The summer of 1910 was "slow-cooking the upper Rocky Mountains until they were as dry as desert." (Source 3) It was a very dry year. The snow melted early. In the Bitterroot Range that divides Idaho and Montana, temperatures in April were the highest on record, while May was even hotter and drier. There were no spring rains. Barely an inch of rain fell in June, and none in July, for an area that usually got up to sixty inches of rain a year. Pine-green forests became shriveled and brown. By …show more content…
To the west, ships five hundred miles at sea could not navigate by the stars because of the smoke. Soot reached all the way to Greenland. One-third of Wallace had been destroyed, and nearby Grand Forks, Idaho was entirely destroyed. In Montana, the towns Taft, DeBorgia, Henderson, and Haugan were destroyed as well.
On August 23, a cold front traveled over the Bitterroots, producing consistent rain that doused the fire. The Fire of 1910 was the largest fire in America, but not the deadliest. "The 1910 fire burned its way into the American conscience as no other fire had done." (Source 2)
Because most of the cremation happened within a six hour period, there was little time to control the devastation. An estimated seventeen hundred thirty-six fires burned more than three million acres of private and federal land in Idaho and Montana. Approximately eighty-five people died, of which were seventy-eight