EIGHTH ANNUAL REPORT 1914 29 



broke away by the wind fanning the smouldering trash into a 

 flame that ran up in the tree tops. Though we had this fire com- 

 pletely trenched it traveled over these fire breaks in the mossy 

 tree tops, driven by a heavy wind, and in an hour's time had 

 covered several sections of timber land. This was the worst 

 fire that we had during the season and as the wind was blowing 

 every day it was nearly impossible to completely control it though 

 we employed two hundred men. While the Washington Creek 

 fire was at its worst two more fires broke out in the Weippe dis- 

 trict but these were more easily controlled on account of them 

 being in a different class of timber where the under-brush and 

 trash were not so heavy. 



On the night of August 20th a general lightning storm that 

 covered the entire Clearwater District as well as a large area 

 both to the north and south of us set more than ninety fires. At 

 this time we had the Washington Creek fire under complete con- 

 trol and we could give the greater part of our attention to the 

 new fires and were able to extinguish the greater part of them 

 before they did much damage. 



The labor conditions were different from what they were 

 in 1910 and we experienced no difficulty in securing plenty of 

 men that were accustomed to woods work to fight fires. As a 

 general thing they were a good class of men and gave us good 

 service. . Though there is a good amount of danger in this class 

 of work when there are limbs, dead snags and large trees con- 

 stantly falling and quite often a crown fire raging we had but 

 one man seriously hurt and this was from his owru_carelessness 

 in cutting his own foot. After two weeks in the hospital he was 

 ready for work again. 



The Clearwater district is only tapped by a rail road on the 

 extreme south line and we experienced a very hard problem in 

 transporting men and supplies to the different fires. We were 

 forced to employ all available teams and pack horses in the dis- 

 trict and in this way barely kept supplied. It is possible that it 

 will be good policy to secure an auto truck of three or four tons 

 capacity for future emergencies. 



We, at all times, received the most hearty co-operation from 

 the officers of the Clearwater National Forest, the Potlatch Tim- 

 ber Protective Association and the Coeur d'Alene Timber Pro- 

 tective Association. 



Very respectfully submitted, 



T. J. HUMBIRD, 

 G. A. RUBEDEW, 

 BEN E. BUSH, 



Fire Committee. 



