Young Men and Fire (25 page)

The formula that gives us a slant distance of 1,400 yards at first looks incomprehensible, except that it comes out with answers that sound about right.

It you want to go one step farther and know why it is true that 1,400 yards is 80 yards closer to the truth about the race in Mann Gulch than a flat map would suggest, you have to remember your sophomore year in high school when you were introduced to plane geometry and for the first time discovered right triangles and Pythagoras, who seemed almost to have invented right triangles. He was also very good at one-liners, and the one of his one-liners that explains the workings of this fancy formula is the one-liner he is best remembered for: the sum of the squares of the two sides of a right triangle equals the hypotenuse squared. It looks like this when
A
and
B
represent the two sides of a right triangle and C the hypotenuse:

A
²
+
B
²
=
C
²

It even works in Mann Gulch.

QED.

I
T’S HARD ENOUGH TO FIND
out about the things the . universe prefers to keep hidden without our government, which somebody you know must have voted for, covering up what has already been found. Sometimes, of course, it hides things to save its own neck and sometimes seemingly just for the hell of it. And where does it find things to hide? Anywhere truth can be found and a dog can scratch and find something
to cover it up with. Anywhere may mean as far away in the backcountry as Mann Gulch.

The timing of the Smokejumpers’ race with fire was more difficult to figure than its distance, and we would need to know both before we could determine the speed of men and of fire. We had taken sixteen minutes to be the duration of the race, and at first I was fairly sure that this figure was correct. Although he said he had not consulted his watch, Dodge testified that it was “about 5:40” when he and Harrison rejoined the crew at point Y. Admittedly there is leeway in that evidence, but the time taken to be the time that the fire caught up to the crew seemed to be based on the hardest of evidence, an artifact, and an artifact is an artifact is an artifact, especially when found on the body of a dead man. The hands of the watch found on Harrison’s body had melted at 5:55, 5:56, or 5:57, the fire damage making it impossible to be sure which.

The Forest Service from nearly the beginning used the melted time on this watch as marking the end of things. As the official
Report of Board of Review
says in a matter-of-fact way, “Within seconds after Dodge walked into the burned area left by the escape fire, at about 5:55 P.M., the main fire passed over. (A recovered watch stopped at 5:57 P.M.)” SO in this story the in-between figure of 5:56 is usually taken to be the tragic end.

Although I was not immediately suspicious of the value of Harrison’s watch as evidence, I developed an uneasy feeling when I found that, late in 1951 and early in 1952, Rumsey and Sallee had been asked to make second statements about the fire. A name began to crop up in my inquiries often enough to make me feel I had better find out who belonged to it—the second statements had been taken in the presence of an A. J. Cramer, the Forest Service “investigator” who had journeyed to Garfield, Kansas, to get Rumsey’s second statement and to Lewiston, Idaho, for Sallee’s.

My uneasy feeling grew when I found (not in a Forest Service archive) a letter to the regional forester at Missoula dated May 23, 1952, from J. R. Jansson. Jansson’s letter is a recantation of an earlier recantation of his first testimony concerning
the time of the Mann Gulch tragedy, which he refers to as the “accident.” The second recantation starts by politely but painfully acknowledging that he, Jansson, had been persuaded, especially by the Forest Service investigator A. J. Cramer, to change his original timing of the race between the men and the fire so that all accounts would agree with what Jansson calls the “established time.” The time of the establishment, according to Jansson, was Dodge’s timing of these events. The devout Methodist then had struggled with his conscience until it forced him to recant once again and return to his original timing: “I would like,” he writes to the regional forester, “to take this opportunity of enumerating my reasons for sticking with my original time statements and what supporting evidence I have to back up my conviction that my times are reasonably correct.”

In addition, he implies that Dodge had been persuaded to change his original timing, which he charges was the same as his own. He says that he talked to Dodge the day after the tragedy, and, although he was too busy to “make copious notes on these conversations,” he carried with him a “strong impression that there was no essential difference in our times.”

Actually, the difference in time that seemed so important to Jansson may not seem like very much; as he himself says, a “time adjustment of twenty minutes in my time would bring me reasonably in line with the ‘established time.’” To his thinking, “the deaths occurred…probably between 5:35 and 5:45.” Jansson arrived at these times by reference to the times of events occurring to him at the lower end of the gulch when the fire blew up. As for the evidence on which the “established time” was based, Jansson says, “It is my honest opinion that the original investigation took Harrison’s watch as prima facie evidence of establishing the time of the accident.” The twenty-minute difference between Jansson and the “established time,” however, would mean that the race on the hill between men and fire was over according to Jansson when it hadn’t even begun according to the “established time.” At 5:35 or 5:37
when it was all over by Jansson’s calculations, Dodge and Harrison probably had not yet caught up with the crew at point Y.

To his charge that he was persuaded to alter his testimony, Jansson adds the equally serious charge that evidence was suppressed to give the impression that Harrison’s watch was the only existing evidence to indicate when the crew was burned. But Jansson, in charge of rescue work at Mann Gulch, had “examined seven or eight watches” taken from or near dead bodies, and a year after the fire he had become deeply suspicious that this fact was being withheld from the public. Accordingly, he telephoned the regional office in Missoula (on September 27 or 28, 1950) and asked for a report on the watches in its possession. “In questioning other investigators,” he informs the regional forester, “I gathered that only Harrison’s watch had been found. Until the record was read to me, I had received nothing but denials as to the existence of other watches, which I knew had existed and could be read.”

It was a “Mr. Kramer,” keeper of the watches in Missoula, who reported by telephone to Jansson that he had four such watches “with readable times,” one at 5:42, two at 5:55, and one at 6:40, a variation to think about, especially the early one at 5:42, since it can always be argued that watches with hands that stopped later were watches that kept running for some time after the fire went by.

It seems almost certain that “Mr. Kramer,” keeper of the watches in Missoula, was the Mr. Cramer who over a year later was to journey to Kansas and Idaho to get second statements from Rumsey and Sallee. For the sake of everyone involved, including him, I had to find him.

I gave the documents to Laird with as few accompanying remarks as possible. I had hesitated some time before informing him about the possibility that some funny business had gone on with what he and I had come to think of as our fire. Laird was headed for a fine career in the Forest Service, and I certainly didn’t want his association with me to hurt him; you’ve heard what Laird said to that.

The next time I met Laird, he said, “We’ll have to see Mr. Cramer.”

I replied, “We have to, if he’s alive. He has the right of personal privilege.”

“He’s alive,” Laird said, “or he was when I last heard. He’s retired and has a home on Flathead Lake. I don’t know him, but I knew one of his sons who was a Smokejumper. If the old man is like his son, he’s big and tough and liable to tell you to go screw yourself.”

I said, “He must be as old as I am or older, so he can’t be very tough.”

But Laird said, “Just the same, better let me call him. I can tell him he owes it to the Forest Service to explain these documents, and you can’t make that argument.”

“Okay,” I said, “but first I’ll write him. And I’ll put it on the barrel-head to him. I’d rather be turned down in the open than sneak up on him with a smile on my face.”

A few weeks later, we made a little outline of what our strategy would be for our meeting with him. Even if he agreed to see us, he probably wouldn’t give us much time, so we decided to concentrate entirely on Jansson’s letter and its main charges—that Jansson had been persuaded to alter his testimony concerning the time of the tragedy and that evidence had been suppressed to make a likely time seem as if it were the only possible one. I told Laird, “I have to be most interested in finding out what happened. But if it turns out the charges are true, I’d be equally interested in the follow-up question, Why to some people was it so important that the deaths of the crew appeared to happen closer to 6:00 than to 5:30 that they were willing to hide evidence suggesting any other possibility?” I asked him, “You think about it, will you? Would the Forest Service have looked like a better firefighting outfit if its crew had died roughly twenty minutes after it actually did?”

“No,” he said, “I’ve already thought about it. It doesn’t make any sense, even if all they were trying to do was to get all their witnesses to agree, because all their witnesses don’t have
to agree in a situation like this to make sense. Dodge, for instance, was at the head of the gulch closer than a hundred yards to the nearest of those who died. Jansson at the disputed time of the tragedy was probably returning from Mann Gulch in the Padbury boat. That’s a lot of difference in perspective and a built-in situation to allow difference of opinion.”

I told him, “Maybe our trouble is we think they thought the difference was important. Maybe we suffer from the belief that the game of cover-up is played only when there is something bad to cover up and only when big boys play it. But for a lot of guys besides Nixon it was a fun game, and all sizes, shapes, and sexes are eligible to play it.

“And don’t kid yourself,” I said by way of conclusion. “It is a game that can be played by woodsmen. There are plenty of big bastards who come out of the woods to become little administrators and little bastards—the woods provide no exception to original sin.”

Laird always tried to look as if he hadn’t heard any such remarks of mine, and I tried to look as if I hadn’t made them. He said, “We’ve waited long enough to hear from Flathead Lake. I’ll call his place this afternoon.”

Late that afternoon, I dropped in to see Laird again before driving back to my cabin at Seeley Lake. Laird announced, “It’s good and it’s not so good. He agreed to see us, but briefly, very briefly. What I especially don’t like is that he seemed old and not to understand very well what I had to say.” I didn’t like that either, so before I left his office we talked things over again and further shortened and simplified the questions we were going to ask him.

I met Laird at Arlee, agency of the Flathead Indian Reservation. He came up from Missoula on highway 93 and I came in a direct line from Seeley Lake on a dirt road that at its peril crosses the Mission Mountains high above the Jocko Lakes, where it almost falls into the lakes and the reflections of white glaciers still higher fall all day into the lakes. At the end of the lakes is a black canyon so buried in its steepness and shade that its gathering, unseen waters are present only as
vapor rising to the tops of the cliffs where the vapor becomes visible as drops of sunshine. Then the unseen gathers noise and multiplies into a roar on its way to the Flathead Valley. Finally the roar comes into sight almost as a waterfall and, once seen, it continues as beauty.

From the mouth of the black canyon it looks as if the whole Flathead Valley had been washed out of it. It spreads like a delta of detritus, ever widening and lowering itself into golden farms.

If fertility counts as beauty, the Flathead Valley is one of the most beautiful agricultural mountain valleys in Montana, maybe anywhere. The fields, although by now all harvested, were still gold and rich enough to be used as pastureland. The cattle had been brought down from the summer grass and shade of the mountains and turned out on the harvested fields in numbers that would have overgrazed them except that the fields had been irrigated all summer from ditches starting at the edges of glaciers, so everywhere everything had followed the biblical precept to increase and multiply.

We saw little of Flathead Lake until we were almost at Cramer’s cottage, because the road on the west side of the lake only occasionally gets close to it. But what we saw wasn’t much like my memories of over half a century ago when my family was thinking of building a summer home there. In Montana, they say it’s the biggest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi, and big it is. But even so, it’s hard to see because of the number of summer homes on its shoreline, and I was glad we hadn’t built on it. We had a hard time finding the Cramer cottage among all the mailboxes lining the side road, but Laird led the way, regarding Cramer as his man. Finally he selected one red cottage out of many red cottages that look much like the mailboxes, went in, and came out with Cramer half stumbling in the lead. Age had probably shriveled him a bit, but he was still big. And it was clear he intended to keep his promise and be brief. He threw himself into a porch chair next to mine and without any introduction said to me, suspecting I was the bloodhound on the trail, “I don’t know much of anything
about the Mann Gulch fire. I was on another fire at the time, on a fire way up near Canada. You shouldn’t bother me—you should see my oldest son, Albert. He was a Smokejumper, and he knows a lot more than I do.”