Wildland Fire Workers in America: The Bigger the Us -- the Stronger We Are

By Erik Apland 
Field Operations Specialist 
Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center

[This article originally appeared in the 2023 Fall lssue of Two More Chains.]

It seems imperative to address one of the most important debates happening in wildland fire management in the United States right now: the status and future of the federal wildland fire labor force. Rather than looking ahead and speculating about what might be, it might be helpful to look back and see how we got where we are.

I’m no labor historian, or a historian of any type. I went to school to learn the names of trees and how to measure them. Therefore, what follows here is my understanding of our history that takes its form from connecting the points where labor and firefighting have touched, have been revealed in accident reports, and written in the memoirs of fires and early firefighters.

The questions I ask are in good faith. Questions about how this workforce sees itself: who we are, and where we are going.

Our Myriad Origins

Most of these “history of wildland fire” stories start in 1910. But before 1910, before 1810—before 10!—fire was managed for community benefit by the first peoples of North America.

As indigenous people were removed from the majority of their lands, these land and fire use practices were likewise removed. As the land and its people were encompassed by the expanding United States, relations to fire changed and the role of a fire worker as we know it today was gradually invented.

Fires still burned wildlands across the United States and were fought by impromptu organizations when they threatened values at risk. “Trees, turpentine, hogs, fences, and a few homes” were reported destroyed in one North Carolina wildfire in 1855. In many states, these impromptu organizations almost certainly included enslaved people, many of whom worked in the woods cutting trees, producing firewood, and harvesting turpentine.

As always, where there are firefighters there are entrapments, burn injuries, tree strikes, heat illness, and tool wounds. And yet, the story of the enslaved forest firefighter of pre-emancipation America has never, to my knowledge, been told.

The process that began in 1910, and continues to this day, was one of an ever-increasing focus on systematized, efficient, and total control of fire in the wildlands. For decades after the 1910 Big Blowup, fire was fought by a small cadre of full-time fire experts, overseeing vast armies of workers who were only employed on a day-to-day basis.

Agencies responsible for fire control went to wherever they could find groups of men able to work a strenuous job in the forest or range. In particularly bad periods of fire sieges, the entire available labor force of the local area would be scoured to staff the fire lines, including at the camps of itinerant workers called “jungles” that housed hoboes and other members of the Western underclass.

This was the time before the Great Depression and the societal changes brought about by the New Deal. Work for many people was precarious and seasonal.

One U.S. Forest Service employee in 1919 believed that loggers and miners made the best firefighters, as opposed to those he called “city riffraff”—the semi- and underemployed “jungle”-dwellers of Spokane, Seattle, Portland, and so on. But, in fact, there was no real distinction during these years between a logger and “city riffraff.” The same man would cut trees in Idaho, fight fire in Montana, pick grapes in Oregon, and over-winter at the YMCA in Spokane – and ride boxcars between them all.

In response to the Great Depression, the government created a constellation of programs to put Americans back to work doing socially productive tasks. One of these programs, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), became a vast standing army of federal employees all over the country trained in wildland firefighting—the first such workforce in U.S. history.

Though the CCC did not survive the outbreak of World War II, in many ways its legacy lives strongly within many fire organizations in the United States. CCC workers did a variety of wildland management work in addition to firefighting, just as the “forestry technician” category of worker has done in many organizations afterwards.

Anyone who has worked a job with "Other Duties as Assigned" section in their position description should see a throughline from those days to now. All over this country the infrastructure that the CCC built is still in service, as warehouses or barracks or engine bays. The CCC even helped create the process of handline construction we now universally use – the progressive or “One Lick” Method.

Who is ‘Us’?

I was reminded of this “city riffraff” comment a few years ago when there was social media commotion over a Congressperson describing wildland firefighters as “unskilled labor.” Indignation was loud and vociferous. Largely unasked in that kerfuffle was the question: What are the words “unskilled labor” supposed to mean? Who do they rightfully apply to? And why is it so important that I not be grouped with them, whoever they are?

Those firefighters on the line with me who plant trees part of the year, or who have spent time in the harvest of the vast California Central Valley, are they skilled or unskilled?

Doesn’t the entry point to nearly any profession begin with the unskilled? One aspect of our profession we tout as a point of pride is the accessibility, the idea that anyone can enter at the bottom with no special skills and “work their way up” to impressive positions and develop intricate and sophisticated skills in tree-felling, fire planning, mapmaking, you name it.

On the federal side, the move toward a single job series solidifies this element as it removes any college education requirements. It can be argued that our history and our future are anchored in unskilled labor.

In 1926, a fire erupted on the Sierra Nevada Front, the steep east-facing slopes of the mountains that form the western edge of the enormous Great Basin. The fire made erratic runs, pushed by the strong and changeable winds for which this area is infamous.

In the midst of one run, five men were caught by fire and burned. Three died on the scene: George Brown and Jacob E. Mitchell, both prison inmates, and Ralph Morse, a Native American railroad employee. Two others, Arthur Sunday, a fire patrolman, and James Whitmore, a prison guard, died later from the burns they received that day.

To commemorate these men, Nevada’s then-Governor James Scrugham said, in part: “The loss of the prisoners Mitchell and Brown and the faithful Indian Morse is of no lesser gravity [than the loss of Sunday and Whitmore].”

At first, this statement seems like a hopelessly anachronistic remnant of a racist and elitist past. But I have to ask, when we conceive of “Us” today, are inmate firefighters a part of this “Us?” Are indigenous fire practitioners using fire in traditional ways a part of that “Us?” What about fire suppression crews from the sovereign lands of the indigenous North Americans, those crews that I have heard maligned here and there as not “real” crews somehow. Are they “Us”?

These two groups of firefighters worked together in Walk Moore Canyon on the 1990 Dude Fire, where a hand crew from Arizona state prison in Perryville were entrapped and forced into fire shelters on a narrow forest road. It was a member of Navajo Scouts Crew 2 who shouted “Get Out!” when they realized entrapment was imminent. The Scouts led the way down and out as the fire made a crown run toward the Perryville and Navajo crews.

Part of the Perryville Crew was cutoff and deployed fire shelters—six did not survive. The cover art of the Incident Action Plan printed two days after the entrapment depicted forest animals seemingly joking about the loss of life.

Expanding the Circle

The task of organizing workers for the sake of adequate pay and conditions has always landed squarely in the hands of labor unions. Compared to other “blue collar” professions, the wildland fire workforce has had very little of the traditional union struggles and benefits. The federal government being the major employer of wildland firefighters has certainly influenced the relative absence of large-scale negotiations, strikes, and protections commonly associated with union-led efforts.

I know of no significant labor action or mass movement in the history of wildland firefighters until the last few years when federal firefighters by the hundreds decided to move along to other employment. Through independent action, Each resignation or retirement done for personal reasons became a tidal movement with the effect of a partial strike of the federal wildland fire workforce that pushed the system to the breaking point that required federal action. 

In looking back, I want most of all to point out that fire management in the United States has never been one thing, nor have fire workers ever looked one particular way. Throughout our history, fires have been managed by indigenous practitioners, by unpaid and coerced labor (either enslaved or in penal servitude), by local volunteers of all kinds, by day workers, by government employees in jobs programs, and most recently, by workers hired fulltime primarily to manage fire. I believe how we understand ourselves now and into the future is inextricably linked to where we came from and why those organizations existed as they did.

Moving forward, I advocate for understanding the "Us" in a broad way, expanding the circle to include as many wildland fire workers and practitioners as will come along. The tasks facing fire management are Herculean and many of the goals stated by federal agencies and state governments seem nearly utopian in scope. I believe it will take all of us to comprehend the tasks and formulate the organizations and alliances that can accomplish them.

The questions that we need to ask won’t be answered in Congress next year. They are deeper and wider than what has been placed before that body. Having found ourselves in the midst of a crisis, there is no better time than now for us to evaluate our vocation as a whole, beyond the limitations of who we have recently seen as “Us” and what our profession has become in the last few decades.

Ideally, the lessons of present and past firefighters would guide future decisions. When I look at the myriad people and organizations who lit or fought fire in the past, first and foremost I see the danger of arbitrary division based on who people are, not on what they do.

The bigger the “Us,” the stronger we are, every time.