Trego's Mountain Ear

The ability to fight fire effectively is based on substitution of technology for human muscle power.  A bucket brigade takes a lot more people and moves less water than a pumper. 

National Humanities Center describes how, in 1880, the Census included fires – now we’d call them incidents – and provides this map:

Causes of fires (1880, U.S):

• Clearing land    1,152              
• Lightning   32
• Hunters     628                 
• Prairie  12
• Locomotives    508                 
• Prospectors      10
• Malice    262                 
• Coal Pits     9
• Improving Pasturage   197                 
• Woodcutters   3
• Camp Fires     72                   
• Carelessness    3
• Indians      56                   
• Travelers      2
• Smokers   35                   
• Spontaneous Combustion    2

The article begins with this paragraph:

“For the 1880 census, Charles Sargent mapped forest fires. Fire was nearly everywhere, some places more vigorously than others. The amount of burning was, by today’s standards, staggering. A developing nation, still primarily agricultural, the United States had a fire-flushed landscape not unlike those of Brazil and Indonesia in more recent decades. While lightning accounted for some ignition, and steam power (notably locomotives) for a growing fraction, the principal sources of fire were people—people burning for hunting, for traditional foraging, for landclearing, for clearing field fallow, for pasturage, for the ecological equivalent of housecleaning. And of course there was a significant amount of sheer fire littering. Where spark met large caches of combustibles (as around logged sites), horrific fires, implacable as hurricanes, broke out. The idea that one might abolish fire seemed quixotic, in fact, dangerous. Without fire most lands were uninhabitable. Free-burning fires came and went with the seasons, as unstoppable as the movement of the sun across the heavens. Right-thinking conservationists, as good Progressives, argued for government intervention to stop them.” 

Another Section seems worth including:

“The railroads of the country, using in the construction and maintenance of their permanent ways vast quantities of timber, inflict far greater injury upon the forests than is represented by the consumption of material. Railway ties, except in California, are almost invariably cut from vigorous young trees from 10 to 12 inches in diameter; that is, from trees which twenty or thirty years ago escaped destruction by fire or browsing animals, and which, if allowed to grow, would at the end of fifty or one hundred years longer afford immense quantities of valuable timber. The railroads of the United States, old and new, consume every year not far from 60,000,000 ties; the quantity of lumber in 60,000,000 ties is comparatively not very great, and would hardly be missed from our forests; but the destruction of 30,000,000 vigorous young trees, supposing that an average of two ties is cut from each tree, is a serious drain upon the forest wealth of the country and should cause grave apprehensions for the future, especially in view of the fact that in every part of the country there are now growing fewer seedling trees of species valuable for railway ties than when the trees now cut for this purpose first started.

The author ends with “Curiously, the problem of industrial fire as a landscape force has not been systematically examined, save the issue of fossil-fuel combustion as a contributor of greenhouse gases. Yet the controlled combustion of fossil biomass is rewriting the Earth’s landscapes wholesale. (Just think of automobiles and how they have refashioned scenes, for beginners.) Until the study of fire acquires a disciplinary standing, however, these questions are unlikely to become the theme of coherent discourse.”

So why did I become interested? That’s easy to explain. A few days after I graduated from high school I took a job on the fire crew at Grand Canyon’s North Rim. I returned for fifteen seasons, and then helped write fire plans at other parks for three summers more. Meanwhile I studied in the humanities, acquiring a Ph.D. in 1976. It finally occurred to me that I ought to apply the techniques of scholarship that I had learned to the subject that most enthralled me. I started what has evolved into a dozen books on fire, six of them organized into a suite—what I call Cycle of Fire—that attempts to survey the history of fire on Earth. When I began on the North Rim, we were called smokechasers. That’s what I still do, chasing smokes, though with a pencil rather than a shovel.”

It’s worth reading.