Photo reference, Young Men and Fire

[truepenny]

The Mann Gulch fire, August 5, 1949, killed thirteen men, twelve Smokejumpers and the guard stationed in Meriwether Canyon:


Both of these pictures of Meriwether Canyon were taken by a gentleman named Rod Benson. The first is taken from Willow Mountain. The second is taken from the divide between Meriwether Canyon and Mann Gulch. You can understand why the Forest Service was concerned about preserving Meriwether Canyon's beauty.


One of the four men in this picture is William Hellman. In his book Young Men and Fire, Norman Maclean mentions that Hellman "only a month before [the Mann Gulch fire] had made a parachute landing on the Ellipse between the White House and the Washington Monument" (Maclean 29). The person who put this on Pinterest captioned it "Ford Trimotor w/USFS Smokejumpers - including Skip Stratton and William Hellman. This four man crew did a jump on the White House lawn to highlight the new field of Smokejumping."

Skip Stratton, his obituary tells me, was the leader of the crew that retrieved the bodies from Mann Gulch. Merle Stratton, the Smokejumper who got so airsick he didn't make the jump into Mann Gulch, doesn't seem to have been related.


Bill Hellman and Joe Sylvia were the two Smokejumpers who were caught in the fire and survived, horribly burned, for less than 24 hours.


Portraits of all thirteen, from Flickr, here, where the image can be enlarged.


Robert Wagner "Wag" Dodge survived the fire by lighting a fire in front of it and lying down in the ashes. He died of lymphoma in 1955.


This is the best photograph I can find that shows how steep Mann Gulch is--it goes a long way to explaining why the mystery isn't why thirteen men died, but how two men actually managed to beat the fire to the top of the ridge.


These are those two survivors in 1949: Robert Sallee (left) and Walter Rumsey (right). Rumsey died in a plane crash in 1980, while Maclean was still working on Young Men and Fire.


Rumsey and Dodge testifying before the Board of Review. (Getty Images has Dodge's name wrong; he's R. Wagner Dodge, not E. Wagner Dodge.)


This is such a beautiful portrait of Robert Sallee, who died in 2014, that I had to add it to this post.

oldmantravels has a bunch more photographs about the Mann Gulch fire in this Flickr album.

And here, by the way, is the website of the National Smokejumper Association.

Comments

[errolwi.livejournal.com]

Thank you for this.
I heard about the Mann Gulch fire from this podcast with an interesting approach to discussing it.
http://disastercast.co.uk/episode-45-mann-gulch/

[(Anonymous)]

Do you know the song Cold Missouri Waters on Cry, Cry, Cry based in the Fire?

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

That's how I first found out about the book. I listened to it obsessively while finishing Corambis.