Mann Gulch Fire - Sequence of Events

Sequence of Events

The fire started when lightning struck the south side of Mann Gulch, in an area named by Lewis and Clark in the Gates of the Mountains Wilderness. The fire was spotted by a forest ranger around noon on August 5, 1949. James O. Harrison, the recreation and fire prevention guard for Meriwether Canyon Campground, had given up his former job as a smokejumper to find a less dangerous profession. On this day, however, he fought the fire on his own for four hours before he met the crew of smokejumpers who had been dispatched from Hale Field, Missoula, Montana, in a C-47.

It was hot, with a temperature of 97 degrees, and the fire danger rating was high, rated 74 out of a possible 100. Wind conditions that day were turbulent. One smokejumper got sick on the way and did not jump, returning with the airplane to Hale Field. Getting off the plane he resigned from the smokejumpers. In all, 15 smokejumpers jumped the fire.

After the smokejumpers had landed a shout was heard coming from the front of the fire. Foreman Wagner (Wag) Dodge went ahead to find the person shouting and to scout the fire. He left instructions for the team to finish gathering their equipment and eat, then cross the gully to the south slope and advance to the front of the fire. The voice turned out to be Jim Harrison, who had been fighting the fire by himself for the past four hours. The two headed back, Dodge noting that you could not get closer to within 100 feet of the fire due to the heat. The crew met Dodge and Harrison about half way to the fire. Dodge instructed the team to move off the front of the fire and down the gully, crossing back over to the thinly forested and grass covered north slope of the gulch, 'sidehilling' (keeping the same contour or elevation) and moving "down gulch" towards the Missouri River. They could then fight the fire from the flank or behind, steering the fire to a low fuel area. Dodge returned with Harrison up the gulch to the supply area, where the two stopped to eat before returning for the all night work of fighting the fire. While there Dodge noticed the smoke along the fire front boiling up, indicating an intensification of the heat of the fire. He and Harrison headed down the gulch to catch up with the crew.

By the time Dodge reached his men, the fire at the bottom of the gulch was already jumping from the high south slope to the bottom of the north side of the gulch. As the fire crossed over onto the north slope the intensity of the heat combined with wind coming off the river and up the gulch hit the fast burning high grass of the north slope and caused a 'blow up', where the area rapidly became engulfed in flames. The crew initially continued down the side of the ridge, the various side ridges running down the slope obscuring their view of the grassy slope below. When Dodge finally got a glimpse of what was happening below them, he turned the men around and started them back up the side of the ridge. Within a couple hundred yards he ordered the men to drop their packs and heavy tools (pulaskis, shovels and crosscut saws) to aid their escape, but by this point the fire was moving extremely fast up the north slope of Mann gulch.

Dodge realized they would not be able to make the ridge line in front of the fire. With the fire less than a hundred yards behind him he took a match out and set fire to the grass just before them, which burned straight up toward the ridge above. In doing so he was attempting to create an escape fire to lie in so that the main fire would burn around him and his crew. Turning to the three men by him, Dodge said "Up this way", but they misunderstood him, and the three ran straight up for the ridge crest, moving up along the far edge of Dodge's fire. Robert Sallee later said he wasn't sure what Dodge was doing, and thought perhaps he intended the fire to act as a buffer between the men and the main fire. It was not until he got to the ridge crest and looked back that he realized what Dodge had intended. As the rest of the crew came up Dodge tried to direct them through the fire he had set and into the center burnt out area. It is not known if the crew understood or even heard him, but none of the men following entered into the escape fire. The group had spread out while running uphill and had become strung out. Furthermore, the noise of the fire, three stories high and pushed by the winds coming up the gulch, was tremendous. The men likened the sound to a massive blow torch, freight train or jet engine. Even shouting they could hardly understand what was being said. In addition the 'escape fire' technique had not been part of their fire escape training. In answering the questions of the Forest Service Review Board as to why he took the actions he did, Dodge stated he had never heard of such a fire being set, it had just seemed "logical" to him. In fact it was not a method that the forest service had considered, nor would it work in the intense heat of the normal tall growth forest fires that they typically fought. Similar types of escape fires had been used by the plains Indians to escape the fast moving but brief duration grass fires of the plains, and the method had been written about by James Fenimore Cooper (1827) in The Prairie. In a book he later wrote about the event, Dodge stated the updrafts generated by the fire moving past him were so intense they caused him to be "lifted off the ground" several times.

Dodge later stated that someone, possibly squad leader William Hellman, said "To hell with that, I'm getting out of here". The rest of the team raced on before the fire up the side of the slope toward the hogback of Mann Gulch ridge, hoping they had enough time to get through the rock ridge line and over to safer ground on the other side. Fire spreads quickly uphill towards a ridge, but advances significantly more slowly coming down the other side. Four of the men reached the ridge crest, but only two, Bob Sallee and Walter Rumsey, managed to escape through a crevice or deep fissure in the rock ridge to reach the other side. In the dense smoke of the fire the two had no way of knowing if the crevice they found actually 'went through' to the other side or would be a blind trap. They came out the other side into Rescue Gulch and managed to find a rockslide with little vegetation before the fire burned down to reach them. Diettert had been close behind Sallee and Rumsey, but he turned away from the crevice and continued on up the right side of the hogback. He did not find another escape route and was overtaken by the fire. Hellman was caught on the top of the ridge and was badly burned. Though he and Joseph Sylvia initially survived the fire, they sufferd heavy injuries and both died in hospital within a day. Of the crew members caught in the fire, unburnt patches underneath their bodies indicated that the rest of the team, including Jim Harrison, suffocated before the fire caught up with them.

The events described above all transpired in a very short period of time. Everyone had jumped by around 4:10 pm. The scattered cargo had been gathered at about 5:00 pm. At about 5:45 pm, the crew had seen the fire coming up towards them on the north slope and had turned to run. By four minutes to 6:00 the fire had swept over them. The time at which the fire engulfed the men was judged by the melted hands on Harrison's pocketwatch, forever frozen at 5:56 pm by the intense heat. Studies estimated that the fire covered 3,000 acres in 10 minutes during this blow-up stage. An hour and 45 minutes after they arrived. Thirteen firefighters had died; three survived.

Those that were killed by the fire:

• Robert J. Bennett, age 22 from Paris, TN
• Eldon E. Diettert, age 19 from Moscow, ID, died on his 19th birthday
• James O. Harrison - Helena National Forest Fire Guard, age 20 from Missoula, MT
• William J. Hellman, age 24 from Kalispell, MT
• Philip R. McVey, age 22 from Babb, MT
• David R. Navon, age 28 from Modesto, CA
• Leonard L. Piper, age 23 from Blairsville, PA
• Stanley J. Reba, from Brooklyn, NY
• Marvin L. Sherman, age 21 from Missoula, MT
• Joseph B. Sylvia, age 24 from Plymouth, MA
• Henry J. Thol, Jr. age 19 from Kalispell, MT
• Newton R. Thompson age 23 from Alhambra, CA
• Silas R. Thompson age 21 from Charlotte, NC

Those that survived:

• R. Wagner (Wag) Dodge - Missoula SJ foreman, age 33 at the time of the fire. Wag died 5 years after the fire from Hodgkin's disease.
• Walter B. Rumsey - age 21 at time of the fire, from Larned, KA. Rumsey died in a plane crash in 1980. He was 52 years old
• Robert W. Sallee - youngest man on the crew, age 17 at time of the fire, from Willow Creek, MT.

Earl Cooley was the spotter/kicker the morning of the August 5th 1949 Mann Gulch fire jump. Cooley was the first Smokejumper to jump on an operational fire jump. The first jump was a two man jump, and was performed on July 12th 1940. Mr. Cooley was the airborne supervisor who directed the crew of smokejumpers who dropped in to fight the Mann Gulch fire. In the 1950s Mr. Cooley served as the smokejumper base superintendent and was the first president of the National Smokejumper Association. Mr. Cooley, died Nov. 9 2009 at age 98,

The C-47/DC-3 NC24320 was the only smokejumper plane available at Hale Field, near the current location of Sentinel High School, on Aug. 5, 1949, when the call came in seeking 25 smokejumpers to fight a blaze in a hard-to-reach area of the Helena National Forest. The C-47/DC-3 could hold only 16 jumpers and their equipment. Even though more help was needed, fire bosses decided not to wait for a second plane, and instead sent No. NC24320 out on its own. NC24320 flew with Johnson Flying Service from Hale Field in Missoula Montana and was used to drop Smokejumpers as well as for other operations Johnson Flying Service held contracts for. The C-47/DC-3 that carried the smokejumpers that day is on exhibit in Missoula Montana at the Museum of Mountain Flying. The aircraft was restored and now serves as a memorial to the Smokejumpers and the Fire Guard that lost their lives at Mann Gulch on August 5th 1949.