The Mann Gulch fire on August 5 1949 in the Gates of the Mountains Wilderness Area of the Helena National Forest in Montana. Thirteen young firefighters from the U.S. Forest Service’s elite Smokejumpers unit died in a sudden blow up of a fire on the north ridge of Mann Gulch, trapped by the fire that had outflanked them. After his retirement as a professor at the University of Chicago, Montana writer Norman Maclean spent the last fourteen years of his life researching the Mann Gulch fire and trying to reconstruct what actually happened to the doomed fire crew on its fatal jump. Young Men and Fire, which was awarded the 1992 National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction.
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He spoke with U.S. Forestry Service officials, firefighters, and fire scientists to assemble the scattered pieces of the Mann Gulch tragedy. Maclean left the manuscript of the book uncompleted at his death, and it was prepared for publication by the editors at the University of Chicago Press. In Maclean’s terse narrative the Mann Gulch fire takes on the dimensions of a Greek tragedy. complete with hubris, nemesis, tragic fate, and purgation the young crew’s inexperience and ignorance of blowups the combination of circumstances favorable to a serious fire at Mann Gulch; the crew’s bad luck in being outflanked and outrun by the fire and the increased knowledge of forestfires that has come about indirectly from the Mann Gulch tragedy. In Part 1 Maclean describes the setting at Mann Gulch, a steep, jagged area in west-central Montana that has been described as “one of the roughest areas east of the Continental Divide.” Mann Gulch is a dry gulch two and one-half miles long that empties into the Missouri River. The north slope of Mann Gulch was rocky and steep, with long, dry grass and brush and only a …show more content…
Thunderheads gather, and even without rain there are lightning storms with many strikes on tall, exposed ridges, where a dead pine or fir can smolder for days before dropping live sparks on the dry grass or brush below. Wildfire is a natural part of the ecology of the West, but the policy of the U.S. Forestry Service at the time was to try to contain small fires before they burned large areas of national forest. When the fire spotters’ reports were radioed in to the regional fire fighting headquarters in Missoula, a crew of fifteen Smokejumpers was dispatched in a C-47 airplane under the direction of foreman R. Wagner Dodge. The pilot reported a great deal of turbulence over Mann Gulch, so the Smokejumpers were dropped from two thousand feet instead of the customary twelve hundred. Their equipment was scattered, and their radio was smashed when its parachute failed to open. The men and cargo were dropped by 4:10 P.M., and they had retrieved their equipment and regrouped by 5:00. No one was worried. They faced a sixty-acre fire that they were confident they could mop up by the next morning. Dodge left his men in the charge of the assistant squad leader, Bill Hellman, and went ahead to scout the fire. Dodge rejoined his group at about 5:30 P.M. By 5:40, the fire had jumped the gulch and was quickly working its way toward them. The men began to hurry. Dodge ordered them to drop their equipment and run. By
He spoke with U.S. Forestry Service officials, firefighters, and fire scientists to assemble the scattered pieces of the Mann Gulch tragedy. Maclean left the manuscript of the book uncompleted at his death, and it was prepared for publication by the editors at the University of Chicago Press. In Maclean’s terse narrative the Mann Gulch fire takes on the dimensions of a Greek tragedy. complete with hubris, nemesis, tragic fate, and purgation the young crew’s inexperience and ignorance of blowups the combination of circumstances favorable to a serious fire at Mann Gulch; the crew’s bad luck in being outflanked and outrun by the fire and the increased knowledge of forestfires that has come about indirectly from the Mann Gulch tragedy. In Part 1 Maclean describes the setting at Mann Gulch, a steep, jagged area in west-central Montana that has been described as “one of the roughest areas east of the Continental Divide.” Mann Gulch is a dry gulch two and one-half miles long that empties into the Missouri River. The north slope of Mann Gulch was rocky and steep, with long, dry grass and brush and only a …show more content…
Thunderheads gather, and even without rain there are lightning storms with many strikes on tall, exposed ridges, where a dead pine or fir can smolder for days before dropping live sparks on the dry grass or brush below. Wildfire is a natural part of the ecology of the West, but the policy of the U.S. Forestry Service at the time was to try to contain small fires before they burned large areas of national forest. When the fire spotters’ reports were radioed in to the regional fire fighting headquarters in Missoula, a crew of fifteen Smokejumpers was dispatched in a C-47 airplane under the direction of foreman R. Wagner Dodge. The pilot reported a great deal of turbulence over Mann Gulch, so the Smokejumpers were dropped from two thousand feet instead of the customary twelve hundred. Their equipment was scattered, and their radio was smashed when its parachute failed to open. The men and cargo were dropped by 4:10 P.M., and they had retrieved their equipment and regrouped by 5:00. No one was worried. They faced a sixty-acre fire that they were confident they could mop up by the next morning. Dodge left his men in the charge of the assistant squad leader, Bill Hellman, and went ahead to scout the fire. Dodge rejoined his group at about 5:30 P.M. By 5:40, the fire had jumped the gulch and was quickly working its way toward them. The men began to hurry. Dodge ordered them to drop their equipment and run. By