at the stars. It was at night. In 1929. And they burned it. The fires got away from them, and it got away and burned the whole hillside, and it is starting to come back to timber now, see?

CERMAK: Yes. That’s what I did in 1962 in Little Grass Valley.

ASPLUND: Are you telling me? Rupert Asplund Interview, September 4, 1984, page 8

CERMAK: [Laughs.]

ASPLUND: Oh, no. Yes, okay. Well, then—another guy over there, Dave Rogers was—no, not Dave Rogers but John Gray was the fire control officer, and he got a hold of us. We didn’t get back together. We got back here a week later, off a fire. The fire in the Middle Fork Feather

River started somewhere way up. I think it was a lightning fire. It started way up by, oh, almost where the trail starts down to the bridge on the Middle Fork, below the Little North Fork.

Started in the head of the Little North Fork. And they sent us down Bald Rock Road to within about a quarter of a mile or half a mile of the river. We started building lines along the hillside.

There were two or three rangers that would shake their head. “What in the world are we doing down here? There’s already fire up above us.” We built line all night long. The next morning, here comes the crew to take our place. And the crew boss says, “You got trouble. The fire jumped the line. And it’s going up the Bald Rock Road.”

I looked over, and there was fire all the way along Bald Rock Road. I went to John Gray, and I told him—I said, “We got to do something!” Remember, I’m not a firefighter, but he says,

“Well, you go down there and get those men out of there.” So he gave me a pickup, and I drove down there, and I walked down that slope and told the crew, “Let’s get out of here.” Going back to the road I went ahead and I had to go tell John Gray that the crew was coming. He put that bunch of men on there, and then they sent us way back up to a spot fire way up in the head of the Little North Fork. And Brush Creek ranger station. That was 1929. I don’t know how many people remember.

CERMAK: It sounds like it must have been an east wind.

ASPLUND: Well, it was a dry year, a dry fall, and I rode the train down from Quincy Junction, and I stood on the back end of that train, and whenever the train was on the north side of the Rupert Asplund Interview, September 4, 1984, page 9 river, we went through fire. The whole North Fork of the Feather was on fire in 1929. When I got to Mad River in ’31, they told about—Ranger Ray Beall said that when he went to Covelo to visit his three daughters for Christmas, he cancelled the trip. He had to cross the river and drive for his Christmas dinner, and that was a scary thing. There was as much smoke in Eureka, they couldn’t see across the street. That was the story that I got.

Shall we stop a minute?

CERMAK: Sure, yes, Let’s take a break.

[Tape interruption.]

ASPLUND: This would be a story that I heard, and I think it was 1933, and I think you need to

[unintelligible]. Thirty men burned up on the Cleveland (actually in Griffith Park, Los Angeles), and they had a congressional investigation, and Show testified, “If you took the risk of fighting fire in California, you’d never put out the fire.” And the congressional committee went home.

[Tape interruption.]

CERMAK: You were working for Sweeley.

ASPLUND: I was working for Sweeley as assistant ranger, particularly in the summertime.

There was a fire in Jose Basin, which is on the main fork of Mill Creek, the drainage down below Shaver Lake. There was a very good-sized fire in those days, 5,000 acres or so, and I worked with Earl Morrow. Earl Morrow was, I believe, the one that gave me much information and knowledge about forestry and fire, and he had started before the war and worked in fire control. Earl Morrow knew fire and was not afraid of fire. We got that fire under control, and I just got home off the fireline and gone to bed, and here Earl Morrow woke me up, shaking me.

“They want you on the Angeles.” Remember, this is my first year as assistant ranger. They wanted me on the Angeles, and I had to go to the Angeles. Rupert Asplund Interview, September 4, 1984, page 10

CERMAK: Was this for a fire?

ASPLUND: For a fire, on the ridge route up between Lebec and Gorman.

CERMAK: Gorman?

ASPLUND: Gorman. We went down on the train, bought a ticket for Newhall, and the conductor says, “This train does not stop in Newhall,” and the ranger says, “It does this time.”

CERMAK: [Laughs.]

ASPLUND: “In no way is this train going to stop in Newhall.” So this discussion went on all the way to Kern (Station), which is Bakersfield. As we got off the train, the agent said, “You better go in and get a stop order.” So Ed Madison went in and got a stop order, and he came in with that yellow slip in his hand, I thought the conductor was going to have a heart attack. So we got down to Newhall, and he says, “You better be ready to get off, because this train won’t stop”

“We’re going to sit right there until the train comes to a complete stop.”

CERMAK: [Laughs.] One hard man and another hard man, huh?

ASPLUND: So we got off, and we went over to the fire camp. We got the whole front country

-- lots of people on this fire. Ed Madison had been known in Southern California. “We’d like to have you go down to Pasadena and stand by in case there’s another fire.”

CERMAK: How familiar! Things haven’t changed, have they?

ASPLUND: This was the year Ray Davis was the dispatcher. So we stayed that Crown Hotel and signed our name and everything and was going into the restaurant in Pasadena and signed the slip on the back, and we spent a week. That fire burned 50,000 acres. It went clear to the desert.

CERMAK: Whew!

ASPLUND: My job was lunches, and we’d order 5,000 lunches. Rupert Asplund Interview, September 4, 1984, page 11

CERMAK: Wow.

ASPLUND: I would go through his cards, which were just organized, probably ten times—well, it’s just as well fifty now, but I think if somebody ordered 5,000 lunches, I don’t know what I’d call—I had phone numbers. I’d just call them. That was my job, was get the lunches. Ed had transportation, I think, or something. Come Saturday, why, Ray Davis said fire crews aren’t needed, bus loads of people coming in, and the fire’s under control. But “You can go home,” but

I wouldn’t go home until I got cleaned up. So I called a friend of mine in L.A., and went out to the beach for the day.

CERMAK: Had you ever been to the beach before?

ASPLUND: No. Well, I had been once before. So when I got home, they were all feeling sorry for us.

CERMAK: Fight fire at the beach!

ASPLUND: Fight fire for a week and then go on to another one, so they all felt sorry for us. In

1929 or ’30, there was a fire—first, there was a guard station (Mountain Rest Guard Station) on the way up to Big Creek from Toll House. The fire was burning through a rancheria and the brush field, and it was not brush fences. And it was climbing through the trees. Ike Bays was an old fireman. And I said, “My goodness, Ike, what are we going to do?” “Sit down, son. Sit down and take it easy. See that ridge right up there? It’s going to hit the top of that ridge just about dark. We’re going to sneak around ahead of it.” Well, it did, and we did.

But I supposed it would 1929 or ’30 that there was a big one in Canyon Creek, I think.

Kings—

CERMAK: Kings River. Rupert Asplund Interview, September 4, 1984, page 12

ASPLUND: On the Sequoia. And I went over there with Ike. I was crew boss and he was division boss. They had one in 1924 that burned up the Kings River from the valley, and this one started up above Millerton, up the river. It was burning downhill. I won’t mention the fire boss. He had been in the Forest Service as assistant supervisor and for some reason had gotten laid off, and Ray Stevenson was the ranger, and he was sick, so they had him come as fire boss.

He sent that line down through the brush and at two or three o’clock in the afternoon that fire would come up and hit us in the face and we’d go down through the burnout to build more line and lose it. We did that a couple of days.

Ike Bays says, “They’ll never put this fire out until we come up from the bottom,” and he’d tell the fire boss, and nothing happened. I was trying to scout the fire a little bit, and I got too close or something. In the middle of the night, I got up on a rock in the middle of the brushfield, and I was sitting on this rock and here come this fellow crawling up alongside of me.

Said, “Young fellow, do you know where you are?” I said, “No.” “Well, there’s two of us lost.”

CERMAK: [Laughs.]

ASPLUND: This is Jay Price. In charge of fire in the San Francisco office.

CERMAK: [Laughs.] Oh, dear.

ASPLUND: So the next day I was crew boss with a crew of Mexicans working a line down the hill, through the brush, getting ready to run, and I heard some chopping down below. I went down, and there were the Mexicans chopping brush. Darned if it was Ike Bays. He’d gone to

Fresno and hired a crew of Mexicans, on his own, without anybody knowing anything about it.

Come in up the Kings River right across from his ranger district, and started building fireline.

CERMAK: [Laughs.] He got tired of trying to tell him (unnamed fire boss) what to do.

ASPLUND: Yes. Rupert Asplund Interview, September 4, 1984, page 13

CERMAK: Right.

ASPLUND: But I think this is the best example of—well, it’s where I learned to hunt and fight forest fires without getting burned up and burning up people. It’s a very, very critical part of fire control, putting out a fire. There’s times when we’d go down to head off the fire safely, if you start from the back side and if the wind is just right and the weather don’t change and things like that. That was 1930.

So then I came to the Trinity in 1931.

CERMAK: What was your job there?

ASPLUND: Ranger, district ranger. Thirty-one was a real severe fire year in the Trinity River.

There were two Canadian creeks fires. Well, there were three, I guess: Frenchman Creek,

Canadian Creek—two or three, 20 or 30 thousand acre fires within the Trinity River. And I was pretty upset because they never did call me to work on them, and I had no fires on my district at all that year.

But the next year, one morning at four o’clock in the morning, I woke up and smelled smoke. I called the lookout and said, “George, can you see any smoke anywhere?” “No,” he said, “can’t see a thing.” “No,” he said, “the whole country is covered with fog.” I said,

“George, look”—

[End Tape 1, Side A. Begin Tape 1, Side B.]

ASPLUND: Two men started up the forest, seven miles on horseback, and they set fire on both sides of the river for seven miles and then were starting up the forks, three forks. I went up one way, and I saw the dust of one fellow taking off on a horse. That’s how close I came to catching him. Just a spot fire about four feet across. We started the control of these thirty fires burned a Rupert Asplund Interview, September 4, 1984, page 14 couple thousand acres, thirty fires caused us a lot of difficulty with, even then, with the organization.

CERMAK: That was part of the training, then.

ASPLUND: Yes. I got a call from Weaverville. “The Forest Service got an airplane. The

Forest Service got an airplane. They wondered if we would like an airplane for observation.” I said, “I think it would help.” Well, Ray Beall was in the ranger group, and they thought that he would be the best one, so they let him pay for it and picked up Ray Beall. So the airplane went flying around. And I waited at the telephone very patiently. Soon it rang, and Ray phoned. I said, “What can you tell me?” He says, “It looks like somebody dropped a pepper box upside down.”

CERMAK: [Laughs.] Oh, that’s interesting.

ASPLUND: You see why—

CERMAK: That whole country, though, particularly on the other side of the ridge, over towards the Eel River, was all country that they liked to burn, wasn’t it?

ASPLUND: Part of that was private land outside the forest.

CERMAK: Yes.

ASPLUND: There was some characters living over there, ranchers. But there wasn’t too many fires there. That period in that Zenia country was quite—old Sam Macklin had been a county supervisor. He owned a store at Zenia. He sat on a rocking chair and everybody owed him money.

CERMAK: That’s the same store that’s still there?

ASPLUND: Yes.

CERMAK: [Laughs.] Rupert Asplund Interview, September 4, 1984, page 15

ASPLUND: It’s in that back woods.

CERMAK: Really back woods!

ASPLUND: Old Sam sits in the rocking chair and some of those characters come out and say,

“It looks like a good day for a fire to go over the hill.”

CERMAK: [Laughs.] Yes, right.

ASPLUND: And I did catch one—they did catch one that year.

CERMAK: Was that the big job there in that district?

ASPLUND: No, no. Fire? No. I had 5,000 sheep and 2,000 or 3,000 cattle on the district, but that was the big job, was range. The sheep came over from Red Bluff, the Yolla Bolly country, and cattle—there was some local cattle around, and there was a big ranch at Ft. Stewart down on the Eel River. Well, I shouldn’t say 3,000. It seemed like that many. I can’t remember. But that was the most important job. I don’t think I had a timber sale as long as I was there. But the

CCs (CCC, Civilian Conservation Corps) came along, and they called me one day, and they said,

“In three weeks, you’ll have 200 boys. You select a foreman for them.” So I did. Paid him $45 a month. “Select a place for the camp, and figure out enough projects to keep them busy.”

CERMAK: This must have been about mid-’33, huh?

ASPLUND: Yes, in the spring, yes. And this fellow that’s writing about the CC’s—have you read it?

CERMAK: Yes.

ASPLUND: Okay. He got, from someplace up north—and this is quite important—that the CCs didn’t fight fire, just forest workers.

CERMAK: I didn’t have that information at all. Go ahead. Rupert Asplund Interview, September 4, 1984, page 16

ASPLUND: I know they were used in fires. Good fire crews, too. They did an awful lot of project work. Also we got roads and trails and good fences and telephone lines and lookouts and ranger stations.

CERMAK: Most of the improvements before World War II, but also, what I’ve read, too, Rupe, was that they didn’t just work in crews but they would detail some individuals to work on regular fire crews.

ASPLUND: Yes.

CERMAK: And that sort of thing.

ASPLUND: Yes. Well, we had the spike camps in various places around the district. There would be twenty men, and they would be standby fire crews. That period was a period there from ’32 through the start of the war that I think it was pretty quiet as far as fires go. Do you know about that?

CERMAK: Yes, that’s what I’ve seen, is that there’s very little—in all of the written stuff I’ve seen, it’s almost as if nothing happened, and I’ve been wondering about that, whether it was because they had plenty of manpower available, whether the weather was good, or just what the cause was.

ASPLUND: Weather was a certain factor. Ross Lanick, when he came to the Forest as supervisor—he had been in the South—he spent two or three weeks, and that would be in

’40—analyzing or going through the fire records and the weather records, and he found that there was no correlation between the total amount of rainfall and the fire season, but there was a correlation between the amount of rainfall in March, April and May and the fire season, and that’s what I was worried about this year.

CERMAK: Yes. Rupert Asplund Interview, September 4, 1984, page 17

ASPLUND: But there was a definite relation between—as far as fires. Except I think we’ve got control of the incendiary situation.

CERMAK: As I recall in reading, in ’31 and ’32, right in the beginnings of the Depression, there were a lot of incendiaries because people were trying to get work.

ASPLUND: Oh, yes.

CERMAK: And then it seemed the other thing was—let’s see, in the thirties you had a lot of people out in the creeks, mining, too.

ASPLUND: That’s right. That’s right, in the early thirties. But I think the biggest problem was incendiary fires.

CERMAK: That was the biggest change.

One other thing I read, too, and that’s one thing that the federal record center has some good records on, is the development of the lookout system, which was—apparently by 1935 pretty well installed a full lookout system that existed right up until World War II.

ASPLUND: Right. Visibility studies, several changes of lookout locations. Visibility studies, which I think is a pretty important phase of our whole fire system.

There’s another story that you may or may not want to include, but Mad River—

CERMAK: Go ahead.

ASPLUND: The survey that climbed the top of Mad River Rock—and I’ve got pictures—proved this Mad River Rock was a sheer cliff all around it for about 100 feet or 200 feet, and they climbed the top of that rock and they stuck a #9 wire up there. I just couldn’t see building a lookout on that rock, so I made my usual complaints about it. They never were very quiet. And finally the supervisor came over, and I took him up there. He wanted to see it. And they’re building a telephone line, they’re building a road, and all the emergency programs were Rupert Asplund Interview, September 4, 1984, page 18 fading out. It all had to be done in just a couple of months. He came over, and here is this wire coming up this cliff, and I took him up with the cracks (put your feet in the cracks in the rock).

The first thing he said was, “Who put this wire up here?” I said, “One of the CC boys.”

“You let him do it?”

CERMAK: [Chuckles.]

ASPLUND: He was unhappy. There was a crew from Fort Bragg that climbing around on the cliffs digging abalone or something out there, and that was just what they loved, to climb up those cliffs. Well, we got up there, and they were up there to build a lookout. We had to do it in about two months. They had to build eight miles of road. They had to build a stairway 200 feet up, and they built a cable, hauling the lumber up there while they were building the stairway, and

I think the lookout lasted about three years and was abandoned.

CERMAK: Oh, boy.

Well, Rupe, when did you first begin to see the use of pumper equipment in the sense of vehicles?

ASPLUND: I have pictures of a slip-on (tanker truck) that had a Pacific pump with couple of hundred gallon tank that you slipped right on a stakeside truck. That was developed at Mount

Shasta, the center up there, where they developed all the equipment. One year they developed a trencher, I think they call it, and they assigned it to the Trinity for me to experiment with it or something. It was geared like a rototiller with disks on the front of it. And after the year, after the summer—and they came up there several times—they decided that a Sears rototiller was better.

CERMAK: Better than that one, huh?

ASPLUND: Better than that one. Rupert Asplund Interview, September 4, 1984, page 19

CERMAK: Probably I suppose in the early thirties, you began to get pumpers?

ASPLUND: Pumpers? Yes. Let me see. It would about ’35 before they really were used.

CERMAK: On the district as kind of a regular thing.

ASPLUND: Yes. And then they were pretty scarce until—in the forties was about the first real development of pumper equipment.

CERMAK: Somewhere there is—and I haven’t located it yet—there’s a history on the development of the bulldozer.

ASPLUND: Okay, I take that back. I mean, the Cletrac was the first bulldozer, not the

Caterpillar but the Cletrac was the first bulldozer. That would have been in the early thirties.

I’m pretty sure it was there when I got to Weaverville in ’35.

CERMAK: You went to Weaverville from Mad River Ranger Station?

ASPLUND: Yes. The ranger station was there. I was the district ranger. The ranger station was in the supervisor’s office. I soon got involved forest wide, and began to get statewide.

Millard Barnum was the supervisor that was there, then Guerdon Ellis, who was pretty nice person to work for, I’ll put it that way. [Chuckles.]

CERMAK: [Laughs.]

ASPLUND: Beautiful country. I had the Trinity Alps in my district. There’s a picture of them right there.

CERMAK: Oh, yes. It’s beautiful.

ASPLUND: That was about twenty miles from the end of the road, where that trail to the Alps began. That was the country I was the ranger, and I didn’t want to leave.

CERMAK: Yes. Rupert Asplund Interview, September 4, 1984, page 20

ASPLUND: Well, during the war they decided that we lost our people in the Second World

War, what we needed was a training officer in every forest. A memo from the Regional Office with a paragraph describing what the job would be in the back. “We recommend Asplund for training officer.” They had my name written in. The supervisor said, “You’re the last man in the world that I would have picked as a training officer.” I said “Fine,” and started out the door.

“They got nobody any better.”

CERMAK: [Laughs.]

ASPLUND: But I couldn’t care for my ranger district, so he put an assistant ranger in charge for the summer fire season, and that’s when I really got involved with fire fighting.

CERMAK: As a professional fireman?

ASPLUND: Yes. I developed the first fire behavior course, and this is personal now, and you can rub that all out, but I developed a fire behavior course. I got a little criticism because I spent eight dollars building a fire table about eight feet long or ten feet long, with a slanting side. I could raise that up and show how a fire burns uphill, and I had a fan and showed how fires burn with the wind and without the wind and uphill and downhill and ignition of cigarettes, which would start fires in the duff but not in the pine needles.

I found out that it was kind of being used up in Oregon. Weyerhaeuser was using it, and it was used nationwide, and I decided maybe I better do something, so I sent copies to all the

Experiment Stations in the West. I got a few comments. I got one from the Experiment Station in Berkeley that I had to come down and go over it with them. So I worked with the chief, the fellow in charge of fire control down there in the Experiment Station for a week. The biggest discussion was the effect of temperature. I had the temperature—the only difference between one degree and ten degrees, there’s no effect really on the fire except on the humidity and Rupert Asplund Interview, September 4, 1984, page 21 possibly ignition. “Well, the temperature’s got more effect than that.” We argued about that for a couple of days, and finally I said, “OK, you write part on temperature and I’ll put it in.” “Well,

I know the temperature has a bigger effect than you got in there, but I can’t put it in words.”

CERMAK: [Laughs.]

ASPLUND: Okay. I had just a lot of fun—I look back. Everything was kind of funny.

CERMAK: Yes.

ASPLUND: But I was down on—and then I got involved with fires all over the state.

CERMAK: After that training center?

ASPLUND: After that training deal, and I became a fireman.

CERMAK: When did you leave the district?

ASPLUND: Well, I was offered the San Bernardino fire control officer job by Supervisor

Norman Farrell, who I had hired years before as a control assistant, and I turned that down, and I turned a couple more down. My wife didn’t want to go to Southern California, and I didn’t either or these other places. Finally the chief of personnel called me up or called the supervisor.

“Tell Rupe I’m offering him a job in Quincy, and he better not turn it down.”

CERMAK: [Laughs.]

ASPLUND: Well, I was fire control officer on the Trinity for four or five years after the war. I came in’50. I already mentioned that there was a big fire, we mentioned, on the Angeles.

CERMAK: Oh, the San Gabriel.

ASPLUND: San Gabriel. I was on the big fire there. I was on four or five fires on the Angeles.

I was on the Inaha on the Cleveland.

CERMAK: Yes, I remember that. When you think back, what were some of the worst fire years? Rupert Asplund Interview, September 4, 1984, page 22

ASPLUND: Well, the fire years—of course, the one I just remember from the stories was ’24,

’31—see, when you ask that question, it varied so much between the north and the south. Some years would be bad one year—I think it was ’45—yes, ’45. The brush was at the wilting stage in early July. This seemed to be the most important factor or thing that affected the fire season more was the wilting stage of the brush. The brush was dry.

CERMAK: The moisture content had dropped.

ASPLUND: The moisture content.

CERMAK: In ’46—wasn’t that when some of these fires burned around Quincy?

ASPLUND: Yes. The ’46 year here was a bad year, went out to here and went to Keddie. The bad one was Clear Creek, late in the fall. Gustafson was the supervisor. He had looked in the records, and it had been ten years since they had any real serious fires. And then ’51, which I don’t know how far you’re going, but ’50 there were six Class E fires on either side of the forest, and the story I got there is that if Honey Lake is dry, look out, and Honey Lake was dry that year.

So I feel that when you talk about years, it would be, except for maybe ’24, the years—

CERMAK: It would be north and south.

ASPLUND: North and south, but even areas, areas.

CERMAK: Well, you know, ’59—of course, my writing is going to ’55—

ASPLUND: Oh, you are going to ’55. [1905-1955]

CERMAK: That’s fifty years. But ’59 was pretty much of a bad year all over the north end of the state, and then in the fall, the south burned.

ASPLUND: Well...

CERMAK: Let’s see, you retired in?

ASPLUND: I retired in ’62, but— Rupert Asplund Interview, September 4, 1984, page 23

CERMAK: But you were in the regional office.

ASPLUND: Yes, I was going to retire in ’55, but they wouldn’t let me. I just couldn’t retire. I was going to take a 5 percent reduction. That’s when I got the job in State and Private. I went to more fires from down there. That would be in the fifties, late fifties over there. It was so bad there. Darn it, I—record-wise—

CERMAK: What I was looking for, Rupe, was just anything that stuck out in your mind.

ASPLUND: Of course, the Milk Ranch Fire I think is the worst fire that ever happened. Were you here?

CERMAK: No, that was in ’51, and I was not in the Forest Service until two years later.

ASPLUND: I feel this is the worst fire that ever happened in the United States. I feel that way.

CERMAK: Why?

ASPLUND: Well, it was started from the railroad tracks and was going up the mountain, just a normal situation. I figured they’d have it controlled at a couple thousand acres by midnight. By ten o’clock the next morning, that crew was going up both sides, and about eleven o’clock, there was a down-canyon wind started, and the fire flared up and started spotting, and I had trouble getting the men off the line because they figured they had contained it. Jay Peterson was there and I sent him up one side and to get the crew off the other side.

I took off, and I went down to Bucks Powerhouse, asking if I could borrow the tram [a cog tramway runs from Bucks Powerhouse on the North Fork Feather River to the Afterbay reservoir over 1,000 feet above], would they take me up the tram. I could ride the tram. They said they would, so I went back to the PG&E camp (Camp Rodgers), to get some fire equipment.

I got back at the Pulga control tower. I called Bear Ranch Lookout and said, “If you can get the shutters down, do it. There’ll be somebody up there in an hour to get you off of there.” She Rupert Asplund Interview, September 4, 1984, page 24 said, “There’s no fire around here.” A half hour later, she was calling. “When are they coming?”

At four o’clock the next morning, it was down below Pulga, fifteen miles, air line. At midnight or one o’clock at the morning.

CERMAK: That was classic, Rupe. In going through this, I see there’s three basic situations in

California. California is unique because of the climate, and that’s proven by a whole bunch of different kind of factors, but the three things are just the normal summertime situation, summertime fog. The second is the heat wave, the heat wave like we had early in July, when it gets very hot and you have subsidence of warm air coming down to the surface. And the third is the east wind. Of course, it’s the Santa Ana down in Southern California. But if you look at the worst fires that I’ve been able to look at so far, most of them are during east wind or heat wave conditions, and the worst I remember were during the east wind conditions.

ASPLUND: Mm-hm.

CERMAK: That’s when you got the high in Great Basin and the low in the valley.

ASPLUND: Yes.

CERMAK: You just got the wind shifts.

ASPLUND: We had a cold high. I called the weather bureau, and found out all the factors on it.

It was a cold high over there. I used to call Dave Harris from Mount Hough to ask him every day what the fire was doing and what the weather was, and he—it seems like the important thing was knowing a little bit about weather conditions and how you feel and how certain fires would just right up the hill like sixty I told you about. They would just go up the hill, and all you got to do is go around them.

CERMAK: Yes, right. Rupert Asplund Interview, September 4, 1984, page 25

ASPLUND: Then the other one was when the 14 men got burned up on the Inaha (Cleveland

National Forest), where it was coming up from the bottom. Are you going to write about that?

CERMAK: Yes. I’m going to draw some conclusions. One thing I’ve learned about writing history is that you just don’t recount the events, you have to interpret them, and there’s a vast amount of information there. I’ve got to winnow it down into what I think is important. The other thing is that every historian’s got their own viewpoint, and it’s based upon their own background. Well, my background happens to have included some fires, so I have a background, and it makes a difference in how I look at it. I can’t help that. In fact, for the most part it’s good.

But I’m going to draw some conclusions, and I think, just off the top of my head, one of the conclusions that I had at the very end of this period of 1955 was that the Forest Service had failed in its efforts to fight fire safely.

ASPLUND: Oh.

CERMAK: This is just a preliminary conclusion: They had not, after the Rattlesnake fire in the

Mendocino in ’56—there were too many of those disasters at one stage, and they just had not really gotten a hold on the problem.

ASPLUND: Let me just say this much about that: I would rather you didn’t quite put it that way, that we (the Forest Service) failed. It was human failure, human failure. Fighting forest fires or a forest fire is so complex that an individual cannot help but make mistakes. I feel like we haven’t changed, we haven’t developed one factor or one way of putting out a forest fire since the time I started. The basic principles of fighting a forest fire were there when I went to work.

CERMAK: Right. Rupert Asplund Interview, September 4, 1984, page 26

ASPLUND: I feel that there’s a sixth sense. If somebody tells you, “Don’t come up the hill.

Don’t come up this way,” and the conditions are such that the fire is going to go down the hill, you better come up the hill, you better run from a fire. Of course, I have always said: Never run from a fire. Just move around the fire and stay right there and get in against the cool air that comes in to replace the hot air going up. I feel that it’s such a complex thing that people make mistakes.

CERMAK: How do you explain that?

ASPLUND: This is a question—

CERMAK: How do you explain Southern California, repeated instances of fighting fire downhill, which occurred right on up until, oh, I’ll say 1964, in the case of the Loop Fire, for example, where there were numerous people burned and killed? It seemed to me that it was, in some instances, a little bit more than just human judgment, although I certainly agree with you there. But perhaps the kind of a general concept that they were using that was in error.

ASPLUND: I can’t agree with that, Bob.

CERMAK: I know it’s easy to criticize after the fact.

ASPLUND: And I’ve never been critical of a mistake because I’ve seen so many errors. I generally—I mean, basically you don’t fight fire downhill. Sure, we’ve lost some men fighting fires downhill, but it’s like—I take the example of Ike Bays. Myron Nelson will agree with me that the first thing is to attack on the side, with somebody protecting your flank, and you work around the head of it.

CERMAK: An anchor point. Rupert Asplund Interview, September 4, 1984, page 27

ASPLUND: An anchor point. I know I had to go across the valley to the Mendocino, just got back from a big one down south, had to go over there when the men were burned on the

Rattlesnake Fire. Well, I agree. I understand how you’re basing your feelings—

CERMAK: Those are not my feelings; I’m just tossing out ideas. I’m trying to get something from you.

ASPLUND: When I base total meaning first, for example, was Ike said it was going to hit the top of the ridge, just about dark, and we moved around the head of it. And then when he told me, “We’ll never put this fire out until we come up from the bottom,” in 1929—

[Abrupt end of interview.] Rupert Asplund Interview, September 4, 1984, page 28

ASPLUND, Rupert 05-16-85 02_Web

U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service Region Five History Project

Interview with: Rupert Asplund Interviewed by: Bob Cermak Location: Asplund Home near Quincy, California Date: MaY 16, 1985

BOB CERMAK: This is Rupe Asplund, made at his home near Quincy, California, on May 16th, 1985. Now, Rupert, do you want to begin? We’ll let ‘er go. RUPERT ASPLUND: Okay. To start with, the dates, those dates I moved are wrong. I moved to Quincy in—they transferred me to Quincy in 1950, and I bought this place in 1951. I was retired when I was fifty-five because they thought I was too old to fight fires. I made the mistake of having the chief of personnel, Allen McCutcheon — I made a mistake of having him out to dinner. Mr. McCutcheon said, “I understand you’re talking about retiring. You can’t retire.” I said, “I can by taking 1 percent less annuity per year under age sixty.” “No, you can’t retire.”

This went on for quite a while, and he went home, and he made two or three phone calls, and that’s when they transferred me to San Francisco. So I was down there four years and retired in

1962. I lived right here for two years and commuted on a Greyhound bus.

CERMAK: Twice a week.

ASPLUND: Twice a week, and one time I was traveling all the time and staying in the hotel, and I was traveling most of the time, and so I thought, Why don’t I transfer to Quincy? So I suggested to Connaughton, the regional forester, and he said, “Hell, no, you and Bill Peterson.

You will try to run the region in a week.”

CERMAK: [Laughs.]

ASPLUND: So much for my— Rupert Asplund Interview, September 4, 1984, page 29

CERMAK: Bright idea.

ASPLUND: —life in—coming to Quincy and retiring.

The first start with that I actually related to fire is 1924. I wasn’t working for the Forest

Service, but I was in the mountains, and I was ranching. The whole state was on fire that year.

We’re talking about 1924, and you probably know about 1924. I don’t know if it’s comparable to any other year. It was dry.

CERMAK: The other thing that I know is wind. At least where we lived, we had wind almost every day except for couple of months.

ASPLUND: And if you go up on the hills around here anyplace and you dig down to the dirt, you’ll find it’s awfully dry. So I guess the question then would be should—do you want to talk about the various fires?

CERMAK: Well, the last time we talked, we talked a little bit about some bad fires. We talked about the Milk Ranch fire and the fires over on the escarpment. We talked about bad fire seasons. And as I recall, you mentioned 1942, 1931, and then ’50, ’51 and some of those later years there. I know what you felt the Milk Ranch fire was particularly bad, and we talked about how it went up the hill and went down the canyon with the wind and so forth. What I remember, reading about it, was that there were a lot of injuries on that fire.

ASPLUND: Yes. They all occurred under Big Bar Lookout, across from Pulga. And I don’t know exactly—I never did know exactly how we decided to cold trail an area from the Pulga

Bridge, up around that steep side hill. But there was a crew of Setzer Lumber Company up there, and the rocks started rolling, and there were several broken bones. It seems to me like there was ten, but there was a lot of people hurt. And that was the only place that I can recall where there was any injuries. Rupert Asplund Interview, September 4, 1984, page 30

CERMAK: I didn’t recall how many, either, but I knew that the rolling rock would be a problem. Later, on the Chambers Creek fire across the canyon, I took a crew up that first hill—I guess it was a follow-up, after the initial attack. We just weren’t making any headway at all. We hadn’t been up there very long at all before the rocks started coming down there. We had to get out of there.

ASPLUND: Yes, there were certain areas over the years, and that was an example of just some places that were not safe. Can’t do too much good, either.

CERMAK: You told me quite a bit about old Supervisor M.A. Benedict.

ASPLUND: I already told you about him.

CERMAK: About that time—let’s see, Show and Kotok came in, began their tour as regional forester and director of the experiment station, about 1926 or so, somewhere in there. Maybe you can give me some impressions about Show, himself.

ASPLUND: Well, Show was a strong man with a good mind, and I think one of his main objectives was to have people do their job and run the show. He sort of was an overseer but made very few everyday decisions himself, as far as I knew him. Naturally, he would have made a lot of important decisions. The one thing I do remember specifically and related to fire: It was in 1933. There was a fire in Griffith Park, City of Los Angeles, where there was a quite a large number of men burned to death. They held a congressional investigation. Have you heard anything about that?

CERMAK: I haven’t come across that yet, no.

ASPLUN: Okay. It would be in history, I’m sure. They were having a congressional investigation. Show got on the stand and testified that if you took the risk out of fighting fire in Rupert Asplund Interview, September 4, 1984, page 31

California, you’d never put a fire out, and the congressional committee went home. But that was an example of his personality.

CERMAK: Were the supervisors and the regional forester’s staff pretty much equal, or did he rely a lot on his own staff?

ASPLUND: As far as I knew and know of him, and I knew him very well, he relied on his staff to make the decisions. He would go and check. He came up on the Trinity while I was there, several times, and he would respond or check on things that seemed to come from Washington.

There’s an example of Show’s personality. I had cancelled a grazing application, permit out on the Trinity Alps. I knew the cowman. He was pretty popular in the county and a pretty strong man around town. He came in and he had a lot of complaints about it.

A year or two later, after I was no longer a ranger, Show came up and wanted to go up to the Trinity Alps. The wind was blowing, and there was a chance for fire, and I knew it [was] a bad day, and I didn’t want to go. The supervisor said I had to go. Why I had to go up into the

Trinity Alps with a regional forester and the supervisor when I was a fire control officer was always a question in my mind. We got out to the end of the road, packing the animals, and the wind was blowing, and I told the supervisor, “I don’t want to go. I shouldn’t go.” I had a feeling, I think.

We got up the first night on the top of Red Mountain, and the wind was blowing so hard, you couldn’t even set up a tent and make camp, and I went over the hill into a pocket where the wind wasn’t blowing. The radio claimed there was a big fire down at the Trinity River. It was dark, so we stayed there overnight ,and then I got up and went back. There was no question I was just going home, and they went with me. When we got to the office, Bevier Show said,

“Well, you didn’t want to go. You didn’t want to go, and that’s as far as I am going to know Rupert Asplund Interview, September 4, 1984, page 32 about the Trinity Alps.” Show wanted to go up into the Alps, but I always had a suspicion he had been up there already.

CERMAK: He was regional forester from then until, what, ’46, something like that, and because of all the writing that he had done on fire, he and Kotok wrote some of the basic investigations of fire for California. You get the impression that fire must have been pretty important to him.

ASPLUND: It was. It was. It was, but not the only thing. I shouldn’t say that, because he had been in research in the experiment station in fire, and did I mention the first experiment they did on controlled burning, prescribed burning?

CERMAK: Is that the one over at Snake Lake?

ASPLUND: No, it was down on the Sierra. They set up an experimental area of 500 acres or something up on a hillside above North Fork, and they had a trench dug at the lower end of the fire. I wasn’t there. It was 1910 to ’20, in the early twenties. They dug this trench to bedrock and after the fire was out they went to analyze the water in the trench. It was hardpan by then, bedrock, I think, but then they would analyze this water, and all the nutrients in the soil was down in the water, soluble salts and nutrients, which was my first introduction—and this is written; there’s a written history of this somewhere, the report. I read the report, I think while I was in San Francisco, of prescribed burning. It was the first attempt, the first official—

CERMAK: Scientific approach.

ASPLUND: Scientific, yes. So I know that he was the first to experiment with fire—and then

Kotok was in charge of fire control research in ’24. I think I told you the story about the sling psychometer.

CERMAK: Yes. [Laughs.] Rupert Asplund Interview, September 4, 1984, page 33

ASPLUND: Incidentally, I have a clipping of Mr. Benedict, a historical recognition of him after he passed away, they renamed Alice Meadow to Benedict Meadow, and there’s a monument on

Shuteye Lookout, incidentally.

CERMAK: Since I talked to you last, I contacted the Sierra, and they have a woman volunteer who takes care of all the history records, and some of the most valuable stuff I’ve gotten so far are the old issues of the Sierra Ranger. That, you know, is pretty much down-to-earth sort of stuff, and it tells you all about things that you wouldn’t find in the files at all. Really important stuff.

ASPLUND: And the Sierra National Forest was my introduction to the Forest Service and where I learned not only to fight forest fires but I learned about grazing, I learned about timber management on the Fresno Sugar Cone Pine timber sale, with electric donkeys and their railroad from Fresno up to the mountains, fifty miles. I got all my introduction from the old-time rangers fighting the fires. It was rather simple. A fire would be crowning up the hill, and there was brush fences, and the fire was crowning up the hill. “My goodness, Ike, what are we going to do?” This is Ike Bayes. “Sit down, son.” We sat down in the shade of a tree. He had a pipe in his mouth. He said, “You see that ridge right up there? It’s going to hit that top of that ridge just about dark, and we’ll just sneak around ahead of it.

CERMAK: Does he spell his name B-a-y-e-s?

ASPLUND: Yes.

CERMAK: Well, one of the things I also found is that the Sierra was kind of—you might say it’s the very beginning of the Forest Service in California. It was kind of a place that supplied the cadre for most of Northern California, supervisors and deputies and sometimes rangers. It was a kind of a main source. Rupert Asplund Interview, September 4, 1984, page 34

ASPLUND: I feel also that young foresters—many of them were sent down there for a start:

Carl Gustafson, for example and—well, a lot of them would come through there for a year or two.

CERMAK: Right.

ASPLUND: And then go on.

CERMAK: You mentioned Deering. Robert “Bob” Deering was in charge of Operations, I guess right up until the mid or late thirties?

ASPLUND: Yes, late thirties at least.

CERMAK: Late thirties. [Deering retired in 1948.]

ASPLUND: Mm-hm.

CERMAK: I’m going to have to get some of the old rosters, regional Forest Service rosters that show who was what, where, because it’s kind of hard to tell from correspondence. Frank

Jefferson was in there after it became a separate staff group.

ASPLUND: That was in the middle forties, Jefferson. I’m pretty sure Bob Deering—I’m sure

Bob Deering was chief operations until he retired, and I feel it was in about ’44 or ’5, in that area. I visited Bob Deering a year before he passed away in San Francisco, and he told me a story. We talked about his life, starting with the US Army forestry group in France during

World War I, when they set up a sawmill. Calais was another one. They set up a regiment over in France. But I think Bob was pretty much in charge of operations. We had, of course, foresters and timber specialists and so forth, but still Bob seemed to be in control.

CERMAK: I think, Operations staff in those days handled fire and finances. He really had his hand on that.

ASPLUND: On everything, yes. Rupert Asplund Interview, September 4, 1984, page 35

CERMAK: And operations also, administration and so forth.

ASPLUND: Yes.

CERMAK: But he was probably the closest thing to a deputy that they had in those days.

ASPLUND: Yes. The first all-forest fire I went to, which I think—there is some kind of history—was a big fire in Jose Basin. There was always fire in Jose Basin on the Sierra. It was a big brush field on the east side of the San Joaquin River. Frank Sweeley was the ranger. He was something else, from the standpoint of administration and personality.

I’m off the subject again, but there was a telephone line from Big Creek across, down through Jose Basin and North Fork, and wooden poles [unintelligible] trees. So Southern

California Edison Company started developments, and the built [unintelligible]. They built

Huntington [unintelligible], Huntington in 1918, I think. I think Huntington Lake dam was built in ’15, a big, big [unintelligible]. And these fires would burn these poles. Down in the construction camp up in—Camp Sixty, I think it was, up by Florence Lake. We’d go by this construction camp. Frank Sweeney—there was all this equipment laying around, like fire equipment in fire camp, cooking equipment. And there was a pipeline, and they would store all the pipes, twenty-foot length pipes, two-inch pipe. We’d figured to make fireproof poles by using one of those pipes and drilling a hole and putting the hook in it and hanging an insulator on it. The fire wouldn’t burn it up.

So we had a Model T Ford pickup, the Forest Service, a special car. If I came in without three or four of those big twenty-foot pipes on the side of the pickup, why, Frank would bawl me out. One day Mr. Benedict called up and said, “There’s going to be a California Edison

Company attorney here in North Fork. They claim you’ve been stealing their equipment.” So

Mr. Benedict told Mr. Sweeley. Frank Sweeley had to go over to North Fork, and I kind of Rupert Asplund Interview, September 4, 1984, page 36 shuddered all day while he was gone, wondering what was going to happen. As we came in with a load of 2-inch pipe we went by the Edison Company office, so when he came back that night, he says, “We got to come back after dark.” [Laughter.]

But the first fire that was all forest was in 1927 or ’28. I think it was ’27. I’ve been up until two or three, and I just got to bed. And Earl Morrow, who probably taught me more about everything, including firefighting, than anyone, came up and shook me, woke me up. [‘Wake up,” and said, “There’s a fire down in Southern California, the Angeles. There’s a fire.” “What do they want me down there for?”

But Ed Madison was the ranger, and he was also a top fire man. You’ve heard his name.

He started in ’24 on the Plumas as fireman, at Brush Creek. His father was a guard at Keddie, where he had to come down Yellow Creek—that was the only road in there, or else go on the railroad. Well, Ed drove down to Fresno to get a train to Los Angeles to go to this fire. He got on the train, and Ed had gone into the office and bought a ticket to Newhall. So we got on the train, down to Bakersfield. I was headed for Bakersfield. They told us we had to go over Cajon

Pass and back to San Bernardino and back to Los Angeles. Instead of through Saugus.

Before we got to Bakersfield, when we got on, the conductor says, “This train doesn’t stop in Newhall.” And Madison says, “It does this time.”

CERMAK: [Chuckles.]

ASPLUND: “No, you got to get off at Saugus. This train does not stop at Newhall.” And this went on continually, all the way to Bakersfield. Kern was the depot there at that time. So just before we stopped, there was an agent came up, suggested they have Madison go in and get a stop order. There’s a hill right out of Newhall that they had to climb and if they stopped at Rupert Asplund Interview, September 4, 1984, page 37

Newhall, then they had slow going up this hill. So we went in and got a stop order, and the conductor got on with this yellow slip in his hand. I thought he was going to have a heart attack.

So we finally got to Newhall. Argued over stopping, but it slowed down for Newhall. “Now, you got to get off. Get up there and get ready to get off because we’re not going to stop rolling”

[unintelligible] come to a complete stop, so that’s what we did.

CERMAK: [Laughs.]

ASPLUND: When we got to fire camp, Ed Madison was recognized immediately because he started in Southern California. He said the instructions were from the camp boss or somebody that “the whole front county is drained of men on this fire, and if we had another fire and nobody to go, we want you to go into Pasadena and stand by until, stay there.” So we went to Pasadena, the dispatcher’s office. Ray Davis was the dispatcher. Have you heard Davis’ name?

CERMAK: Yes, he was supervisor of William “Bill” Peterson on the Shasta.

ASPLUND: Oh, yes. Well, Ray Davis put me in charge of lunches, and Ed had the transportation, I think. I get an order for 5,000 lunches. It was a box lunch. I had a list of restaurants in Pasadena and around the outskirts, and I’d go through that, and I’d order 5,000 lunches. That went on for about a week, and we’d go to a hotel, Crown Hotel, and sign our name, and we’d go to the restaurants and sign our name and didn’t pay a dime. So come

Saturday, I think the fire went out into the desert finally and died out. It was up on the ridge route, and it was August. And then it started coming in, and Davis said, “Well, you can go home anytime,” but I wouldn’t go home until [unintelligible] check out the [unintelligible]. So I saw a friend of mine and he took us out to Santa Monica for the day, and then we got on the train, and we got back to North Fork. Everybody was feeling sorry for us.

CERMAK: [Laughs.] Because you had a vacation. Rupert Asplund Interview, September 4, 1984, page 38

ASPLUND: Vacation. Those kind of stories show up.

CERMAK: Have you got some thoughts about what happened with the CCC [Civilian

Conservation Corps] folks?

ASPLUND: Yes. I want to ask this question first: Have you heard anything of the history

Pendergrass is supposed to be writing?

CERMAK: Yes.

ASPLUND: Okay.

CERMAK: In fact, I’ve talked to him two or three times on the telephone and have sent him some information and he’s sent some to me.

ASPLUND: Well, his first information he got, the Cs weren’t used on fires. He had only gone to the Six Rivers and the Shasta before he came to talk to me. I got the word on the telephone that I would have 200 enrollees there in three weeks, and I had to get a place for the camp and

[unintelligible].

CERMAK: At Weaverville?

ASPLUND: Yes, no at Mad River. I had to pick out foremen and hire the LEMs, the “Local

Experienced Men” that got forty-six dollars a month. They were right out of fire crew, crew foreman, and four men was a fire crew. We only had two or three guards working at that time, in

’33. Fortunately, I didn’t have many fires on the district that year, but we did send them all over the forest fighting fire. I’m sure they had—

CERMAK: Did they have a camp in Weaverville?

ASPLUND: No, there were six camps on the Trinity National Forest, one on each district. One down at Hyampom in the Hayfork District. Oh, I could tell a story about when they brought in Rupert Asplund Interview, September 4, 1984, page 39 all the lumber, and bags of nails, the kegs of nails on trucks. The CC boys said, “Look, Ma, brand-new nails that haven’t even been pulled out of a board yet.”

CERMAK: [Laughs.]

ASPLUND: But I tell you, they were a real critical, important part of Forest Service development. They built more roads and telephone lines.

CERMAK: Would you say that really they perhaps were more important in that way, in developing facilities for firefighters?

ASPLUND: Yes.

CERMAK: They built—

ASPLUND: The work they did—the Ponderosa Way. How far have you gotten on the

Ponderosa Way?

CERMAK: I collected a lot of information. The writing is up to 1921, and what I want to do now Rupe, is Ethel, my sweet wife, got me a word processor for Christmas, so I’ve been putting all this stuff on the processor and just print it up. I’ve been going to CSU-Chico up until next week, but I started working on it again the other day and typed up the introduction and the first chapter and printed them off, in drafts. I’ve got about four or five chapters written. I’ve got about another six or seven after that, five or six. So I’m up to about 1921 in the writing. I’ve done a lot of research past that point.

ASPLUND: Well, the Ponderosa Way idea came into the picture about 1930, in the early thirties. One of the jobs I had with the tractor was building a fire line across the front country of the Sierra National Forest.

CERMAK: That was where the idea came from, the Sierra and the Sequoia.

ASPLUND: Sierra and Sequoia. Rupert Asplund Interview, September 4, 1984, page 40

CERMAK: Right.

ASPLUND: At that time, a lot of the ranchers were doing a lot of burning, and the fires would get away. Okay, you have that.

Well, then—I’ll tell you—I’m not sure about this, but I feel that the actual 200-foot

Ponderosa Way idea came from Show. An awful lot was done with the CC program.

CERMAK: In fact, I think—who was it?—was it Joseph “Joe” Elliott was put in charge of that?

ASPLUND: Oh, the Ponderosa Way? Probably so.

CERMAK: I believe so. In fact, from what I’ve read, the majority of it had already been completed by 1935, although the total thing didn’t get finished until right on up to 1942.

ASPLUND: Could be.

CERMAK: But that was pretty much the impression I’ve gotten so for. The Cs weren’t used for fire fighting and as fire crews, but probably all the road development and building of lookouts and other buildings and telephone lines would be the most important [unintelligible].

ASPLUND: Yes. And every one of these so-called compounds, supervisors’ headquarters, were built in that period of time. I went on the lookout on South Point Mountain, and I wanted a twenty-foot tower. Have I told you that story?

CERMAK: Is that the one when they went to Ruth Rock (Mad River Rock)?

ASPLUND: No, that’s another one.

CERMAK: You told me the one about—

ASPLUND: I told you about Ruth Rock. Well, South Point Mountain. So I had a carpenter in the Cs. We didn’t have any engineers. The best example of that is we built the road up some canyon with a Cat [Caterpillar] operator [who] was given a hand level, and don’t go over 7 percent. That was my engineering. But about the same thing happened on this lookout. I asked Rupert Asplund Interview, September 4, 1984, page 41 the carpenter—I told him I wanted a twenty-foot tower. “Well,” he said, “I got to have eight

10x10s, Douglas fir, seventeen rings to the inch, twenty feet long.” And he developed a footing for those posts, 10x10s, that I had to go to the foundry to have cast. Steel plates with the side on it attached to the post, and holes with bolts about two feet long and go down into the foundation.

He dug holes—he had the Cs build holes. Dug holes about four or five feet deep, and they’re arrow shaped. Filled them with concrete and then stuck these poles down.

When I went to the Scotia sawmill—Scotia is south of Eureka, isn’t it? Went to the manager, told him the ranger, and I had a truck. I had to go down and we’d haul the men on that.

We took a truck and went down to the mill, and I told the manager we need eight 10x10s. He said, “Well, you go out on the deck and pick out some logs and we’ll bring them in and saw them for you.”

CERMAK: [Chuckles.]

ASPLUND: So I came home, and I went to the foundry and got the footings made, and a few years later, when the engineers came on the job, I had them check the lookout to see if it was safe. Turned out it had about a six-to-one safety factor.

CERMAK: [Laughs.]

ASPLUND: I don’t want to get into just personal problems all the time.

CERMAK: That’s interesting.

ASPLUND: Yes.

CERMAK: Yes, I think so.

ASPLUND: Because this is the story of my life. When I look back, everything was good and everything was funny. As far as I can remember, they had funny parts to them. Rupert Asplund Interview, September 4, 1984, page 42

CERMAK: Now, one of the things that we talked last time about [was] when you went to

Weaverville you kind of got into the training activity and developed a fire behavior course, a fire table, and some of the other things you got going there. About 1931 or so, they came up with ten

A.M. policy. Do you have any thoughts about that?

ASPLUND: I feel that that is one of the biggest mistakes, I call it, but changes in policy that was made. The ten A.M. policy changed our whole fire situation. You went out to a fire, and if you couldn’t control it by ten A.M. the next day, you were in trouble. That’s, at least, the feeling that

I had. It was an objective. It was just the same as everyday work.

CERMAK: It was easily understood.

ASPLUND: It was easily understood, and if it went beyond ten A.M., there was a board of fire review, and I felt frustrated when I went down to the board of review on the Milk Ranch fire because it had been a tough situation, and I felt it took too long to put it out. Frank Jefferson started the board review by saying, “A 24,000-acre fire under control in forty-eight hours.” I didn’t consider it controlled in forty-eight hours, but I guess it was contained—

CERMAK: Contained.

ASPLUND: —shall we put it, and that was the way he started the board of review, so we didn’t have any discussion. On that fire, we had 2,000 men and sixteen Cats the next day on it.

CERMAK: You also, as I recall, had a lightning bust sometime during the period of that fire.

ASPLUND: It could be. Not much in my diary. Too busy that year. There were 350 lightning fires on the Plumas in ’51 and 150 one night. That was over on the Jim Jam on the Trinity that year. But I don’t recall— Rupert Asplund Interview, September 4, 1984, page 43

CERMAK: Rupe, what was your impression of the board of reviews that you attended? Did you feel that they were pretty impartial and objective and the idea was to get at the facts, or did you feel that they kind of made people nervous and afraid of the results or whatever?

ASPLUND: The ones I attended I felt were objective. I had no feeling that they were trying to get someone in trouble. They were trying to find out if there were problems, what the problems were so they could do something about it. Part of it may have been analyzing the personnel that might have been involved, but I never heard—I don’t remember any real experiences or times when this actually was just personnel.

CERMAK: They focused on the action, not the people.

ASPLUND: The action and what might have been done different to help, and if there were mistakes or—not necessarily mistakes but something was done that might have been done a little bit different, they developed that. I attended several of them. I guess I was involved in all of the boards of review for the big fires on the Trinity, held in Redding. The board of review consisted of one or two from regional office and—oh, the old-timer from the Eldorado, supervisor for forty years. I can’t think of his name. But he was on it. Bill Peterson was there. But I didn’t get the idea that he was on the board of review. Later I found out that he was there, just sizing me up to see if he wanted me as fire control officer. [Laughter.] But this supervisor from the Eldorado said, “I’m going to ask the meanest question I’ve ever asked in my life, and you can’t answer it.”

He said, “I’m retiring this spring.”

CERMAK: [Chuckles.]

ASPLUND: “What was the supervisor and the regional office representative doing during this time?” Apparently they were asking me all the questions. [Laughs.] Because I was the fire boss. I feel that this was my job. I usually would tell the supervisor, all of them, that “I’m Rupert Asplund Interview, September 4, 1984, page 44 running the fire, and I want you to be there and if I make a mistake or I miss three or four days and get criticized for something, you watch and see what I’m doing. Go ahead and check me, but I’m running the fire. That’s about the way I feel.”

Also I don’t know how you could use this, but I feel this firefighting game is almost an intuition. Montana right now, the experiment station in Montana is doing a lot of studying, trying to put it on computer. I just feel that there’s just no way that this can be done. You know about the fire behavior wheel? They had about thirty fire solutions.

CERMAK: Yes, the little wheel.

ASPLUND: Yes.

CERMAK: There was one they called the Gisborne computer, but there was another one, a little wheel—

ASPLUND: A little wheel, and you put fuel, slope, wind into it. They had us over here for two weeks in a training session in the so-called work center. Now it’s the experiment station. Aerial photos were in the picture by that time, and we had the map, and they would put the start of one of the big fires that we had on the map, and then we were supposed to use the wheel and decide where the fire should have been put out.

CERMAK: And that was fire behavior?

ASPLUND: Yes. Supposed to be one of the uses of the wheel.

CERMAK: I tend to agree with you. I know I like fighting fire from the standpoint of being on the line, and I think my best position was as division boss. I believe in fighting fire aggressively and also— Rupert Asplund Interview, September 4, 1984, page 45

[Transcriber’s note: At counter #529, about 86% into the side, the tape didn’t advance

properly in the transcribing machine for a very brief while, and then it was okay,

although the background whoosh became much louder.]

I was very successful at it, but I also got to the point where I was getting a little nervous about it.

I had a couple of little close calls, but I wasn’t afraid to take a risk, and I think that’s what you have to be able to do, but you have to know what the consequences are and also fully understand what the consequences are. I get the impression these days, before I left the Forest Service, that there’s a little bit too much of a careful approach to things.

ASPLUND: Oh, I suppose a lot of it is just plain experience.

CERMAK: Yes.

ASPLUND: But one example, on the Red Cap fire on the Klamath. An old-time foreman,

[Charles] “Charlie” Crews, was down at the bottom of a creek. From ten o’clock in the morning, he sensed something, and he started the men out of there, and they got out at one o’clock. They just barely made it in. Some intuition—

CERMAK: Told him.

ASPLUND: —told him. And that’s when they burned the fifteen men. That’s right up on the

Mendocino.

CERMAK: The Rattlesnake.

ASPLUND: The Rattlesnake. Again, intuition. I mention knowing fire behavior, but you have to have this intuition thing. The crew were above a spot fire, resting. When the fire started to blow up the men started running up the hill, the fire control Lafferty on the road yelled, “Don’t come this way.” Don’t go down the canyon, but go up. There’s no way—a machine can forecast this, but I sensed the same thing on the Inaja fire down in the Cleveland. The line was Rupert Asplund Interview, September 4, 1984, page 46 built off (away from) the fire. Five or six of the forest fire control officers that I had been working with down there said to fire the line. That afternoon, the cool air come out from the coast and down the mountain, and, well, the wind came down the hill and the ground shifted.

The turbulence was so heavy, the ground shifted. The flames roared overhead 200 feet, and blasted through an olive orchard and burned all the leaves off the olive trees, and there was no grass or fuel in there much at all, which gives you an example of what I’m talking about.

I don’t think—and I’ve been very careful, in my mind, at least, not to criticize people for making a mistake on a fire. It is such a complex situation that you have to have more—

CERMAK: Knowledge.

ASPLUND: Knowledge.

CERMAK: Yes. I think that’s probably right. I asked you the last time what you thought about the fire disasters the Forest Service had in the late fifties and early sixties. It’s pretty much what you said. I think that the situations, as you say, are so complicated, and you can’t really control the environment there. The weather can change so quickly, or a wind situation. I recall the

Charles fire in 1959. We had that thing corralled that first night after it burned about 2,500 or

3,000 acres. I was coming off shift the next morning in a helicopter about eleven o'clock. A weak front was moving through, and the wind shifted enough to reach in and grab a big chunk of burning brush from inside the fire [and] threw it outside, about a hundred yards. Boom! Away she went.

ASPLUND: Okay, that’s a good example, and I feel that in writing—

[End Tape 1, Side A. Side B cannot be transcribed due to tape malfunction.]