Uncovering Our Lost Wildland Fire History

After a year of looking at incident reviews, agency annual reports, and lots and lots of newspapers, I want to share the stories that surprised me the most and, I think, shine a light on the least discussed corners of wildland fire management in the U.S.

By Erik Apland, Field Operations Specialist

Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center

For over a year, I have been immersed in U.S. wildland fire history with the primary goal of building a base of knowledge about what has actually happened. The metaphor of “uncovering” fits the best here – you don’t know what’s under the ground until you actually dig it up. You can speculate all you want, but you do eventually have to pick up a shovel. Sherlock Holmes put it well: “It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly, one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”

The military historian Robert Citino wrote, “Operational history (that is, explaining what actually happened in the course of a campaign, and why) is complicated enough without spending time lecturing historical actors on what they ought to have done.” He explains that in the practice of uncovering history, “[t]hese approaches, which praise this decision as ‘correct’ and that one as ‘wrong’ …are essentially ahistorical (as important as they may be to the training of soldiers and officers).”

I wouldn’t pretend that what I have discovered is comprehensive. The sources I have primarily been using – newspaper stories, grave registries, death certificates – have their own biases and gaps.

Doing this research, I have discovered that the full story is much more elusive than I expected (and I expected it to be elusive). For instance, it is somewhat difficult even now, in a time of highly organized wildland fire response organizations, to always agree which current incidents are correctly called “line of duty” deaths. Trying to piece together these events of the distant past, when the role of professional wildland firefighter simply didn’t exist, is very challenging.

After a year of looking at incident reviews, agency annual reports, and lots and lots of newspapers, I want to share the stories that surprised me the most and, I think, shine a light on the least discussed corners of wildland fire management in the U.S. These first two, one hundred years apart, highlight two groups that I have never heard talked about much—if at all—in wildland fire history.

An Unnamed Enslaved Firefighter: Goldsboro, North Carolina

In late fall of 2023, The Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center explored the topic of “Fire Workers” in our quarterly publication, Two More Chains. In that issue, I tried to trace the convoluted history of the various people who have worked in wildland fire in the United States, which includes indigenous people, transient workers and enrollees in New Deal era employment programs.

I speculated that it was probably common for enslaved people in the pre-Civil War era to have fought fires, particularly in places where they were already working in the forest to cut timber and firewood, or to extract turpentine from pines, among other woods work.

To start off this survey of wildland firefighter fatalities, I offer this small notice of a firefighter death in April 1860 (shown above in box), that was reported in the Baltimore Sun.

The 1860 census of Wayne County, of which Goldsboro is the county seat, showed a population that was 61% free, 39% enslaved. It is probably not surprising that this fallen firefighter is not named, given the context of his life and death. Perhaps the fact that his death was reported at all is unusual – would the death of an enslaved person in any other work accident be reported in a newspaper two states away?

While this may indicate that firefighter deaths on wildfires were rare at the time, there simply is not enough information to confirm this. Considering that 20^th century newspapers are filled with reports of fatalities on wildland fires it seems unlikely there was ever a time when people worked in the forest and didn’t succumb to the hazards found there. Whatever the case, I have yet to find another reference to 19^th century enslaved firefighters anywhere.

Alga Raymond Jones: Los Angeles County, California

In 1959, Alga Raymond Jones, Ray, was a 16-year-old student at Warren High School in Downey, a city south of downtown Los Angeles that was quickly transforming from orange groves to suburbia.

After being charged with a small string of petty property crimes, Jones became a ward of Los Angeles County, posted at Mendenhall Forestry Camp in rural LA County in early 1960. “We were happy when Ray was sent to a forestry camp because he was proud to be helping take care of fire engines and equipment,” his mother is quoted as saying to the Los Angeles Times. “But we never dreamed he’d actually be sent to fight a fire.”

Ray Jones was sent to the Magic Mountain Fire in the mountains south of his forestry camp in late July 1960 as part of a handcrew assigned to help cold trail and mop-up the 28,000-acre fire.

On the line, Ray was hit by a rock described in multiple sources as a “boulder,” allegedly dislodged by a bulldozer working on the slope above him. The rock struck him on the head, causing traumatic brain injuries that sent him into a comatose state. Ray remained in this state for the next 20 weeks at Los Angeles General Hospital, where he passed away on December 12, turning 17 while in a coma.

This would be a notable tragedy if Ray Jones was the first and last minor teenager killed fighting a fire. But that is far from the case, making this even more tragic. Before labor law reforms in the 1930s, child labor was common across the country in many industries. Extreme workforce shortages during World War II meant that wildland fire agencies like the U.S. Forest Service or state forestry departments employed firefighters under the age of 18, a practice that continued for decades.

Los Angeles County, Jones’ legal guardian, had already seen a disaster involving their juvenile probation forestry program. In 1955, an adult fire captain and five teenagers were killed on a wildfire about 10 miles east of Downey. On the Hacienda Fire on September 2, 1955, a youth crew from Camp 5-1 were similarly assigned to mop-up a brush fire. This time, a gust of wind caused the fire to awaken and flash over the crew in a phenomenon we would likely now call “area ignition.” Twelve from the crew of 14 were burned, six fatally.

Nor was Ray Jones the last minor firefighter to lose his life on a fireline in SoCal. In 1968, a fire eerily similar to the Loop Fire two years earlier, entrapped an LA County handcrew. Eight firefighters died on the Canyon Inn Fire, of whom only one was over the age of 18.

We shouldn’t think that it was one particular geographic area or agency that used juvenile firefighters. Deaths of teenaged firefighters are reported throughout the 20^th century. Employing minors had been common, if controversial, before the Great Depression, then became a contingency during World War II. It seems to have transformed from necessity to virtue after the war ended. Fire agencies employed high schoolers on summer break when kids wanted money and adventure and the agencies wanted seasonal firefighters, or used children sentenced to detention in forestry camps.

One Foot in the Black, Wearing Jeans

Although these are sad stories, my intent is not to bum you out.

In wildland fire, we can bear these hard stories and learn from them. What I am beginning to understand more and more these days is how my own experience has shaped my view of the past. When I read, for instance, that a firefighter’s clothes caught on fire (which I have come across again and again), my initial reaction is, “Thank God I started fighting fire when flame-resistant clothes were available.”

A step beyond that is this: catching on fire, at any time in history, is a horrifying prospect. Fire was used for centuries as a punishment that inflicted not only death but terror on the condemned and onlookers alike. In the face of that horrifying prospect, we fought fire for decades in jeans. Our most basic tactic – direct attack at the fire’s edge – comes from a time when firefighters wore cotton work clothes and wide-brimmed fabric hats. There is something hard for my millennial mind to understand about this fact, and yet it is true.

As I stated at the beginning of this piece, I began this project with the goal of understanding, not finding evidence to back up some point I already wanted to make. To be honest, I don’t know enough yet to draw any big conclusions. The first step towards drawing any conclusions is figuring out what happened in the first place, and that usually proves much more difficult than people like to admit.