By: Angie Thomas | Edited By: Jim Hardee

There are few references to large, uncontrolled wildfires in the Rocky Mountains in fur trade journals. One notable exception is George Ruxton’s detailed account of a narrow escape from a wildfire near Pike’s Peak in the spring of 1847. After descending from the mountains to camp beside a spring, Ruxton awoke to find the surrounding landscape engulfed in flames, with fire sweeping rapidly through the gorge and consuming dry brush, pines, and cedars. In a desperate effort to escape, he saddled his horse and drove his mules through the burning grass and brush, eventually forcing his way through a wall of fire and into an icy creek to reach safety.¹ (Click here for full account).  While such large-scale fires were rarely recorded by fur traders, there are several references to intentional burning – often by Native Americans using fire for communication, improving habitat for hunting, or as a battle strategy. 

Fire As Communication

Rather than the intricate smoke signals made famous in Hollywood westerns, Native Americans often set entire valley bottoms on fire to create dense, visible smoke plumes. On August 31, 1804, near the Lemhi River in what is now eastern Idaho, members of the Lewis and Clark Expedition witnessed the following:

This day warm and Sultrey, Prairies or open Valies on fire in Several places. The country is Set on fire for the purpose of collecting the different bands (of Pend d’Oreille Indians), and a Band of the Flatheads to go to the Missouri (River drainage) where They intend passing the winter near the Buffalow.²

Trapper Warren Ferris observed a similar event in 1833:

The Indians with us, announced our arrival in this country by firing the prairies.  The flames ran over the neighboring hills with great violence…and filling the air with clouds of smoke.³

A year earlier, in 1832, Ferris had described a fire signal exchange near today’s Bannock Pass: 

[W]e saw a dense cloud of smoke rising from the plains forty or fifty miles to the southeastward, which we supposed to have been raised by the Flatheads, who accompanied Fontanelle to Cache Valley, and who were now in quest of the village to which they belong. The Indians with us answered the signal by firing a quantity of fallen pines on the summit of a high mountain.⁴

Ferris also recorded an accidental fire that quickly escalated into a threatening situation near present-day Deer Lodge, Montana:

A careless [Flathead] boy scattered a few sparks in the prairie, which, the dry grass almost instantly igniting, was soon wrapped in a mantle of flame. A light breeze from the south carried it with great rapidity down the valley, sweeping everything before it, and filling the air with black clouds of smoke … [The fire] however occasioned us no inconsiderable degree of uneasiness as we were now on the borders of the Blackfoot country … who it was reasonably inferred might be collected by the smoke, which is their accustomed rallying signal, in sufficient force to attack us … Clouds of smoke were observed on the following day curling up from the summit of a mountain jutting into the east side of the valley, probably raised by the Blackfeet to gather their scattered bands, though the truth was never more clearly ascertained.⁵

Fire in Battle

Fire was also used in warfare. In September 1835, Osborne Russell described an attack by “about 80 Blackfeet” who attempted to flush his party out by setting fire to the surrounding grass: 

We lay almost silently about 3 hours, when finding they could not arouse us to action by their long shots they commenced setting fire to the dry grass and rubbish with which we were surrounded. The wind blowing brisk from the south, in a few moments the fire was converted into one circle of flame and smoke which united over our heads. This was the most horrible position I was ever placed in.  Death seemed almost inevitable, but we did not despair, and all hands began immediately to remove the rubbish around the encampment and setting fire to it to act against flames that were hovering over our heads.  This plan proved successful beyond our expectations. Scarce half an hour had elapsed when the fire had passed around us and driven our enemies from their position. At length we saw an Indian whom we supposed to be the chief standing on a high point of rock and give the signal for retiring.⁶

Fire in Hunting

Fire was even used to trap game. In the 1840s, Father Pierre De Smet described a deer hunt near present-day Lake Coeur d’Alene in which fires were lit on both sides of a line to drive animals into the lake, where hunters in canoes awaited: 

On both ends of their line they light fires, some distance apart … The frightened deer rush to right and left to escape. As soon as they smell the smoke of fires, they turn and run back. Having the fires on both sides of them and the hunters in the rear, they dash toward the lake, and soon they are so closely pressed that they jump into the water, as the only refuge left for them. Then everything is easy for the hunters: they let the animals get away from the shore, then pursue them in their light bark canoes and kill them without trouble or danger.⁷

Fire in Art

The drama of a wildfire was not wasted by early artists. George Catlin, an eyewitness to prairie fires, captured the chaos in his painting Prairie Meadows Burning, showing billowing smoke and figures fleeing before the flames. Alfred Jacob Miller’s Prairie on Fire depicts trappers hurriedly creating a firebreak to protect their camp from an approaching blaze.

These accounts demonstrate that fire was indeed a part of life during the Rocky Mountain fur trade, not only as a natural threat but also a cultural and strategic tool.

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1. George F. Ruxton, Adventures in Mexico and the Rocky Mountains (London: John Murray, 1849), 262-263. ↩︎
2. Gary E. Moulton, The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983–2001), 179. ↩︎
3. Warren A. Ferris, Life in the Rocky Mountains, Paul C. Phillips, ed. (Denver, CO: The Old West Publishing, Co., 1940), 215. ↩︎
4. Ibid., 103. ↩︎
5. Ibid., 106-07. ↩︎
6. Osborne Russell, Journal of a Trapper: Or Nine Years in the Rocky Mountains, 1834-1843 (Boise, ID: Syms-York Company, Inc., 1921) 36-37. ↩︎
7. Hiram Chittenden and Alfred Richardson, eds., Life, Letters, and Travels of Father Pierre-Jean De Smet, S.J., 1801-1873. (1905; New York, NY: Francis P. Harper, 1969), 1021-22.) ↩︎