26/03/2026
A little bit of history for you on a Friday.
One of the hand tools we use on the fire ground is a Pulaski, which is a combination of an axe and a mattock (grubber). Used for cutting and digging along fire lines or during mop up.
The Forest Ranger Who Fought the Big Blowup Alone for Three Days
Edward Pulaski had been a Forest Service ranger in the Coeur d'Alene National Forest since 1908, responsible for a district in northern Idaho that contained the specific combination of steep terrain, old-growth timber, and dry summer conditions that made the 1910 fire season the most dangerous in the Forest Service's short history. He was forty-one years old and had spent his career before the Forest Service as a miner and prospector in the Idaho mountains, which had given him the specific physical and navigational competence that forest ranging in remote Idaho country required.
The fires that came in August 1910 — the Big Blowup, as the Forest Service named them afterward — were not a single fire but a convergence of hundreds of separate fires ignited by lightning and dry-summer conditions and driven by hurricane-force winds that arrived on August 20th and turned manageable fires into the specific catastrophe that killed 85 people and burned three million acres in two days. Edward Pulaski was responsible for a crew of 45 firefighters and civilians working a fire near Wallace, Idaho when the August 20th winds hit.
What he did in the next several hours is in the Forest Service's historical record because he wrote a detailed account of it in 1923, thirteen years after the event, when the Forest Service's historical program was collecting first-person accounts of the 1910 fires. He led his 45 men through a fire that was moving faster than men could run, to a mine tunnel he knew from his prospecting years, forced them into the tunnel at gunpoint when some of them panicked and attempted to flee back through the fire, sealed the tunnel entrance with wet sacks, and held them there through the hours that the firestorm burned above the tunnel entrance.
Five men died in the tunnel — from smoke inhalation in the early hours before Edward's sacks reduced the smoke infiltration. Forty survived. Edward himself was blinded temporarily by the smoke and burns from his hands where he had held the sacks against the tunnel entrance without gloves because he had given his gloves to a man whose hands were unprotected.
He recovered his sight. He went back to forest ranging. In 1911 he invented the Pulaski tool — a combination axe and adze on a single handle that became the standard wildland firefighting hand tool used by every crew on every fire in the United States for the following century and still used today. He invented it because the 1910 fire had shown him that firefighters needed a tool that could do both chopping and grubbing without requiring a tool change, and he happened to have the blacksmithing knowledge from his mining years to make it.
He received a commendation for the 1910 tunnel action. The Pulaski tool was adopted by the Forest Service without patent or royalty payment to him, which was the standard treatment of employee inventions at the time and which Edward accepted without documented complaint. He retired from the Forest Service in 1930. The Pulaski tool is in every wildland firefighting cache in the United States. Every wildfire that has been fought since 1911 has been fought in part with a tool that a forest ranger invented because a fire in 1910 showed him what firefighters needed.
"He led 45 men to a mine tunnel he knew from his prospecting years, held them there at gunpoint through a firestorm, lost five to smoke and saved forty. He was temporarily blinded from the smoke. He invented the Pulaski tool the following year because the fire had shown him what firefighters needed and he had the blacksmithing knowledge to make it. Every wildfire since 1911 has been fought with his tool."
