Those who came before
The wildland fire service that exists today evolved over decades of forward thinking experimentation, interrupted by organizational reaction to tragedies, all mixed with public and political pressures. Out of all this, the Interagency Hotshot Crew has emerged as the premier asset for large fire suppression and emergency response. Just as the current wildland fire service has evolved, so too have present day crews evolved from those who came before...here is a thread of that story.
During the late 19th century, federally-owned lands were vaguely identified and subject to trespass for a variety of activities. The only protection these early parks and forest reserves had was the U.S. Army. The first military detachment to take charge of federal public lands did so at Yellowstone National Park in 1886. This arrangement was common in other parks and forest reserves until the U.S. Forest Service was established in 1905 and the National Park Service was established in 1916. These troops were tasked with enforcing regulations and protecting resources, which included wildland firefighting duties. Several of these military units were U.S. Army Buffalo Soldiers, which were all-black regiments.
Great Fires of 1910
The story of Forest Service Ranger Ed Pulaski's defense of Wallace, Idaho from wildfire and his forceful actions to save 45 firefighters is legendary. But the Fires of 1910 were also a significant turning point for federal land management policy in this country. The epic destruction of whole towns and vast timber resources along with the deaths of 78 men, pressed into temporary firefighter roles, sparked a national political debate resulting in the passage of the Weeks Act by Congress in 1911. One piece of this legislation mandated cooperative forest fire protection between the federal and state governments. It could be argued this was the origin of wildland firefighting as a professional duty.
The missing years
The documentation for wildland fire activity in the years immediately following the Fires of 1910 is sparse. This is not surprising considering the dispersed nature of the newly established U.S. Forest Service organization; the communication technology of the times; and the effects of World War I and the Spanish Flu epidemic. According to National Wildfire Coordinating Group records there were no wildland firefighter fatalities between 1910 and 1926, while other sources identify a number of fatalities during this same time period. Also, there is very little information available about the many large fires during this period. Lastly, the absence of any substantial firefighting organization lends itself to this thin historical record; crews of this era were put together on an as-needed basis with ranch hands, homesteaders, miners, loggers, railroad crews, and vagrants being conscripted as firefighters by local fire wardens and forest rangers. In the late 1920s the Forest Service began a large scale Blister Rust Control program to protect White pine forests from the disease. These 30 man BRC crews were eventually utilized for initial attack on fires in their respective areas and provided a glimpse of what organized fire crews could provide.
The CCC Boys
In 1933 the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was established as a work relief program during the Great Depression. The CCC program had camps all over the country. Over 3,000,000 young men worked in the woods across the country during a nine year span. The camps were administrated by the U.S. Army, but the crews were supervised by land management agency employees. Many spectacular projects were completed in parks and forests that still stand today…bridges, lookout towers, trails, roads, lodges, dams, campground improvements, and other facilities. The CCC crews were also the first source of organized manpower for wildland firefighting. These crews, while motivated, had a steep learning curve. The CCC program endured many individual fatality incidents, as well as four major entrapments: 5 fatalities on the 1936 Chatsworth Fire in New Jersey; 15 fatalities on the 1937 Blackwater Fire in Wyoming; 8 fatalities on the 1938 Pepper Hill Fire in Pennsylvania; and 5 fatalities on the 1939 Rock Creek Fire in Nevada.
A year of experiments
By the late 1930s the CCC program began restricting the unlimited use of its crews for firefighting due to safety reasons. Diminished access to firefighters spawned some experimentation within the U.S. Forest Service. In 1939 David P. Godwin, Assistant Director of Fire Control, led the Aerial Fire Control Project which conducted the first smokejumper experiments on the Chelan National Forest. Also in 1939, the Siskiyou National Forest put together an experimental crew program for the entire fire season. The crew was composed of carefully screened and trained CCC enrollees with top Forest Service foremen…all were issued a special badge. The crew answered the call to fires all over the Pacific Northwest Region during the season. The title page shown is from the 1940 Fire Control Notes article "The 40-Man Crew" describing the crew experiment. Notice the name of the lead author, Forest Supervisor Edward P. Cliff; his name will come up again. The experiment was well received and was replicated for a couple years. There is evidence that some specially trained CCC crews were identified using the term "Hot Shot." However, with the start of World War II this initiative took a back seat to other priorities and the entire CCC program was discontinued in 1942.
Early Hotshots
During World War II an impressive coalition of fire suppression assets were utilized…state-side military personnel, war time conscientious objectors, inmates, college students, all-women crews, and some local Forest Service on-call crews. Following the war, a more modern era of firefighting began with the help of technological advances from World War II such as helicopters, heavy machinery, larger aircraft, and portable radios. In 1946, the San Bernardino National Forest established an organized fire crew supported with flood control funds. This is the earliest known Forest Service crew to use the term "Hot Shot" which may have been resurrected from the specially trained CCC crews using it in the late 1930s. However, over the next decade all Southern California forests followed with their own hot shot crews. Certainly, the concept was soon well accepted as shown in a 1951 Fire Control Notes article simply titled "Hot Shot Crews" written by the Fire Control Officer of the Cleveland National Forest. By 1954, there were seven hot shot crews in Southern California typically staffed with 30 firefighters from various sources. Most were paid agency employees, but sometimes inmates were used, and some crews relied on Navajo, Hopi, and Zuni Indians from Arizona and New Mexico (as related in an interview with Lynn Biddison, a Hot Shot Crew Superintendent from 1951 to 1953 and a Regional Fire Director from 1970 to 1982). These early Hot Shots set the example as innovators for generations of crews to follow. Two 1956 Fire Control Notes articles, "Brush Saws for Hot Shot Crews" and "Trucks for Hot Shot Crews," were written by a Hot Shot Foreman from the San Bernardino National Forest and illustrate early crew initiatives.
Edward P. Cliff's IR Crews
Remember who co-authored the article about the 40 man crew experiment in 1940? Fast forward to 1961, Edward P. Cliff was now the Deputy Chief of the U.S. Forest Service, and the agency established the nationally funded Inter-regional Fire Suppression Crew program. Five "IR Crews" were initially stationed near airports; and several had dedicated aircraft for a short while. Edward P. Cliff became the Chief in 1962, and more crews were added, pushing the total to nine as noted in this 1963 Fire Control Notes article. Chief Cliff served until 1972; during that decade the program expanded to 19 nationally designated IR Crews. The crew locations are shown in this map originally from the 1974 Fire Management Today article "High Mobility: The Inter-regional Fire Suppression Crew."
We need more Hotshots!
In 1972, under the direction of Regional Fire Director Lynn Biddison, the U.S. Forest Service Southwest Region began to fund their own hotshot crew program on several forests. The 1976 Fire Managment article "Hot Shot Crews Pay Big Dividends" describes the start-up experience on the Tonto National Forest. Then in 1974 the California Region again added more hotshot crews. As all these crew programs were maturing their organization started to become more standardized as shown in these 1969 Hotshot Crew Superintendent Meeting Notes and this 1970 Inter-regional Fire Suppression Crew Manual.
Women Join the Fray
Women have been involved on organized wildland firefighting crews dating back to at least World War II, but the hotshot world had always been off limits to them. Identifying anything or anyone as a "first" in the wildland fire business is as hazardous as the job itself, but it is very certain that women started joining hotshot crews in 1976; and by the late 1980s and early 1990s women began moving into Hotshot Superintendent roles. Today it is not unusual to see women on hotshot crews working in every capacity. Some of these trailblazing hotshots from the 1970s are shown above.
Click on the following links to learn more about each of their stories: Aragon / Brandel / Feldman / Husari / Lund / Shulman
Other agencies join the fray
Then came the "Hotshot Massacre" in California...many hotshot crews were abruptly disbanded at the end of the 1978 fire season due to budget cuts. One outcome from the massacre was the Forest Service pushing the Department of Interior agencies to provide a more equitable amount of national shared resources. A fair share agreement was made, and in 1981 the National Park Service started three hotshot crews. Soon after, crews from the Bureau of Land Management and the Bureau of Indian Affairs began to join the ranks as national shared resources. Eventually, even a few non-federal fire agencies began fielding hotshot crews.
What's in a name?
In just over 30 years, from the late 1940s to the early 1980s, crews morphed in several ways. Crew size declined from the early hotshot crews of the 1950s staffed at 30, to the IR Crews of the 1960s staffed at 25, to a crew mobilization limit of 20 in the 1970s. And the name was a moving target; initially they were "Hot Shots" but somewhere in the 1960s some crews put it together as a single word "Hotshots." In the 1970s a subtle competition for status was found in the organizational co-existence of the Inter-regional Crews and the Hotshot Crews...and some crews even went by the handle of "Inter-regional Hotshot Crew." Then mix in the move from a dispatching tag of Category I Crew in the Large Fire Organization (LFO) era to a Type 1 Crew (or Type 1A or Type 1 IHC) in the current Incident Command System (ICS). This does not even take into account the now defunct Regional Reinforcement Crew program; or the occasional and mysterious appearance of a Smokejumper Type 1 crew. But when all is said and done, who doesn't want to be a Hotshot? Like moving from LFO to ICS, it took a few years to resolve, however by the early 1980s there were over 60 crews and all of them were being called Interagency Hotshot Crew (IHC).
What else can these crews do for us?
As these crews expanded into the different agencies each with different agency mandates, the newly labeled Interagency Hotshot Crews also expanded in the scope of their actions. Following the devastating 1985 Mexico City earthquake, two hotshot crews from Southern California were mobilized to assist in recovery efforts. The crews and their vehicles were loaded into a military transport aircraft and flown directly to the assignment. This marked a turning point for hotshot crews becoming an integral component of the national emergency response capability. Since then, hotshot crews have provided assistance in a variety of all-hazard settings including hurricanes, volcano eruptions, tornados, floods, animal disease outbreaks, and aircraft accidents.
United we stand
With a shared identity, the Interagency Hotshot Crews began to collaborate across geographic and agency lines to achieve common goals. In 1988 the first National IHC Workshop was held in Portland, Oregon. One of the outcomes from this event was the initiative to develop an IHC Operations Guide. Driven by the South Canyon Fire tragedy, the 1995 Interagency Management Review Team report provided recommendations to improve hotshot crew staffing, equipment support, budgeting, and to make the new IHC Operations Guide an interagency standard.
We need more Hotshots, again!
As the wildland fire service entered into this current era, the importance of the Interagency Hotshot Crew program was recognized with the establishment of the National IHC Steering Committee in 1999. This arrangement gave the crews more direct access to decision makers at the National Interagency Fire Center. Again, in 2001 the vital nature of what hotshot crews provide was recognized as part of a new National Fire Plan...funding was provided for a major expansion of crews which led to the 100+ Interagency Hotshot Crew programs now in service.
The Interagency Hotshot Crews of today are a chapter in a legacy which goes back to the very beginning of the wildland fire service. Over the years crews have come and crews have gone, but each crew has its own unique story of origin and growth that is as varied as the personalities drawn to the business. The evolution of hotshot crews is a larger story filled with a little nuance, some conflictive truths, and lots of local legends. To read another thread of the story check out this U.S Forest Service Historian's essay. Through all the changes in national fire policies and national resource management objectives, these crews have proven their worth and remain the answer whenever extreme challenges arise.
About the author
James R Cook
Started as a wildland firefighter in 1975; served 18 years as a Hotshot Crew Superintendent; retired as a staff member for the US Forest Service at the National Interagency Fire Center; student of leadership and history.