In 1905, old Mr. Teeth and Testicles himself, President Teddy Roosevelt, founded the U.S. Forest Service, which as you can probably guess from the name had the duty of looking after our nation’s forests. Now at the time, large logging conglomerates were cutting down millions of trees across the western U.S. all willy nilly to supply the world’s insatiable demand for lumber. Thanks to miraculous advancements in modern medicine, the world’s population was growing exponentially, leading to never before seen demand for lumber to build new houses and other random stuff made out of wood, which this being the start of the twentieth century was a whole lot of different shit. As a result, whole forests were cut down, leading many to start worrying that perhaps we were consuming trees faster than new trees could be grown, which was decidedly a bad thing, both in respects to the survival of our species, as well as the ability of said species to enjoy beautiful tree filled vistas. As a result of these concerns, the modern conservationist movement was born, of which Teddy Roosevelt, a man who would’ve humped nature if he could just find the right place to put it, was a prominent proponent. In a relatively short period of time, Teddy locked away millions of acres of forest into public reserves, safe from the swinging axes of loggers, creating the national forest system.
Now at the time, forests in the western United States were probably at about their most natural state in over ten thousands years. That’s right, I said over ten thousand years. You see, in a natural state, Mother Nature allows forests to grow thicker and denser until she gets pissed off at them for whatever reason and unleashes a fusillade of lightening to start fires to burn those bitches to the ground. This was basically what was happening at the beginning of the 20th century, though at times instead of lightening it involved some careless idiot. Though people sometimes fought smaller wildfires, in general when it came to bigger fires basically the only option was to run away as fast as possible. Now for pretty obvious reasons, the various Native Americans who first inhabited what became the western U.S. were not really down with Mother Nature just randomly burning shit up. To counter this, many of them utilized small controlled burns to clear out underbrush and deadwood and open up prairies in the middle of forests. This had the benefit of not only limiting the number and severity of wildfires, but also created spaces for natural root vegetables to grow and wildlife to gather, helping secure food supplies. These practices went on for thousands of years, until renowned asshat Christopher Columbus showed up, bringing with him all sorts of diseases and a decidedly less than accommodating attitude towards other cultures. As a result, after three hundred years of douchebaggery, the Native American population was mostly dead, with the scrappy few survivors forced to assimilate or live on reservations.
The downfall of the Native Americans led to western forests being allowed to return to a mostly natural state for most of the late nineteenth century, which led to increasingly severe fires over time. This culminated in what became known as the Big Blowup of 1910, a massive fire that consumed over three million acres of forest in Montana and Idaho, completely over running several towns. Not too happy with this turn of events, people collectively agreed that something needed to be done, though agreeing on what that might be proved more problematic. Though many top scientists of the day pointed out that the Native Americans seemed to have some proven methods for improvement, a strange coalition of conservationists and loggers were against controlled burns. The loggers viewed burning trees to be the same as burning money, and the conservationists argued that there wasn’t much use in saving the forests from loggers just for the government to burn them instead. You can probably guess who won the debate.
Following the 1910 fire, the Forest Service adopted a policy of snuffing every fire as quickly as possible. Networks of roads and watch towers were built throughout the national forest system, and an intricate system of fire suppression took hold, advancing quickly with the adoption of new technology throughout the early twentieth century. Fire became a hated enemy, and the Forest Service began to see itself as ever vigilant guardians, the thin line between pristine wild lands and fiery destruction. The epitome of the attitude of this era was the creation of a Forest Service mascot, Smokey the Bear, diligently teaching kids from a young age the simple lesson that when it came to forests, fire was bad, period. Such was the zeal for fighting fires, seen as a heroic struggle against that bitch Mother Nature, that alternative ideas were actively suppressed and discredited by the leadership of the Forest Service.
Unfortunately, this turned out to be rather stupid. The continual fighting of small fires led to the national forests becoming overgrown and full of easily burnable undergrowth and dead trees. This situation was further exacerbated by the western U.S. being a climatic dry cycle during the early twentieth century. Though countless small fires were put out, those that did grow larger were increasingly more severe and devastating. Throughout the 1920’s, forest fires grew worse, to which the government responded by hiring more people, something made easier by the Great Depression and resulting New Deal, and buying more equipment. It was an escalating conflict, with no end in sight.