Disasters of the Pikes Peak Region

By Dennis Daily

Disasters of the Pikes Peak Region serves as an intense summary of many of the major fires, floods, and other catastrophes of this area. Though thoroughly researched by the contributors, this book is not intended to be a comprehensive accounting, but rather a collection of some of the more significant calamities impacting the area—many of which were discussed at the 9th Annual Pikes Peak Regional History Symposium, also titled “Disasters of the Pikes Peak Region.”

Readers will learn that recent misfortunes experienced in the Pikes Peak region were unprecedented in their destruction, but were not unfamiliar, or even unpredictable, events. In fact, we should expect some natural disasters. For example, did you know that Colorado was designated the “hail capital of the U.S.”? Or did you know that Colorado is on the western borderline of Tornado Alley and that twisters have damaged property in both the El Paso County plains and Manitou Springs, where an estimated $1 million in tornado damage occurred in 1979?

In these pages you will learn how the devastating 19th century fires in Cripple Creek and Colorado Springs influenced how these communities developed and how waging battle against destructive flames evolved from making fire breaks by blasting buildings to sophisticated military missions involving satellites, GPS, and aerial firefighting methods. You will understand, from first-hand accounts, how the 1898 Antlers Hotel fire started and quickly burned an extensive area of Colorado Springs three blocks long and two blocks wide. And you will be shocked by the damaging 1935 Memorial Day Flood, and other floods, that swiftly overcame Colorado Springs’ parks, streets, and buildings.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pikes Peak Library District
• Release date: Mar 23, 2017
• ISBN: 9781567353457

Dennis Daily

The Pikes Peak Library District's Regional History Series chronicles the unique and often undocumented history of Colorado and the Rocky Mountain West. The subjects of the books are based on the annual Pikes Peak Regional History Symposia. The books are edited by PPLD staff members and by local historians.

Book preview

Defining Disaster:

Death, Destruction, or Distress?

Michael L. Olsen

Disaster struck in Colorado Springs on the morning of March 3, 1991. Shortly before 10:00 a.m., United Airlines Flight 585 was making its final approach to land at the Colorado Springs airport, en route from Denver, when something went terribly wrong. The Boeing 737-200 rolled abruptly to the right and pitched nose downward toward the ground. The pilot attempted to pull out of the dive, but to no avail. Flight 585 then crashed violently at Widefield Park, some four miles south of the airport, narrowly missing an apartment complex. The crew of five and 20 passengers all died instantly. So horrific was the crash that El Paso County Sheriff Bernard Barry, commenting on the scene, said, We can’t even find a chair. There’s not a great deal of that airplane left.¹

Initially it was thought that some erratic wind shear or vortex brought the plane down, but in 1994 another Boeing 737-200 met a similar fate. The National Transportation Safety Board then determined that the failure of each plane’s rudder power control unit was at fault. Today many people who then lived in the southern part of Colorado Springs can remember seeing the fireball, flames, and smoke. One family, driving home from church on that clear Sunday morning, saw the smoke coming from the direction of their house and the father—as he now somewhat ruefully remembers given the circumstances—commented to his teenage daughter, You left your curling iron on again, didn’t you?²

The following volume of essays and articles is drawn from presentations made at the 9th Annual Pikes Peak Regional History Symposium, whose theme was Disasters of the Pikes Peak Region. Additionally, besides a newly written general review of the history of wildfires in the American West, it includes several considerations of various regional disasters that occurred subsequent to the symposium: the Waldo Canyon Fire in late June 2012, the Black Forest Fire in mid-June 2013, and area flooding resulting from heavy rains on burn scars of these fires.

This introduction is designed to put these papers in a wider context, raising in a reader’s mind what he or she, or the authors of these pieces, or even the general public, might think of or picture when encountering the word disaster. It will ask such questions as: What is our contemporary American definition of disaster? Has that definition or our experience of disasters changed over time, from what it might have been in the past? Do other peoples, cultures or societies consider disaster differently than we do? Some observations on these questions can, perhaps, inform our understanding of the varied Pikes Peak Disasters" included in this book.

The American Heritage College Dictionary succinctly defines disaster, as either an occurrence causing widespread destruction and distress; a catastrophe, or a grave misfortune. Interestingly, this same source says that the word catastrophe can mean a great, often sudden calamity; a complete fiasco; the concluding action of a drama, especially a classical tragedy; or a sudden violent change in the earth’s surface; a cataclysm. And in a sense, to go full-circle, this dictionary lists a tragedy as, a drama or literary work; a play, film, television program or other narrative work that portrays or depicts calamitous events and has an unhappy ending, or, as we might more familiarly think of a plane crash, a fire, a flood, a tsunami, etc., a disastrous event, especially one involving distressing loss or injury to life."³

The linguistic roots of the word disaster, its etymology, go back to Latin and Greek. Somewhat simplistically, disaster is the marriage of two words, "dis for mischance or misfortune, and astra, for star. Originally then, in the Roman world, people saw a disaster as being caused by ill-fated stars, and as we know, in many ancient societies it was believed that one’s destiny was determined by the stars. Latin, of course, is the progenitor of Europe’s Romance languages, so it is somewhat revealing to contrast dis – astra with the term for disaster in the Germanic languages of northern Europe. In Norwegian, for example, the comparable word is ulykke—quite obviously meaning unlucky. Someone bringing ill-fortune or disaster on another is said to, gjøre an ulykke på en,—inflict harm or injury on, and komme i ulykke,—means to become pregnant out of wedlock!"⁴

Shakespeare’s plays include some of the earliest recorded uses of the word disaster in English literature. In Hamlet we hear of Stars with trains of fire and dews of blood, disasters in the sun. In All’s Well we find, It was a disaster of war that Caesar himself could not have prevented. And in Anthony and Cleopatra Shakespeare described, The holes where eyes should be, which pitifully disasters the cheeks. The Oxford English Dictionary chronicles these and other first uses, including one familiar to us today, President Dwight Eisenhower’s statement apropos of events in September 1960, that sections of the state of Florida will be designated as a major disaster area.⁵

With these definitions and changing usages in mind we can easily conjure up a list of what can be termed iconic disasters of our own times. For instance, what might first spring to mind for Americans today is, though it happened a hundred years ago, the sinking of the RMS Titanic. The Colorado Springs Gazette for Tuesday, April 16, 1912, the day after that tragedy, ran the headline 1,234 GO DOWN WITH TITANIC, and had a subhead tellingly phrased, "OTHER DISASTERS ECLIPSED." The Titanic has remained the sine qua non of disasters even though in the century since we have witnessed single events in which tens or hundreds of thousands of people have lost their lives, such as the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004.

Titanic4439RevBitmap.tif

More than half-a-dozen songs were written about the Titanic disaster including Heroes of the Ocean in Memory of the Titanic Disaster, composed by John Mand with lyrics by Emma La Turno Thrum, published in 1912 by J. T. La Turno of Denver. Library of Congress Performing Arts Reading Room, Washington, D.C. (2009543375).

Another image seared in our collective memory, a disaster brought to us via then new technology of live radio broadcasts and filming for the newsreels in movie houses, was the crash and burning of the airship Hindenburg at its Lakehurst, New Jersey, docking station in 1937. Once seen the film clip of the burning Hindenburg is unforgettable, along with reporter Henry Morrison’s horrified commentary, broadcast the next day. In tears Morrison said, Oh, the humanity! . . . I can’t talk, ladies and gentlemen.⁶

A third example, from this same period, was the Great Stock Market Crash of 1929. This is an instance of a disaster that, while it had what might be called a flashpoint, on October 29, 1929, actually of course extends for over a decade and impacted millions of people in a variety of different ways. Here the iconic images that spring to mind are of bank panics with thousands of depositors milling about in front of closed banks, or long lines of men, women and children waiting for soup and bread, or of a migrant mother framed in the doorway of her shanty home, surrounded by her hungry children. Again we are reminded that a disaster can take many forms and have different meanings for different folks.

And finally, can there be an American today who doesn’t have the images of the collapsing World Trade Center Twin Towers etched on his or her mind? The headline in the New York Times for Wednesday, September 12, 2001, said it all, U.S. Attacked—In Day of Terror.⁷

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The hydrogen-filled Hindenburg crashed at Naval Air Station, Lakehurst, New Jersey, on May 6, 1937, at 7:25 p.m. The event took the lives of 35 aboard the German airship, and one crewmember on the ground, and was the first disaster captured on motion-picture film. U.S. Navy photograph.

There is, of course, a vast literature—our cultural heritage—recalling or depicting disasters in world history. Type the word disaster into an Internet search engine or an online library card catalog and thousands of hits appear. Such a search in the catalog of the Pikes Peak Library District turns up some provocative and compelling titles—books such as, Terrifying Steamboat Stories: True Tales of Shipwreck, Death, and Disaster on the Great Lakes, or Everything Is Going To Kill Everybody: The Terrifying Real Ways The World Wants You Dead, or The Great Big Book of Horrible Things. Even children can get in on the action, with titles such as Disasters: Natural and Manmade Catastrophes through the Centuries. This book has chapters entitled, Smallpox —The Great Chicago Fire—Johnstown Flood—San Francisco Shaking—Triangle Shirtwaist Fire—Titanic—Blue Skin and Bloody Sputum , Pandemic Flu of 1918—No Water. No Jobs. No Relief, The Dust Bowl of the 1930s—Mammoth Shakes and Monster Waves, Destruction in 12 Countries,—[and] Hurricane Katrina and the Drowning of New Orleans.⁸

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Thirty-two-year-old mother Florence Thomson (right) was recognized internationally as the iconic Migrant Mother during the Great Depression after Dorothea Lange photographed her in a field in Nipomo, California, in 1936. This view shows Thomson and some of her children and belongings inside a rudimentary shelter. Dorothea Lange photograph, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. (LC-DIG-ppmsca-03054).

The historical record also offers us numerous eyewitness accounts of disasters both large and small, both personal and those affecting thousands. Fires provide some of the most dramatic of these accounts. Here are three from the Anglo-American past.

In the days of all-wooden buildings, whole cities often burned—we have the Great Fire of Chicago, the fire that consumed San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake, and very memorably, the Great Fire of London in 1666. The diarist Samuel Pepys drew a picture of that conflagration almost as graphic as if a camera had been there. It was September 2, a Sunday when he wrote,

Some of our maids sitting up late last night to get things ready against our feast today, Jane called up to us, about 3 in the morning, to tell us of a great fire they saw in the City. So I rose and slipped on my nightgown and went to her window . . . but . . . thought it far enough off, and so went to bed again and to sleep. About 7 rose again to dress myself, and there looked out at the window and saw the fire. . . . By and by Jane comes and tells me that she hears that above 300 houses have been burned down tonight by the fire we saw, and that it was now burning down all Fishstreet and by London Bridge. So I made myself ready presently, and walked to the Tower and there got up upon one of the high places; . . . and there I did see the houses at that end of the bridge all on fire, and an infinite great fire on this and the other side the end of the bridge. . . . So [then] down, with my heart full of trouble.

Early the next morning, as the fire approached his neighborhood, Pepys and his household had to flee. He reported,

About 4 a-clock in the morning, my Lady Patten sent me a cart to carry away all my money and plate and best things to Sir W Riders at Bednall greene, which I did, riding myself in my nightgown in the Cart; and Lord, to see how the streets and the highways are crowded with people, running and riding and getting of carts at any rate to fetch away thing[s].⁹

On the American frontier fire also often posed a threat to life, limb and property, be it a forest fire such as the great Peshtigo Fire in Wisconsin in 1871 which killed upwards of 1,500 people, or prairie fires, which could move with frightening speed. In 1861, Lydia Spencer Lane was traveling east on the Santa Fe Trail going to Pennsylvania with her children to visit her parents, leaving behind her husband, the commandant at Fort Union, New Mexico. In central Kansas, a prairie fire caught the wagon train. In her memoir, I Married A Soldier, she recalled,

The tents were pitched, and everything required for the night was put into them, beds made, etc. I had just gone into mine when I heard an unusual noise, and I went to the door to see what caused it. Will I ever forget the scene before me? The grass was on fire, and the flames, driven by the wind, leaped a hundred feet at a time! It was a fearful sight. I knew instantly our only safety was in flight, and not a second must be wasted. As I left the tent, I seized such of the bedclothes as I could reach, and threw them outside; took one child in my arms, and the other by the hand. The servants followed, and by this time every woman and child in the camp had joined us. We fled down the side of the hill and into the water, which was nearly knee deep, the poor little children bravely struggling beside us,—those that could walk,—then up the opposite bank, never looking back until we had the water between us and the fire.

The Lanes and the other families lost every stitch of clothing they had and their possessions. Luckily the commissary wagons for the soldiers accompanying them did not burn, so they had food and could shelter in the wagons at night, though as Lydia said climbing in and out of the high, two story wagons was very undignified.¹⁰

As a third example, we can return to Colorado Springs, to the very day of the United 585 crash. That day, March 4, 1991, also witnessed one of the most anguishing fires in the city’s history. Nine people died when the Crystal Springs Estates retirement home at 825 South Hancock burned. As the Gazette Telegraph reported, "It took 30 firefighters six hours to control the blaze, which was reported at 12:38 a.m. [sic]. The fire was touched off by a hot furnace flue." Besides the dead, 14 other residents of the home suffered injuries, as did four firemen, a paramedic and a neighbor who rushed to help. The Gazette Telegraph noted in a subhead that this was the city’s deadliest fire.¹¹

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The astonishing rapidity with which the prairie fire, driven by furious winds, sweeps on in its work of devastation [—it] is something beyond the power of description. Awakening terror under any circumstances, it is especially dreaded when it makes its way toward the settlements. Frenzeny and Travernier lithograph, Fighting the Fire, Harper’s Weekly, February 28, 1874. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. (LC-USZ62-62759).

Beyond the definitions of disaster and the examples noted so far in this essay, two questions posed initially remained to be considered. First, has our conception of what constitutes a disaster changed over time? And second, do other peoples, cultures or societies consider disaster differently than we do? Somewhat simplistically the answer to the first question is an easy, Yes! The answer to the second is more problematic.

The Industrial Revolution introduced a new category of disasters, or, perhaps more definitively, enhanced the category of man-made disasters. For example, in ancient societies around the world, to venture out on the water in a ship, boat, or raft was to invite catastrophe, but certainly not on the scale of the Titanic. In those pre-industrial times most calamities could be classified as natural disasters, conforming to the universal Greek take on the world as composed of earth, air, fire, and water. Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and floods come to mind, but these are in a different class than the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers, the disintegration of the Space shuttle Challenger, or even the Dust Bowl of the Great Plains in the 1930s. Another way to think about it is that in many cultures in the past, disasters were seen as incurred by the displeasure of the gods and the only way to avert them was to propitiate those gods in some way. Compare that outlook to the exhaustive reports we get today on The Weather Channel. We cannot control nature yet, but we certainly try to mitigate its more disastrous effects. So our conception of what constitutes a disaster has been augmented by our technology.

In this same vein, we should include the realm of what might be termed biological disasters. Plagues, diseases, and famines have always beset humankind, just as they do our world today. And although we have in some cases managed to mitigate them, we have also managed to intensify them and their effects through technology, be it rapid worldwide travel and communication, global warfare, or laboratory experimentation. We have a host of contemporary best-selling books and popular films based on the ideas of global pandemics and technological Armageddon. So, yes, in this instance again, the nature of what constitutes a disaster is different than what it was for our ancestors.

And finally, there is the question of what might be termed cultural relativity and the conception of disasters. Somewhat surprisingly, a search of current research, even among anthropologists, does not cast much light on this question. As Gertrude Stein might have said, a disaster is a disaster is a disaster. Obviously, no one in Jamaica is going to die from the blizzard of the century, just as no one in Minnesota is going to perish in a hurricane, but folks in both places know a disaster when they experience it. What is different from one society to another, and hence is of interest to us in our considerations of disasters in this book, is how diverse societies respond to calamity. A highly centralized political state is going to handle disaster differently than a decentralized village system. A culture that prizes individualism will have different expectations in the face of disaster than a people who traditionally rely on cooperative efforts. A culture’s religious view is, obviously, another variant in disaster response. Over time and across the earth, how people regard disaster and how they meet it, as in most areas of life, depends on who they are and what works for them. In recent years various crises at nuclear facilities around the world have provided examples of these varied cultural responses, as with Chernobyl in the Ukraine, Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, or Fukashima Prefecture in Japan.

The situations covered in the following chapters of this book run the gamut of the definitions of disaster and the disastrous developments suggested in this introductory essay. Among them we will read of the Antlers Hotel fire of 1898, a flood at Glen Eyrie in Queens Canyon, regional volcanic activity, and train wrecks. And of course, when the Disasters of the Pikes Peak Region symposium was held on June 9, 2012, neither the organizers, presenters or audience could have imagined how calamitous the fires and floods that very summer and the next would be. These fires and floods, in effect, are among the most significant disasters the area has ever experienced. As is abundantly evident, we here in the Pikes Peak region share a heritage of disaster with all our fellow humans throughout time and across the earth.

Michael L. Olsen has a BA in History from St. Olaf College and an MA and PhD from the University of Washington. He is retired as a professor of history from New Mexico Highlands University, where he taught for 30 years. He currently lives in Colorado Springs, Colorado. His primary research interest is in the social and cultural history of the Santa Fe Trail and the Smoky Hill Trail. He has published extensively on the story and heritage of both trails. He has served as vice president of the Santa Fe Trail Association and is immediate past-president of the Smoky Hill Trail Association.

NOTES

1.Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph, March 4, 1991.

2. See http://www.airdisaster.com (accessed April 17, 2012). You left . . .—in conversation with the author.

3.The American Heritage College Dictionary (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002), 402, 226, 1457.

4.The American Heritage College Dictionary,402; Haugen, Einar, ed. Norwegian-English Dictionary (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967), 455.

5. J. A. Simpson, Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 722–723.

6.New York Times, May 6, 1937. Morrison broadcast can be seen online at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F54rqDh2mWA (accessed December 21, 2016).

7.New York Times, September 12, 2001.

8. James Donahue, Terrifying Steamboat Stories, True Tales of Shipwreck, Death, and Disaster on the Great Lakes (West Bloomfield, MI: Alwerger and Mandel, 1991); Robert Brockway, Everything Is Going To Kill Everybody, The Terrifying Real Ways The World Wants You Dead (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2010); Matthew White, The Great Big Book of Horrible Things, The Definitive Chronicle of History’s 100 Worst Atrocities (New York, W. W. Norton, 2012); Brenda Z. Gulberson, Disasters: Natural and Manmade Catastrophes Through the Centuries (New York, Henry Holt and Co., 2010).

9. Robert Latham and William Matthews, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, 1666 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 267–268, 272.

10. Lydia Spencer Lane, I Married a Soldier: Old Days in the Old Army (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994), 120–121.

11.Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph, March 5, 1991.

Group Poem Composed

While Waldo Canyon Fire Rages

From one small spark

a flame will build

Dazzle and Terror

in one Sky.

Darkness flashes!

Blinding light

darkens the crashing air,

baiting the hope

that someone might care

about a purple river or

an orange rock thought . . .

Around the bend of memory,

the Robin weaves a nest —

without finger,

needle, or pattern to follow—

a cuddly, warm, safe bed

to call home.

Price, Joe, Paula, Sue, Chris, & Celeste

PPLD Cheyenne Branch

PPPLP poetry event June 27, 2012

FIRE

Evolution of Fire: Our Changing Views of

Fire in the Pikes Peak Region

Erinn Barnes

On June 26, 2012, at approximately 4:30 p.m., a forest fire crested the mountains on Colorado Springs’ western side. Ignited four days prior, the Waldo Canyon Fire burned out of control and careened toward utter disaster that afternoon and late into a hellish night. Many residents stood dumbfounded one year later when a black column of smoke rose over the northeastern outskirts of the city as the Black Forest Fire of 2013 ripped its own merciless path of destruction. Not one, but two devastating fires in the span of two years begged the question: how do these disasters fit within a broader history of fire within the Front Range, both the landscape and its people? Should we consider these recent conflagrations anomalous rarities, or do they fit into a wider more cyclical environmental history of the region?

Fire is that primal, elemental force that continues to transform the earth, feed nature, and at times, roar right through our manpower, technology, and progress. This chapter seeks to place these recent disasters within the broader historical context of both the Pikes Peak region and traditional fire behavior. Fire has a long history in the Rocky Mountains and the arid west, and many excellent accounts exist for the wider region of the West. Various agencies have created detailed scientific documentation of Colorado’s past fires with sage projections for the future. This chapter seeks not to repeat such work. Rather, I desire to provide a broad historical narrative of fire’s regular and varied presence within the region for the lay person, while also examining a cultural history of the area’s experience of fire. This twofold approach will allow us to better contextualize the catastrophic wildfires of 2012 and 2013. Modernity has created a sharp disconnect with the actual presence and experience of wildfire. As cultural ideas of fire have changed over time, these changing definitions have impacted the use, suppression, management, and ultimately the experience of wildfire. Understanding both the physical and cultural history of fire in the Pikes Peak region will place these recent disasters in a clearer context, and provide a clearer relationship with fire moving forward.

The Biological Record of Fire

Stretching beyond early oral and written documentation, the biological record leaves us an excellent starting point for examining the history of fires in the region. Generalizations must be made with caution when discussing fire history on a regional scale, owing to the impact elevation has on fire behavior. We can, however, confidently discuss fire behavior based on tree samples from our immediate region. Amid the primarily ponderosa pine forests of the Front Range, scientists estimate small surface fires occur every 10–20 years on average, while larger, more serious fires occur every 30–60 years. Moving up in elevation, where ponderosa pine becomes mixed with lodgepole pine and Douglas fir, tree ring analysis reveals fires occurred at intervals of approximately 50 years or more. These often are characterized as stand-replacement blazes, in which the majority of above ground vegetation is killed, substantially altering the forest itself.¹ Studies of trees within the Lake George area, burned in the Hayman Fire of 2002, confirm a burn cycle with 50-year intervals between 1300 and 1880, with some fires being more severe than others. Large, catastrophic fires, like Hayman, were not unprecedented. Samples demonstrate clear evidence that large historical fires typically burned over extended periods, perhaps several weeks or months, creeping slowly or residing in logs, but increasing in intensity over brief periods during which trees were killed.² The proclivity for fire has also been shown to be highly influenced by weather patterns, particularly that of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, or ENSO. ENSO is the interaction between the tropical waters of the Pacific Ocean and the atmosphere resulting in warming or cooling of sea surface temperatures. This in turn highly influences the weather patterns arriving in the United States, producing either drier or wetter conditions. It is common to hear allusion to El Niño and La Niña weather during a particular year, perhaps vaguely understanding how that might impact the Pikes Peak region. An ENSO warming phase, El Niño, creates wetter conditions in parts of North America. A cooling phase of ENSO results in La Niña, in which conditions tend to be much drier with lower than average precipitation.³ As U.S. Forest Service meteorologist Russell Graham has stated, without a doubt the link between La Niña and drought in Colorado appears unmistakable.⁴ These drier conditions do not guarantee fire, but rather provide an incredibly fire friendly environment, particularly prone to large fast moving wildfires. As we shall see, historically, Colorado’s worst fire disasters have burned their brightest in times of La Niña weather patterns.

The historical experience of the Front Range can be characterized by cyclical fire, highly dependent on weather conditions. Fire has always been a fairly normal, natural presence, offering the forest and its inhabitants a necessary cycle of nutrient rich re-growth and future stand-replacing fire protection. As products of the 20th century, we tend to define fire, in all its forms, as catastrophic devastation. When the historical evidence is examined, it is clear that fire has been both a natural and necessary presence in the West. Far from being a landscape disaster, fire has fed the Front Range forests for thousands of years. It is a natural, albeit terrifying, part of the Rocky Mountains’ life cycle.

American Indians & Fire

Physical evidence in the landscape of the Rocky Mountain West reveals fire’s history as early as the 1300s, when various Native American peoples called Colorado home. Colorado’s first human inhabitants long witnessed fires along the Front Range and beyond. Little exists in written form of American Indians and catastrophic fire in this area. Yet the ancient, multifaceted relationship between American Indians and fire has survived within the oral traditions of many tribes, including those native to this region. Their unique historical experience of fire in the mountains and plains has much to teach us about the very definition of fire as disaster, underlining its crucial presence in this region.

White settlers associated fire with disaster, destruction, and horror. In contrast, American Indians traditionally defined fire as an integral, sacred, and life giving force at the very heart of their culture. So vital was fire that to the Eastern tribes of the United States, it was known as Our Grandfather Fire.⁵ Nearly every tribe across North America tells the mythic tale of fire’s entrance into the world such as the Colville’s Origin of Fire or the Pend d’Oreille’s Beaver Steals Fire.⁶ These legends reminded tribal members that fire was a gift from the Creator, to be managed, respected, and utilized. Early Jesuit missionary Father Pierre-Jean De Smet wrote Fire is, in all the Indian tribes that I have known, an emblem of happiness or of good fortune. It is kindled before all deliberations . . . They attribute to fire a sacred character, which is remarkable everywhere in their usages and customs.⁷ Ever present in the midst of daily life, fire was used for cooking, warmth, and light. Its smoke was utilized for communication and sacred purification. Its light hosted sacred dances and prayers. Fire nurtured and sustained the resources that nurtured and sustained the tribes.

These resources included the environment in which American Indians lived, where fire was widely used as a tool to shape and cultivate the natural landscape. According to oral traditions of the Pend d’Oreilles of the northern Rockies, knowledge of the complicated and often dangerous use of fire was entrusted to a specific person within the tribe, known as the sxwpaam, or the one who makes fire. To reduce the risk of more serious fires, tribal elders tell of intentional fires set to underbrush. Tribal peoples also claimed the forest looked better cleaned up in this manner. Customary camping areas were regularly burned to drive out snakes, mice, and other pests, maintaining these areas as open places suitable for camping. Likewise, trails were created and maintained with small, cool burns, usually done in the fall as cooler weather approached. Burning nurtured certain medicinal and food plants such as huckleberry bushes and camas, knowing that the ashes fertilized growth for the next season. Fire was also a key to successful hunting. Game is highly attracted to forest floors recently burnt, as the new growth is rich in nutrients.⁸ A Jesuit missionary recorded the Coeur d’Alene Indians using a fire surround to hunt deer, while other tribes are reported to have burned the food sources of game in order to force them closer into camps.⁹ The introduction of the horse to native peoples of the Rocky Mountain region provided yet another use for prescribed burning: to provide better and more pasture for their grazing. As one Pend d’Oreille elder put it, the goal was to sweeten up the grasses for their horses, and ensure lush, healthy grass for next year’s pasturage.¹⁰ Tribal people also utilized fire for communication and signaling, announcing a tribes arrival home. Fire was commonly used for military objectives, a means of destroying enemy resources or obstructing enemy entrance to a tribe’s own territory.

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American Indians enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with fire that sharply contrasts with white settler’s experience of fire as disaster. Various tribes routinely set controlled fires to cultivate increased crop yields, military strategy, and communication. Frederic Remington, ca. 1907, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. (LC-USZ62-99357).

In the region of the Front Range, evidence suggests that Ute Indians held many of the same practices and beliefs detailed above. Several different ethnographers in the early part of the 20th century had informants tell of how their old people set fires to aid in hunting deer, and others who used a fire circle for catching rabbits. One Colorado Ute recalled burning to increase the yield of wild seeds and tobacco. Vegetation burning was in fact very common among the Utes of Colorado.¹¹ A forest service pamphlet from 1912 underscores this fact, claiming that the extensive parks in the Rocky Mountain region were due mostly to regular burning by Indians. The forest service goes on to say at least two causes of fire operated in ancient times—lightning and Indians. The practice of Indians firing the forests, prairies, or swamps was to permit growth of berries, to drive game, and occasionally to impede an enemy.¹² This evidence demonstrates that Utes, and other native inhabitants, actively nurtured and shaped the landscape of the Front Range with the tool of fire.

This functional and rather beautiful relationship with fire did not preclude mishaps. Fire could, of course, be handled carelessly. Signal fires were often left to burn out on their own. Downed trees, lit as a campfire, could also be left to burn for days. Even careful burning of underbrush or huckleberry patches could potentially escape control given the right circumstances. Ute Indians were often known to use fire as a weapon against early white settler incursions into their territory.¹³ It would be naïve to falsely portray American Indians as flawless cultivators of fire within their environment, with little to no accidental conflagrations. It is safe to speculate that intentionally set fires did occasionally become uncontrollable wildfires. Yet American Indians possessed a major advantage over white settlers when it came to wildfire, even those which they themselves inadvertently set: a highly mobile lifestyle. The Utes lived in both wickiups and hide covered teepees. The wickiups functioned more as semi-permanent structures, used as seasonal shelters when hunting away from their winter headquarters.¹⁴ From early spring into late fall, each band would move throughout its territory, hunting game and gathering berries, seeds, and fruits.¹⁵ Such a lifestyle more easily afforded escape should a blaze spiral out of control. Note also that this mobile existence coincided well with high fire season, namely early summer into fall. This is not to say that packing up camp was easy and swift, but dwellings and belongings were in fact transportable for the seasons most prone to fire. Contrast this with the stationary life of Colorado’s early settlers. One cannot simply move the farm out of harm’s way. American Indians, in general, did not define fire as a disaster. Even a great loss of trees and plant life to wildfire was not defined as such. American Indians understood that this kind of natural phenomenon led to better hunting, preferable food sources, and nutrient rich regeneration in the Rocky Mountains.

This cultural relationship with fire deserves careful attention. Frontiersmen often adopted American Indian fire practices such as firing pasturage, underbrush and trails, and fire surrounds for hunting. These mountain men and explorers often learned basic fire survival from their Indian guides, copying their firefighting methods using blankets, bags, and backfires.¹⁶ This knowledge was freely passed on, yet as the frontier gave way to more settled farms and even towns throughout the West, this shared cultural knowledge often fell by the wayside. Increasingly permanent populations of the American West brought with them distinctly European ideas concerning fire and its threat as disaster. As products of a Western European heritage, fire was not widely viewed in the positive terms we have seen among American Indians. Though still utilized as a tool by American settlers—for cooking, heating, and light—its use was more limited and less free ranging.

European Americans’ relationship with fire was highly influenced by two major cultural experiences: Christianity and the advent of stationary, agricultural societies. Within Christianity, both Roman Catholic and Protestant alike, fire was bound up within the powerful imagery of hell and damnation. Fire signified eternal suffering and pain to those not entering into heaven. Graphic portrayals of the fires of hell are emblematic of the attitudes embedded in western culture concerning fire. Couple this with a society hailing from the crowded confines of Europe, in which fire spelled certain and brutal disaster to the closely clustered buildings of many towns.

Americans living in the more open expanse of the frontier created homes intended to be permanent. Unlike the nomadic lifestyle of American Indians, established farms are more obviously in danger to the potential disaster of fire. To American settlers, fire was not a tool to be left unattended, and certainly not a tool to be brazenly turned on the American wilderness. Western culture held the sense that fire was inherently evil, part of the great, uncontrollable forces of nature that must be tamed in order to civilize their surroundings. The near extermination of wolves, aggressive fire suppression, and the straightening of stream channels, among many other natural resource management practices, all demonstrate how most American newcomers to the West felt these raw, potent forces of nature must be brought into submission.

This cultural understanding of fire influenced settlers’ views of the American Indians use of fire. Grave misunderstanding prevented Americans from appreciating, and perhaps incorporating, the cultural experience of fire held by their Indian neighbors. Colorado governor Frederick Pitkin, hailing from Connecticut, provides an excellent illustration of these contrasting views of fire. In a telegram to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs in July 1879, Pitkin claimed that White River Utes had

burned millions of dollars of timber. Immense forests are burning throughout Western Colorado, supposed to have been fired by [Indians]. I am satisfied that there is an organized effort on the part of the Indians to destroy the timber of Colorado . . . These savages should be removed to the Indian Territory, where they can no longer destroy the finest forests in the state.¹⁷

Pitkin’s allegations originated with reports coming from Nathan Meeker, the White River Indian agent. He undoubtedly witnessed much of the fire activity detailed above—fire surrounds for hunting, intentional burning to cultivate food sources, and the cleaning up of campgrounds and trails. In one report, Meeker asserts that the Indians had no appreciation of the value of forests, and in order to obtain dry fuel for winter use, or to drive deer . . . fires were lighted, by which large tracts of valuable timber were burned over.¹⁸ Such traditional use of fire by Ute Indians was labeled by both Meeker and the United States government as depredations . . . of a most serious character.¹⁹ American authorities and settlers alike did not understand nor approve of this utilization of fire as a tool. Noted explorer John Wesley Powell believed that the West’s prolific fires could be greatly curtailed by the removal of the Indians.²⁰ The majority of white Americans did not stop to consider that perhaps American Indians did indeed know how to best cultivate a countryside that had been supporting their peoples for generations.

Arising from a cultural definition of fire as a necessary and natural tool, American Indians understood fire to be a natural feature of the Rocky Mountain West. It was a force to be accommodated and even exploited to enhance life in this arid region. Indian removal naturally led to a sharp decline in fire frequency, beginning a process of fundamental change to the landscape of the Rocky Mountains. American settlers, influenced by a very different cultural definition of fire and its potential for disaster, discarded traditional fire practices of American Indians. Fire became an unwanted, feared outsider in its own natural habitat.

Fire as Disaster

We have examined evidence of fire’s ancient