Fire today ManagementVolume 60 • No. 3 • Summer 2000
WILDLAND FFIRE— AN AAMERICAN LEGACY
United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service Editor’s note: This issue of Fire Management Today is the first of two special issues focusing on fire history and past fire management practices in the United States. The first issue addresses wildland fire before the 20th century; the next will focus on aspects of wildland fire management in the 20th century. Articles in this issue by Stephen W. Barrett, Hutch Brown, Stephen J. Pyne, and Gerald W. Williams discuss fire history and use in centuries past, exploring their implications for land managers today and in the decades to come.
Frederic S. Remington, The Grass Fire, 1908 (oil on canvas). Artwork courtesy of the Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, TX (1961.228).
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Mike Dombeck, Chief Robert H. “Hutch” Brown, Ph.D. Forest Service Editor
José Cruz, Director Gerald W. Williams, Ph.D. Fire and Aviation Management Issue Coordinator
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On the Cover: CONTENTS Where Have All the Fires Gone? ...... 4 Stephen J. Pyne
Introduction to Aboriginal Fire Use in North America ...... 8 Gerald W. Williams
Early Fire Use in Oregon ...... 13 Gerald W. Williams The Grass Fire (detail—the entire painting is shown on the facing Fire History Along the Ancient Lolo Trail...... 21 page), a 1908 painting by Frederic Stephen W. Barrett Remington, depicts a band of American Indians using fire on the Wildland Burning by American Indians in Virginia ...... 29 Great Plains against an enemy. In warfare, Indians used fires for such Hutch Brown purposes as covering a retreat, panicking an enemy into flight, Reintroducing Indian-Type Fire: Implications camouflaging an ambush, depriving for Land Managers ...... 40 an enemy of fodder for horses (in Gerald W. Williams the West), and destroying enemy villages and cropfields (in the East). New Automated System for Tracking Remington’s painting matches the depiction of Indian fire use by James Federal Excess Personal Property ...... 49 Fenimore Cooper in his 1827 novel Roberta Burzynski, Jan Polasky, and Diana Grayson The Prairie (see the excerpt on page 28). Indian fire use, mostly for peaceful purposes, was so extensive HORT EATURES that it shaped ecosystems across S F North America. Guidelines for Contributors...... 7
The FIRE 21 symbol (shown below and on the cover) stands for the safe and effective use of Websites on Fire...... 12 wildland fire, now and throughout the 21st century. Its shape represents the fire triangle (oxygen, heat, and fuel). The three outer red triangles represent the basic functions of wildland Fire Use in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Prairie ...... 28 fire organizations (planning, operations, and aviation management), and the three critical aspects of wildland fire management (prevention, First Peoples First in Fire Shelter Use ...... 39 suppression, and prescription). The black interior represents land affected by fire; the emerging green points symbolize the growth, restoration, Photo Contest for 2001 ...... 51 and sustainability associated with fire-adapted ecosystems. The flame represents fire itself as an ever-present force in nature. For more information on FIRE 21 and the science, research, and innovative thinking behind it, contact Mike Apicello, National Interagency Fire Center, 208-387-5460.
Firefighter and public safety is our first priority. WHERE HAVE ALL THE FIRES GONE?
Stephen J. Pyne
n the United States, few places know as much fire today as they The fires that once flushed I did a century ago. Fires have fled the myriad landscapes of North America from regions like the Northeast were fires that people once set that formerly relied on them for farming and grazing. They have and no longer do. receded from the Great Plains, once near-annual seas of flame, ebbing and flowing with seasonal natural fire. Moreover, it is pro- The aboriginal lines and fields of tides. They burn in the South at foundly interactive. It burns in a fire inscribed a landscape mosaic only a fraction of their former context of general landscape (see Lewis and Ferguson (1988) for grandeur. They have faded from meddling by humans—hunting, a different terminology). Some the mountains and mesas, valleys foraging, planting—in ways that tiles were immense, some tiny. and basins of the West. They are shape both the flame and its Some experienced fire annually, even disappearing from yards and effects. So reliant are people on some on the scale of decades. In hearths. One can view the dim- their fire monopoly that what most years, fires burned to the ming panorama of fire in the same makes fire possible generally edge of the corridor or patch and way that observers at the close of makes human societies possible. then stopped, melting away before the 19th century viewed the What prevents one retards the damp understories, snow, or wet- specter of the vanishing American other. Places that escaped anthro- flushed greenery. But in other Indian. pogenic fire likely escaped fire years, when the land was groaning altogether. with excess fuels and parched by Missing Fires, droughts, fires kindled by intent or Missing Peoples Pre-Columbian Fire accident roared deep into the Practices landscape. People move and fire And with some cause: Those Did American Indians really burn propagates; humanity’s fiery reach missing fires and the missing far exceeds its grasp of the fire- peoples are linked. The fires that the land? Of course they did. All peoples do, even those committed stick. Remove those flames and the once flushed the myriad land- structure of even seldom-visited scapes of North America and have to industrial combustion, who disguise their fires in machines. forests eventually looks very faded away are not fires that were different. kindled by nature and suppressed, The issue is whether and how those fires affected the landscape. but rather fires that people once What Burning Meant set and no longer do. In some Much of the burning was system- places, lightning has filled the atic. Pre-Columbian peoples fired How effective were these burns? void. But mostly it has not, and along routes of travel, and they That, of course, depends. If the even where lightning has reas- burned patches where flame could land was fire prone, people could serted itself, it has introduced a help them extract some resource— easily seize control over it. They fire regime that can be quite camas, deer, huckleberries, maize. simply burned before natural distinct from those shaped by the The outcome was a kind of fire ignition arrived, sculpting new fire torch. foraging, even fire cultivating, regimes, forcing the biota to such that strips and patches adjust. The aboriginal firestick Anthropogenic (human-caused) burned as fuel became available. became a lever that, suitably sited, fire comes with a different seasonal But much burning resulted from could move whole landscapes, even signature and frequency than malice, play, war, accident, escapes, continents. The outcome was and sheer fire littering. The land particularly powerful where places Steve Pyne is a professor in the Biology and was peppered with human-inspired had the ingredients for fire but Society Program, Department of Biology, lacked a consistent spark. That Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ. embers.
4 Fire Management Today people supplied. They made flame The aboriginal firestick became a lever an environmental constant, which that, suitably sited, could move whole left fuel and climate as the prin- ciple variables in determining how landscapes, even continents. extensively fire burned. This is worth repeating: People trans- formed ignition from chance into clearly seen in the human impact kind of grazing gap into which fire choice, from something that was on and through animals, which poured. Likely these creatures sparked through lightning’s lottery both shape biotas and crop off survived because they could into something as chronic as biomass. What grazers and brows- accommodate the new fire regime. sunshine. ers consume through the slow combustion of respiration cannot In fire-intolerant places, however, People were less effective in places feed the rapid combustion carried the reverse could occur. Eliminat- that were fire intolerant, that by flame. ing the animals helped eliminate lacked wet–dry climatic rhythms, fire. Without their crunching, that favored shade forests with Evicting those animals—and trampling, and rooting, shady scant understories of sun-hungry three-quarters of North America’s woodlands could overgrow the vegetation, that had neither spark megafauna disappeared as pre- scene, filling the cracks through nor adequate combustibles. The Columbian peoples spread across which flame could enter the solution, of course, was to make the continent—left more biomass landscape. In North America, the fuel—to slash woods into kindling, unconsumed and shifted the missing megafauna did not return to open canopies, to grow fallow. character of what remained. In until Europeans introduced And this, from a fire ecology fire-prone places, the outcome was domestic livestock, which found a perspective, is the meaning of more fuel for flame and a rapid bonanza of ready-made pastures agriculture. One could fashion shift to increasingly open and and proved invaluable in rolling fuel, dry it, and burn it, more or grassy landscapes. The beasts that back the shaded woods. Open less in defiance of natural biases. continued to flourish could not landscapes that had once fed fire Forests broke into a kaleidoscope consume the “surplus,” leaving a now fed horses, cattle, sheep, of fields and fallow, a multitude of new habitats for flame. Not least of all, agriculture could complement an aboriginal economy and thus carry anthropogenic fire almost everywhere. The eastern half of the United States knew fire precisely for these reasons. Only the most inhospitable landscapes escaped. Missing Megafauna Still, complications always exist. Human history is lumpy—its kindled flame flickers with the winds of migration, war, and disease. Humanity’s restless hand, moreover, fiddles compulsively with the land on scales that range from fire-pruning blueberry bushes to fire-scouring densely packed conifers. Not least of all, what people do to a biota, quite A chronology of charcoal preserved in sediments off the Pacific coast of Central America apart from how they use fire, can (Suman 1991). Note that the greatest input occurred in the 50 years prior to the Spanish Conquest ca. (1523). When the native population crashed, so did the fire regimes. affect fire regimes. This is most Analogous events probably occurred across most of North America.
Volume 60 • No. 3 • Summer 2000 5 Forests broke into a kaleidoscope of fields and fallow, a multitude of new habitats for flame. swine, and donkeys. Closed land- those who knew fire only in stoves flame back are compelling. But scapes that had driven fire to the or through books. It is worth returning fire to the land in hopes margins now saw flame’s return. recalling that the greatest chal- of restoring pristine pre- lenge to early fire control was the Columbian vistas is not one of The Mystery of the doctrine of “light burning,” them. We must reinstate fire Missing Flame deliberately promoted as the because we cannot sustain the Fire is as effective removed as “Indian way” of forest stewardship. landscapes we value without applied, and therein lies much of Ultimately, what snuffed out free- burning. We should reinstate fire its ecological (and moral) magic. burning fire was not simply the because burning is what we do as Places that had known regular fire, removal of the American Indian human beings, as holders of a perhaps for thousands of years, but also the failure to replace the species monopoly over flame, for suffered when those fires vanished. Indians’ fires with others. That whom fire neutrality is not an Set aside and protected as reserves, brash experiment could only have option. We have no choice, no the public lands have witnessed happened through full-bore more than did American Indians, staggering biotic changes that industrialization. Australian Aborigines, or European could not have occurred had fire peasants. We must decide how to continued. And it is obvious that Worse, that too-simple explanation apply and withhold fire in the fire did not continue: The evidence for the missing flame sustains a landscape because we still re- is scrawled like woody graffiti all problematic myth: that Europe main—all of us, all peoples, across over the land itself. found a wilderness and tried to a hundred millennia—the keepers render it into a garden. Closer to of the planetary flame. The usual explanation is that the truth, the critics can well reply, Europeans stopped the fires; in a is that Europe found a garden and Literature Cited and loose sense, they did. A further has tried to render it into a wilder- Suggested explanation is that Europeans ness. Yet the myth has power, and Boyd, R., ed. 1999. Indians, fire and the introduced an unholy trinity of the choice between stories has land in the Pacific Northwest. Corvallis, meaning for fire management. The OR: Oregon State University Press. environmental evils—overgrazing, Lewis, H.T.; Ferguson, T.M. 1988. Yards, crude logging, and systematic fire first story argues that nature alone corridors, and mosaics: How to burn a suppression. All this is also true, can restore itself; the second, that boreal forest. Human Ecology. 16: 57–77. anthropogenic fire must return. Powell, J.W. 1878. Report on the lands of and misleading. It ignores the the arid region of the United States. adoption of Indian fire practices by Washington, DC: Government Printing settlers and the attempted adapta- Keeping the Flame Office. The missing fires are those that Pyne, S.J. In press. The story of fire: An tion of European fire habits to a introduction. Seattle, WA: University of New World. The critical divide was were once set by the now missing Washington Press. not between Indians and Europe- peoples, the Indians who were Suman, D.O. 1991. A five-century ans but between city and country, removed and the newcomers who, sedimentary geochronology of biomass burning in Nicaragua and Central between those who resided on the on the public lands, failed to pick America. In: Levine, J.S., ed. Global land and those who lived in urban up the Indians’ fallen torches. The biomass burning. Boston, MA: MIT ■ areas, between those who grew up reasons for putting some of that Press. with their hand on a torch and
6 Fire Management Today GUIDELINES FOR CONTRIBUTORS
Editorial Policy agency, institution, or organization. way as the corresponding material (figure 1, 2, Fire Management Today (FMT) is an 3; photograph A, B, C; etc.). Captions should international quarterly magazine for the Style. Authors are responsible for using make photos and illustrations understandable wildland fire community. FMT welcomes wildland fire terminology that conforms to the without reading the text. For photos, indicate unsolicited manuscripts from readers on any latest standards set by the National Wildfire the “top” and include the name and affiliation of subject related to fire management. Because Coordinating Group under the National the photographer and the year the photo was space is a consideration, long manuscripts Interagency Incident Management System. FMT taken. might be abridged by the editor, subject to uses the spelling, capitalization, hyphenation, approval by the author; FMT does print short and other styles recommended in the United Electronic Files. Please label all disks carefully pieces of interest to readers. States Government Printing Office Style with name(s) of file(s) and system(s) used. If the Manual. Authors should use the U.S. system of manuscript is word-processed, please submit a Submission Guidelines weight and measure, with equivalent values in 3-1/2 inch, IBM-compatible disk together with Submit manuscripts to either the general the metric system. Try to keep titles concise and the paper copy (see above) as an electronic file manager or the editor at: descriptive; subheadings and bulleted material in one of these formats: WordPerfect 5.1 for are useful and help readability. As a general rule DOS; WordPerfect 7.0 or earlier for Windows 95; USDA Forest Service of clear writing, use the active voice (e.g., write, Microsoft Word 6.0 or earlier for Windows 95; Attn: April J. Baily, F&AM Staff “Fire managers know…” and not, “It is Rich Text format; or ASCII. Digital photos may P.O. Box 96090 known…”). Provide spellouts for all be submitted but must be at least 300 dpi and Washington, DC 20090-6090 abbreviations. Consult recent issues (on the accompanied by a high-resolution (preferably tel. 202-205-0891, fax 202-205-1272 World Wide Web at
CONTRIBUTORS WANTED
We need your fire-related articles and photographs for Fire Management Today! Feature articles should be up to about 2,000 words in length. We also need short items of up to 200 words. Subjects of articles published in Fire Management Today include: Aviation Firefighting experiences Communication Incident management Cooperation Information management (including systems) Ecosystem management Personnel Education Planning (including budgeting) Equipment and technology Preparedness Fire behavior Prevention Fire ecology Safety Fire effects Suppression Fire history Training Fire use (including prescribed fire) Weather Fuels management Wildland–urban interface To help prepare your submission, see “Guidelines for Contributors” in this issue.
Volume 60 • No. 3 • Summer 2000 7 INTRODUCTION TO ABORIGINAL FIRE USE IN NORTH AMERICA
Gerald W. Williams
vidence for the purposeful use of fire by American Indians has “There was no ‘pristine wilderness’ here. E been easy to document but Prairie and forest were to a large extent difficult to substantiate. Many the creation of indigenous peoples.” people discount the fact that Indians greatly changed ecosys- –Historian Dennis Martinez tems so they could survive and flourish in North America. How- ever, a growing body of literature is Many written accounts by early genocide—that land was not used showing that many presettlement settlers noted evidence of burned to its productive potential by its fires that were once believed to or scorched trees and open prairies Native inhabitants—was false.” have been natural were in fact or savannas with tall grasses in the intentionally caused. Exploring river basins (Lorimer 1993; Fragmentary Evidence how American Indians used fire McClain and Elzinga 1994; Russell Still, documentation of the Indian will help us better understand how 1983; Stevens 1860; Whitney conditions in our ecosystems today use of fire is fragmentary at best. 1994). The abundance of rich Historically documented incidents were shaped by humans in the prairie ready for the plow was one past. are rare; photography was invented of the primary reasons for settlers after most tribes had disappeared to head west to the present-day Pristine Wilderness? or surrendered their traditional States of California, Idaho, Oregon, ways. A few early paintings and By the time that European explor- and Washington, and later to drawings do show how Indian fires ers, fur traders, and settlers arrived establish homesteads on the Great were set (see cover illustration). in many parts of North America, Plains. As Dennis Martinez (1998) But researchers today must rely millions of acres of “natural” has noted, “There was no ‘pristine primarily on indirect references landscapes or “wilderness” were wilderness’ here. Prairie and forest and incomplete accounts by early already manipulated and main- were to a large extent the creation settlers, missionaries, trappers, tained for human use, although of indigenous peoples. The main and explorers. the early observers did not recog- justification by Europeans for nize the signs (Blackburn and Anderson 1993; Botkin 1992; Denevan 1992; Doolittle 1992; Lewis 1973, 1982; Pyne 1995; HOW NATURAL IS “NATURE”? Shrader-Frechette and McCoy 1995; Stevens 1860; Stewart 1954, Researchers today tend to believe that the concepts “nature” and 1955, 1963; Whitney 1994; Wilson “wilderness” are human constructs, not reflections of an original 1992). Early explorers and fur pristine landscape. Many researchers note that people have been part trappers often observed huge of ecosystems since long before recorded time. In the contemporary burned-over or cleared areas with view, people are part of ecosystems, have evolved with ecosystems, many dead trees “littering” the have used parts and pieces of ecosystems for survival, and have landscape, without knowing changed portions of ecosystems to meet their needs. In North whether the fires were natural or America, as Emily Russell (1997) has observed, “humans have been a Indian caused. part of the ecosystem over the past ten centuries of major climatic change, so that all forests have developed under some kind of human Jerry Williams is a historical analyst for influence….This influence must be accounted for as an important the USDA Forest Service, Washington part of any study of forest structure and dynamics.” Office, Washington, DC.
8 Fire Management Today Until recently, few people acknowl- the land” is wrong. “Native Ameri- because their food came from the edged the impact that Indian fire cans had three powerful technolo- ocean and rivers. But the tribes use had on the land. As Stephen gies: fire, the ability to work wood living a few miles inland exten- Pyne (1995) has put it, “[E]ven a into useful objects, and the bow sively used fire to maintain the decade ago the question of ‘Indian and arrow. To claim that people prairies or savannas they depended burning’ was a quaint appendix to with these technologies did not or on for food (Norton et al. 1999). fire management.” “[I]t is at least a could not create major changes in fair assumption,” a classic forestry natural ecosystems can be taken as In the Northeast, the impact of textbook in the 1970’s declared, Western civilization’s ignorance, Indian fire use was equally mixed. “that no habitual or systematic chauvinism, and old prejudice As Emily Russell (1983) has burning was carried out by the against primitivism—the noble but pointed out, “There is no strong Indians” (Brown and Davis 1973). dumb savage.” evidence that Indians purposely Early researchers labeled the burned large areas….The presence notion that American Indians Complex Burning of Indians did, however, undoubt- routinely burned large areas of Patterns edly increase the frequency of fires wildland “inconceivable” (Raup The many original diaries, letters, above the low numbers caused by 1937) and “preposterous” (Coman books, and reports by eyewitnesses lightning.” As might be expected, 1911). of Indian fire use from the 1600’s Indian fire use had its greatest to the 1900’s have yielded consider- impact “in local areas near Indian Many people still believe that able evidence that American habitations.” American Indians lived in com- Indians did use fire to change plete harmony with the environ- ecosystems (Barrett 1980, 1981; Role of Indian Fire Use ment, neither disturbing nor McClain and Elzinga 1994; Russell Fire was the most powerful tool destroying but taking only what 1983; Whitney 1994). Of course, Indians could use to create land- was absolutely needed for survival. not all tribes burned the landscape scapes capable of sustaining As Daniel Botkin (1990) has often. For example, Indians living thriving, growing societies (Trudel pointed out, the impression of a directly along the coast in the 1985; Whitney 1994). Indian-set “benign people treading lightly on Pacific Northwest rarely used fires, fires differed from natural fires in
PITFALLS IN RESEARCHING INDIAN FIRE USE
Many studies purport to docu- • Overreporting: Some studies • Reliance on hearsay: Some ment Indian manipulation of attribute ecosystem changes to studies rely on reports of ecosystems through fire use and Indian fire use when those Indian fire use, especially by other means. Some make changes have natural explana- early settlers, that amount to sweeping generalizations (e.g., tions. hearsay or third-party ac- “Indians burned the prairies”), • Misinterpretation: Some counts. whereas others are very specific studies misinterpret the unfamil- • Overgeneralization: Some (e.g., “The women of the iar language and perspectives— studies fail to account for Kalapuya Indians burned the far removed from those of regional and tribal variations prairies and foothills of the today—in source materials that in the use of fire. middle Willamette Valley every can be up to four centuries old. fall”). However, most studies • Imprecision: Some studies suffer from basic methodological • Reliance on secondary sources: fail to name the tribe or band shortcomings: Some studies cite other studies that used fire in the ecosys- • Underreporting: Some to support their conclusions tem, the exact location or studies focus on instances of instead of examining the primary even the general area of fire fire use by Indian people that sources of evidence. use, or the purposes of did not result in ecosystem burning (such as hunting or changes. improving pasture for game).
Volume 60 • No. 3 • Summer 2000 9 their seasonality, frequency, and Europeans were, as Stephen Pyne (1994) on the Midwestern United intensity (Lewis 1985; McClain and (1982) perhaps best put it, “the States. Robert Boyd (1999) has Elzinga 1994; Pyne 1995). Reasons result of repeated, controlled, edited a collection of outstanding for burning were many; they varied surface burns on a cycle of one to studies on wildland burning by from tribe to tribe and region to three years, broken by occasional American Indians in the Pacific region. Most accounts indicate that holocausts from escape fires and Northwest and parts of Canada. Indians used fire to achieve “mosa- periodic conflagrations during Stephen Pyne’s many works ics, resource diversity, environ- times of drought….So extensive contain ample information about mental stability, predictability, and were the cumulative effects of aboriginal people and their use of the maintenance of ecotones” these modifications that it can be fire in North America and other (Lewis 1985). said that the general consequence parts of the world. of the Indian occupation of the American Indians tended to burn New World was to replace forested Literature Cited ecosystems differently depending land with grassland or savannah, Barrett, S.W. 1980. Indians and fire. on the resources being managed. or, where the forest persisted, to Western Wildlands. 6(3): 17–21. Barrett, S.W. 1981. Indian fires in the pre- Hardly ever did the various tribes open it up and free it from under- settlement forests of western Montana. purposely burn when the forests brush.” In: Stokes, M.A.; Dieterich, J.H., tech. were most vulnerable to cata- coords. Proceedings of the Fire History Workshop; 20–24 October 1980; Tucson, strophic wildland fire (McClain and Wherever Europeans went, they AZ. Gen. Tech. Rep. RM–81. Fort Elzinga 1994; Pyne 1995). Indeed, generally stopped the Indians from Collins, CO: USDA Forest Service, Rocky for some Indians, saving the forest burning, usually by eliminating Mountain Forest and Range Experiment Station: 35–41. from fire was crucial for survival them from the land. Ironically, Blackburn, T.C.; Anderson, K., eds. 1993. (Barrett 1980; Booth 1994; Fish more forest exists today in some Before the wilderness: Environmental 1996; Lorimer 1993; Phillips parts of North America than when management by Native Californians. Menlo Park, CA: Ballena Press. 1985). For the most part, tribes set the Europeans first arrived. As Booth, D.E. 1994. Valuing nature: The fires that did not destroy entire Pyne (1982) observed, “The Great decline and preservation of old-growth forests or ecosystems, were rela- American Forest may be more a forests. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc. tively easy to control, and stimu- product of [European] settlement Botkin, D.B. 1990. Discordant harmonies: lated new plant growth. than a victim of it.” The implica- A new ecology for the twenty-first tions for land management today century. New York, NY: Oxford Univer- sity Press. Burning seasons varied by are profound: Should we restore Botkin, D.B. 1992. A natural myth. Nature ecoregion. In the boreal forests of fire on millions of acres of Federal Conservancy. 42(3): 38. Boyd, R.T., ed. 1999. Indians, fire and the Canada, for example, Indians lands to help ecosystems recover land in the Pacific Northwest. Corvallis, tended to burn in late spring, just some semblance of their pre- OR: Oregon State University Press. before new plant growth appears. settlement vigor? The legacy of Brown, A.A.; Davis, K.P. 1973. Forest fire: Control and use. New York, NY: In the more arid southern Rockies fire use by our American Indian McGraw–Hill Book Company. and Sierra Nevada foothills, where predecessors deserves careful Coman, W.E. 1911. Did the Indian protect most plant growth occurs in scrutiny as we enter the 21st the forest? Pacific Monthly. 26(3): 300– 306. winter, Indians tended to set fires century. Denevan, W.M. 1992. The pristine myth: during late summer or early fall. The landscape of the Americas in 1492. Wherever Indians burned, they Annals of the American Geographers. Further Reading 82(3): 369–385. usually did so at regular intervals For more information on aborigi- Doolittle, W.E. 1992. Agriculture in North of up to 5 years. nal wildland burning, see (in America on the eve of contact: A reassessment. Annals of the American addition to the articles in this issue Geographers. 82(3): 386–401. Impact of Indian Fire of Fire Management Today) Fish, S.K. 1996. Modeling human impacts Use to the borderlands environment from a especially the excellent studies by fire ecology perspective. Ffolliott, P.F., et The cumulative impact of burning Henry Lewis (1973, 1982, 1985) on al., tech. coords. Effects of Fire on by American Indians profoundly California and Canada, by Emily Madrean Province Ecosystems: A Symposium Proceedings; 11–15 March altered the landscape in many Russell (1983) and Gordon 1986; Tucson, AZ. Gen. Tech. Rep. RM– parts of North America. Many Whitney (1994) on the Northeast- 289. Fort Collins, CO: USDA Forest ecosystems first encountered by ern United States, and by William Service, Rocky Mountain Forest and Range Experiment Station: 125–134. McClain and Sherrie Elzinga
10 Fire Management Today DOCUMENTED REASONS FOR INDIAN FIRE USE
Henry T. Lewis (1973) concluded that American Indians burned the landscape for at least 70 different reasons. Other researchers have listed fewer reasons, using different categories (Kay 1994; Russell 1983; Whitney 1994). What follows is a summary of 11 documented Indian purposes for using fire in ways that modified ecosystems.
Hunting. Indians burned large areas to force deer, elk, and bison into small unburned areas for easier hunting. Fire was also used to drive game over cliffs or into impoundments, narrow chutes, and rivers or lakes where the animals could be easily killed. Some tribes used a surround or circle fire to force rabbits and other game into small areas. The Seminoles (in present-day Florida) even used fire to hunt alligators. Some Indians used torches to spot deer and attract fish for spearing or netting. Some used smoke to dislodge raccoons and bears from tree cavities.
Crop management. Indians used fire to harvest crops, especially for collecting tarweed, yucca, greens, and grass seed; to improve yields of camas, seeds, and berries (especially raspberries, strawberries, and huckle- berries); to prevent abandoned fields from growing over; to clear areas for planting corn and tobacco; to facilitate the gathering of acorns by clearing the ground of vegetation around oak trees; to roast mescal; and to obtain salt from grasses.
Insect collection. Some tribes used a fire surround to collect and roast crickets and grasshoppers. Fire was also used to harvest pandora moths in pine forests and to collect honey from bees.
Pest management. Burning was sometimes used to reduce pest populations, including rodents, poisonous snakes, and such insects as black flies and mosquitoes. Indians also used fire to kill mistletoe in mesquite and oak trees and the tree moss favored by deer (thereby forcing game animals into the valleys, where they were easier to hunt).
Range management. Fire was often used to keep prairies and meadows open from encroaching shrubs and trees and to improve browse for deer, elk, antelope, bison, horses, and waterfowl.
Fireproofing. Some Indians used fire to clear vegetation from areas around settlements and near special medicinal plants to protect them from wildland fires.
Warfare and signaling. Indians used fire to deprive the enemy of hiding places in tall grass and underbrush, to destroy enemy property, and to camouflage an escape. Large fires (not the Hollywood version of blankets and smoke) were ignited to signal enemy movements and to gather forces for combat.
Economic extortion. Some tribes burned large areas to prevent settlers and fur traders from finding big game and then to profit from supplying them with pemmican and jerky.
Clearing areas for travel. Indians used fire to clear overgrown trails for travel. In forests and brushlands, burning improved visibility for hunting and warfare.
Tree felling. Indians used fire in different ways to fell trees. One way was to bore two intersecting holes into the trunk, then drop burning charcoal into one hole and allow the smoke to exit from the other. Another way was to surround the base of the tree with fire, thereby “girdling” the tree and eventually killing it.
Clearing riparian areas. Fire was commonly used to clear brush from riparian areas and marshes to stimu- late new grass and tree sprouts for beaver, muskrats, moose, and waterfowl.
Volume 60 • No. 3 • Summer 2000 11 Kay, C.E. 1994. Aboriginal overkill: The Norton, H.H.; Boyd, R.; Hunn, E. 1999. and forty-ninth parallels of north role of Native Americans in structuring The Klikitat Trail of south-central latitude, from St. Paul to Puget Sound. western ecosystems. Human Nature. Washington: A reconstruction of In: Reports of explorations and surveys 5(4): 359–398. seasonally used resource sites. In: Boyd, to ascertain the most practicable and Lewis, H.T. 1973. Patterns of Indian R.T., ed. Indians, fire and the land in the economical route for a railroad from the burning in California: Ecology and Pacific Northwest. Corvallis, OR: Oregon Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean.... ethnohistory. Bean, L.J., ed. Ballena State University Press: 65–93. Book I: General Report in Vol. 12. 33rd Anthrop. Pap. 1. Ramona, CA: Ballena Phillips, C.B. 1985. The relevance of past Congress, 1st Session, House of Repre- Press. [Reprinted in: Blackburn, T.C.; Indian fires to current fire management sentatives, Executive Document 56. Anderson, K., eds. 1993. Before the programs. In: Lotan, J.E., et al., tech. Washington, DC: Government Printing wilderness: Environmental management coords. Proceedings—Symposium and Office. by Native Californians. Menlo Park, CA: Workshop on Wilderness Fire; 15–18 Stewart, O.C. 1954. Forest fires with a Ballena Press: 55–116.] November 1983; Missoula, MT. Gen. purpose. Southwestern Lore. 20(12): Lewis, H.T. 1982. A time for burning. Tech. Rep. INT–182. Ogden, UT: USDA 42–46. Occas. Pub. 17. Edmonton, Alberta: Forest Service, Intermountain Forest Stewart, O.C. 1955. Why were the prairies University of Alberta, Boreal Institute for and Range Experiment Station: 87–92. treeless? Southwestern Lore. 21(4): 59– Northern Studies. Pyne, S.J. 1982. Fire in America: A cultural 64. Lewis, H.T. 1985. Why Indians burned: history of wildland and rural fire. Stewart, O.C. 1963. Barriers to under- Specific versus general reasons. In: Princeton, NJ: Princeton University standing the influence of use of fire by Lotan, J.E., et al., tech. coords. Proceed- Press. aborigines on vegetation. Proceedings: ings—Symposium and Workshop on Pyne, S.J. 1995. World fire: The culture of Tall Timbers Fire Ecology Conference; Wilderness Fire; 15–18 November 1983; fire on Earth. New York, NY: Henry Holt 14–15 March 1963; Tallahassee, FL. Missoula, MT. Gen. Tech. Rep. INT–182. and Company. Tallahassee, FL: Tall Timbers Research Ogden, UT: USDA Forest Service, Raup, H.M. 1937. Recent changes of Station: Number 2: 117–126. Intermountain Forest and Range climate and vegetation in southern New Trudel, P. 1985. Forest fires and excessive Experiment Station: 75–80. England and adjacent New York. Journal hunting: The ascription of the native’s Lorimer, C.C. 1993. Causes of the oak of Arnold Arboretum. 18: 79–117. role in the decline of the northern regeneration problem. In: Loftis, D.; Russell, E.W.B. 1983. Indian-set fires in Quebec caribou herds, circa 1880–1920. McGee, C.E., eds. Oak Regeneration: the forests of the Northeastern United Recherches Amerindiennes au Quebec Serious Problems, Practical Recommen- States. Ecology. 64(1): 78–88. (Canada). 15(3): 21–38. dations: Symposium Proceedings; 8–10 Russell, E.W.B. 1997. People and the land Whitney, G.G. 1994. From coastal September 1992; Knoxville, TN. Gen. through time: Linking ecology and wilderness to fruited plain: A history of Tech. Rep. SE–84. Asheville, NC: USDA history. New Haven, CT: Yale University environmental change in temperate Forest Service, Southeastern Forest Press. North America from 1500 to the Experiment Station: 13–39. Shrader-Frechette, K.S.; McCoy, E.D. 1995. present. New York, NY: Cambridge Martinez, D. 1998. Wilderness with or Natural landscapes, natural communi- University Press. without you. Earth First! 18(5): 1, 13. ties, and natural ecosystems. Forest and Wilson, S.M. 1992. “That unmanned wild McClain, W.E.; Elzinga, S.L. 1994. The Conservation History. 39(3): 138–142. countrey”: Native Americans both occurrence of prairie and forest fires in Stevens, I.I. 1860. Narrative and final conserved and transformed new world Illinois and other Midwestern States, report of explorations for a route for a environments. Natural History. 101(5): 1670 to 1854. Erigenia. 13(June): 79–90. Pacific Railroad, near the forty-seventh 16–17. ■
WEBSITES ON FIRE* USFS Fire News Global Fire Monitoring Center Looking for a quick wildland fire news update? The For news and information on wildland fires world- Website maintained by the USDA Forest Service’s wide, a good place to start is the Website of the Global Fire and Aviation Management Staff features a Fire Monitoring Center (GFMC). Founded in 1998 by Webpage with news clips and photos for the public, international cosponsors, the GFMC monitors and the media, and the wildland fire community. Up- archives information on wildland and prescribed fires dated regularly, the news page includes items on at the global level. In addition to back issues of the wildland fires and firefighters; safety alerts; job journal International Forest Fire News, the Website openings; fire management operations, policy, and features global fire inventories and models; data bases resources (including congressional action); and on wildland fires and fire seasons around the world; upcoming fire-related events. More than 1,000 information on international programs and projects, people a day from more than 20 countries use the including meetings and training courses; and links to page to stay abreast of current wildland fire news. wildland fire resources worldwide. Found at
* Occasionally, Fire Management Today briefly describes Websites brought to our attention by the wildland fire community. Readers should not construe the description of these sites as in any way exhaustive or as an official endorsement by the USDA Forest Service. To have a Website described, contact the editor, Hutch Brown, at USDA Forest Service, Office of Communication, P.O. Box 96090, Washington, DC 20040-6090, tel. 202-205-1028, fax 202-205-0885, e-mail: rbrown/[email protected].
12 Fire Management Today EARLY FIRE USE IN OREGON
Gerald W. Williams
or thousands of years, Oregon’s ecosystems have been molded The first white travelers in the Willamette Valley F by human activities, especially found extensive prairie and oak savanna through the use of fire. Long maintained through Indian-set fires. before the first Europeans arrived, American Indians used fire in both the valleys and the mountains of The valley bottom is generally flat, each year.” Another source (Riddle Oregon to improve food and other with rolling hills and hummocks. 1953) described how “the country resources. Their impact on the The first travelers in the early was burned off” when tarweed land, recorded in fragmentary 1800’s found “extensive areas of (Madia spp.) seeds were mature in accounts by early explorers, prairie, oak openings, and occa- late summer or fall. After burning trappers, and settlers, has pro- sionally oak forests” (Habeck 1961) the land, the Kalapuyas would found implications for land man- along a meandering river bordered harvest the fire-roasted tarweed agers today, especially in the by wetlands (fig. 2) (Towle 1979, seeds by beating them off the Pacific Northwest. 1982). For homesteaders, the scorched plants into baskets. valley was a paradise of deep Indians burned partly to improve No deliberate records of Indian fire alluvial soils and abundant water. hunting. “By burning the prairies,” use were kept by contemporary With few trees and rocks to clear observed local historian Robert observers. Probably the best away, it was virtually ready for the Clark (1927), “the Indians forced serendipitous records came from plow. the deer to graze on convenient the Willamette Valley in western hunting grounds, and they by this Oregon. From the early 1810’s to Early settlers found the Kalapuya method also made it easy to collect the 1890’s, a series of explorers, fur people living in the bottomlands of wild honey, grasshoppers and trappers, missionaries, and settlers the Willamette and lower Umpqua crickets.” in the Willamette Valley made Valleys. Separated into six or more many observations of the country- bands, the Kalapuyas gathered David Douglas, the renowned side and its inhabitants, including roots from camas (Camassia Scottish botanist for whom the their purposeful use of fire. quamash) and seeds from grasses, Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga hunted blacktail deer (Odocoileus menziesii) is named, kept a careful The Willamette Valley hemionus spp.), and caught journal of his travels through the The Willamette River and its Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus Willamette Valley (Davies 1980). tributaries drain both the Cascade tshawytscha) and Pacific lamprey On August 19, 1825, Douglas Mountains of central Oregon and eels (Lampetra tridentata). Trans- described the Indian practice, told the coastal ranges to the west (fig. portation was on foot or by dugout to him by a native, of burning 1). From its mouth on the Colum- canoe (Barnett 1937; Mackey areas of downed wood to cultivate bia River near Portland, OR, the 1974). tobacco in the ashes. On Septem- Willamette extends more than 180 ber 27, 1826, he found “beautiful miles (290 km) to the south and Valley Burning solitary oaks and pines” in the southeast. Near Eugene, the valley by Indians southern Willamette Valley, noting is about 30 miles (50 km) wide; Accounts by early trappers and that the entire area was “all burned near Corvallis and Albany, it settlers describe the widespread and not a single blade of grass extends to more than 50 miles use of fire by the Kalapuyas. To except on the margins of rivulets (80 km) wide; and at Portland, it reduce the brush, according to one to be seen.” On September 30, narrows to 10 miles (16 km) wide. source (Cornutt 1971), “the 1826, Douglas recorded the reasons for the widespread burn- Jerry Williams is a historical analyst for Indians would set fire and burn off the USDA Forest Service, Washington one side of the valley in the fall of ing: “Some of the natives tell me it Office, Washington, DC.
Volume 60 • No. 3 • Summer 2000 13 Figure 1—Oregon in the 1800’s, showing major valleys and mountain ranges. The Willamette Valley is the shaded area. American Indians routinely used fire in Oregon’s valleys and mountains to increase food and other resources for survival. Illustration: Gene Hansen Creative Services, Inc., Annapolis, MD, 2000.
Figure 2—The Willamette River From a Mountain, an oil painting by Paul Kane in about 1850. Kane’s painting shows the open prairie that settlers found in the Willamette Valley, the result of periodic burning by American Indians. Photo: Courtesy of the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, ©ROM.
14 Fire Management Today is done for the purpose of urging After burning the bottomlands, the Indians would deer to frequent certain parts, to harvest the fire-roasted tarweed seeds by beating feed, which they leave unburned, and of course they are easily killed. them off the scorched plants into baskets. Others say that it’s done in order that they might the better find wild honey and grasshoppers, survival, supplying materials for Cascades] and the killing of bear which both serve as articles of food, shelter, and clothing. and deer and elk, and the burning winter food.” off of the brush in the fall to make Documentary evidence of Indian more hunting ground....The In 1841, a U.S. military expedition fire use in the mountains, though burning off of the brush would be ventured from Fort Vancouver fragmentary, is important to done in the fall as the Indians down the Willamette Valley along a understand (Barrett and Arno returned to Eastern [central] trail originally blazed for fur 1982; Seklecki et al. 1996). John Oregon. Since it was late in the trading by the Hudson Bay Com- Minto (1908), an early Oregon season the rains would soon pany. Led by Lt. George F. pioneer, noted that setting fires in extinguish the fires before any Emmons, the party traveled the Cascade Range, for the Molalla great damage was done. The overland all the way to San Fran- people, “was their agency [method] burning made easier access cisco Bay. Several diaries and in improving game range and through the country as well as journals exist to document the berry picking.” According to forage for horses and big game travel. Minto, small prairies dotted the animals.” western slopes of the Cascades, In the southern Willamette Valley, from the valley floor nearly to the Stephen Barrett (1980), who has the Emmons party found “hilly crest (at 4,000 to 6,000 feet [1,200– written extensively about Indian prairie, charred by a recent grass 1,800 m]). According to another use of fire, interviewed people who fire” (Stanton 1975). Crossing into Oregon settler, the “Pioneer of still remembered the old Indian the Umpqua Valley, the explorers 1847” (1911), “The Indian method ways in western Montana. He encountered smoke and fire was to burn the old burns about concluded that tribes such as the reaching from the prairie to the every three years or as soon as Salish and Kootenais often ignited distant hills. Upon entering the there was growth enough to make both intentional and unintentional Rogue Valley, they discovered the a good fire. They would burn early fires in the region. “Indian fires origin of the fires: “Indian signs in the Summer before the logs and were apparently set primarily in were numerous,” Titian Ramsey old stumps were dry enough to valley-bottom grasslands [much Peale (Poesch 1961) noted in his burn.” like the Willamette Valley in journal on September 27, “though Oregon] and lower-elevation we saw but one, a squaw who was Hunting was reportedly an impor- forests dominated by ponderosa so busy setting fire to the prairies tant purpose for Indian fire use in pine [Pinus ponderosa], Douglas- & mountain ravines that she the mountains. USDA biologist fir or western larch [Larix seemed to disregard us.” Two days Frederick Coville (1898) main- occidentalis],” observed Barrett. later, the party reported the Coast tained that Indians customarily “Although relatively rare, some Range on fire (Beckham 1971). “set fires in the [Cascade] moun- Indian fires occurred in high- tains intentionally and systemati- elevation forests.” Most fires were Indian Fire Use in the cally, in connection with their fall set in fall and spring, when their Mountains hunting excursions, when deer intensity could be best controlled. were driven together and killed in Fires set during the summer Most American Indian tribes in large numbers.” Prince Helfrich months were usually uninten- Oregon did not live in the moun- (1961), a long-time fishing and tional. tains and forests. They visited the hunting guide in the western mountain areas during summer Oregon Cascades, told of meeting a In the Blue Mountains of north- and fall, leaving before the snows very old Indian in the early 1900’s. eastern Oregon, especially in the came. Nevertheless, the mountain Reminiscing about his youth, the Grande Ronde and Powder River forests were important for Indian old man spoke of “his hunts [in the country, fires set by Indians were
Volume 60 • No. 3 • Summer 2000 15 For Indians in the Cascade Range, setting fires delivering thousands of home- was a method for improving game range steaders to Oregon. Others arrived by ship after sailing around South and berry picking. America and landing at Fort Vancouver. common as late as the mid-1800’s Postsettlement Most settlers viewed the moun- (Langston 1995; Robbins and Wolf Burning tains and forests as formidable 1994). “The Cayuse, Nez Perce, Beginning in the mid-1800’s, obstacles on the long overland Paiute, Umatilla, and Shoshone settlers arrived from the Eastern journey. They rarely settled in the tribes had heavily used the Blue United States seeking homesteads mountains. Those who did used Mountains for centuries and had in the Oregon territory, especially fire to clear the land and keep altered the landscape accordingly,” in the Willamette Valley—the end forested areas open for grazing, noted Nancy Langston (1995). of the Oregon Trail. Wagon trains following burning traditions “Native Americans had traveled, traversed the trail annually, learned from the Indians. However, traded, hunted, fished, gathered roots and berries, maintained herds of horses [sometimes num- bering in the thousands], burned the hills to improve hunting and grazing, and fought wars in the Blues for centuries before whites showed up.”
Indians reportedly used fire in almost every western forest type. In the central Sierra Nevada of California, fire was used to manage oak groves for acorns, to prevent forest encroachment in utilized areas, to deprive enemies of cover, and to improve hunting (Anderson 1993; Bean 1973; Reynolds 1959). Harold Weaver (1967) noted that fires burned in ponderosa pine forest “as frequently as fuel accu- mulated in sufficient quantity to Homesteader in 1909 on Oregon’s Umpqua National Forest. Few settlers in Oregon chose support combustion over the forest to live in the mountains, but many visited the mountains seasonally for range and other floor, whenever weather conditions resources. Following the American Indian example, they often used fire to exploit were favorable, and whenever mountain resources. Photo: Courtesy of National Agricultural Library, Special Collec- tions, Forest Service Photograph Collection, Beltsville, MD (H.M. Hale, 1909; 79653). lightning strikes or Indians caused them to start.” Stephen Arno (1985) documented fire use by Indians in various forest commu- INDIAN VERSUS SETTLER FIRE USE nities, including pinyon–juniper, chaparral and oakbrush, interior The American Indians generally burned parts of ecosystems to montane forests, interior subalpine promote habitat diversity, especially through the “edge effect.” forests, and maritime forests. Using fire to maintain a variety of habitats gave the Indians (as well However, reliable documentation as animals) greater food security and resource stability. By contrast, on the exact sites and the extent of white settlers used fire to promote ecosystem uniformity, especially the areas burned is often difficult when it came to crop production and pasturelands. to obtain.
16 Fire Management Today most fires set by the whites were In the Blue Mountains of northeastern Oregon, not carefully managed; some fires set by Indians were common as late escaped, ravaging mountain forests. as the mid-1800’s.
Those who settled in the valleys often seasonally used mountain resources such as trees and grass, much as the American Indians had seasonally used the mountains for thousands of years. From the late 1800’s to the mid-1900’s, for example, the mountain prairies were extensively used in summer and fall for sheep grazing (Rowley 1985; Williams 1985; Williams and Mark 1995). When the shepherds left the mountains in the fall, just before the snow came, they often set fires to improve grasses for the following summer (Williams and Mark 1995). Oregon white oak (Quercus garryana) (above), now in decline due to competition from Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) (below, in cross-section; the Douglas-fir engulfed a Miners sometimes ignited fires to nearby Oregon white oak). The oak once flourished in groves and savannas that covered burn public forestland adjacent to Oregon’s river valleys. American Indians maintained the oak ecosystems through their their claims in order to expose the frequent use of fire, which eliminated fire-intolerant competitors. Photos: Courtesy of National Agricultural Library, Special Collections, Forest Service Photograph Collection, rocks and soil, thereby facilitating Beltsville, MD (above—Ray Filloon, 1936, 321063; below—Ernest L. Kolbe, 1935, 303495). mineral discovery (Harley 1918). Large areas of forest surrounding mining claims, camps, and dis- tricts were reportedly often burned over. Other fires were caused by careless hunters, anglers, and travelers, usually when they left their abandoned campfires burning (Harley 1918). Some pioneers reportedly set fires just to see the forests burn (Lutz 1959); many early Americans treated forests carelessly, considering them an inexhaustible resource. Burning in the Forest Reserves Beginning in 1891 with the Forest Reserve (or Creative) Act, millions of acres of mountainous forestland in the public domain (all in the West) were set aside as forest reserves. Under the Organic Act of 1897, the USDI U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) began mapping and
Volume 60 • No. 3 • Summer 2000 17 describing the forest cover on the Early settlers in the mountains used fire forest reserves (Williams 1997). to clear the land and keep forested areas open The survey work resulted in 3 major reports and 13 professional for grazing, following burning traditions papers. Several of these studies learned from the Indians. mentioned Indian burning of ecosystems at the turn of the century; all of the studies docu- any number of fires caused by fires set by “the renegade whites mented and mapped extensive hunting parties of Indians from the and indians in the district” (Harley burned-over areas and huge Warm Springs reservation, whom I 1918). According to the ranger, expanses of second growth, mostly have seen set out fires in the “the indians will sometimes try without attributing a fire cause. mountains to make the atmo- and burn off the leaves and humus sphere smokey so that game would under the oak trees, to facilitate Indians continued to burn not scent them” (Williams and the gathering of acorns.” They also Oregon’s wildlands into the late Mark 1995). set small fires to improve vegeta- 19th century, even on some forest tion growth for basket material. reserves. John Minto, a strong Well into the 20th century, Indians supporter of sheep grazing on continued to burn in the steep Impact of Indian Fire Oregon’s Cascade Range Forest mountain country of northern Use Reserve, noted in 1898 that “the California. In 1918, a Forest American Indians in the Warm Springs Indian reserve is Service district ranger on the Willamette, Umpqua, and Rogue bounded on the west by the Klamath National Forest deplored Valleys clearly used fire to modify [Cascade] summit, and the Indians have the rights of hunting and grazing their ponies on the entire PRESETTLEMENT FIRES— [Cascade] range, to which many of them resort every season, when (by NATURAL OR HUMAN CAUSED? custom from which they see not reasons to desist) they renew the At the turn of the 20th century, when the U.S. Geological Survey old berry patches and coarse (USGS) mapped vegetation in the newly created forest reserves, it grasses of the dry lake beds by reported evidence of widespread wildland fires. Although the USGS fires” (Williams and Mark 1995). did not indicate a fire cause, its reports left the impression that the fires were caused by lightning. Today, the impression lingers that In 1899, Salmon B. Ormsby, fires in the presettlement mountain West were mostly caused by superintendent of the forest hundreds and even thousands of lightning strikes per year. reserves in Oregon, reported that five wildland fires on the Cascade Lightning in fire-adapted ecosystems does not usually cause fires. Range Forest Reserve were caused Lightning tends to strike individual trees, high rocky points, and by Indians “setting out” fires other places where no ignition occurs or small snag fires result. Most (Anonymous 1899). According to snag fires are soon extinguished by the rain that usually accompa- Ormsby, “the most reckless people nies lightning; the few fires that persist often smolder and die encroaching on the reserve are the without ever spreading. Indians from the reservations [Warm Springs] and the half- In Oregon, the mountains are indeed susceptible to heavy lightning breeds, who, in their berry-picking storms in late summer and early fall, and the storms do start fires. and hunting expeditions, set most Historically, Indians probably started fewer fires than did lightning; of the fires, by leaving their camp however, their carefully controlled burns—timed in spring or late fires burning when moving from fall to coincide with proper fuel and other burning conditions— one place to another” (Williams would spread without extinguishing until they achieved the desired and Mark 1995). At about the same effect. Indian fires therefore likely had greater and longer term time, Oregon sheep owner Fred A. impacts on the mountain forests and prairies than did lightning Young reported that “there is also fires.
18 Fire Management Today Indians continued to burn Oregon’s wildlands as some would like to believe. To into the late 19th century, even on some fully come to grips with our forest health crisis today, we must go forest reserves. back to much earlier land manage- ment decisions that ended thou- sands of years of Indian interac- the environment. “In the case of Scattered historical evidence tions with the land, especially the Willamette Valley, as much as suggests that mountain forests through the use of fire. 2 million acres [800,000 ha] of were managed through the use of land were maintained in prairie fire by both the Indians and the Literature Cited and savanna as a consequence of early settlers. What is not clear is Agee, J.K. 1990. The historical role of fire aboriginally set fires,” noted the frequency of burning. Fire in Pacific Northwest forests. In: Walstad, Douglas Booth (1994). Lightning scars from old trees, pollen studies, J.D.; Radsevich, S.R.; Sandberg, D.V., could not have been the primary and charcoal layers in lake sedi- eds. Natural and prescribed fire in Pacific Northwest forests. Corvallis, OR: cause of these prairie fires, because ments can indicate fire frequencies Oregon State University Press: 25–38. the Willamette Valley experiences for most areas, but they cannot Anderson, M.K. 1993. Indian fire-based very few lightning storms. reveal the fire cause, the total area management in the sequoia–mixed conifer forests of the central and burned, or the season of burning. southern Sierra Nevada. Final contract Fire use to increase food resources In each regard, historical accounts report (Cooperative Agreement Order was so central to aboriginal sur- vary considerably (Williams 1999). 8027–2–002) submitted to Yosemite vival in Oregon’s valleys that it Research Center, Yosemite National Park, CA. formed an essential part of the Implications for Anonymous. 1899. Summary of a report by Indian lifestyle and culture (Boag Wildland Management Salmon B. Ormsby, superintendent of 1992; Boyd 1986; Johannessen et the forest reserves in Oregon. The Most forest and savanna areas in Oregonian (Oregon City, OR). December al. 1971). Yet the type of burning North America have had thousands 9. practiced by the Kalapuyas and of years of human interaction and Arno, S.F. 1985. Ecological effects and others has not occurred since the management implications of Indian management. American Indians, fires. In: Lotan, J.E., et al., tech. coords. 1850’s. As a result, the native who themselves were newcomers Proceedings—Symposium and Work- Oregon white oak (Quercus to the New World some 12,000 to shop on Wilderness Fire; 15–18 November 1983; Missoula, MT. Gen. garryana) “is now a declining type, 30,000 years ago, adapted to the largely due to replacement by Tech. Rep. INT–182. Ogden, UT: USDA environments they found and in Forest Service, Intermountain Forest Douglas-fir on most sites,” accord- turn modified those environments and Range Experiment Station: 81–86. ing to James Agee (1990). Elimi- for their survival. Fire was the Barnett, H.G. 1937. Culture element nating competition from Douglas- distributions: VII Oregon coast. major tool that American Indians Anthropological Records. 1(3): 155–204. fir would require burning the used to render ecosystems livable. Barrett, S.W. 1980. Indians and fire. Willamette Valley at least every Western Wildlands. 6(3): 17–21. 5 to 10 years (Agee 1990). Barrett, S.W.; Arno, S.F. 1982. Indian fires Little of the original open prairie as an ecological influence in the remains today; millions of acres northern Rockies. Journal of Forestry. The evidence for Indian burning is have been transformed into farms, 80(10): 647–651. Bean, L.J., ed. 1973. Patterns of Indian less compelling for the mountains pastures, highways, and cities. The than for the valleys (Booth 1994). burning in California: Ecology and basis for much of our forest health ethnohistory. Ballena Anthrop. Pap. 1. Few early travelers, settlers, and crisis nationwide lies in the almost Ramona, CA: Ballena Press. writers reached remote areas in complete cessation of Indian Beckham, S.D. 1971. Requiem for a people: the mountains, so records are The Rogue Indians and the frontiers- burning in fire-adapted ecosys- men. Norman, OK: University of fewer than for the valleys. Still, tems, largely accomplished by the Oklahoma Press. travelers and explorers did note the early 1700’s in the East and the Boag, P.G. 1992. Settlement culture in parklike appearance of many nineteenth-century [Calapooia Valley] 1850’s in the West. The crisis is Oregon. Berkeley, CA: University of forests in the mountains, especially commonly attributed to the advent California Press. in areas of ponderosa pine (Stevens of systematic fire suppression and Booth, D.E. 1994. Valuing nature: The 1860; Weaver 1967). decline and preservation of old-growth the Smokey Bear mentality in the forests. Lanham, MD: Rowman and 20th century. Although partly true, Littlefield Publishers, Inc. this explanation is not as sufficient
Volume 60 • No. 3 • Summer 2000 19 Boyd, R.T. 1986. Strategies of Indian burning in the Willamette Valley. Fire use to increase food resources was so Canadian Journal of Anthropology. 5(1): central to aboriginal survival in Oregon’s valleys 65–86. Clark, R.C. 1927. History of the Willamette that it formed an essential part of the Valley, Oregon. Chicago, IL: The S.J. Indian lifestyle and culture. Clark Publishing Company: Vol. 1. Cornutt, J.M. 1971. Cow Creek Valley [OR] memories: Riddle pioneers remembered in John M. Cornutt’s autobiography. Poesch, J. 1961. Titian Ramsey Peale, Towle, J.C. 1979. Settlement and subsis- Eugene, OR: Industrial Publishing Co. 1799–1885, and his journals of the tence in the Willamette Valley [of Coville, F.V. 1898. Forest growth and sheep Wilkes Expedition. Amer. Philos. Soc. Oregon]: Some additional consider- grazing in the Cascade Mountains of 52. Philadelphia, PA: The American ations. Northwest Anthropological Oregon. USDA Div. of Forestry Bull. 15. Philosophical Society. Research Notes. 13(1): 12–21. Washington, DC: Government Publish- Reynolds, R.D. 1959. Effect of natural fires Towle, J.C. 1982. Changing geography of ing Office. and aboriginal burning upon the forests Willamette Valley woodlands. Oregon Davies, J. 1980. Douglas of the forests: The of central Sierra Nevada. Masters thesis. Historical Quarterly. 83(1): 66–87. North American journals of David Berkeley, CA: University of California. Weaver, H. 1967. Fire as a continuing Douglas. Seattle, WA: University of Riddle, G.W. 1953. Early days in Oregon: A ecological factor in perpetuation of Washington Press. history of the Riddle Valley. Myrtle ponderosa pine forests in Western Habeck, J.R. 1961. The original vegetation Creek, OR: Myrtle Creek Mail for the United States. Advancing Frontiers of of the mid-Willamette Valley, Oregon. Riddle Parent Teachers Association. Plant Sciences. 18: 137–154. Northwest Science. 35(2): 5–77. Robbins, W.G.; Wolf, D.W. 1994. Landscape Williams, G.W. 1985. The USDA Forest Harley, F.W. 1918. Letter to the supervisor and the intermontane Northwest: An Service in the Pacific Northwest: Major of the Klamath National Forest, Yreka, environmental history. Gen. Tech. Rep. political and social controversies CA, January 30. PNW–319. Portland, OR: USDA Forest between 1891–1945. Presentation at Helfrich, P. 1961. Coming of the Indians. Service, Pacific Northwest Research meeting: The Pacific Northwest Eugene Register-Guard (Eugene, OR). Station. Historians Guild; 2 March; Seattle, WA. July 14. Rowley, W.D. 1985. U.S. Forest Service [Latest revision April 30, 1998.] Johannessen, C.L.; Davenport, W.A.; Millet, grazing and rangelands. College Station, Williams, G.W. 1997. Early years of A.; McWilliams, S. 1971. The vegetation TX: Texas A&M University Press. national forest management: Implica- of the Willamette Valley [Oregon]. Seklecki, M.; Grissino-Mayer, H.D.; tions of the Organic Act of 1897. Annals of the Association of American Swetnam, T.W. 1996. Fire history and Presentation at biennial meeting: The Geographers. 61(2): 286–302. the possible role of Apache-set fires in American Society for Environmental Langston, N. 1995. Forest dreams, forest the Chiricahua Mountains of southeast- History; 6–9 March; Baltimore, MD. nightmares: The paradox of old growth ern Arizona. In: Ffolliott, P.F., et. al., Williams, G.W. 1999. References on the in the inland West. Seattle, WA: tech. coords. Effects of Fire on Madrean American Indian use of fire in ecosys- University of Washington Press. Province Ecosystems: A Symposium tems. Unpublished manuscript and Lutz, H.J. 1959. Aboriginal man and white Proceedings; 11–15 March 1986; bibliography on file at USDA Forest men as historical causes of fires in the Tucson, AZ. Gen. Tech. Rep. RM–289. Service, Pacific Northwest Region, boreal forest, with particular reference Fort Collins, CO: USDA Forest Service, Portland, OR. [Latest revision January 5, to Alaska. Yale Sch. of Forestry Bull. 65. Rocky Mountain Forest and Range 1999.] New Haven, CT: Yale University. Experiment Station: 238–246. Williams, G.W.; Mark, S.R., compilers. Mackey, H. 1974. The Kalapuya: A Stanton, W. 1975. The great United States 1995. Establishing and defending the sourcebook on the Indians of the exploring expedition of 1838–1842. Cascade Range Forest Reserve: As found Willamette Valley. Salem, OR: Mission Berkeley, CA: University of California in the letters of William G. Steel, John Hill Museum Association. Press. B. Waldo, and others, supplemented by Minto, J. 1908. From youth to old age as Stevens, I.I. 1860. Narrative and final newspapers, magazines, and official an American: Chapter II, Learning to report of explorations for a route for a reports 1885–1912. Portland, OR: USDA live on the land. Oregon Historical Pacific Railroad, near the forty-seventh Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Quarterly. 9(2): 127–172. and forty-ninth parallels of north Region; and Crater Lake, OR: USDI Pioneer of 1847. 1911. Indian vs. Pinchot latitude, from St. Paul to Puget Sound. National Park Service, Crater Lake conservation—Pioneer of [18]’47 In: Reports of explorations and surveys National Park. ■ upholds aborigines’ plan of burning to ascertain the most practicable and underbrush. Letter to the editor. The economical route for a railroad from the Oregonian (Oregon City, OR). January Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean.... 26: 10, col. 6. Book I: General Report in Vol. 12. 33rd Congress, 1st Session, House of Repre- sentatives, Executive Document 56. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.
20 Fire Management Today FIRE HISTORY ALONG THE ANCIENT LOLO TRAIL
Stephen W. Barrett
or untold centuries before 1900, the Lolo Trail was a Crossing the Bitterroot Mountains on the F notoriously difficult route Lolo Trail was a daunting experience for the across the Bitterroot Mountains in historic Lewis and Clark Expedition. present-day north-central Idaho (fig. 1). Indeed, this approximately 150-mile (240-km) mountain the deep and twisting Lochsa Today, recreationists and students traverse was by far the most Canyon, only to climb out again in of cultural history can drive much dreaded segment of the several- just a few miles. Worse, the area’s of the original Lolo Trail, seeing a thousand-mile Lewis and Clark lush, often impenetrable forests vignette of the historic journey by Expedition of 1804–06 (DeVoto are periodically destroyed by Lewis and Clark. Post-1900 fires 1953; Moulton 1988). Factors such intense wildland fires, producing and modern management have as steep terrain, dense forests, heavy snagfalls. Foot travel along eliminated much of the primeval fickle weather, and lack of game the ancient trail was far more forest along the trail, but tree ring combined to make travel on the arduous than in the broad valleys research can be used to interpret Lolo Trail a daunting experience. and plains that Captains the forest conditions at various Although much of the trail follows Meriwether Lewis and William times. In 1995, I sampled fire high ridges, some segments Clark had earlier encountered on history along the Lolo Trail in the descend several thousand feet into their journey. Powell Station portion of the
Lolo Trail
• Historic Interpretive Sites 1 Glade Creek Camp 2 13 Mile Camp 3 Powell Island 4 Whitehouse Pond 5 Snowbank Camp 6 Bears Oil and Roots Camp 7 Lonesome Cove Camp 8 The Sinque Hole Camp 9 The Smoking Place Camp
Figure 1—Location in Idaho (left) of the Powell Station portion of the Lochsa Ranger District, Clearwater National Forest; and, within the Powell Station area (right), of the Lolo Trail, including upper and lower loops. Used by early-day American Indians to cross the rugged Bitterroot Mountains, the trail was one of the most difficult traverses faced by the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1804–06).
Steve Barrett is a consulting research forester in Kalispell, MT.
Volume 60 • No. 3 • Summer 2000 21 Lochsa Ranger District,* Clear- Lodgepole pine and water National Forest, ID. The goal mountain hemlock, now 200 to 400 years was to document long-term fire old, dominate much history as a primary basis for of the ridgeline interpreting past and current traversed by the ancient Lolo Trail. forest environments along the Photo: Courtesy of trail. What were conditions like for Steve Barrett, Lewis and Clark? How do they Kalispell, MT differ today? And what are the © 1995. implications for ecosystem-based management? Landscape Fire History Northern Idaho has a notorious recent fire history (Barrett 1982, 1995; Koch 1942; Larsen 1929). For example, hundreds of thou- sands of acres of forest were destroyed by extensive fires during droughts in 1889, 1910, 1919, and 1934 (Barrett 1995). Determining long-term fire history can be challenging in many locales, but most areas contain some remnant old growth or at least scattered fire-scarred veterans and well- preserved snags. In the Powell Station area, most of the forest along the Lolo Trail occurs in the by American Indians occurred m]), but the ancient Indian trail stand replacement fire regime largely in valley grasslands and usually traversed the more easily (where fires occur infrequently but adjacent dry forests (Barrett and traveled south sides of ridges, with sufficient severity to result in Arno 1982; Boyd 1999). where less dense stands of lodge- mortality for most trees) (Quigley pole pine (Pinus contorta) and et al. 1996). Scarred trees typically I sampled fire history for a zone beargrass (Xerophyllum tenax) are are rare, and fire history is inter- about 50 miles (80 km) long and 1 interspersed with grassy glades and preted largely from age class mile (1.6 km) wide, bisected by the rock outcrops. I took fire scar and analysis. The remaining forest Lolo Trail. I obtained fire scar and pith samples from old-growth along the Lolo Trail is in the forest age class data from 67 plots stands dominated by lodgepole mixed-severity fire regime, com- (Arno and Sneck 1977; Barrett and pine and/or western larch (Larix prising relatively dry south-facing Arno 1988), including at 13 occidentalis), and from stands of stands in the Lochsa Canyon. historic sites visited by Lewis and mixed conifers such as western These usually contain a few fire- Clark. In the Powell Station area, larch, Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga scarred trees, but they rarely about one-third of the Lolo Trail menziesii var. glauca), grand fir survive more than one or two fires passes through montane and (Abies grandis), Engelmann spruce before succumbing during rela- riparian forests at low elevations, (Picea engelmannii), subalpine fir tively severe conflagrations. and the remaining two-thirds (A. lasiocarpa), western redcedar Historically, lightning probably passes through subalpine forests (Thuja plicata), and western white caused most fires along the Lolo and meadows. Nearly pure stands pine (Pinus monticola). Trail, because intentional burning of mountain hemlock (Tsuga mertensiana) occupy north aspects An estimated 22 fires occurred * The study was conducted in the Powell Ranger at high elevations (such as from between about 1510 and 1960 District, which is now administered by the Powell Ranger Station as part of the Lochsa Ranger District. 6,000 to 7,000 feet [1,800–2,100 (fig. 2), for an areawide mean fire
22 Fire Management Today Historically, fires occurred somewhere along 2000 the 50-mile trail corridor at least every two decades, on average. 1960 1949 interval (MFI) of 21 years. That is, Lolo Trail thus passed through a 1929 fires occurred somewhere in the diverse forest mosaic, including 1926 nearly 50-mile-long (80-km-long) immature stands that must have 1910* trail corridor at least every two been difficult to traverse due to 1900 decades, on average. Six or seven heavy postfire snagfalls and dense fires apparently produced most of regeneration. today’s age class mosaic, yielding an MFI of about 70 years for major Lewis and Clark took at least 5 1861 stand-replacing fires. days to cross the Bitterroot Moun- tains via the Lolo Trail in Septem- Fire frequency has varied widely ber 1805 (DeVoto 1953). On 1835 over time. For example, fires were September 13, in the eastern trail very active throughout the 1700’s, segment, a possible error by their 1810* when area MFI was just 11 years. Shoshone guide caused Lewis and 1800 1797 Fires declined during the 1800’s Clark to leave the Lolo Trail near (the MFI was 30 years), at the Glade Creek (Moulton 1988). 1784* height of the cool, moist Little Ice Consequently, the party had a very 1767 Age (Graumlich 1987). Subsequent trying day in the steep, densely 1754 drought-induced fires between forested Lochsa Canyon. Decades 1748 1745 1910 and 1929 burned large of heavy logging have depleted the 1733* portions of the area, and no old growth in this area, but the 1723 important fires have occurred trail still contains three of the since then due to systematic fire oldest forest age classes found 1710 exclusion. Before about 1930, (from fires in about 1510, 1571, 1700 actual intervals between fires in and 1733). Thus, the 1805 mosaic the corridor ranged from about was highly variable, with stands 3 years to 43 years, but were ranging from just 20 to 300+ years 1667 usually between 10 and 20 years. old. 1657* The fire-free interval in the last seven decades is therefore unprec- Three forest age classes (from fires edented since at least the mid- in about 1733, 1784, and 1810) 1600’s, and is four times longer dominate the 12-mile (19-km) than the pre-1929 MFI of 17 years. lower trail segment from Packer 1600 Moreover, the current fire interval Meadows to Powell Island and the now equals the 70-year MFI found 13-mile (21-km) higher elevation for major historical fires. segment between 21-Mile Camp 1571 and Snowbank Camp (fig. 3). 1557 Challenges for the Captain Clark’s journal entry on Lewis and Clark September 14 verifies that the Expedition lower trail was much more difficult to traverse than the more open The data provide new perspective lodgepole pine stands east of 1510* on some of the hardships endured Packer Meadows (near the present- 1500 * = Major fire year by early travelers. For example, day Lolo Hot Springs). “The ridgetops often contain multiple Figure 2—Estimated fire years along the Mountains which we passed to intersecting burn margins from Lolo Trail in the Powell Station portion of day,” observed Clark, “[were] much the Lochsa Ranger District, Clearwater fires on either side. The ancient National Forest, ID.
Volume 60 • No. 3 • Summer 2000 23 Mean Stand Age (years)
Figure 3—Forest age class mosaic along the Lolo Trail in 1805 and 1995. Timber harvesting and fire exclusion have reduced landscape diversity since 1805. Also, the 1995 mosaic is skewed toward old stands, possibly indicating high fire risk. Mean stand ages are based on dominant seral classes in consecutive square miles of the Lolo Trail corridor from east to west along the lower trail loop. A = Packer Meadows; B = Glade Creek Camp; C = Powell Island; D = Whitehouse Pond; E = Snowbank Camp; F = Cayuse Junction; G = Bears Oil and Roots; H = Indian Post Office/Lonesome Cove; I = Howard Camp; J = Sinque Hole; and K = Smoking Place. worst than yesterday the last this route, as they had done 3 apparently regenerated after fires excessively bad & Thickly Strowed weeks earlier in central Idaho’s in about 1510, 1557, and 1710. with falling timber & Pine Spruce virtually impassable Salmon River Thus, the party had to traverse fur Hackmatak & Tamerack, Steep Canyon. four widely varying age classes in & Stoney our men and horses just 6 very steep miles (10 km). much fatigued” (Moulton 1988). On September 15, Captain Clark The 1810 fire subsequently de- described the trail up Wendover stroyed most of these stands, but Ironically, an extensive fire oc- Ridge as “winding in every direc- scattered remnants exist along the curred shortly after Lewis and tion to get up the Steep assents & upper trail today. Clark passed through this area. An to pass the emence quantity of 1810 age class dominates the forest falling timber which had [been] Post-1800 forest age classes (from mosaic for more than 15 miles falling from dift. causes i e fire & fires in 1810, 1861, and 1910) now (24 km) between Brushy Fork and wind and has deprived the greater dominate the south-facing slopes Squaw Creek. Conceivably, the part of the Southerly Sides of this between Snowbank Camp and outcome of the expedition could mountain of its green timber” Indian Post Office. However, older have been different had the fire (Moulton 1988). I found that a fire stands of mountain hemlock and occurred just a few years earlier. in about 1784 likely produced this mixed conifers (regenerated after Faced with a vast and impenetrable tangle of fallen snags, whereas fires from 1657 to 1784) still recent burn, the explorers might older stands along upper Wendover occupy many north slopes in the well have been forced to abandon Ridge (near Snowbank Camp) upper Cayuse drainage, as well as
24 Fire Management Today that the high country was much easier to traverse.
On their return from the Columbia River in 1806, Lewis and Clark again struggled across the dreaded Bitterroot Mountains. But the rest of the trip went fairly smoothly, with the help of Indians along the way. The weather, in particular, remained favorable—thanks to a ceremony observed near Lolo Pass? (See the sidebar on page 27.)
Packer Meadows, near Lolo Hot Springs, MT. Lewis and Clark camped in this area on Implications for September 13, 1805, and June 29, 1806. Such glades among the high-elevation lodgepole pines allowed easier travel and provided grazing and water for horses. Photo: Courtesy of Ecosystem-Based Steve Barrett, Kalispell, MT, ©1995. Management The fire-generated mosaic in 1805 between Lonesome Cove and Clark passed through. Only the was evidently quite diverse, both Gravey Creek. To the west, exten- lower trail loop (for example, near compositionally and geographi- sive stands of 60- to 80-year-old Powell Island) contained much old cally (fig. 3). But by 1995, timber lodgepole pines (regenerated after growth in 1805—that is, dense harvesting together with fire fires in 1910, 1919, and 1929) river bottom stands that regener- exclusion had reduced landscape blanket the remaining 8 miles (13 ated after fires in the 1500’s and diversity. The eastern trail corridor km) of trail between upper Gravey before. Conversely, drier lodgepole is now dominated by early-succes- Creek and the former Powell pine stands occupied most subal- sional forest on large clearcuts, District’s western boundary, pine terrain near Packer Meadows interspersed with patches of old including at the Sinque Hole and and between Snowbank Camp and growth. Conversely, the subalpine Smoking Place historic sites. Here, the western boundary of the forest in the middle to western only a few fire-scarred veterans and former Powell District. Clearly, the trail segment is documented by burned snags remain from the Indians showed Lewis and Clark middle to old age classes, with no 1657–1784 period.
Throughout their journey across the Bitterroots, Lewis and Clark were repeatedly hampered by windfalls, largely from fire-killed snags. For instance, numerous detours on September 19 forced the party to travel nearly twice the direct distance of the trail near Hungery Creek (just west of the former Powell District boundary). Today’s Lolo Motorway follows much of the ancient trail, but recreationists can scarcely appreci- ate the trials and tribulations that earlier travelers endured. Although the forest mosaic has changed, High-elevation lodgepole pines that regenerated after a fire in 1810, shortly after the portions of the primeval forest Lewis and Clark Expedition traversed this area. Understories are more open along remain—stands that were young ridgelines, where beargrass and other short plants predominate. Photo: Courtesy of Steve or middle aged when Lewis and Barrett, Kalispell, MT, ©1995.
Volume 60 • No. 3 • Summer 2000 25 Over the last five centuries, six or seven major fires produced the bulk of today’s forest age class mosaic along the Lolo Trail.
Table 1—Intervals between stand-replacing fires near 15 historic sites along the Lolo Trail, Powell Station portion of the Lochsa Ranger District, Clearwater National Forest, ID.
Fire intervals (years) Site Cover type a Montane/riparian Subalpine forest zone forest zone Packer Meadows/Glade Creek Camp L, LP, S–F — 113, 143, 177
21-Mile Camp L, MC, WRC 223, 400 —
Powell Junction LP — 116 Powell Island L, WRC 239, 300 —
Whitehouse Pond L, WRC 223 —
Wendover Ridge L, LP, MC 100, 126 — Snowbank Camp LP, MH — 100
Cayuse Junction LP, MC, MH — 126
Bears Oil and Roots LP, MH — 204 Indian Post Office/Lonesome Cove LP, MC, MH — 53, 88, 184, 219, 272
Howard Camp LP, MH — 77, 126, 151, 200, 204, 253
Sinque Hole/Smoking Place LP — 75, 113
All sites (average) — 230 150
a. L = western larch; LP = lodgepole pine; MC = mixed conifer; MH = mountain hemlock; S–F = spruce–subalpine fir; WRC = western redcedar. young fire-regenerated stands. 150 years long and about 230 years age stands are often contiguous in Interestingly, many of the area’s long in montane and riparian the central to western portions of old lodgepole pine stands might stands (table 1). In 1995, about the trail, major stand-replacing actually be easier to traverse afoot half the stands in unlogged areas fires might be imminent. now than during the 1800’s, were relatively old, and another 15 because they have more openings, percent were mature (from 80 to Stand-replacing fires are the fewer understory trees, and less 100 years old). Thus, about two- predominant fire severity type in dense snagfalls. thirds of the stands in the mosaic the Lochsa country (Quigley et al. are now within or approaching the 1996). However, patchy under- Nonetheless, seven decades of fire upper range of historical replace- burns also occasionally occurred suppression have promoted ment intervals. Stand senescence along subalpine ridges and lower increasing homogeneity in from windthrow, insects, and elevation south slopes. Purposely unlogged portions of the trail diseases is widespread, especially in igniting some fires might help corridor. Before 1930, the MFI in a the subalpine zone, frequented by thin stands, but could tempo- given subalpine stand was about lightning. Because old to middle- rarily increase fire hazards by
26 Fire Management Today The ancient Lolo Trail passed through a diverse forest mosaic, including immature stands difficult to traverse due to heavy postfire snagfalls and dense regeneration.
BURNING BY AMERICAN INDIANS IN THE NORTHERN ROCKIES
On its historic journey in 1804– guard against both the effects of On June 25, 1806, Captain William 06, the Lewis and Clark Expedi- high water, and that of the fire Clark observed the following tion observed several instances which is frequently kindled in ceremony while camped near Lolo of Indian fire use in the north- these plains by the natives. Pass, southwest of present-day ern Rockies, mostly in valley Missoula, MT (DeVoto 1953): bottom grasslands and lower About a week later, on August 31, elevation forests dominated by members of the expedition saw Last evening the [Flathead] ponderosa pine, Douglas-fir, or large signal fires near the Lemhi indians entertained us with setting western larch. On August 23, River on the headwaters of the the [subalpine] fir trees on fire. 1805, as the expedition was Columbia (Thwaites 1904–05): they have a great number of dry leaving the headwaters of the limbs near their bodies which Missouri River, Captain This day warm and Sultry, Prairies when Set on fire create a very Meriwether Lewis noted wide- or open Valies on fire in Several sudden and emmence blaize from spread Indian fire use in his Places. The countrey is set on fire bottom to top of those tall trees. journal (DeVoto 1953): for the purpose of collecting the they are a boutifull object in this different bands [of Pend d’Oreille], situation at night. this exhibition I laid up the canoes this morn- and a Band of Flat Heads to go to remi[n]de[d] me of a display of ing in a pond near the forks; the Missouri where they intend firewo[r]ks. the nativs told us that sunk them in the water and passing the winter near the their object in Setting those trees weighted them down with stone Buffalow. on fire was to bring fair weather […] hoping by this means to for our journey.
management for ecosystem accelerating the accumulation of ha) of subalpine stands per year. At processes and recreation values dead fuels. Therefore, selective that rate, and because seven would reasonably focus on today’s harvests before reintroducing fire decades have passed without subalpine stands. might provide effective mitigation, significant fires, about 9,800 acres at least near important cultural (4,000 ha) of subalpine forest— Given northern Idaho’s rather sites. nearly half the total subalpine notorious fire history (Larsen area—are theoretically overdue for 1929; Koch 1942; Barrett et al. replacement. Similarly, the fire Future Challenges 1997), future wildland fires along cycle for the 11,000 acres (4,500 Historical fire cycles and forest age the Lolo Trail could become ha) of montane and riparian forest class maps can serve as useful conflagrations that consume most suggests that about 3,300 acres guides for selecting and scheduling of the “backlog” of unburned (1,300 ha) might have burned stand treatments. For example, the stands. Even with relatively between 1930 and 1995. All told, as Lolo Trail study area contains aggressive management, fires will much as 40 percent of the forests roughly 21,000 acres (8,500 ha) of presumably continue to play a in the corridor might have burned subalpine forest with a mean stand dominant role in shaping forests in the absence of fire suppression. replacement interval of 150 years. along the Lolo Trail. The question Timber harvest has removed much Therefore, fires historically burned is how future management will of the old montane forest, but not an average of about 140 acres (57 influence that natural process. in the subalpine zone. Therefore,
Volume 60 • No. 3 • Summer 2000 27 Literature Cited Service, Intermountain Research When the mountains roared: Stories of Station. the 1910 Fire. USDA Forest Service, Arno, S.F.; Sneck, K.M. 1977. A method for Barrett, S.W.; Arno, S.F.; Menakis, J.P. Coeur d’Alene National Forest, Coeur determining fire history in coniferous 1997. Fire episodes in the Inland d’Alene, ID.) forests of the Mountain West. Gen. Tech. Northwest (1540–1940) based on fire Larsen, J.A. 1929. Fires and forest Rep. INT–42. Ogden, UT: USDA Forest history data. Gen. Tech. Rep. INT–370. succession in the Bitterroot Mountains Service, Intermountain Forest and Ogden, UT: USDA Forest Service, of northern Idaho, 1909 to 1919. Range Experiment Station. Intermountain Research Station. Monthly Weather Review. 49(3): 55–68. Barrett, S.W. 1980. Indians and fire. Boyd, R., ed. 1999. Indians, fire and the Moulton, G.E., ed. 1988. The journals of Western Wildlands. 6(3): 17–21. land in the Pacific Northwest. Corvallis, the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Lincoln, Barrett, S.W. 1982. Fire’s influence on OR: Oregon State University Press. NE, and London, UK: University of ecosystems of the Clearwater National DeVoto, B., ed. 1953. The journals of Lewis Nebraska Press. Volume 5. Forest: Cook Mountain Fire History and Clark. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. Quigley, T.M.; Haynes, R.W.; Graham, R.T., Inventory. Unpublished report on file at Graumlich, L.J. 1987. Precipitation tech. eds. 1996. Integrated scientific the USDA Forest Service, Clearwater variation in the Pacific Northwest assessment for ecosystem management National Forest, Orofino, ID. (1675–1975) as reconstructed from tree in the Interior Columbia Basin. Gen. Barrett, S.W.; Arno, S.F. 1982. Indian fires rings. Annals of the Association of Tech. Rep. PNW–382. Portland, OR: as an ecological influence in the American Geographers. 77: 19–29. USDA Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Northern Rockies. Journal of Forestry. Koch, E. 1942. History of the 1910 forest Research Station. 80(10): 647–650. fires in Idaho and western Montana. Thwaites, R.G., ed. 1904–05. Original Barrett, S.W.; Arno, S.F. 1988. Increment- Processed report on file at the Idaho journals of Lewis and Clark Expedition, borer methods for determining fire Panhandle National Forests, Coeur 1804–06. New York, NY: Arno Press, history in coniferous forests. Gen. Tech. d’Alene, ID. (Reproduced in 1976 as Inc. ■ Rep. INT–244. Ogden, UT: USDA Forest
FIRE USE IN JAMES FENIMORE COOPER’S THE PRAIRIE*
James Fenimore Cooper (1789– men were proficient in the use of ignite a handful of dry grass.] 1851) was an early American fire. Then he placed the little flame novelist whose works often in a bed of the standing fog feature frontier life. The Prairie “Ah’s me!” said the trapper. “The [tallgrass], and withdrawing (1827) concludes Cooper’s imps [enemy Indians] have cir- from the spot to the centre of Leatherstocking Tales about the cumvented us with a vengeance. the ring, he patiently awaited frontiersman Natty Bumppo, The prairie is on fire!” Bright the result. As the fire gained from his youth in upstate New flashes of flame shot up here and strength and heat, it began to York to his old age as a Great there in a broad belt about their spread on three sides, dying of Plains trapper. In The Prairie, place of refuge. Huge columns of itself on the fourth, for want of the old trapper and his friends smoke were rolling up from the ailment [fuel]. It cleared every- escape from pursuing American plain; the red glow which gleamed thing before it, leaving the black Indians by hiding in tallgrass. upon their enormous folds pro- and smoking soil. By advancing That night, the Indians ignite claimed louder than words the to the spot where the trapper the prairie to flush out their character of the imminent and had kindled the grass, they quarry. The trapper saves the approaching danger. avoided the heat [from the main day by lighting an escape fire. fire], and in a very few moments Cooper’s novel suggests that “Come lads, come,” the trapper the flames began to recede in American Indians and frontiers- exhorted. “Put hands on this short every quarter, leaving them and withered grass where we enveloped in a cloud of smoke,
* From The Prairie by James Fenimore Cooper stand, and lay bare the ‘arth.” but perfectly safe from the (Cornwall, NY: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1951), pages [After a circle was cleared of fuel, torrent of fire that still furiously 282–288. To facilitate reading, the excerpt does not indicate omitted words and passages. the trapper used his flintlock to rolled onward.
28 Fire Management Today WILDLAND BURNING BY AMERICAN INDIANS IN VIRGINIA
Hutch Brown
wo days after first sighting the coast of Virginia in 1607, the One of the first things T Jamestown colonists noticed that the English discovered about “great smokes of fire” rising from American Indians in Virginia was that deep in the woods. “We marched to those smokes,” recalled George they burned their wildlands. Percy (1607), “and found that the savages had been there burning down the grass as, we thought, At the other extreme, Emily seaboard (Delcourt and Delcourt either to make their plantation Russell (1983) has challenged the 1996, cited by Barber 1999; there or else to give signs to bring notion that American Indians Patterson and Sassaman 1988). their forces together, and so to give burned much at all. Most colonial Local concentrations of natural us battle.” One of the first things accounts that describe Indian life, fires might have favored fire- the English discovered about she notes, do not mention wildland adapted species in some areas American Indians in Virginia was burning. But such accounts in (Stapleton 1999; Williams 1998); that they burned their wildlands. Virginia are generally limited to but in most of Virginia’s presettle- what visitors saw Indians doing in ment landscapes, frequent fire The purposes for burning— their villages, which would not would have depended on activities agricultural clearing or military have included setting vegetation by American Indians. If we are to signaling—are speculative in on fire. preserve and restore our eastern Percy’s account. Notable, however, wildland ecosystems, then we must is the fuel type mentioned: grass. Today, many researchers agree that first understand the role American Grassland in Virginia rapidly disturbances, both natural and Indians might have played in using succeeds to forest unless main- manmade, helped to shape the fire to make presettlement ecosys- tained by grazing, mowing, or fire. patchwork of presettlement tems livable and productive. In his account, Percy suggests a ecosystems sometimes known as possible reason for its persis- the primeval forest. Wildland fire is A thorough study of the role that tence—American Indian fire use. capable of making fundamental, Indian fire use played in Virginia’s long-term changes to ecosystems presettlement ecosystems would A Burning Question in the mid-Atlantic region. For require examining evidence, both example, slash fires in the early qualitative and quantitative, from Was burning by American Indians 20th century severely burned the multiple sources (see sidebar on extensive enough to influence Dolly Sods area on the Mononga- page 31). However, a single Virginia’s ecosystems? The answer, hela National Forest, WV. The source—accounts by colonial according to one early USDA original red spruce forest never explorers and travelers—can Forest Service researcher, is recovered; a dense tangle of heaths provide a useful preliminary emphatically yes. Hu Maxwell now covers much of the burn site. overview of the impact that Indian (1910) claimed that had the fire use might have had on wild- colonists not “snatched the fagot The overwhelming majority of land ecosystems in Virginia. from the Indian’s hand,” Virginia wildland fires in Virginia are would have become one vast ignited by humans (Main and Why Did Indians Burn? “pasture land or desert.” Haines 1976; Stapleton 1999) and Based on historical evidence, four probably have been for thousands purposes for burning—agriculture, Hutch Brown is the editor of Fire Manage- of years. For the past 4,000 years, hunting, range management, and ment Today, USDA Forest Service, lightning fires have been uncom- travel—might have opened Washington Office, Washington, DC. mon on most of the Atlantic
Volume 60 • No. 3 • Summer 2000 29 THE FOREST PRIMEVAL
Many people believe that the first English to settle North America found an ancient, impenetrable wilderness stretching uninterrupted from the shores of the Atlantic to the banks of the Mississippi. The popular view of a pristine wilderness inhabited by American Indians who left no trace on the land is rooted in the Romantic notion of “the forest primeval” promoted by such poets as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
The Romantic view entered the early conservation movement through the writings of Henry David Thoreau and others (Williams 1999). It plays a strong role in today’s environmental movement (Brown 1999) and has even influenced the science of ecology (Whitney 1994). For example, ecologists often conceive of forest succession as a progression toward a stable, self-perpetuating “climatic climax” (or “potential natural”) forest. Implicit in the notion of the climax forest is the goal of returning to an undisturbed state of forest stability— the condition that prevailed in the Romantic imagination before the arrival of Europeans.
Old-growth remnants today suggest that there is some truth to the Romantic notion of a forest primeval, but only on some sites (Whitney 1994). Research has shown that the pre-Columbian eastern temperate forest was actually a complex, relatively unstable (Davis 1981) patchwork of ecosystems that included extensive grass- lands. Disturbances at various scales, from the decline of a single species to the destruction of vegetation for miles around, helped to shape—and could change—presettlement ecosystems in various ways, depending on such factors as soil, climate, geography, and human activities (Patterson and Sassaman 1988; Pyne 1982; Whitney 1994; Williams 1999). Accordingly, there is also some truth to one researcher’s claim that “most of the forests seen by the first settlers in America were in their first generation after one or another kind of major disturbance” (Raup 1967).
Virginia’s landscape and affected its 1998). Two centuries later, an forest out of easy reach. A few ecosystems the most. almost identical village was built decades after a village was estab- on the same site, only to be aban- lished, these circumstances Slash-and-Burn Agriculture. All of doned again after a single genera- combined to make the village Virginia’s native populations tion. Why? untenable (Brinker 1998). The practiced agriculture, from the inhabitants then moved on. The Coastal Plain (Rountree 1989) to Each village required, depending original site, if left undisturbed, the western valleys (Brinker 1998). on its size and location, from a few passed through successional stages Small farming communities were acres to hundreds of acres of fields until reaching climax forest two or concentrated near freshwater for corn, beans, and squash (Ar- three centuries later. Depending springs or creeks along major cher 1607a; Rountree 1989; Smith on local conditions, it might take waterways (fig. 1) (Smith 1612; 1624). Villagers cleared the fields decades or even centuries for the Barber 1999). by felling, girdling, or firing trees site to be suitable for renewed at the base and then using fire to inhabitation. Although the American Indian reduce the slash and stumps. The presence was permanent through- farmers did not use fertilizer, so With every change in location, a out Virginia, Indians periodically soil productivity gradually de- village used fire to clear new land moved their villages from site to clined, requiring new fields to be and left an even larger amount of site. An excavated archeological cleared. Fishing and hunting cleared land behind. Traces of site at Seneca Rocks, on the depleted local fish and game, and clearings abandoned during headwaters of the Potomac River trash and waste disposal dimin- previous decades might be scat- in what is now West Virginia, ished local water quality over time. tered over many miles. From its shows that a farming village Meanwhile, tree felling for fuel- farming activities alone, a single flourished there for about 20 years, wood, new cropfields, and building village occupying 50 acres (20 ha) then was abandoned (Brinker materials eventually pushed the might leave a disturbance pattern,
30 Fire Management Today SOURCES OF EVIDENCE FOR INDIAN FIRE USE at any given time, on hundreds of acres of widely scattered tracts at Did wildland burning by American Indians affect presettlement ecosys- various successional stages. Where tems in Virginia? Relevant sources of evidence (adapted from Whitney populations were relatively con- 1994) might include: centrated, this broad pattern of impact probably helped provoke • Historical materials, including written accounts, maps, and draw- warfare among peoples competing ings; for limited resources such as • Statistical records, especially land surveys; hunting grounds. As stocks of deer • Studies of old-growth forests or ancient individual trees; declined on the coastal plain, for • Archeological evidence, especially from excavated Indian village example, the Powhatans organized sites; and large upriver hunts in areas • Paleoecological studies, including pollen and charcoal analyses from claimed by the Monacans, leading sediments. to occasional bloody battles Evidence from different sources does not always agree. Despite eyewit- (Rountree 1989; Strachey 1612). ness accounts of bison in Virginia, archeologists have found no sup- porting evidence such as bison bone fragments in excavated Indian Hunting. Fire was widely used in fire- and trashpits (Stapleton 1999). But bison did not spread into Virginia during organized hunts. Virginia until the 14th or 15th century (Haines 1970), whereas most Villagers, “commonly two or three archeological excavations are on earlier, “prebison” sites (Brinker hundred together” (Strachey 1999). 1612), would form a large circle and ignite the forest leaf litter,
Shenandoah Valley Blue Ridge Mountains
Potomac River
Cumberland Gap
C O A S T A L P I E D M O N T P L A I N
James River
Dan River
Major Indian trails Areas of inhabitation on the Coastal Plain Areas of reported prairie/savanna Possible bison migration corridor
Figure 1—Virginia in about 1600, showing some of the areas where fire use by American Indians might have affected presettlement vegetation. Areas of Indian settlement on the Coastal Plain are based on Smith (1612); areas of settlement in the interior are not shown, but were similarly concentrated along waterways. American Indians burned lands adjacent to their villages for agriculture, hunting, and other purposes, opening the forest and promoting pines and oaks over less fire-resistant species such as maples and beech. The western Piedmont and Shenandoah Valley had fire-maintained grassland or open woodland that probably reached southwestward along valleys to the Cumberland Gap, providing a migration corridor for bison (Haines 1970). The major Indian trails shown were used for regional trade and travel (Lambert 1989; Randolph 1973); not shown are the many local trails along rivers and ridges. Frequent fire use to maintain such trails probably formed corridors of open pine and oak forest. Illustration: Gene Hansen Creative Services, Inc., 2000.
Volume 60 • No. 3 • Summer 2000 31 driving deer into the center where investment of time and energy. To Range Management. European they could easily be killed. Or they reduce the risk, hunters ignited settlers found extensive areas of would burn a line of forest across a areas known to abound in game, open game habitat throughout the point of land, driving game into which had the self-reinforcing East, commonly called “barrens” the river to be shot by hunters in effect of increasing future game (Pyne 1982). The American Indians canoes (Smith 1624). Fire sur- stocks in those areas. Even in used fire to maintain such areas as rounds were organized in autumn, closed forest, underburning rangeland. Europeans reported when leaf litter was plentiful and multiplies the quantity and quality evidence of widespread grassland there were fewer ladder fuels to of deer browse, attracting and or savanna in two parts of Virginia: turn a surface burn into a raging supporting increased deer herds the Piedmont (including the Dan canopy fire. (Mellars 1976). The fire surround River watershed in southern thus functioned not only to drive Virginia) and the Shenandoah Communal fire surrounds were game, but also to regenerate game Valley (fig. 1). more efficient than individual for future hunts. By improving hunts, which might go for weeks browse through fire, the hunters In the Piedmont, after “marching without success. However, com- could concentrate animals in into the country” from Little Falls munal hunts represented a limited areas where they were on the Potomac River (near larger—and therefore riskier— easiest to find and kill. present-day Washington, DC),
“Chieftain of Virginia,” from a drawing in about 1585 by John White near the ill-fated Roanoke colony in what is now coastal North Carolina. Note that the hunting ground behind the “chieftain” is sparsely wooded; sharp forest margins suggest careful disturbance control. White’s drawing matches Henry Spelman’s (1613) mention of open areas in coastal Virginia supporting luxurious grass for game. Illustration: U.S. Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
32 Fire Management Today Four purposes for burning—agriculture, Samuel Argall (1613) spotted “a hunting, range management, and travel—would great store of cattle as big as kine [cows]” that were “heavy” and probably have opened Virginia’s landscape “slow.” From his description, what and affected its ecosystems the most. Argall must have seen were bison, a grassland indicator species. The explorer John Lederer (1672) prepared a map of his travels AMERICAN INDIANS AND COLONISTS showing “savanae” throughout Virginia’s western Piedmont. In the IN VIRGINIA same area, the traveler Robert Beverley (1705) described “large Colonial accounts suggest that at least 13,000 people, or about 2 Spots of Meadows and Savanna’s, people per square mile, were living in what is now Virginia in 1607, wherein are Hundreds of Acres when Jamestown was founded (Rountree 1989). Estimates are without any Tree at all; but yield highly conjectural, partly because European epidemics and 17th- Reeds and Grass of incredible century wars for control of the inland beaver trade devastated Height.” American Indian populations in eastern North America before settlers actually encountered them. The pre-Columbian population In the Dan River watershed, the might have been much higher. surveyor William Byrd (1733) saw After accounting for the effects of epidemics and warfare, one extensive areas “pretty bare of researcher calculated that pre-Columbian population densities timber,” including vast cane- reached 50 people per square mile in parts of coastal New England breaks—a type of vegetation that (Cook 1976, cited in Whitney 1994). The coastal Virginians under needs frequent fire to flourish the Powhatan confederacy, also sustained by agriculture and rich (Komarek 1974). Byrd’s survey fishing grounds, probably had similarly high population densities, at party found scattered bison and least locally. Moreover, the Powhatans’ inability to conquer the took the opportunity to kill one for inland Chickahominies, Monacans, and Manahoacs suggests that food. populations of the Piedmont interior were comparable in size. Archeological excavations indicate that the Tutelos and others who In the Shenandoah Valley, the occupied the mountain valleys to the west maintained extensive traveler Robert Fallam (1671) villages in the floodplains and frequent camps in the uplands for found “brave meadows with grass hunting and other purposes (Barber 1999). about a man’s height.” John Fontaine (1716), who accompanied The Jamestown colony, established in 1607 by a few dozen settlers the expedition led by Virginia from England during a rare prolonged regional drought, faced Governor Alexander Spotswood starvation and was almost abandoned in 1610. But ships from into the Shenandoah Valley, England brought fresh supplies and new settlers, and the colony reported finding “the feeting of soon expanded. By 1616, after destroying nearby native villages, the elks and buffaloes, and their beds,” colonists had established a series of settlements from the mouth to sure signs of grassland. George the falls of the James River. Washington surveyed parts of the Shenandoah Valley in 1752, after The Powhatans, eager to trade for English tools and other manufac- American Indians had disappeared tures, generally tolerated the Jamestown settlement until too late. from the area and their burning In 1622, they finally launched a coordinated series of assaults that nearly wiped out the English. In 1644, after another failed military had ceased, but before extensive campaign, the Powhatans suffered bloody reprisals that broke their European settlement. He found power for good. By the 1750’s, decimated by European diseases and many “barrens” with old burnt warfare, most native peoples—including populations in the inte- stumps and patches of hardwood rior—had abandoned their fields and villages in what is now Vir- saplings (Spurr 1951), signs that ginia. A tiny Indian reservation remains on the Pamunkey River the prairie had once been burned near the original seat of Powhatan power. to remove the trees and was now succeeding to forest.
Volume 60 • No. 3 • Summer 2000 33 To the south, localities in the By using fire to improve browse and upper James River watershed, such remove thickets, American Indians kept game as Cowpasture and Calfpasture, reportedly took their names from animals concentrated on relatively open hunting the bison herds that once roamed grounds where they were easiest to find and kill. the tallgrass prairie northward from the Cumberland Gap into the Shenandoah Valley (Fithian 1775). reported, implying that there were Spelman’s use of the term “their” Bison reportedly once used a salt other parts without forest. “[The to describe the game on the range lick near present-day Roanoke, in Powhatans] have marish ground maintained by the Powhatans southwestern Virginia, on their [marshland], and small fields for suggests proprietorship. Wildland migrations through the corn, and other grounds whereon burning, including fire surrounds, Alleghenies to the Piedmont their deer, goats [sic], and stags took an investment of time and (Haines 1970). Daniel Boone feedeth.” Open areas such as old energy toward future hunting blazed the Wilderness Trail in 1769 cropfields, periodically reburned to success. Groups therefore claimed on a well-trodden bison path prevent forest succession, sup- and defended the areas they through the Cumberland Gap, ported patches of shrubby habitat burned. For example, when John suggesting that grassland corridors with “rank [plentiful] grass” for Smith once blundered into a once reached from southwestern deer and elk (Spelman 1613). John Powhatan fire surround, he was Virginia into the Piedmont and Smith described one such area, promptly captured and the others Shenandoah Valley (fig. 1). where “all the woods for many an in his party were killed (Smith hundred mile for the most part 1608), even though the Powhatans Even coastal Virginia had patches grow sleight” (Arber 1910). Fre- generally tolerated the Jamestown of fire-maintained rangeland. “The quent burning would have been colonists and often traded with country is full of wood in some necessary to maintain such fire- Smith. parts,” Henry Spelman (1613) stunted woodland.
Fire-adapted species on the George Washington and Jefferson National Forests, VA. The endangered Peters Mountain mallow (left) requires fire for germination. Pre- scribed fire in Table Mountain pine–pitch pine forest (right) promotes pine regeneration by opening serotinous cones and suppressing competing vegetation. For thousands of years, such fire-adapted species flourished in Virginia despite a low incidence of lightning fires, suggesting that fire use by American Indians played a role in sustaining fire- adapted ecosystems. Photos: Steven Q. Croy, USDA Forest Service, George Washington and Jefferson National Forests, Roanoke, VA, 1995.
34 Fire Management Today Travel. Colonial explorers discov- European explorers reported evidence of ered Virginia by ship or by follow- widespread grassland or savanna in two parts of ing trails known to their American Indian guides. Most used trails Virginia—the Piedmont and the Shenandoah Valley. leading up the major rivers from the coastal plain into the interior. Another set of trails, leading along oak and pine dominated much of individual trees die from pests, the spine of the Blue Ridge and the Virginia (Kneller and Peteet 1993; disease, and windthrow, canopy branches of the Shenandoah River, Maxwell and Davis 1972). The role openings result in patches of thick connected to a network of regional of fire in oak and pine regeneration successional vegetation, and large trails (fig. 1) used by American (Abrams 1992; Apfelbaum and quantities of leaf litter and deadfall Indians for trade and travel Haney 1991; Barnes and Van Lear accumulate. Such features are (Randolph 1973; Lambert 1989). 1998; Brose and Van Lear 1998; strikingly absent from most The trails were maintained Komarek 1974; Van Lear and Watt colonial accounts. “Thick[et]s through fires kindled annually “by 1993; Whitney 1994; Williams there is few,” Smith (1624) wrote, the Indians that happen to pass 1998), coupled with the compara- and Strachey (1612) observed that that way,” according to William tively slow spread of such fire- the forest floor was “clean” and “at Byrd (1728). “They cannot travel intolerant species as beech and least passable both for horse and but where the woods are burnt,” maple (Davis 1981), raises a foot.” In 1634, Andrew White even John Smith (1624) noted. question: Did Indian fire use claimed that forest trees near the during the Holocene (the last Potomac River were “commonly so In addition to using fire-main- 10,500 years) help to shape the farre distant from each other as a tained trails to reach specific forest that colonists found in coach and fower [four] horses may destinations near and far, Ameri- Virginia? travel without molestation” (Frius can Indians traversed Virginia’s 1971). wildlands in search of game and In a detailed study for the late edible plants. They routinely Holocene (the past 3,900 years), Indeed, colonial accounts describe burned areas near their villages to Delcourt and Delcourt (1996, remarkably open forests (Rostlund help them find and gather food. summarized by Barber 1999) 1957). After discovering the area Fire not only promoted game found that Indian fire use in where “the savages” had been browse, but also reduced deadfall, western North Carolina resulted in burning grass, George Percy leaf litter, and underbrush, facili- a changing mosaic of vegetation (1607) and his party of Jamestown tating passage and making it easier types that included fire-adapted colonists “pass’d through excellent for hunters to spot and stalk their species on some sites and fire- ground full of flowers…and as prey (Mellars 1976). intolerant communities on others. goodly trees as I have seen” into “a Colonial accounts in Virginia little plat of ground full of fine and How Did Burning suggest that Indian fire use had a beautiful strawberries,” a mixed Affect Ecosystems? similarly patchy pattern of impact landscape of open forest and on the land. meadow. Members of the About 16,000 years ago, at the peak Spotswood expedition were able to of the last ice age, Virginia was Forest Communities travel upriver on horseback all the largely covered by tundra and jack way to the Blue Ridge, then enjoy pine forest (Davis 1981). As the ice Most of Virginia was wooded when the Jamestown colonists arrived. sweeping vistas from its crest sheet retreated, successive waves of (Fontaine 1716). By contrast, the temperate forest species invaded Many trees were enormous— Robert Beverley (1705) reported density of Virginia’s forests today Virginia from the south and west. prevents most horseback travel American Indians entered Virginia forest trees so large that they were free from branches up to 70 feet and blocks the view from almost at least 11,500 years ago (Barber every ridgetop. 1999), roughly coinciding with the (21 m) above ground. rapid spread of oak into Virginia But the colonists did not report In the absence of frequent light- about 11,000 years ago (Davis ning fires, presettlement Virginia’s 1981). By about 8,000 years ago, certain telltale signs of fire-free old growth. In undisturbed forests, as clean forest floors and open, varied
Volume 60 • No. 3 • Summer 2000 35 landscapes were probably due to succeed to hardwood forest within Royall 1996; Russell 1983). Of frequent fire use by American about 100 years (Komarek 1974; course, Indian fires would have Indians. Underburning would have Monette and Ware 1983). The pine burned deep into adjacent unused reduced the underbrush and forests found by the Jamestown areas and might have occasionally debris, facilitating passage and colonists were probably succes- climbed into the canopy to become promoting the abundant herba- sional woodland on old cropfields high-severity crown fires that ceous cover that the colonists or village sites cleared by fire. could have spread for miles. But in admired each spring. Herbaceous areas distant from human habita- growth and edge habitat along fire- On upland slopes and ridges tion and travel, such events might cleared openings would have throughout western Virginia, fire- have been too sporadic to have had multiplied such game species as dependent forests of pitch pine and much long-term effect (Patterson deer and turkey (Komarek 1965; Table Mountain pine were more and Sassaman 1988). Mellars 1976; Whitney 1994). common before European settle- Increased light and heat in open ment than now (Williams 1998). Even in well-populated areas, the areas would have favored dry-forest Without fire, these forests succeed impact of Indian fire use was species such as oaks. Burning to oak on all but the most exposed probably uneven. Jamestown would also have affected interior sites. Regular burning on ridgetops colonists reported many fire- forest recruitment, promoting the by pre-Columbian travelers and intolerant hardwood species, fire-resistant keystone species that hunting parties would have kept including elm, ash, and beech. dominate oak–hickory communi- many western ridges and slopes Presettlement landscapes near ties and are frequently mentioned under grass or open pine forest, Indian villages probably supported in colonial accounts. with views of the valleys below. a patchwork of communities ranging from moist forest assem- In addition to oak and hickory, the Overall, American Indian fire use blages on the wetter sites (perhaps Jamestown colonists found abun- probably had a mixed impact on similar in appearance to older dant pine, enough to support a Virginia’s forests, greatly affecting bottomland or cove forests today) pitch and tar industry (Archer areas near villages, trails, and to relatively open, fire-maintained 1607b; Strachey 1612). Pines are hunting grounds while scarcely oak and pine forests on the drier successional species on Virginia’s touching areas that were uninhab- sites, interspersed with patches of Coastal Plain; undisturbed stands ited and little used (Clark and grassland.
DID FIRE KEEP BEECH OUT OF THE CANOPY?
American beech is mentioned less often in early fire and other disturbances, oak is known to give colonial accounts from Virginia than many other tree way to shade-tolerant species such as beech and species, particularly oak. William Strachey (1612), for maple on many sites in the eastern temperate forest example, cataloged coastal Virginia’s trees in detail, (Barnes and Van Lear 1998; Brose and Van Lear describing their utility for both the colonists and the 1998; Olson 1996; Van Lear and Watt 1993; Whitney American Indians. He listed oak, elm, ash, walnut 1994). If beech was at least as important as oak in (including hickory*), cypress, cedar, sassafras, pines, Virginia’s presettlement forest canopy, then why did and even wild rose, but did not mention beech. John colonial accounts seem to ignore it? Smith (1624) wrote that the “woods that are most common are oak and walnut [hickory],” then listed a One reason might be American Indian under- number of other species that did not include beech. burning. Beech is slow growing and thin barked, vulnerable to fire. Frequent fire would have sup- One study has suggested that undisturbed stands of pressed beech in favor of more fire-resistant species pine on Virginia’s Coastal Plain succeed first to oak such as oak (Barnes and Van Lear 1998; Van Lear forest and finally to forest dominated or codominated and Watt 1993). If presettlement underburning by beech (Monette and Ware 1983). In the absence of prevented beech from becoming widely established in the forest canopy, then pine and oak–hickory * Europe has no native hickories (Carya spp.). The early colonists classified hickory forests would have predominated and the colonists as a type of walnut (it does belong to the walnut family). would not have reported extensive beech.
36 Fire Management Today Prairie and Savanna settlement, suggesting that Indian Sassaman 1988; Whitney 1994). In Early explorers were awed by the fire use played a role in maintain- addition to grasslands, the ecosys- expanses of grassland they found in ing the midwestern grasslands tem mosaic probably included some parts of Virginia, especially in (Pyne 1982). large areas of successional wood- the Shenandoah Valley. In the land maintained through burning Piedmont, dry oak–hickory forest It seems doubtful that grasslands techniques that were likely as in the rain shadow of the Blue in Virginia could have had a effective as any we know today. Ridge likely opened into patches of similar climatic origin. Wilkins savanna or grassland covering et al. (1991) have shown that the Of course, any conclusion based on hundreds of acres. West of the Blue Big Barrens of Kentucky, a grass- the limited evidence of historical Ridge, a fire-maintained tallgrass land outlier of the midwestern accounts alone must remain prairie probably blanketed some prairie peninsula, formed only hypothetical. Still, accounts by valley floors, bordered by forest after the Hypsithermal Interval, early European settlers and travel- and interspersed with groves of possibly as a direct result of Indian ers, coupled with what we know trees in the wetter areas. After the fire use. Moreover, the effects of about Virginia’s climate in recent American Indians stopped burning, dry air from the Great Plains are millennia, consistently point to the large grassland herbivores minimal in Virginia (Whitney one conclusion: that at least some disappeared from all of these areas, 1994). In recent millennia, of Virginia’s ecosystems evolved which promptly sprouted trees. In Virginia’s climate has been too with, and depended on, frequent 1733, for example, William Byrd’s moist and natural fire too rare to burning by American Indians. survey party in the Dan River sustain prairie or savanna. The Shaped and maintained to make watershed found abandoned, prairie in Virginia’s mountain the land livable, such ecosystems overgrown Indian village sites; a valleys and the open woodland in should not be confused with few scattered bison; and miles of the western Piedmont were prob- wilderness. Instead, they should be “young saplings, consisting of oak, ably formed and almost certainly treated as what they were—a hickory and sassafras” (Byrd 1733), maintained through seasonal cultural imprint left on the land by signs of grassland succeeding to burning by American Indians to Virginia’s first inhabitants. forest. promote browse for bison and elk. Acknowledgments In a letter to John Adams, Thomas A Legacy of Fire This article would not have been Jefferson (1813) observed that The Jamestown colony was possible without generous assis- American Indian fire use “is the founded on the myth that Virginia tance from USDA Forest Service most probable cause of the origin was, as John Smith (1624) put it, staff on the George Washington and extension of the vast prairies “a plain wilderness as God first and Jefferson National Forests in in the western country, where the made it.” The wilderness myth Roanoke, VA. The author would grass having been of extraordinary persists to this day in the notion particularly like to thank Fire Staff luxuriance, has made a conflagra- that the East was once covered by a Officer Glen Stapleton, Forest tion sufficient to kill even the old primeval forest that a squirrel Archeologist M.B. Barber, and as well as the young timber.” could have crossed “from bough to Forest Ecologist Steven Q. Croy for Jefferson was only partly right: The bough for a thousand miles and their photographs, extensive midwestern prairie peninsula never have seen a flicker of sun- references, and invaluable infor- extending from Illinois into Ohio is shine on the ground” (Adams mation and commentary. Thanks often attributed to the period 1931). also go to Ruth Brinker, the known as the Hypsithermal heritage resource specialist for the Interval (about 7,300 to 3,900 That squirrel must have taken a Monongahela National Forest in years ago) (Wilkins et al. 1991) or tortuous route across Virginia’s Elkins, WV, for reviewing the to the dry air masses from the base checkered landscape. Studies article and sharing her insights of the Rocky Mountains that still suggest a similarly varied land- into American Indian cultural bring drought to the Midwest scape, including broad swathes of history in West Virginia. The (Whitney 1994). However, trees grassland and savanna, in other author alone is responsible for any rapidly grew all over the midwest- Eastern States (Day 1953; Rostlund errors. ern prairie soon after European 1957; Pyne 1982; Patterson and
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The journal of Philip ecological relationships in prehistory. Barnes, T.A.; Van Lear, D.H. 1998. Pre- Vickers Fithian. In: Branch, M.P.; Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society. scribed fire effects on advanced regen- Philippon, D.J., eds. 1998. The height of 42: 15–45. eration in mixed hardwood stands. our mountains. Baltimore and London: Monette, R.; Ware, S. 1983. Early forest Southern Journal of Applied Forestry. The Johns Hopkins University Press: succession in the Virginia coastal plain. 22(3): 138–142. 100–103. Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club. Beverley, R. 1705. The history and present Fontaine, J. 1716. The journal of John 110(1): 80–86. state of Virginia. Book 2, chapter 3. In: Fontaine. In: Branch, M.P.; Philippon, Olson, S.D. 1996. The historical occur- Branch, M.P.; Philippon, D.J., eds. 1998. D.J., eds. 1998. The height of our rence of fire in the central hardwoods, The height of our mountains. Baltimore mountains. Baltimore and London: The with emphasis on southcentral Indiana. and London: The Johns Hopkins Johns Hopkins University Press: 71–78. Natural Areas Journal. 16(3): 248–256. University Press: 67–71. Frius, H.R. 1971. Highlights of the history, Patterson, W.A., III; Sassaman, K.E. 1988. Brinker, R. 1998. Personal communica- geography and cartography of Arlington Indian fires in the prehistory of New tion. Heritage resource specialist for the County and contiguous areas of Virginia: England. In: Nicholas, G.P., ed. Ho- USDA Forest Service, Monongahela Prior to 1870. Arlington Historical locene human ecology in northeastern National Forest, Elkins, WV. Magazine. 4(3): 21–34. North America. New York: Plenum Brinker, R. 1999. Personal communica- Haines, F. 1970. The buffalo. New York, NY: Press: 107–135. tion. Heritage resource specialist for the Thomas Y. Crowell Co. Percy, G. 1607. Observations gathered out USDA Forest Service, Monongahela Jefferson, T. 1813. Letter to John Adams, of a discourse of a plantation of the National Forest, Elkins, WV. May 27. In: Fire Control Notes. 13(2): southern colony in Virginia by the Brose, P.H.; Van Lear, D.H. 1998. Re- 31. English, 1606. In: Haile, E.W., ed. 1998. sponses of hardwood advance regenera- Kneller, M; Peteet, D. 1993. Late-quater- Jamestown narratives. Champlain, VA: tion to seasonal prescribed fires in oak- nary climate in the Ridge and Valley of RoundHouse: 85–100. dominated shelterwood stands. Cana- Virginia, U.S.A.: Changes in vegetation Pyne, S.J. 1982. Fire in America: A cultural dian Journal of Forest Research. 28(3): and depositional environment. Quater- history of wildland and rural fire. 331–339. nary Science Reviews. 12(8): 613–628. Seattle, London: University of Washing- Brown, H. 1999. Smokey and the myth of ton Press. nature. Fire Management Notes. 59(3): 6–11.
38 Fire Management Today Randolph, J.R. 1973. British travelers Smith, J. 1624. The generall historie of 1992; Knoxville, TN. Gen. Tech. Rep. among the southern Indians, 1660– Virginia, New England, and the Summer SE–84. Asheville, NC: USDA Forest 1763. Norman, OK: University of Isles. Book II, part I. In: Lankford, J., ed. Service, Southeastern Forest Experi- Oklahoma Press. Captain John Smith’s America. New ment Station: 66–78. Raup, H.M. 1967. American forest biology. York, Evanston, IL, London: Harper and Whitney, G.G. 1994. From coastal Journal of Forestry. 65: 800–803. Row: 3–34. wilderness to fruited plain: A history of Rostlund, E. 1957. The myth of a natural Spelman, H. 1613. In: Haile, E.W., ed. environmental change in temperate prairie belt in Alabama: An interpreta- 1998. Jamestown narratives. Champlain, North America, 1500 to the present. tion of historical records. Annals of the VA: RoundHouse: 481–495. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Association of American Geographers. Spurr, S.H. 1951. George Washington: Press. 47(4): 392–411. Surveyor and ecological observer. Wilkins, G.R.; Delcourt, P.A.; Delcourt, Rountree, H.C. 1989. The Powhatan Ecology. 32(3): 544–549. H.R.; Harrison, F.W.; Turner, M.R. 1991. Indians of Virginia: Their traditional Stapleton, G. 1999. Personal communica- Paleoecology of central Kentucky since culture. Norman, OK, London: Univer- tion. Fire officer for the USDA Forest the last glacial millennium. Quaternary sity of Oklahoma Press. Service, George Washington and Research. 36: 224–239. Russell, E.W.B. 1983. Indian-set fires in Jefferson National Forests, Roanoke, VA. Williams, C.E. 1998. History and status of the forests of the Northeastern United Strachey, W. 1612. The history of travel Table Mountain pine–pitch pine forests States. Ecology. 64(1): 78–88. into Virginia Britannia. In: Haile, E.W., of the Southern Appalachian Mountains Smith, J. 1608. A true relation of such ed. 1998. Jamestown narratives. (USA). Natural Areas Journal. 18(1): 81– occurrences and accidents of note as Champlain, VA: RoundHouse: 381–443. 90. hath hap’ned in Virginia. In: Haile, E.W., Van Lear, D.H.; Watt, J.M. 1993. The role of Williams, G.W. 1999. Aboriginal use of fire: ed. 1998. Jamestown narratives. fire in oak regeneration. In: Loftis, D.; Are there any “natural” plant communi- Champlain, VA: RoundHouse: 142–182. McGee, G.E., eds. Oak regeneration: ties? Unpublished manuscript. Washing- Smith, J. 1612. A map of Virginia. In: Serious problems, practical recommen- ton, DC: USDA Forest Service. ■ Haile, E.W., ed. 1998. Jamestown dations. Proceedings, Symposium on narratives. Champlain, VA: RoundHouse: Oak Regeneration; 8–10 September 207.
FIRST PEOPLES FIRST IN FIRE SHELTER USE*
American Indians, though skilled in the use of fire, were occasionally entrapped by wildland fires. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark witnessed one such incident on their historic expedition from St. Louis, MO, to the mouth of the Columbia River. On October 28, 1804, a prairie fire near a Mandan village north of present-day Bismarck, ND, overran several people. As Clark testified in his journal, a boy survived under a fresh bison hide—perhaps the first recorded use of a fire shelter.
The Prarie was Set on fire (or cought by accident) by a young man of the Mandins, the fire went with such velocity that it burnt to death a man & woman, who Could not get to any place of Safty, one man a woman & Child much burnt and Several narrowly escaped the flame. a boy half white was saved unhurt in the midst of the flaim, Those ignerent people say this boy was Saved by the Great Medison Speret because he was white. The couse of his being Saved was a Green buffalow Skin was thrown over him by his mother who perhaps had more fore Sight for the pertection of her Son, and [l]ess for herself than those who escaped the flame, the Fire did not burn under the Skin leaveing the grass round the boy. This fire passed our Camp last [night] about 8 oClock P.M. it went with great rapitidity and looked Tremendious
* From Bernard DeVoto, ed., The Journals of Lewis and Clark (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997 [1953]), p. 60.
Volume 60 • No. 3 • Summer 2000 39 REINTRODUCING INDIAN-TYPE FIRE: IMPLICATIONS FOR LAND MANAGERS
Gerald W. Williams
oday, many Federal and some State forests are being ravaged Removing American Indians from the land T by insects and diseases and are effectively ended wildland burning practices prone to catastrophic wildland that had lasted for millennia. fires. Over the decades, foresters have found that eliminating fire from fire-adapted forests does not restore them to pristine parklands WHAT IS INDIAN-TYPE FIRE? and primeval wilderness (where “man is but a visitor”). Instead, Reintroducing Indian-type fire is not the same as allowing lightning- removing fire usually creates an caused fires to burn or applying prescribed fire for fuels management. environment or ecosystem that has Lightning-caused fires usually start in late summer or early fall, never before existed (Pyne 1995; when temperatures are high and humidity is low; by contrast, Ameri- Schiff 1962). can Indians usually burned when fuel and other conditions permitted controllable, low-intensity fires, often in spring or late fall. Prescribed Degraded Ecosystems fire for fuels reduction, usually in combination with clearcutting, Federal foresters at the turn of the selection harvesting, thinning, grazing, or even raking and piling of 20th century, under the guise of fuels, has a different, more uniform character and purpose than “scientific forestry,” firmly believed Indian-type burning. that their mission was to save wild nature (Langston 1995). But many Indian-type fire is intensive land management, where not every area presettlement ecosystems were is treated at the same time in the same way. The idea is to create a hardly natural. As Nancy Langston mosaic of forests and grasslands, not monocultures. The result is a (1995) has noted, “[American] combination of open prairie or savanna, shrubland, young trees, Indians had been changing those mature stands, and old-growth forest. lands for millennia, reshaping them according to their needs and desires.” The primary tool Indians warfare or indirectly through dense and scrubby, with impen- used to reshape ecosystems was relocation to reservations, effec- etrable thickets of vegetation fire. White settlers, according to tively ended wildland burning beneath the woodland canopy.” Langston, “hated the fires that practices that had lasted for mil- swept through the mountains, and lennia, even on the reservations. Western landscapes underwent a usually saw the Indian burning The result was a striking transfor- similar transformation following practices as threatening the open mation of America’s forestland the removal of Indian populations [ponderosa] pine [Pinus ponde- (Botkin 1990; Gruell 1985; Wilson and their fire. In 1897, the Oregon rosa] forests they loved. They failed 1992). “English settlers recorded a pioneer John Minto described how to realize that excluding fire would marked shift in the forest vegeta- the oak forests and open prairies of lead to the demise of what they tion after the Indians retreated Oregon’s Willamette Valley had liked most about the forest.” farther west,” observed Samuel changed (Williams and Mark Wilson (1992). “At first the forest 1995). Much of the land, Minto Removing American Indians from [in the East] was described as said, was originally unforested, the land, whether directly through ‘parklands,’ with little vegetation at kept open “by grass fires, set by the ground level. After the Indians died native [Indian] race.” The last large Jerry Williams is a historical analyst for or moved away, the Europeans fires in Oregon’s mountains were the USDA Forest Service, Washington began to describe the forest as also “set out, I believe, by the Office, Washington, DC.
40 Fire Management Today The Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management together administer several hundred million acres of grassland and other grazing land where Indian burning techniques can and should be used.
Indians.” Now, said Minto, “tens of might resist a notion so seemingly INDIAN-TYPE thousands of acres of what was at odds with decades of promotions open land 50 years ago grew into against careless fire use. Others FIRE ON THE dense forests,” such that “there is a would surely regard the reintro- RESERVATIONS greater area in Oregon of timber duction of fire as a waste of a growth today than there was 50 valuable resource (trees). Still Somewhat ironically, most years ago.” others, of course, would welcome American Indian tribes have the idea as a long-overdue pre- come to manage the forests Secretary of the Interior Bruce scription for saving the Nation’s on their reservations—some Babbitt (1997) illustrated the forests. 17.1 million acres (6.9 growing problem for Federal land million ha), primarily in the managers with an example from Unfortunately, using Indian-type West and Southwest—in Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains, fire is no cure-all for what ails our the same way as most other where “the pre-settlement mosaic Nation’s forests. Research increas- forest owners, as potential of young and old stands of mixed ingly shows that nurturing a income from timber sales. species has mutated into a solid, “friendly flame” through small Accordingly, they have uniformly older, and highly explo- fires in the underbrush will not traditionally suppressed sive lodgepole [Pinus contorta] suffice to solve the problem of fires swiftly and at any cost. forest.” The weakened trees were wildland fuel buildups. During the more susceptible to insects, “disastrous” fire season of 1994, for But the attitude on the disease, and conflagrations. How example, when about 3.3 million reservations is changing. did this happen? The answer, said acres (1.3 million ha) burned in Tribal foresters and ecolo- Babbit, is inscribed in the ancient the Western United States, the gists are now using pre- ponderosa pines through their acreage burned was not nearly scribed fire to reduce fuel annual growth rings. The rings enough from an ecological per- accumulations, change show that light, nonlethal surface spective. “Intense and wide- species composition, and fires swept through the open forest ranging fires,” George Wuerthner manage vegetation struc- every 7 to 10 years until the 1890’s. (1995) observed, “at times may in ture and density for After that, the telltale black fact be necessary for ecosystem healthier forests and range- smudges disappear. “Ninety rings health and forest regeneration.” lands. In the 1990’s, tribal ago,” Babbitt concluded, “when forests used prescribed fire fire exclusion became the mission Land managers face a critical to treat about 55,000 acres of the newborn [USDA] Forest policy problem. The intense blazes (22,000 ha) annually— Service, the number of ponderosas necessary for rapid fuel removal— about 20 percent of the per acre had doubled.” and for some ecosystem pro- estimated 300,000 acres cesses—occur only under severe (121,000 ha) that could Is Restoring Fire the fire conditions. “Yet, as a matter of benefit from periodic Answer? policy,” noted Wuerthner (1995), controlled fire (Haglund Reintroducing fire to the land in “most [Federal and State] agencies 1998). Other forestland on ways that emulate the past prac- call for fire suppression under reservations is considered tices of American Indians, on its these extreme conditions.” unsuitable for prescribed face, sounds both interesting and burning due to air quality timely (Saveland 1995). But the However, the use of Indian-type concerns or excess fuel idea has skeptics. Portions of a low-intensity fire is certainly part accumulations. public raised on Smokey Bear of the answer. In the 1990’s, land
Volume 60 • No. 3 • Summer 2000 41 managers found that prescribed OBJECTIONS TO INDIAN-TYPE FIRE USE fire, if carefully managed, can yield excellent results by reducing fuel Not all fire researchers and routinely burned many areas of loads, burning out the underbrush managers agree that land forest and underbrush, light- that can choke new trees, and managers should simulate ning fires had less chance to stimulating new seed production Indian burning. In a survey of have a major impact than today. and natural regeneration. The wildland fire experts from 5. Simulating past Indian Forest Service and USDI Bureau of around the country, Bruce burning would amount to Land Management together ad- Kilgore (1985) found eight basic preserving an artifact; minister several hundred million objections to reintroducing ecosystems must be free to acres of grassland and other aboriginal-type fire. Each evolve. grazing land, where Indian burn- objection below is followed by a counterargument. Most North American ecosys- ing techniques can and should be tems have coexisted with fire for used. Several Western States have 1. It has not been demonstrated millennia. By simulating Indian hundreds of thousands of acres of that Indian burning played a burning, we are striving to State forestlands that could also significant role in altering maintain these ecosystems. forest ecosystems. benefit from Indian-type fire use. 6. What is our goal? Do we Of course, large industrial land- Indian fires were utilized exten- want to restore processes owners will continue to manage sively in almost every locality or that existed before Europe- their forests for maximum fiber ecosystem of North America, ans arrived or before all production, probably excluding although not every area was human beings arrived? burned. most fire. But private woodlot The goal is to revive fire re- owners might be motivated to use 2. We will never have suffi- gimes to produce healthier, fire- fire or similar techniques approved ciently accurate data to adapted, resilient ecosystems. by their State forestry departments understand the extent, 7. In some areas, frequent to improve their wildland re- seasonality, and intensity of Indian fires. Indian fires and lightning sources. fires have the same impact Accurate data are lacking for on vegetation. Restoration Challenges every area, but we do know quite a lot about the extent or location Lightning does not usually Sound practices for restoring of fires, intensities, timing or cause fires at the same time of ecosystems or improving forest seasons of burning, and fre- year as do human-caused fires. health, including the use of fire, quency of fires. Moreover, lightning fires are are predicated on careful plans. In hotter and very difficult to 3. We do not simulate other planning, land managers should control, whereas Indian-type factors that have changed— consider the difficulties inherent fires are cooler and relatively extirpated plants and ani- easy to control. in restoring a past “natural” mals, Indian hunting, and condition. Basic questions about Pleistocene glaciers. 8. We have come too far to the role of people in ecosystem expect society to accept Other ecosystem components management have no easy an- simulated Indian fires in (such as wolves in Yellowstone) parks and wilderness areas. swers. Moreover, it is far from clear are being considered for reintro- what restoring “natural” condi- duction, just like fire. Using Indian-type fires might be tions means. the only way to prevent poten- 4. Lightning fires were a major tially catastrophic wildland fires source of fire for millions of Is the goal to restore ecosystems as (such as in Yellowstone National years, yet the Indians have Park in 1988), prevent insect they were 25, 50, or 100 years ago, only been in North America a during the settlement and modern and disease outbreaks, and short time—minor in evolu- restore ecosystems. The biggest periods? Or does restoration mean tionary or ecological terms. returning to presettlement condi- problem with reintroducing Lightning caused fewer fires in Indian-type fire on a regular tions during the golden age of the the forests and especially the basis will be getting the public fur trappers, some 150 to 300 years prairies than previously thought. to accept the smoke. ago? Or should we return to the Moreover, because Indians pre-Columbian era before 1492, or
42 Fire Management Today In planning, land managers should consider ignited by lightning or by manage- the difficulties inherent in restoring ment, as long as the outcome enhances ecosystem functions. a past “natural” condition. “Management issues of this kind involve judgment, followed by action,” Starker Leopold observed perhaps even to conditions that condition would mean eliminating (Kilgore 1985). “They are not existed before humans arrived in decades, centuries, or even millen- resolved simply by allowing North America, some 12,000 to nia of human impacts, a difficult if natural ecosystem processes to 30,000 years ago? Depending on not impossible task. As Emily operate.” the target era chosen, restoration Russell (1997) put it, “We cannot requirements will vary greatly assume that just because active Moreover, if Federal land managers (Flores 1997; Forney 1993). management has ceased, some choose a presettlement or pre- preexisting ‘natural’ community Columbian landscape as the Indeed, attempting to restore will reassert itself. Even the “natural” condition to strive for, conditions to what they once were eliminating of non-native species the American Indian presence in might seem futile. As Nancy or the reintroducing of native and the landscape will still be lost Langston (1995) observed, “After natural processes cannot erase the forever. “Re-creating the vegeta- we interfere with a [forest] com- effects of centuries or even millen- tion at the time of European munity, that community’s history nia of human impact.” discovery,” Stephen Pyne (1995) proceeds along paths quite differ- noted, “or preserving select natural ent from those it would have taken Management processes does not re-create the without our interference….We Responsibility historic wilderness experience cannot simply backtrack to a time Abdicating management responsi- because the most critical element, before some particular decision we bility to let “nature” do its work— the encounter with humans, many now regret, because so many through lightning-caused fires, hostile, all alien, is gone.” Pyne additional changes have radiated floods, disease, and insect out- argues that to restore “natural” out from that original action.” breaks—is not a realistic option. If conditions without the Indians and Restoring ecosystems to an arbi- an area is ready to burn, it makes the things they did, including trarily chosen past “natural” little difference whether the fire is burning, is to construct an artifi- cial landscape that is historically and ecologically incomplete. WHERE DO PEOPLE FIT INTO ECOSYSTEMS? Range of Variability Similar problems apply to the Reintroducing fire poses difficult questions about the fundamental concept “range of natural variabil- role of people in ecosystems: ity” (Flores 1997; Forney 1993; • Are ecosystems natural or human constructs? Kilgore 1985; Pyne 1995; Shrader- • Are humans part of ecosystems? Frechette and McCoy 1995). How • How many years does it take for humans (such as the original far back do we go in measuring the American Indian immigrants) to be considered a natural, native range of variability? Do we even part of ecosystems? know the exact abundance and • Should we address ecosystems and their many components without range of flora and fauna at any considering people? given point in time? Even if we do • Are humans the problem or the solution in ecosystems? Should know, how can we recreate ecosys- humans be excluded from ecosystems or is management by people tems that can sustain them? the answer? • When we restore or preserve ecosystems, what are we doing it for? Most ecosystem restoration efforts Who is asking us to restore or preserve ecosystems (the plants, the today—at least on the Federal animals, or people)? • Should we include our knowledge of past human impacts on lands that dominate the West— ecosystems in future ecosystem management? rely on the range of variability, documented through extensive
Volume 60 • No. 3 • Summer 2000 43 research efforts, to assess current Abdicating management responsibility forest health. Knowing the range to let “nature” do its work—through can give managers some idea of how to better manage the flora and lightning-caused fires, floods, disease, fauna on the land. However, and insect outbreaks—is not a realistic option. restoration of ecosystems, espe- cially those that are or were fire dependent for thousands of years, interior Pacific Northwest is a Project show. For multiple rea- is not easy. It will take work, time, national management priority, as sons, thinning, prescribed burn- and money. draft environmental impact ing, and reintroducing Indian-type statements for the Interior Colum- fires are important components of Managers and specialists have bia Basin Ecosystem Management many restoration strategies. Jim many opportunities to research fire-adapted ecosystems to deter- mine historical conditions. The first step is to discover an area’s fire history by documenting the “original” vegetation and any changes over the last 150 to 250 years (Seklecki et al. 1996). This might involve digging into old books and archives, field survey notes by the Bureau of Land Management (known until 1946 as the General Land Office), forest surveys by the U.S. Geological Survey, and other repositories of land and vegetation data. After an extensive paper/map investigation, the next step is to talk to or interview older residents and Prescribed fire site during (above) and after (below) a burn to promote turkey brood American Indian tribal elders on habitat on the George Washington and Jefferson National Forests, VA. Many eastern how they manage or managed the ridgetops were burned by American Indians to clear trails for travel and improve browse land. After compiling the prelimi- for game. Photos: Steven Q. Croy, USDA Forest Service, George Washington and Jefferson nary data, there is still the final National Forests, Roanoke, VA, 1995. step of interpreting the results. Fire history, as Clinton Phillips (1985) explained, can be “difficult to interpret because of continual past changes in the fire environ- ment and the overlapping effects of natural fires, Indian fires, and other fires….[M]anagers must use extreme care in translating the information into current fire management programs.” Support for Fire Use The Federal land management agencies currently support ecologi- cally based (ecosystem) manage- ment. Ecosystem restoration in the
44 Fire Management Today REASONS FOR USING FIRE Saveland (1985), a Forest Service fire ecologist, has recommended Ffolliott et al. (1996) and Wuerthner (1995) have noted a number of that “disturbance ecology in benefits from fire in montane forests, woodland ecosystems, and general and the use of prescribed desert shrub and grassland communities. fire in particular be considered core competencies of the agency • Reducing fuel loads. Periodic prescribed fires can reduce ground [Forest Service].” fuel loading, but managers must be careful not to create a fire that will kill existing trees (unless that is a goal). In the 1990’s, support for fire use on Federal lands grew dramati- • Disposing of slash. Piling and burning slash from timber harvest cally. Secretary of the Interior greatly reduces the threat from wildland fire and removes breeding Bruce Babbitt repeatedly reiterated places for insect pests and disease. his strong support for prescribed • Preparing for replanting. Burning helps prepare the soil for fire on the Federal forests and planting seedlings or tree seeds by reducing leaf litter, slash, and grasslands. In 1995, the Federal downed woody material, as well as grasses and shrubs. But manag- land management agencies ers must ensure that the fire is not too hot, that potential seed trees adopted a new interagency wild- are not killed, and that the mineral soil is exposed for planting. land fire policy (Federal Wildland Some trees and plants, including giant sequoia, lodgepole pine, and Policy 1995) that promotes the use quaking aspen, require periodic fires to germinate seedlings. of fire to meet wildland resource • Thinning stands. Fire can be used to thin overstocked, stagnated, objectives. In the same year, the diseased, or insect-infested forest stands. Burning can be a low-cost Forest Service set a goal of burn- and effective method to reduce stand density, releasing survivors ing 3 million (1.2 million ha) acres from competition and creating vigorous trees. However, fires can annually by the year 2005 (F&AM kill too many trees or leave others so badly scorched that they 1995). By 1998, prescribed burn might take years to recover. acreage on Forest Service lands • Increasing plant growth. Fire use can enhance certain plant had soared from the previous growth. Fire can reduce soil pathogens, increase soil fertility by annual average of 385,000 acres recycling nutrients from burned vegetation, and invigorate remain- (156,000 ha) to 1.25 million acres ing plants by releasing roots and foliage from competition. In (500,000 ha) (Bunnell 1998). addition, the removal of tree litter and shrubs often promotes desirable, fire-adapted species. Timing of the burns is critical— Unresolved Issues spring, summer, fall, or even winter might be best for particular Costs. Prescribed fire manage- species. ment to restore a forest or water- • Improving wildlife and fish habitat. Fire use can enhance or shed to its condition in, say, the reduce food and cover for wildlife and fish for years after a burn. For mid-18th century would not be example, fires produce snags for cavity-dwelling species and deadfall cheap. Depending on the site, such in streams for fish and aquatic-insect habitat. Yet very different a project would require extensive strategies and fire outcomes might be needed for different types of prework, multiple burns, and wildlife resources, such as large open areas, small dense stands, and careful monitoring and control. repeated fires. Fire use always entails a risk that • Changing hydrologic processes. Fire reduces litter that can the fire will escape, and the con- prevent moisture from reaching tree roots, allowing some nutrients comitant risk to human life and to more quickly enter the soil. But runoff from a burn site will often property must be considered in the increase, carrying away some nutrients; and heavy rains or snow- overall plan. Moreover, prescribed melt in burned watersheds can adversely affect soil stability for fire inevitably stirs ingrained years. public fears. “It’s one thing to sell • Improving aesthetic environments. Fire use can help keep a forest the idea of using carefully tended, open and parklike, and it can protect people and property from intentionally set fires or allowing wildland fires. However, the public often perceives the actual fires certain wildfires to burn as a and their immediate aftermath as detrimental. forest-rejuvenating force in the abstract,” remarked an editorial in
Volume 60 • No. 3 • Summer 2000 45 The Missoulian (Editor 1998), “but might be the most serious obstacle BRUCE BABBITT ON people often tend to react emotion- to reintroducing Indian-type fires ally when the flames kick up.” in ecosystems. REINTRODUCING FIRE* Smoke. Smoke in the atmosphere Soil Nutrients. Prescribed fires, is a growing problem for land like wildland fires, can affect the …To restore health, character, managers and landowners. Under quantity of nutrients in the soil. and structure to our forests, the Clean Air Act, the Environ- Very hot fires can reduce soil then, the obvious first step is to mental Protection Agency is productivity by eliminating nutri- bring back their own ancient committed to keeping the air as ents and by killing many of the predator: wildland fire.… clean and pure as possible for microorganisms necessary for human health. Also, smoke can nutrient cycling. Even relatively Where forests are crowded with homes, we must continue to reduce visibility many miles away cool Indian-type fires can affect keep fire out. Where the public from its source, diminishing the nutrient cycling. In addition, worries at smoke and flame, we quality of scenic views (Federal according to new ecosystem must explain and prepare them Wildland Policy 1995; Potter and guidelines for the Forest Service for this progression in our Fox 1996). Smoke is managed by and Bureau of Land Management, stewardship values. At the root minimizing its generation and by downed woody material should be of the recent [catastrophic dispersing it in the atmosphere. conserved on forest sites to pro- wildland fire] infernos lies a The preferred method, minimizing mote nutrient cycling. But woody basic yet overlooked truth: We smoke production, is difficult debris sometimes breeds insects don’t have a “fire problem” in because it often conflicts with and diseases that can devastate the West. We have a fuels other fire management objectives standing trees, and it can also form problem.… (Potter and Fox 1996). The threat a potentially dangerous fuel load We once thought all fire was to health from smoke in the (Potter and Fox 1996). evil. Now some think all fire is atmosphere, combined with the good. But that simple mind set need to preserve scenic quality in Fuel Load. In some forests, doesn’t work. Fire is neither class I airsheds over national parks decades of fire exclusion, coupled good nor evil; it is a part of the and most wilderness areas (Na- with drought, insects, and disease, natural process of change, a tional Academy of Sciences 1993), have built up heavy fuel loads. In tool, a complex force that can be used to meet restoration goals.…
It is now time to take the same approach to the restoration of forest ecosystem health.…[A]t the Federal level, we must integrate fuels management with suppression funds.…And Congress, in turn, needs the support of the voters who elected them. So I challenge you, the American people, to recognize how fire and smoke—rising from the ashes like the mythical phoenix—can and must continue to play an essential, natural role in the life cycle of the wildlands we live in and love.
* From a 1997 speech by Secretary of the Interior Smoke lingering over national forestland. Smoke in the atmosphere is a growing problem Bruce Babbitt (see Babbitt 1997). for land managers and landowners, endangering health and reducing the quality of scenic vistas. Photo: USDA Forest Service, 1992.
46 Fire Management Today stands where various tree species intensity fires can reduce un- possibility. After decades of fire and age classes intermix, a combi- wanted vegetation and fuels, exclusion, fuel buildups on many nation of fuels ranging from duff combat insects, and kill diseased of our Nation’s forests have set the to shrubs to small trees can form a trees before they become transmis- stage for catastrophic wildland “ladder” that a fire can quickly sion agents. fires. Under these conditions, we climb from the ground into the cannot simply let nature run its canopy, turning a low-intensity But Indian-type fires also accom- course. Lives, property, and surface burn into a raging canopy plish much more. After fires are wildland values are at stake for fire. Reducing ladder fuels is restored, the forests and grasslands generations to come. difficult and very expensive. will have a much different look. As Jim Saveland (1995) explained, “I The basis for much of today’s forest Silvicultural Techniques. Silvicul- see open stands of large pine trees health crisis lies in the cessation of tural techniques such as thinning (for example, longleaf pine [Pinus the Indian burning that once can be used to remove unwanted palustris] in the southern Coastal sustained vast ecosystems nation- trees and debris from the forest Plain, ponderosa pine in the West), wide. Although we have the ability floor, making a stand less suscep- lush native bunchgrasses, and a to change our management, tible to catastrophic wildland fire. carpet of wildflowers. There are fundamental questions remain: However, such methods do not clumps of regeneration. I smell the What do we want to change and have the same long-term ecologi- pine and wildflowers. I hear the why? Are we actually “improving” cal impacts as Indian-type fires. birds—songbirds, hummingbirds, or “protecting” the forests? Or are Moreover, they are neither easy to woodpeckers, and raptors. There is we being just as arbitrary and plan nor cheap. a great diversity of life, especially capricious as past land managers? in the understory. The midstory is Combination of Methods. Forest- sparse. If I look closely, I can see A first step might be to agree that ers today often use silvicultural evidence of ‘no trace’ logging. Fire healthy forests and grasslands at techniques to remove unwanted or is an integral part of this forest.” all scales support multiple habi- overgrown vegetation, then tats, including open, prairielike reintroduce Indian-type fire The Future of conditions; areas of shrubs and (Devlin 1998; Eskew 1995; Federal Indian-Type Fire young trees; mature stands; and Wildland Policy 1995; Shindler On millions of acres of Federal old growth. The next step is to 1997). As the American Indians forestland, the reintroduction of work to include the public in our found out centuries ago, low- Indian-type fire is a distinct vision for our Nation’s wildlands. It
RESTORING PONDEROSA PINE FOREST*
An ambitious plan is under way on the Missoula Forest, “if we want to grow deer and elk, we have to Ranger District, Lolo National Forest, MT, to restore let fire back into the forest.” a degraded ponderosa pine forest. Eighty years of fire exclusion have radically changed the ecosystem. It will be difficult to put fire, insects, disease, and Douglas-firs fill the spaces between the big pines windthrow—each of which have a place in the and western larch, making the forest resemble a forest—back into balance. “Historically, these were thicket. processes that happened a little bit at a time,” said District Ranger Dave Stack. “We can’t just put fire Ironically, the only way to save the old growth now back into the thicket, or we’ll lose everything. It will is to log the mountainside timber stands, taking out burn so hot and fast, we won’t be able to stop it.” the Douglas-fir and leaving the pine and larch, Before fire can be reintroduced, the trees must be whether living or dead. After giving the big trees the thinned. “It’s going to take a long time,” observed space they need, low-intensity fire will be reintro- Stack, “longer probably than the 80 years it took us duced. “If we want to grow old trees,” said Mike to get here.” “But we’ve got to at least get the Hillis, a wildlife biologist for the Lolo National mechanism started,” said Hillis. “Or we will lose it altogether.” * Based on Devlin (1998).
Volume 60 • No. 3 • Summer 2000 47 will not be easy, not everyone will et al., tech. coords. Effects of Fire on Fort Collins, CO: USDA Forest Service, agree, and it will be expensive. But Madrean Province Ecosystems: A Rocky Mountain Forest and Range Symposium Proceedings; 11–15 March Experiment Station: 205–216. it will be worth it to work toward a 1986; Tucson, AZ. Gen. Tech. Rep. RM– Pyne, S.J. 1995. World fire: The culture of time when, as Jim Saveland (1995) 289. Fort Collins, CO: USDA Forest fire on Earth. New York, NY: Henry Holt has put it, we “once again steal fire Service, Rocky Mountain Forest and and Company. Range Experiment Station: 217–222. Russell, E.W.B. 1997. People and the land from the mountain gods and Flores, D. 1997. The West that was, and the through time: Linking ecology and through a great relay, bring fire West that can be. High Country News. history. New Haven, CT: Yale University and the message of disturbance 29(15): 1, 6–7. [Forthcoming in: Keiter, Press. R.B., ed. Reclaiming the native home of Saveland, J. 1995. Fire in the forest. In: ecology back to the modern-day hope: Community, ecology, and the Eskew, L.G., compiler. Forest Health people of the world. And perhaps West. Salt Lake City, UT: University of Through Silviculture: Proceedings of one day, the Phoenix will replace Utah Press.] the 1995 National Silviculture Work- Smokey Bear as the de facto Forney, S.J. 1993. Heritage resources: shop; 8–11 May 1995; Mescalero, NM.. Tools for ecosystem management. Gen. Tech. Rep. RM–267. Fort Collins, symbol of the Forest Service.” Presentation at conference: 26th Annual CO: USDA Forest Service, Rocky Society of Historical Archaeology Mountain Forest and Range Experiment Conference; 9 January; USDA Forest Station: 14–19. Literature Cited Service, Eastern Region, Milwaukee, WI. Schiff, A.L. 1962. Fire and water: Scientific Babbitt, Bruce. 1997. A coordinated Gruell, G.E. 1985. Indian fires in the heresy in the Forest Service. Cambridge, campaign: Fight fire with fire by interior West: A widespread influence. MA: Harvard University Press. treating fuel, through thinning and In: Lotan, J.E., et al., tech. coords. Seklecki, M.; Grissino-Mayer, H.D.; prescribed burns, we can restore our Proceedings—Symposium and Work- Swetnam, T.W. 1996. Fire history and wildlands to their former health and shop on Wilderness Fire; 15–18 the possible role of Apache-set fires in character. Remarks of U.S. Secretary of November 1983; Missoula, MT. Gen. the Chiricahua Mountains of southeast- the Interior Bruce Babbitt at Boise State Tech. Rep. INT–182. Ogden, UT: USDA ern Arizona. In: Ffolliott, P.F., et. al., University, Idaho, February 11. Forest Service, Intermountain Forest tech. coords. Effects of Fire on Madrean Botkin, D.B. 1990. Discordant harmonies: and Range Experiment Station: 68–74. Province Ecosystems: A Symposium A new ecology for the twenty-first Haglund, S. 1998. Indian country on the Proceedings; 11–15 March 1986; century. New York, NY: Oxford Univer- forefront in new approaches to wildland Tucson, AZ. Gen. Tech. Rep. RM–289. sity Press. fire. Evergreen. 9(19): 44. Fort Collins, CO: USDA Forest Service, Bunnell, Dave. 1998. Issue—Change is Kilgore, B.M. 1985. What is “natural” in Rocky Mountain Forest and Range needed in the fire management wilderness fire management? In: Lotan, Experiment Station: 238–246. program. Forest Service briefing paper J.E., et al., tech. coords. Proceedings— Shindler, B. 1997. Public perspectives on dated October 22, 1998. Washington, Symposium and Workshop on Wilder- prescribed fire and mechanical thinning. DC: USDA Forest Service, Fire Manage- ness Fire; 15–18 November 1983; Tech. Notes BMNRI–TN–9. La Grande, ment. Missoula, MT. Gen. Tech. Rep. INT–182. OR: USDA Forest Service, Blue Moun- Devlin, S. 1998. Missoula foresters want to Ogden, UT: USDA Forest Service, tains Natural Resources Institute. log and burn the young [Douglas-fir Intermountain Forest and Range Shrader-Frechette, K.S.; McCoy, E.D. 1995. trees] to save the old [ponderosa pine Experiment Station: 81–86. Natural landscapes, natural communi- and larch]. The Missoulian (Missoula, Langston, N. 1995. Forest dreams, forest ties, and natural ecosystems. Forest and MT). October 22. nightmares: The paradox of old growth Conservation History. 39(3): 138–142. Editor. 1998. Favorable fire conditions in the inland West. Seattle, WA: Williams, G.W.; Mark, S.R., compilers. kindle understanding. The Missoulian University of Washington Press. 1995. Establishing and defending the (Missoula, MT). August 24. National Academy of Sciences. 1993. Cascade Range Forest Reserve: As found Eskew, L.G., compiler. 1995. Forest Health Protecting visibility in national parks in the letters of William G. Steel, John Through Silviculture: Proceedings of and wilderness areas. Washington, DC: B. Waldo, and others, supplemented by the 1995 National Silviculture Work- Committee on Haze in National Parks newspapers, magazines, and official shop; 8–11 May 1995; Mescalero, NM. and Wilderness Areas, National Research reports 1885–1912. Portland, OR: USDA Gen. Tech. Rep. RM–267. Fort Collins, Council, National Academy of Sciences. Forest Service, Pacific Northwest CO: USDA Forest Service, Rocky Phillips, C.B. 1985. The relevance of past Region; and Crater Lake, OR: USDI Mountain Forest and Range Experiment Indian fires to current fire management National Park Service, Crater Lake Station. programs. In: Lotan, J.E., et al., tech. National Park. F&AM (Fire and Aviation Management, coords. Proceedings—Symposium and Wilson, S.M. 1992. “That unmanned wild USDA Forest Service). 1995. Course to Workshop on Wilderness Fire. 15–18 countrey”: Native Americans both the future: Positioning Fire and Aviation November 1983; Missoula, MT. Gen. conserved and transformed New World Management. Washington, DC: USDA Tech. Rep. INT–182. Ogden, UT: USDA environments. Natural History. 101(5): Forest Service, F&AM. Forest Service, Intermountain Forest 16–17. Federal Wildland Policy. 1995. Federal and Range Experiment Station: 87–92. Wuerthner, G. 1995. Fire power: After wildland policy, role of fire. Staff report Potter, D.U.; Fox, D.G. 1996. Clean air and years of suppressing forest fires, the dated December 18, 1995. Signed by healthy ecosystems: Managing emissions Park Service is realizing its policy does Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman from fires. In: Ffolliott, P.F., et al., tech. not necessarily benefit ecosystems and Secretary of the Interior Bruce coords. Effects of Fire on Madrean that depend on intense blazes for Babbitt. Washington, DC: USDA, USDI. Province Ecosystems: A Symposium regeneration. National Parks. 69 Ffolliott, P.F.; Cabrera, L.A.; Guido, C.M. Proceedings; 11–15 March 1986; (5–6): 32–37. ■ 1996. Use of fire in the future: Benefits, Tucson, AZ. Gen. Tech. Rep. RM–289. concerns, constraints. In: Ffolliott, P.F.,
48 Fire Management Today NEW AUTOMATED SYSTEM FOR TRACKING FEDERAL EXCESS PERSONAL PROPERTY
Roberta Burzynski, Jan Polasky, and Diana Grayson
he USDA Forest Service has developed a new automated FEPMIS will reduce errors and slash T system for States to use in paperwork by eliminating the need to repeat tracking vehicles, parts, and other information at different points in the property equipment received through the Federal Excess Personal Property management process. (FEPP) Program. The Federal Excess Property Management Information System (FEPMIS) will lower levels have designated access document is still open, that an reduce errors and slash paperwork that is limited by system security. inventory is due, or that a coopera- by eliminating the need to repeat- Information entered at any level tive agreement under which edly enter the same information at updates the central data base so property was loaned needs to be different points in the property that the same information will not renewed. management process. The interac- need to be entered again. tive data base will allow sharing of Disposing of Property. When the data needed to acquire, use, Capabilities property is no longer useful to the track, manage, and dispose of Participants in the FEPP Program borrowing unit, FEPMIS compiles property by more than a thousand can use FEPMIS to acquire Federal the history of the property, with all users throughout the United States excess personal property, track the information needed by the and its territories. property after it is in their posses- Forest Service to make it available sion, and then return it to the to other units or to dispose of it. Advantages Forest Service for disposal. States report all excess property to the Forest Service to determine One of the key features of FEPMIS the method of disposal. FEPMIS is flexibility. Each State can decide, Acquiring Property. From the time a local user requests specific then documents the physical based on the size and extent of its disposal and simplifies Forest fire management organization, property, FEPMIS builds a property file that is viewed, updated, and Service accounting through a link how many levels will have access to the National Finance Center. to the data base. For example, employed by subsequent users to California is expected to set up its approve, acquire, receive, and distribute the property. Providing Online Help. Through system differently from Delaware. an electronic link to the FEPP A State can have two users manage Desk Guide, which is posted on the its whole program, or it can give Tracking Property. After a local unit has property in its possession, Internet, FEPMIS puts help at the access to any combination of user’s fingertips. additional levels, such as district, FEPMIS automates inventory, station, or local unit. biennial reconciliation with Federal records, and annual Software and Users at the highest level can reports to Congress. Some stan- Hardware perform all functions, and those at dard reports are built into the FEPMIS is an application devel- system, and a variety of others can oped using commercially available Roberta Burzynski is a writer/editor and be generated. FEPMIS accommo- Oracle Lite* software. The system Jan Polasky is the FEPP program manager dates approvals for and modifica- for the USDA Forest Service, State and tions to property, such as cannibal- * The use of trade, firm, or corporation names in this Private Forestry, Northeastern Area, publication is for the information and convenience of Newtown Square, PA; and Diana Grayson izing and installing in other the reader. Such use does not constitute an official is a computer systems analyst for the endorsement of any product or service by the U.S. vehicles. The system also has built- Department of Agriculture. Individual authors are Forest Service, National Interagency Fire in reminders, for example, that a responsible for the technical accuracy of the material Center, Boise, ID. presented in Fire Management Today.
Volume 60 • No. 3 • Summer 2000 49 FEPMIS can be used to acquire Federal excess Acknowledgment personal property, track the property, and then The authors thank Beverly return the property for disposal. Duplessie, property disposal specialist, USDA Forest Service, Northeastern Area State and was inspired by a design prepared Missouri and Pennsylvania in Private Forestry, Newtown Square, by William Hale at the Missouri summer 2000. Implementation of PA, for reviewing the manuscript. Department of Conservation. The the system will start with the State Forest Service developed the Foresters and proceed through prototype for FEPMIS under a consecutively lower organizational ABOUT THE FEPP cooperative agreement with the levels. By spring 2001, all users PROGRAM U.S. Army Information Systems should be on board. Software Development Center in The Federal Excess Personal Fort Lee, VA. IBM will finalize the Setup will be fast and easy. After Property (FEPP) Program system. Jan Polasky managed the the Forest Service enters names loans, without charge, equip- system development project. into the user data table, users need ment that is no longer needed only enter some additional identi- by the Federal Government States will supply their own fying information to begin using (usually the military) to States hardware. Requirements are at the system. The Forest Service will and communities for fire least a 486-speed processor and maintain the data table of users, protection. Equipment most Windows 95. The Forest Service which identifies level of access, in often loaned includes trucks will provide each State with five the central data base. that can be converted to copies of Oracle Lite. engines, as well as generators, Potential for Expansion pumps, fire hoses, breathing FEPMIS will have a central data Two additions to FEPMIS are apparatus, and protective base server accessible via the planned. The ability to scan bar clothing. State Foresters and World Wide Web. Users can work codes will further simplify acquir- local fire departments that use either directly in the data base via ing, managing, and inventorying the equipment pay only the the Web or offline on a PC. When a property. A link to the General costs of transporting, convert- user is finished working in Services Administration will allow ing, and maintaining it. When FEPMIS on a PC, logging onto the users to request a piece of property no longer needed or usable, Web or dialing an 800 number will and receive data for insertion the equipment is returned to synchronize data in the data base directly into the property record. the USDA Forest Service for and on the PC. disposal. The Forest Service For more information on FEPMIS, administers the FEPP Pro- Implementation contact April Baily, FEPP National gram in cooperation with the User training begins in fall 2000 Program Officer, USDA Forest State Foresters, who in turn and is being conducted by a Service, Fire and Aviation Manage- maintain agreements with nationwide Forest Service team— ment, Washington, DC, 202-205- rural fire departments. the same team that reviewed the 0891 (voice), [email protected] system before field testing in (e-mail).
50 Fire Management Today PHOTO CONTEST FOR 2001
Fire Management Today invites Rules full name, agency or institu- you to submit your best fire- • The contest is open to everyone. tional affiliation (if any), address, related photos to be judged in our You may submit an unlimited and telephone number. annual competition. Winners in number of entries from any place • Photos are judged by a photogra- each category will receive awards or time, but for each photo, you phy professional whose decision (first place—camera equipment must indicate only one competi- is final. worth $300 and a 16- by 20-inch tion category. • Photos will be eliminated from framed copy of your photo; second • Each photo must be an original competition if they lack detailed place—an 11- by 14-inch framed color slide. We are not respon- captions; have date stamps; show copy of your photo; third place— sible for photos lost or damaged, unsafe firefighting practices an 8- by 10-inch framed copy of and photos submitted will not be (unless that is their express your photo). Winning photos will returned (so make a duplicate purpose); or are of low technical appear in an issue of Fire Manage- before submission). quality (for example, have soft ment Today. All contestants will • You must own the rights to the focus or show camera move- receive a CD–ROM with all photos photo, and the photo must not ment). (Duplicates—including evaluated in the competition. have been published prior to most overlays and other compos- submission. ites—have soft focus and will be Categories • For every photo you submit, you eliminated.) • Wildland fire must give a detailed caption • Prescribed fire (including, for example, name, Postmark Deadline • Wildland-urban interface fire location, and date of the fire; March 2, 2001 • Aerial resources names of any people and/or their • Ground resources job descriptions; and descrip- Send submissions to: • Miscellaneous (fire effects; fire tions of any vegetation and/or USDA Forest Service weather; fire-dependent commu- wildlife). Attn: Hutch Brown nities or species; etc.) • You must complete and sign a Editor, Fire Management Today statement granting rights to use USDA Forest Service your photo(s) to the USDA Office of Communication Forest Service (see sample P.O. Box 96090 statement below). Include your Washington, DC 20090-6090
Sample Photo Release Statement (You may cut out and use this statement. It must be signed.) Enclosed is/are ______(number) slide(s) for publication by the USDA Forest Service. For each slide submitted, the contest category is indicated and a detailed caption is enclosed. I have the authority to give permission to the Forest Service to publish the enclosed photograph(s) and am aware that, if used, it or they will be in the public domain and appear on the World Wide Web.
Signature Date
Volume 60 • No. 3 • Summer 2000 51 5614
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