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REVIEWS
A GREAT DAY TO FIGHT FIRE: MANN GULCH, 1949
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by Mark Matthews
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| University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 2007. Illustrations, maps, notes. 280 pages. $24.95 cloth. |
| Wildfire is as old as the convergence of dry tinder and lightning, but the serious literature devoted to this ubiquitous force of nature is only a few decades old. Mark Matthews's book, A Great Day to Fight Fire: Mann Gulch, 1949, enriches that literature by offering a book that is equal parts history, journalism, historical fiction, and epitaph for the thirteen men who lost their lives in 1949 on the Mann Gulch fire. |
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On the afternoon of August 5, 1949, fifteen U.S. Forest Service smokejumpers parachuted into an obscure canyon above the Missouri River, northeast of Helena, Montana, to attack a routine blaze. Within a few hours, the fire had "spotted" below the crew and quickly expanded into a roiling conflagration that overran the men, claiming the lives of twelve smokejumpers and one Forest Service fire guard. In the nearly sixty years that have elapsed since that fateful day, numerous attempts have been made to unravel the mystery of the tragedy, including technical monographs on fire behavior, personal narratives by those who had some connection to either the deceased or the firefighting organization at the time, and philosophical reflections on the nature of the tragedy itself. |
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Probably the best known attempt to make sense of the loss of life on the Mann Gulch fire is Norman Maclean's classic, Young Men and Fire (University of Chicago Press, 1992). To make direct comparisons between Young Men and Fire and A Great Day to Fight Fire would be to miss the point of Matthews's book. Maclean's project was one of translating ostensive "catastrophe" — "terror without consolation of explanation," as Maclean puts it — into "tragedy," with a "filled-in story" (p. 37–38) As such, Maclean grapples with the meaning of the deaths of young smokejumpers who chose career paths that might have been his own, but was not; who might have gone on to jump other fires, but as a result of the convergence of fuel, weather, topography, and fallible human decisions, ended in waves of flame under a hot Montana sun. |
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In contrast, Matthews, himself a former firefighter, has written a book that is simultaneously more detached and more personal than Maclean's elegy. Matthews is absent from the narrative but, with the skill of a journalist and storyteller (and drawing on interviews, letters, and other primary source material), he weaves together the lives of those who directly engaged the Mann Gulch fire and those who were forever transfigured by the tragedy — like Ranger Bob Jansson, who assisted with the recovery effort of the injured and dead, or Julie Reba, whose husband of only a few months died in the gulch. According to Matthews, his goal in writing the book was "to reconstruct the events that led up to and occurred in Mann Gulch as well as bring to life the memory of those who died that day" (p. xiii). He describes the book as a "nonfiction novel," intended "as a memorial to the young firefighters, hoping it will free their personalities from the emotionless confines of historical statistics and distant events" (p. xiii). In this, he succeeds. |
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This is a book that should be read with one finger in the notes, because it is in the notes that Matthews identifies the points where he takes literary license to chink the gaps in what otherwise might be a disjointed, third-person narrative. For some, this reconstruction will remain unsatisfying insofar as it contains elements of conjecture. Nevertheless, Matthews adds much-needed flesh to the individuals — World War II veterans, forestry students, and adventurers — whose stories largely remained obscure and untold. It is a respectful, poignant tribute to the individuals whose lives intersected the Mann Gulch tragedy and the legion firefighters who continue to engage the fires of summer to this day. |
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| David Strohmaier
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| Missoula, Montana |
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