[Vision2020] One Hundred Years Ago Today (August 20, 1910)

Fri Aug 20 05:52:23 PDT 2010

The fire of 1910, or as it is otherwise known as the "Big Burn of 1910".

Courtesy of the Spokesman-Review and their thorough series, located at:

http://www.spokesman.com/1910fire/

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Great fire wiped out wild towns of Taft, Grand Forks

Logging outposts reviled for boozing, brothels

Back in 1910, respectable folk believed that the wild, debauched towns of
Taft and Grand Forks deserved to burn in hell.

They got their wish. Both towns were wiped clean by the Big Burn of 1910.

Search for them today, and you'll find nothing but a dusty and uninhabited
freeway exit (Taft) and a tangle of undergrowth below the Route of the
Hiawatha mountain-bike trail (Grand Forks).

But from 1907 to 1910, those old towns howled.

Both owed their existence to the most expensive and audacious railroad
engineering feat in the nation's history - the construction of the Milwaukee
Road over (and through) the Bitterroot Range from the St. Regis River in
Montana to the St. Joe River in Idaho. These rough-hewn towns sprang up
overnight as work began on the line's dozens of tunnels and trestles.

Taft was the biggest and most notorious of the new railroad towns. Its
population shifted with the arrival of practically every work train, but at
its height it was said to be 3,200.

At one point the town had 23 saloons. It also had, according to one
contemporary letter-writer, "300 women and only one decent one."

They served the railroad work gangs, who were not exactly model citizens. In
the spring of 1907 alone, 18 murders were committed. Sometimes, no one even
knew a murder had taken place until the spring thaw came and a corpse
appeared from under a snowbank.

Taft was also the scene of Balkans-style ethnic tensions. In one notorious
incident, the self-proclaimed "king" of a large contingent of Montenegrin
laborers was shot by a foreman. An ethnic riot nearly flared; subsequent
shootouts left the foreman and five Montenegrins dead. 

The very name Taft was a kind of ironic joke, according to a story told in
both "Up the Swiftwater" by Sandra A. Crowell and David O. Asleson, and in
"The Big Burn" by Timothy Egan (two books which provided much of the
information in this story).

The story, possibly apocryphal, goes like this: In 1907, William Howard
Taft, then the Secretary of War, came through the unnamed - but already
notorious - work camp and stopped to make a speech from the platform of his
Northern Pacific train. He berated the town as a blight and a smudge on the
American landscape and told the assembled throng to clean up their act. The
railroad workers gave him a big, drunken cheer (or maybe jeer) - and then,
by acclamation, they named the town in his honor.

Taft burned down at least twice before the Big Burn, each time being reborn
with more saloons and brothels than before.

In 1909, a Chicago Tribune reporter came through and called Taft "the
wickedest city in America." 

But there was plenty of competition. When Grand Forks hit its stride, it
"quickly went into first place for that honor," said ranger William W.
Morris.

Grand Forks was at the mouth of Cliff Creek on the Idaho side, down in a
lush hollow far below the tracks. It was built around a muddy square,
surrounded on all sides by rough wooden saloons, chow houses, boarding
houses and "hotels."

Here's how the Forest Service's Joe Halm - famous for his Big Burn exploits
- described Grand Forks in a memoir:

"During the mornings, the court (square) was deserted except for a few
sobering stragglers sitting on empty beer kegs piled in front of the 12 or
15 saloons.

". Toward evening, the town would begin to show signs of life and as night
came on and as oil lamps began to glow, player pianos began their tinny din,
an orchestra here and there began to tune up. Women daubed with rouge came
from the cribs upstairs and sat at lunch counters or mingled with the
ever-increasing throng of gamblers and rough laborers from the camps. As the
hours wore on, the little town became a roaring, seething riotous brawl of
drinking, dancing, gambling and fighting humanity."

Grand Forks had burned twice before, once in 1909 by accident and again in
July 1910, when a prostitute poisoned a customer and set her room on fire to
cover up the murder. By August, the town had revived in hastily built
shacks, tents and even a treehouse, which became the place of business for
two high-flying prostitutes.

Yet on the afternoon of Aug. 20, 1910, when the winds whipped the mountains
into a roaring, red-hot frenzy, both Taft and Grand Forks were defenseless.

The saloon-dwelling population of Taft, to the disgust of the forest
rangers, showed no gumption when it came to saving the town. The rangers
went from saloon to saloon trying to round up men to work the firelines, but
got few takers. In Egan's words, Taft's denizens had decided that "if they
were going to be burned to death in an inferno . they would go down drunk."

They tried to drain as much whiskey from the barrels as they could before
the evacuation train came through. Everyone was staggering toward the
platform when the burning embers came raining down and the trees began to
topple. The train made it out just before the wall of flame hit.

There was only one fatality - a drunk whose clothes caught fire before he
got on the train. A ranger rolled him in the dirt, extinguished him and
hauled him to the train. When the man got to Saltese, he was wrapped in
bandages and put in a dark boxcar to recover. A fellow drunk came in to see
him, lit a match - and caught the man's oil-soaked bandages on fire. He
burned to death.

In Grand Forks, the inhabitants had time only to race to the train platform
at nearby Falcon before the saloons, tents and shacks vanished "in a sniff,"
according to Egan. 

The inhabitants, along with the frightened population of Falcon, huddled at
the depot, hoping a rescue train was on the way. It was. An engineer backed
an engine and boxcar six miles to Falcon. The frightened people grabbed on
to whatever handhold they could find and, after a harrowing trip, finally
made it to Avery.

Both Taft and Grand Forks made desultory attempts to rebuild, but by 1911,
the forest rangers managed to shut down the last tent saloon in Grand Forks.

Taft revived partially and served as a staging point when the Milwaukee Road
electrified its line over the Bitterroots. But Taft never regained its
former size or notoriety. By the 1930s, the Federal Writers Project reported
that Taft consisted of only four buildings, all abandoned.

Today, travelers who take the Taft exit on I-90 won't even see abandoned
buildings. There's a sand pile for use by freeway snowplows and some piles
of old railroad ties. The old main street is covered by the interstate.

That's more than you'll find at Grand Forks. The green forest reclaimed it
long ago. You can drive to the spot where Cliff Creek empties into Loop
Creek, but rangers say you can find the old townsite "only with metal
detectors."

And what might those metal detectors find? Maybe the wires and mechanisms of
old player pianos, which played their last ragtime tunes in August 1910.

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Patrons gather at a saloon in Grand Forks, circa the summer of 1908. The
patrons' attire and flies on the wall indicate it's summer, and the electric
light on the ceiling indicates a time before a power plant at Taft was shut
down in early 1909.

http://media.spokesman.com/photos/2010/08/19/GRAND_FORKS_HISTORICAL_t620.jpg

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Seeya round town, Moscow.

Tom Hansen

Moscow, Idaho

"Evening found our little party many miles from camp. We saw the remains of
an elk and several deer; also a grouse hopping about with feet and feathers
burned off - a pitiful sight. Men who quenched their thirst from small
streams immediately became deathly sick. The clear, pure water running
through miles of ashes had become a strong, alkaline solution, polluted by
dead fish, killed by the lye. Thereafter, we drank only spring water."

- Joe Halm, fire fighter (August 27, 1910)

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