03/26/2026
In the summer of 1910, a man named Edward Pulaski led 45 men out of a burning forest in northern Idaho and into a mine tunnel and held them there at gunpoint while the greatest wildfire in American history burned over them.
The Big Blowup of August 1910 burned three million acres across Idaho and Montana in two days — driven by hurricane-force winds that turned individual fires into a single continental conflagration. It killed 85 people, most of them firefighters. It is still the largest wildfire in recorded American history.
Pulaski was a Forest Service ranger based in Wallace, Idaho, forty-three years old, a former miner and surveyor who had been fighting the fires in the Coeur d'Alene National Forest since August 19. On the evening of August 20, the wind changed and the fire exploded around his crew. He made a decision in minutes: a mine tunnel he knew about, two miles away, was the only shelter that might survive what was coming.
He led 45 men through burning forest to the tunnel entrance. By the time they reached it, several men were trying to run — panic, which Pulaski understood was reasonable and lethal. He stood at the tunnel entrance with his service revolver and told the men that anyone who ran would be shot.
He did not intend to shoot anyone. He intended to save everyone, and panic was the mechanism most likely to kill them.
The men went in. Pulaski worked at the tunnel entrance, beating out flames with his hat, pouring water from a nearby ditch onto the portal timbers to keep the entrance from igniting, working until he collapsed from smoke inhalation. When he regained consciousness the fire had passed. He called into the darkness: "Are the men still alive?" A voice from inside answered: "Yes, but barely."
Five men died in the tunnel from smoke inhalation. Forty survived. Without the tunnel, the survival count would almost certainly have been zero.
Pulaski survived but was permanently blinded in one eye and had reduced lung capacity for the rest of his life from the smoke. The Forest Service initially proposed to deny his disability claim on procedural grounds. A public outcry — the story had been reported nationally — forced a reversal.
The most lasting consequence of Edward Pulaski's survival, beyond the forty men he kept alive, was a tool. During his recovery, Pulaski designed a firefighting implement that combined an axe and an adze in a single head — allowing a firefighter to both chop and grub with one tool. He manufactured the first prototypes himself. The Forest Service adopted it in 1913. It became the standard wildland firefighting tool in America and remains so today.
It is called a Pulaski.
Every wildland firefighter in America uses one. Most of them know the name. Some of them know the story behind it — a man who held forty-five panicking men in a mine tunnel at gunpoint and then, during his recovery, designed a better axe because there was still work to do.
