Arson: It ain't like it used to be...

Arson is considered by most, and particularly firefighters, to be a serious crime. Pennsylvania treats it as a first degree felony.  Federal sentencing guidelines call for as little as five years in prison.  States vary, but things were a bit different in the old days.   

Here in my area, just a generation ago, but long enough for the statute of limitations to expire, a local fire chief was reliably rumored to have taken a fire setter back behind the station and administered an “attitude adjustment” to the offender which was probably more painful than what the judge ultimately meted out.  If our current crop of politicians believe laws and punishment for arson are stringent today, they are not students of history.  The first such law in Pennsylvania was passed in 1700, and stated “Whosover shall be convicted of willfully firing another man’s house, warehouse, outhouse, barn, or stable, shall forfeit his or her own estate to the party suffering, and be imprisoned all their lives in the House of Correction at hard labor to the behoof of the said party suffering.”  Apparently life with hard labor wasn’t a sufficient punishment as in 1718, the penalty was increased to death, and in 1767, they took away the condemned’s access to a clergyman before execution.  

As tough as the old Pennsylvanians were, they had nothing on the Babylonians in the days of Hammurabi, around 2000 BC.  “If in a man’s house, a fire has been kindled, and a man who has come to extinguish the fire has lifted up his eyes to the property of the house, and has taken the property of the owner of the house, that man shall be thrown into that fire.”  In both Japan and early Edwardian England, the older Babylonian concepts were continued; the penalty for incendiarism being death by fire, a rather poetic form of justice.  

While societal norms and our jurisprudence have evolved over time, most can probably think of a few incidents where we wouldn’t have minded taking a fire setter on a Marty McFly time travel journey back to meet one the judges from these time periods.  So if anyone knows where to find an old DeLorean….

 

Gifford Pinchot and Forest Fires: The Early Battles

Most of the focus on fighting forest fires; the tools, techniques, and tactics, have long been on the West.  The beginnings, though, came from one of our own; a Pennsylvanian.  Gifford Pinchot, who served two terms as Governor, headed the Forest Service in the early 1900s, starting under President McKinley, and through the administration of his friend and supporter, Theodore Roosevelt.  In the early days, Pinchot was a Forester with no forest, as control of the actual Federal land was in the General Land Office.  Finally, in 1905, Roosevelt was able to out maneuver the land barons’ both in and outside of Congress, and transfer control of the forests to Pinchot’s agency, the newly named United States Forest Service. 

The danger of fire was one of the ways in which Pinchot convinced a reluctant Congress to fund his corps of green shirted rangers.  The danger was not illusory.  In 1871, the Pestigo fire in Wisconsin burned over a million acres and killed 1,182 people.  In Minnesota in 1894, another tragic fire struck which killed 413 people.  Pinchot knew that fire was necessary and in some cases beneficial to forests and understood that nature could never be completely controlled.  His fire control efforts started a debate which continues to this day as to where to draw that line. 

The rangers on the front lines were highly motivated by poorly paid; a miserable salary even for the day of $900 per year.  Pinchot’s directions to them on fighting fires were simple.  As he told the New York Times, “the one secret to fighting fires is to discover your fire as soon as possible and fight it as hard as you can and refuse to leave it until the last ember is dead.”  The Forest Service had some successes in their first two summers as only one tenth of one percent (0.1%) of Forest Service land burned each year.  There were bad years as well, however. 

One of the assistant rangers hired in the Bitterroot area was Ed Pulaski.   He was older than most of the Yale Forestry program graduates initially hired by Pinchot, but a skilled outdoorsman.  The man himself, who died in 1931, is little known, but his name lives on as the inventor of the tool still in use today—the Pulaski tool. 

 

Successors to Pinchot such as Bill Greeley took his concerns and tactics on fire and elevated them in priority increasing the Forest Service role in prevention and suppression efforts.  The debate continues over the proper level of these, but forgotten by many is that man with who it began, Pennsylvanian Gifford Pinchot.