One of the reasons why John Muir and other naturalists would have believed that the grandeur of Western America was shaped entirely by natural forces is that they had no idea how many Native Americans had once lived there. When the Spanish established missions and settlements in “Alta California” in the 18th century, they brought smallpox with them, which decimated an estimated 70 to 90 percent of the Indigenous population.
“A lot of what we think of as wilderness was a temporary artifact of the depopulation of the native people—It was a major crash,” says Pyne. “Explorers and early travelers didn’t believe that such small groups of Native Americans could make significant changes in the landscape. Well, there were a lot more of them in earlier times.”
European colonists brought with them an attitude that fire was a destructive force with no beneficial applications. Lake points out that one of the first official proclamations by a Spanish bureaucrat in California in 1793 was to outlaw “Indian burning,” which was viewed as a threat to the Spanish cattle herds and pastures.
“With attention to the widespread damage which results to the public from burning of the fields, customary up to now among both the Christian and Gentile Indians in this country, whose childishness has been unduly tolerated,” wrote Don José Joaquín de Arrillaga, “I see myself required to have the foresight to prohibit for the future…, if it be necessary, of the rigors of the law all kinds of burnings, not only in the vicinity of the towns, but even at the most remote distances … [t]o uproot this very harmful practice of setting fire to pastureland.”
Successive waves of colonists brought the same dismissive attitude toward the benefits of controlled burns, even though European farmers and herdsmen had practiced it for centuries.
“Europe’s elites treated their own farmers and pastoralists and their knowledge of fire with the same disdain,” says Pyne. “Europe had thousands of years of agriculture and they used fire very widely, but it was a mark of ‘primitivism.’ To be modern and rational, you had to find an alternative to fire.
The ‘Paiute Forestry’ Debate
Not everyone agreed that outlawing cultural and other controlled burns was best for America’s forests. Throughout the late-19th and early 20th century, millions of acres were destroyed by a series of deadly wildfires, many caused by sparks thrown from the new transcontinental railroad.
The trouble with fire suppression laws is that they create a buildup of “fuel” in the forests, fallen trees and drought-ridden undergrowth that feed and spread a wildfire. In the early 20th century, some forestry scientists were calling for a return to the Indigenous practices of “light-burning” to keep fuel supplies low.
Opponents of light-burning dubbed it “Paiute forestry,” meant as an insulting reference to the Paiute Indians of Nevada and California.
“The question was, ‘Do we burn like the heathen Indians or do we protect our forests and timber interests?’” says Lake.
The answer came in 1910 with one of the largest wildfires in American history. Known as the “Big Blowup” or simply the “Great Fires of 1910,” this multi-state conflagration consumed more than 3 million acres and leveled entire towns. Lake says that on one tragic day, 78 firefighters were killed by the blaze.
Rather than renewing calls for a traditional approach to forest management that incorporated cultural burning, a traumatized U.S. Forest Service doubled down on fire suppression. In response, Congress passed the Weeks Act of 1911 authorizing the government’s purchase of millions of acres of land in which all fires would be outlawed.