A Great Day to Fight Fire: Mann Gulch, 1949 (review)

One can hardly discuss the Mann Gulch tragedy (thirteen dead firefighters) of August 1949 without mentioning Norman Maclean, the author famously of A River Runs Through It, but more significantly for this review, of Young Men and Fire, the seminal work on the Mann Gulch fire. Since it has been awhile since this reviewer tapped into Maclean's text, I will not compare it to A Great Day to Fight Fire: Mann Gulch 1949. But from what I recall of Young Men, these are two different books and should not be put side by side.

On August 5, 1949, fifteen smoke jumpers parachuted into the Montana sky and onto a small fire near Mann Gulch and the Continental Divide. They met with a recreation/fire prevention guard (or in fire-fighting parlance a ground pounder) who had started to build a fire line to contain the then small fire. With a change in weather, the fire blew up and trapped the fifteen smoke jumpers and the one ground pounder. They tried to escape by running to the top of a ridge. One survived by lighting a backfire and falling into the blackened ground; two others made it to a rocky area where the fire could not consume more fuel and, consequently, them. The rest died either instantly or within hours from when the fire overtook them. To give one an understanding of how fast this occurred, all the men had jumped by 4:00 p.m.; eleven of the sixteen perished before 6:00 p.m.

In the aftermath, the U.S. Forest Service created more training (specifically safety) for all firefighters, not just smoke jumpers. To say, then, the deaths gave a strong pause to the then fledgling smoke-jumping program (started in 1939) would stand as an understatement. The deaths, understandably, affected the survivors and those who knew the casualties and survivors as well.

As a brief aside, from interviews conducted for the Idaho State Historical Society almost a decade ago, this reviewer received firsthand accounts of what it meant and took to smoke jump in those early years. While no one interviewed for that project fought the Mann Gulch fire, those who fought fire in 1949 offered their memories of when they heard about the tragedy and how it affected them. In the past couple of decades—starting with their first reunion in Missoula in 1984—smoke jumpers have published a lot about their history, as have others. (The Idaho State Historical Society's smoke-jumping/forest fire-fighting oral history project started with a group of smoke jumpers who met every other month in Boise, Idaho, to reminisce.)

As with most of those recent works, A Great Day informs through anecdotes, although Matthews never includes his voice. He lets the smoke jumpers, other firefighters, and those around the two groups speak for themselves.

Mark Matthews, with myriad primary sources, including interviews, crafts A Great Day. A former forest firefighter himself, he uses these sources to create a work documenting the days before, during, and after the August catastrophe through the eyes of those who fought it (both the dead and the survivors) and those who were left to pick up the pieces. His chapters focus on the sixteen men who were on the ground at Mann Gulch, as well as other people (both men and women) and things (the lightning that started the fire and the fire itself), telling their (or its) stories through them. Matthews and the editors insert photos and maps from archival and personal collections to give readers visual images to go along with the text.

Even though he scoured the primary sources, including documents gathered by Helena High School students in the late 1990s for the fiftieth anniversary of Mann Gulch, Matthews describes the work as a "nonfiction novel," meaning he creates some conversations based on the sources. So while this work has some fictional elements within it, Matthews' "Notes" section lets...