Sixth Grade
Worksheets
The Big Burn of 1910
Caption: A lone building still stands in Wallace, Idaho, after the fire.
"Our shoes were burned off our feet, and our clothes were in parched rags." This is the way one firefighter described a scene from the Big Burn of 1910. The Big Burn, or the Great Fire of 1910, occurred on August 20 and 21 of 1910. It was a forest fire that burned three million acres of forest in northeast Washington, western Montana, and northern Idaho. This fire changed the way all future forest fires were fought. It was the greatest forest fire on record for the Rocky Mountains.
It had been a long, rainless summer. It was the hottest summer on record. The forests were dry. June brought lightning storms, which started several small fires along the Salmon River near the Canadian border. Smoke filtered the sunlight the rest of the season. By the end of July there were nearly ninety fires burning near the mountains in Idaho and Montana. Firefighters were in short supply. Finally, the military was called in to assist.
