We Burned the Beans

by Jack Horton

It was July 20, 1955. I had just returned to the Bartle Station on the Shasta-Trinity National Forest after fighting the Switzer Fire on the Angeles National Forest.  I stoked more wood into the sidearm water heater in the shower building and stepped into the shower to wash some Angeles soot down the drain.  I was well into the process when I heard someone yelling “fire”. I thought we had been dispatched to a wildland fire. I pulled my clothes on over a dripping, wet body, stepped out of the shower building and saw fire racing through our mess hall. As the tanker (“engine” nowadays) crew foreman, I led the assault on the fire. The 40 gallon a minute pump on the tanker would only supply a single one inch hose line adequately, but we managed to work our way into the fire close enough to make some headway and close enough for me to single my face. I sent Walt Cook with the tanker to the nearest stream to draft another load of water.

About this time, a passerby stopped and told me he had just seen a red fire truck on Highway 89 headed toward Burney. Hoping it was a California Division of Forestry rig, I sent a firefighter down Highway 89 in a pickup to try and catch it and request help. He sped halfway to Burney, but never did overtake this phantom fire truck.

By the time the McCloud tanker arrived and the Bartle tanker returned with a full load of water, we had lost the cook shack; the one building none of us really wanted to lose. District Fire Control Officer, Paul Friday, stared into the cinders in disbelief.

The Bartle fire crew managed to beg meals at the timber stand improvement camp at Ash Creek, but the ribbing we took from these tree butchers for letting our own chow hall burn down was intolerable. It would have been more fun eating C-rations on the front lawn of our station while we converted our garage into a new cook shack. Some of those present at the mess hall burning that night remained in the Forest Service throughout my career. Needless to say, I never forgot July 20, 1955.

I last saw the old Bartle Station site in 1977. There was a beautiful stand of pine trees growing inside the foundation of the old cook shack. Our site preparation work was a success, inadvertent as it may have been.

Printed in Forest Service Humor edited by Gil W. Davies and Florice M. Frank © 1966