Since we always knew that the center of the tragedy of the Mann Gulch fire was a race, early in our study we had started to make an accurate map of it, much as a storyteller early tries to make an outline of his plot. This is a story in which cartography and plot are much the same thing; if the tragedy was inevitable, it was the ground that made it so. We ultimately confirmed the accuracy of the 1952 contour map in its essential details. But the cartography of the tragedy would not be complete until we studied each leg of the race and analyzed the comparative speed of men and fire in their race between established points.
Common sense should tell us that it would be a good idea as soon as possible to locate the beginning and end of the race on the map, just as it’s generally a good idea for a storyteller to have a notion of the beginning and end of his plot before constructing what went on in between, although admittedly many stories seem more comfortable not knowing where they are going and never getting there. The end of the race is easy to locate on the ground—its location depends upon the hardest of evidence, the concrete crosses.
Where the race begins is a lot less certain than where it ends, because where things begin depends a great deal on prior definition and general direction. The race for the fire and the race for the men did not start at the same place, and for the first leg of the race fire and men were going in almost opposite directions. The start of the race for the fire will be taken to be point 13 on the map, where the lower end of the fire jumped the gulch to its north side and then turned up-gulch to confront the crew.
In a sense, the crew began to run from the fire as early as point X on the map, when Dodge decided that the front of the fire was too hot to handle and ordered his crew to start toward the mouth of the canyon to take on the lower end of the fire, where they could jump into the nearby river if they had to. They were to proceed downgulch on contour while he and Harrison returned quickly to the cargo area for something to eat. But the real race for the men began later. From the cargo area, Dodge could see that the fire in the lower end of the gulch, instead of quieting down in the late afternoon, was boiling up. Afraid that the fire might spread and close off the mouth of the canyon, he and Harrison hastily rejoined the crew at point Y, where the foreman regrouped his men and started them on what was to be a fast trip downgulch. Accordingly, we will take Y to be the beginning of the race for the crew.
Leg 1, crew. The first leg of the crew’s race is from point Y to point 6, a distance that can be known only approximately and so, for arithmetic convenience, will be spoken of as an even four hundred yards. The foreman tried to hurry his men, but it was tough going—there was no trail to follow, they were trying to sidehill on contour, and they were keeping a watch on the lower front of the fire just across the gulch. The gulch was narrow, and the fire close to them. But the crew thought of it as interesting, and Navon was taking his snapshots.
At point 6, Dodge saw ahead that the fire at the lower end had jumped the gulch (at point 13 on the map) and was already advancing upgulch toward them. He immediately reversed direction and started back upgulch. He also reversed his downgulch intention of keeping to the same contour; from here on he tried steadily to gain elevation (without cutting down drastically on speed), hoping to gain the top of the ridge and presumably the greater safety of the other side.
Leg l, fire. The fire’s first leg of the race is from point 13 to point 6, where it started to follow directly in the footsteps of the crew. The fire almost literally followed on their heels. At point 6, Dodge estimated that the fire was 150 to 200 yards away. By the time Sallee and Rumsey left the foreman behind at the escape fire and broke for the top of the ridge, Sallee estimated the fire was only 50 yards behind.
Legs 2, 3, and 4. After point 6, the race became practically identical in course and distance for both fire and men, and, although in the first leg of the race men and fire were going in almost opposite directions, we shall see that the distance covered by each in their first leg was approximately the same (400 yards) and that, as far as total distance went, the race was an even-steven affair.
The final legs of the race also appear as divisions of the tragedy from so many different perspectives that they seem to be divisions in nature. Legs in a race are at once scenes in a tragedy, each leading to a station that must be passed to reach crosses near the top of a hill.
Leg 2. At point 7, 450 yards beyond point 6, the foreman was enough alarmed by the rate at which the fire was gaining on his crew to order them to discard their packs and heavy tools. Some of them did. Some of them already had. Others would not give up their tools, and fellow crew members had to take them from their hands. When firefighters are told to throw away their tools, they don’t know what they are anymore, not even what gender.
Leg 3. Only 220 yards farther at point 8 is the breaking point. Here, the foreman, having given up hope that his crew could reach the top of the ridge, lit his escape fire and tried to persuade his crew to enter it with him. Point 8 must have been each man’s most important station until he reached his crevice or his cross. The men did not know it, but for most of them Dodge’s escape fire was the last place where conceivably they might have been saved. Here also with the lighting of Dodge’s fire began much of the dissension and legal controversy to which the Mann Gulch fire owes a goodly portion of its afterlife. Almost immediately beyond it the crosses begin.
Leg 4. The crosses spread over a wide area, and no two are close enough together to suggest that the crew itself stuck close together or even in small bunches. On the last leg of the race, from point 8 to the crosses, it was each man for himself, with no favors asked and none given, although before the race was over there must have been some asking. Of those whom Sallee, after crawling through the crevice, saw angling toward the top, Henry J. Thol, Jr., came closest to making it to the top. His cross (L) is some 390 yards from point 8. When a “representative cross” is needed, we will take that of Leonard L. Piper (G), the farthest from point 8 of the middle group—250 yards beyond the origin of the escape fire.
The total distance of the race from Y to the representative cross G is approximately 1,320 yards, or three-quarters of a mile, and tells us, as a race, that it was run at one of the most dramatic of distances, one calling for the utmost in human speed and stamina. Earlier in this century the two most honored races were the one to crown the “world’s fastest human,” the 100-yard dash, and the marathon, to test human stamina. Always there will be special laurels for the winners of each of these, but as the art and power of the runner have developed in modern times, middle-distance runs have changed into sprints or dashes. First, the quarter-mile run changed to the 440-yard dash, next the half-mile became the 880-yard dash, and then came the four-minute mile, and now four minutes is nothing much to brag about. Nowadays, a three-quarter-mile race tests a combination of the utmost in speed and stamina. At the end of it, no contestant trots off the field for the lockers; teammates wait at the finish line to catch collapsing runners. It is hard to imagine what the finish line of a three-quarter- mile race would be like if the last lap of it were run on a 76 percent slope of slippery grass and rock slides, on the hottest day on record.
Piper’s representative cross is the closest to marking the end of this three-quarter-mile race. Henry Thol’s cross, the closest to the top of the ridge, is around 150 yards farther. Of both these distances, the conventional saying must have been true—the last part was the hardest.
MUCH OF THE INTERESTING BUSINESS of life is learning . one way or another how to represent the earth. The easiest way still to abstract short distances is by pace and (if need be) compass, but this is not as easy as it sounds and is never very accurate. It is only accurate if you have had a lot of practice in discovering what your average pace is (inches per pace) and a lot more practice in maintaining an average pace over different kinds of ground. If you are a practiced walker, then all you need is a “tally whacker” (pedometer) to count the paces, although it should go without saying that what you need most is f
airly even and level ground. In Mann Gulch, especially when you have to sidehill (as you do all the way in order to follow the course of the race), it is useless—compass-and-pace is no good where you can’t pace and do well just to crawl. The most accurate method, of course, is steel tape or chain, but it takes two to run it, one to hold each end, and a lot of time to operate, and unless you live close by in Helena or Wolf Creek you are going to need three days just to get part of a day in Mann Gulch. We used a 100-yard steel tape only when we measured such crucial distances as from point 8 to the crevice.
Your best friend when you feel curious about what you are walking on is usually a good map of it, if you can find one. Fortunately Laird and I had found a very good large-scale map, the 1952 contour map titled “Part of Mann Gulch Fire Area.” But how do you use this map to measure the distance of the crew’s race with fire? In fact you don’t find it by putting your ruler on the map, ascertaining the number of inches between point Y and the representative cross, and converting the inches into miles by consulting the scale at the bottom of the map, which says that eight inches of map represents a mile of ground. When that little piece of arithmetic is completed, the figure of three-quarters of a mile, or 1,320 yards, emerges, which is the figure we have cited as the length of the race, but that’s only because it was assumed most readers have learned what they know about cartography not from contour maps but from reading maps they picked up in gas stations. If you say the race was 1,320 yards, you are reading this fancy contour map as if it were a gas station map that does not represent a third dimension, elevation.
Much of the light that can be thrown on the Mann Gulch fire comes, as we shall see, from the very modern science of fire behavior, but to solve this next problem requires a classical turn back to the sixth century B.C. From point Y, where the race began, to the representative cross G, there are 20 or 21 contour lines, each representing an interval of 20 feet, and 20 feet times 21 equals 420 feet, or 140 yards. That gives some idea of how much farther the crew had to go than the 1,320 yards, but only a general idea, because the crew did not travel 1,320 straight yards on what would be a base to a right triangle and then turn at right angles and climb up 140 yards. They climbed something approximating a hypotenuse between the two points, which among map men is called the “slant distance.”
The formula that gives us a slant distance of 1,400 yards at first looks incomprehensible, except that it comes out with answers that sound about right.
It you want to go one step farther and know why it is true that 1,400 yards is 80 yards closer to the truth about the race in Mann Gulch than a flat map would suggest, you have to remember your sophomore year in high school when you were introduced to plane geometry and for the first time discovered right triangles and Pythagoras, who seemed almost to have invented right triangles. He was also very good at one-liners, and the one of his one-liners that explains the workings of this fancy formula is the one-liner he is best remembered for: the sum of the squares of the two sides of a right triangle equals the hypotenuse squared. It looks like this when A and B represent the two sides of a right triangle and C the hypotenuse:
A2 + B2 = C2
It even works in Mann Gulch.
QED.
IT’S HARD ENOUGH TO FIND out about the things the . universe prefers to keep hidden without our government, which somebody you know must have voted for, covering up what has already been found. Sometimes, of course, it hides things to save its own neck and sometimes seemingly just for the hell of it. And where does it find things to hide? Anywhere truth can be found and a dog can scratch and find something to cover it up with. Anywhere may mean as far away in the backcountry as Mann Gulch.
The timing of the Smokejumpers’ race with fire was more difficult to figure than its distance, and we would need to know both before we could determine the speed of men and of fire. We had taken sixteen minutes to be the duration of the race, and at first I was fairly sure that this figure was correct. Although he said he had not consulted his watch, Dodge testified that it was “about 5:40” when he and Harrison rejoined the crew at point Y. Admittedly there is leeway in that evidence, but the time taken to be the time that the fire caught up to the crew seemed to be based on the hardest of evidence, an artifact, and an artifact is an artifact is an artifact, especially when found on the body of a dead man. The hands of the watch found on Harrison’s body had melted at 5:55, 5:56, or 5:57, the fire damage making it impossible to be sure which.
The Forest Service from nearly the beginning used the melted time on this watch as marking the end of things. As the official Report of Board of Review says in a matter-of-fact way, “Within seconds after Dodge walked into the burned area left by the escape fire, at about 5:55 P.M., the main fire passed over. (A recovered watch stopped at 5:57 P.M.)” SO in this story the in-between figure of 5:56 is usually taken to be the tragic end.
Although I was not immediately suspicious of the value of Harrison’s watch as evidence, I developed an uneasy feeling when I found that, late in 1951 and early in 1952, Rumsey and Sallee had been asked to make second statements about the fire. A name began to crop up in my inquiries often enough to make me feel I had better find out who belonged to it—the second statements had been taken in the presence of an A. J. Cramer, the Forest Service “investigator” who had journeyed to Garfield, Kansas, to get Rumsey’s second statement and to Lewiston, Idaho, for Sallee’s.
My uneasy feeling grew when I found (not in a Forest Service archive) a letter to the regional forester at Missoula dated May 23, 1952, from J. R. Jansson. Jansson’s letter is a recantation of an earlier recantation of his first testimony concerning the time of the Mann Gulch tragedy, which he refers to as the “accident.” The second recantation starts by politely but painfully acknowledging that he, Jansson, had been persuaded, especially by the Forest Service investigator A. J. Cramer, to change his original timing of the race between the men and the fire so that all accounts would agree with what Jansson calls the “established time.” The time of the establishment, according to Jansson, was Dodge’s timing of these events. The devout Methodist then had struggled with his conscience until it forced him to recant once again and return to his original timing: “I would like,” he writes to the regional forester, “to take this opportunity of enumerating my reasons for sticking with my original time statements and what supporting evidence I have to back up my conviction that my times are reasonably correct.”
In addition, he implies that Dodge had been persuaded to change his original timing, which he charges was the same as his own. He says that he talked to Dodge the day after the tragedy, and, although he was too busy to “make copious notes on these conversations,” he carried with him a “strong impression that there was no essential difference in our times.”
Actually, the difference in time that seemed so important to Jansson may not seem like very much; as he himself says, a “time adjustment of twenty minutes in my time would bring me reasonably in line with the ‘established time.’” To his thinking, “the deaths occurred…probably between 5:35 and 5:45.” Jansson arrived at these times by reference to the times of events occurring to him at the lower end of the gulch when the fire blew up. As for the evidence on which the “established time” was based, Jansson says, “It is my honest opinion that the original investigation took Harrison’s watch as prima facie evidence of establishing the time of the accident.” The twenty-minute difference between Jansson and the “established time,” however, would mean that the race on the hill between men and fire was over according to Jansson when it hadn’t even begun according to the “established time.” At 5:35 or 5:37 when it was all over by Jansson’s calculations, Dodge and Harrison probably had not yet caught up with the crew at point Y.
To his charge that he was persuaded to alter his testimony, Jansson adds the equally serious charge that evidence was suppressed to give the impression that Harrison’s watch was the only existing evidence to indicate when the crew was burned. But Jansson, in ch
arge of rescue work at Mann Gulch, had “examined seven or eight watches” taken from or near dead bodies, and a year after the fire he had become deeply suspicious that this fact was being withheld from the public. Accordingly, he telephoned the regional office in Missoula (on September 27 or 28, 1950) and asked for a report on the watches in its possession. “In questioning other investigators,” he informs the regional forester, “I gathered that only Harrison’s watch had been found. Until the record was read to me, I had received nothing but denials as to the existence of other watches, which I knew had existed and could be read.”
It was a “Mr. Kramer,” keeper of the watches in Missoula, who reported by telephone to Jansson that he had four such watches “with readable times,” one at 5:42, two at 5:55, and one at 6:40, a variation to think about, especially the early one at 5:42, since it can always be argued that watches with hands that stopped later were watches that kept running for some time after the fire went by.
It seems almost certain that “Mr. Kramer,” keeper of the watches in Missoula, was the Mr. Cramer who over a year later was to journey to Kansas and Idaho to get second statements from Rumsey and Sallee. For the sake of everyone involved, including him, I had to find him.
I gave the documents to Laird with as few accompanying remarks as possible. I had hesitated some time before informing him about the possibility that some funny business had gone on with what he and I had come to think of as our fire. Laird was headed for a fine career in the Forest Service, and I certainly didn’t want his association with me to hurt him; you’ve heard what Laird said to that.
The next time I met Laird, he said, “We’ll have to see Mr. Cramer.”
I replied, “We have to, if he’s alive. He has the right of personal privilege.”
“He’s alive,” Laird said, “or he was when I last heard. He’s retired and has a home on Flathead Lake. I don’t know him, but I knew one of his sons who was a Smokejumper. If the old man is like his son, he’s big and tough and liable to tell you to go screw yourself.”