Remembering Mann Gulch - Kalispell woman's memories still vivid of fire that killed her brother-in-law

The Mann Gulch fire blew up as winds intensified on an especially hot, dry August evening. Estimates suggest the lightning-caused blaze covered 3,000 acres in 10 minutes.

“Flames were estimated at 50 feet high and were moving 50 yards every 10 seconds,” according to a U.S. Forest Service history of the Mann Gulch tragedy.

Seventy years ago, on Aug. 5, 1949, 13 men died while attempting to fight and then flee what first seemed to be an ordinary fire near what is now the Gates of the Mountains Wilderness in Helena National Forest. The fire was east of the Missouri River and about 20 miles north of Helena.

Two of the dead were from Kalispell: William Hellman, 24, and Henry Thol Jr., 19.

Another victim, Stanley Reba, 25, was from Brooklyn, New York, but attended the University of Minnesota.

One of Reba’s surviving relatives, Andre Nagel Anderson, 82, lives now in Kalispell. She was 12 years old when her brother-in-law and a friend of his, Joseph Sylvia, 24, died as a result of the Mann Gulch fire.

The Nagel family learned first that Sylvia had died of his injuries soon after the wildfire, which occurred on a Friday. There was no word initially about Stan Reba. Anderson’s sister’s frantic efforts to learn more on Saturday were not successful.

“We marched over to the church,” Anderson said. “We prayed. My mother lit candles. I was thinking, ‘He just couldn’t be dead.’”

On Sunday, news from the Forest Service finally came to the Nagel home in Minneapolis.

“About two o’clock in the afternoon the phone rang,” Anderson recalled. “I heard this wail, this total wail I had never heard before. I went into the kitchen and my dad was just sobbing.”

Anderson said her sister, Julie Reba, never recovered from her husband’s death.

“She just floundered,” she said. “She was totally lost.”

Roughly 10 years after the fire, Julie Reba committed suicide.

Anderson said Julie had visited Mann Gulch after her husband died. She believes that was a mistake.

Anderson recalls that her father had loaned Stan Reba, a veteran of the U.S. Army Air Corps, and Sylvia a car in the summer of 1949 so they could drive west to join the smokejumpers for another summer.

“I remember my dad asking, ‘Are you sure this isn’t dangerous?’ And Stanley said, ‘I went through the South Pacific in World War II and I’m sure this will be OK.’”

Stan and Julie Reba had been married only a few months.

Norman Maclean’s book “Young Men and Fire,” which won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992, chronicled and analyzed the circumstances that led to the Mann Gulch tragedy. The Forest Service also has published accounts of the fire and used lessons learned to revise training for fighting wildfires.

When the plane carrying Forest Service smokejumpers that had been dispatched from Missoula arrived over the fire around 3:10 p.m. on Aug. 5, 1949, the fire’s size was estimated at 60 acres and “was still considered a routine fire,” the Forest Service reported.

Roughly three hours later, 15 smokejumpers and a Helena National Forest fire guard were entrapped by the wildfire in Mann Gulch. Ten jumpers and the forest guard died that evening; Sylvia and Hellman died later from burn injuries and three smokejumpers survived.

When the fire blew up, the men had attempted to flee uphill.

“The men quickly became exhausted due to the steep slopes, high temperature and smoke-filled air,” according to a Forest Service account.

One of the survivors was smokejumper foreman R. Wagner “Wag” Dodge.

As he and his men tried to run from the fast-moving, wind-driven fire, Dodge decided to light an “escape fire,” intending to burn a clearing in advance of the fire, providing refuge for him and others as the fire burned past. Accounts of that day report that Dodge tried to convince others to join him in the burned out clearing, but no one did.

A Forest Service article reported, “The crew members split up afterward, with the majority continuing to run up the canyon...The slowest of the crew members only got about 100 yards before being caught by the fire. One man broke his leg while fleeing on the steep, rocky slope.”

That man was Reba, according to Maclean’s account, which noted that Reba had likely rolled down the slope and into the fire.

“He had literally burned to death,” Maclean wrote.

Varied causes have been cited through the years for the deaths of the other men who died Aug. 5, including smoke inhalation and suffocation.

The Forest Service article noted, “Dodge lay down within the area he had burned off. The grassy slope quickly burned away, giving him a large area free of fuels to prevent the main fire’s flames or radiation from injuring him.”

In the aftermath of the fire, there was controversy about Dodge’s escape fire and whether it might have even contributed in some way to the deaths of his colleagues.

Henry Thol Sr. blamed Dodge’s fire for the death of his son and others who died that day. Maclean wrote that the elder Thol considered the setting of the fire to be “a homicidally incompetent act.”

In addition, Maclean wrote, “The Mann Gulch fire would never have attained its pre-eminence in the history of forest fires if foreman Wag Dodge had not set his escape fire. It made the Mann Gulch fire a lasting mystery story, unlike much larger tragic forest fires that were open-and-shut affairs, buried forever with only one interpretation.”

But the fire was ultimately vindicated and even embraced.

Maclean wrote, “The one invention that came out of Mann Gulch and was immediately made a part of training courses for firefighters is the escape fire. It was spectacular and had saved Dodge’s life and soon became a permanent part of the common knowledge of forest firefighters.”

The last surviving smokejumper from the Mann Gulch fire, Robert Sallee, died in May 2014 in Spokane. He was born in Willow Creek, Montana, but grew up mostly in Idaho. According to a news obituary in The Washington Post, Sallee was back to work 10 days after the Mann Gulch fire, parachuting to fight another fire.

Andre Anderson and her husband, Ronald, moved to Kalispell in 1983 from Minnesota after Ronald got a job as a chemical dependency counselor. He died in 2017.

The couple once traveled to Mann Gulch and made the arduous climb to the markers for Reba and Sylvia.

“The day we climbed I felt I had accomplished something, a dream,” Anderson said.

Of the men who died in the Mann Gulch fire, Maclean wrote, “They were young and did not leave much behind them and need someone to remember them.”

Anderson is among those determined to keep the men’s memories alive.

“You think back, and you just wish, you just hope that they’re not completely forgotten.”

Reporter Duncan Adams may be reached at dadams@dailyinterlake.com or 758-4407.