The Sierra Buttes Lookout in 1945
Photo Courtesy of the U. S. Forest Service
In 1850 gold was discovered in the region and soon became the sole focus of Euro-American miners. The gold was underground and required elaborate and often expensive machinery to mine. But after about 1865 there was no shortage of investors who made mining much more profitable, at least for the investors. For the average miners and their families there was steady year-round work.
Artist, M.L. Strangroom (18??)
Courtesy of the Bancroft Library
Just upslope to the north and above the town of Sierra City were several mines, the most notable being the Sierra Buttes Mine which, in its 80 years of existence, produced $17 to $20 million in gold. From 1870 to 1905 it was owned by English investors who paid the over 200 miners who worked there $2.50 to $3 a day. By the time the mine closed there were very few standing trees in this area – the vegetation that remained was primarily brush.
Map by James Sinnott (1978)
Sierra City and the Sierra Buttes Mine (1900)
A Stereo Photo of the Employees of the Sierra Buttes Mine (date unknown)
Photographer M. M. Hazeltine
Fire is part of the ecology of the Sierra Nevada. To date, our experiment with fighting or “stamping out” fire has not worked very well. We still want to have our way with nature, yet we seem oblivious to the reality of being locked in her embrace. We’re going to have to learn to live with fire. What follows is the story of the Tunnel #6 Fire as told to me in 2012 by Todd White, a wildland firefighter for the Tahoe National Forest:
The Tunnel #6 Fire as told by Todd White
“If you stand on top of the Sierra Buttes and look to the south and you look downhill at the bottom you’ll see a river canyon and that’s the river canyon where the North Fork of the Yuba River flows, and upslope of that is the old gold rush town of Sierra City. This hillside is big and open and drops more than 4,000 feet to the river canyon below. It’s broken by drainages that run downslope, and covered primarily in mountain chapparal like greenleaf manzanita, silk tassel and huckleberry oak brush. Mid-slope on that hill, more than 50 years ago, a group of men took to salvaging some scrap iron from a penstock of an old gold mine. Their cutting torches threw some sparks which started a fire, and that fire became known as the Tunnel #6 Fire.
When the Forest Service got wind of this, they dispatched fire fighters. At around 4 o’clock that afternoon a group of firefighters hiked up and started building a fire line. Most of these firefighters were inmates. They were inmates from Folsom State Prison that were supervised by the Forest Service superintendent and a couple of three foremen. In summers they lived in canvas-walled tents at the old Eureka Honor Camp #24, which was not far away from Eureka Diggings. Daily they’d work on timber stand improvement and other reforestation projects and occasionally they’d fight some fire.
Well, so they’re swinging brush hooks, Pulaskis, McLeods and shovels and not really getting anywhere – they weren’t really making very good progress. The wind would blow and throw spot fires and they’d have to back up and start again. About 8 o’clock that night they decided to bag it and retreat back to the road and get a bite to eat and rest up and come up with a new plan.
Well by then, there were more firefighters and there was an old cable dozer that belonged to a logging company. They decided to put a fire line on a ridgetop that was about a mile to the west of where the fire had gotten established in Independence Ravine. This ridgetop would connect a couple of roads that contoured above and below the fire and if they could build it and burn it out in time, they could successfully box the fire in. So around midnight the dozer’s pushing downhill, the men from the honor camp and a schoolteacher from Downieville filled in behind improving the fireline and getting it ready to burn out. Now all evening the cool night air was doing what it does, which is flow downhill and downcanyon and kinda keep the fire parked down below – it really wasn’t moving uphill.
But sometime around 2:30 in the morning the wind switched and started coming out of the east. It was a dry wind and it started blowing pretty strong and it started to push the fire’s edge toward the dozer line and these firefighters. Well, the order came to abandon the fire line and get everybody downhill and load them into the trucks and relocate them out to the west and the north up at a place called Mule Camp, which would be out of the way of the fire if it kept blowing west unchecked. Well, all but four of them made it to the bottom of the handline and those four they got cutoff by a finger of fire that blew across the dozer line and cut them off and got established in a windy ravine and forced them to retreat uphill. But one of them made it uphill to the Shaughnessy Wood Haul Road and got up there, but the other three didn’t. They were found later that afternoon, not more than 150 feet from the road that would have got them out of there. That fire eventually burned 2,500 acres and a few structures. Later that week a headline in the San Francisco Examiner read, “Three Felons Die Fighting Fire in Sierra City.”
Well, there’s no cross on a hill that marks where Frank Burr, Mel Grodzik and Richard Fierro fell in 1954 and luckily there hasn’t been a firefighter burned over on the Tahoe (National Forest) since. But those hard-fought lessons in the Tunnel #6 Fire helped shape what became known as the Ten Standard Firefighting Orders that, to this day, are taught, learned and memorized by firefighters everywhere. About the only thing that remains on the hill now is a small number of rusted hand tools buried underneath the mountain chaparral on that south aspect of Sierra Buttes.”
The FlumeCreek Drainage on the Southeast Slope of The Sierra Buttes
Despite the brevity of Todd’s story his narrative reveals some of the skills typical of the men and women who fight wildland fires. He is alert to the topography, vegetation, wind direction, the location of his colleagues, possible escape routes and more. We’re fortunate to have such wide-awake, disciplined and courageous people around. We appreciate the firefighters and respect their skills!
Eight years ago, I assisted artist Kris Timkin with an audio project by recording Todd White. For me the project was a rewarding experiment in acoustic geography, and I recommend checking it out: http://absencepresenceaudio.com On the website you can hear Todd White tell the story about the Tunnel #6 Fire. You’ll notice that storytelling has more vibrancy and nuance than the written word. It’s the way we’ve taught, learned, entertained and bonded for who knows how many years.
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