the US Congress created the office of Special Agent, as part of the Department of Interior. The Bureau of Forestry was created in 1905 by President Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt, and the responsibility for taking care of those forests were transferred from the Department of Interior, where they were originally placed, to the Department of Agriculture. The new forest service was named the Division of Forestry and the President Roosevelt appointed Gifford Pinchot as the new director (Williams, 2005).
One of the first goals of Pinchot was to decentralize the Division of Forestry from the Washington, DC bureaucrats. Prior to his appointment, almost all decisions about the forests and their ongoing health were made and based in Washington DC. This allowed decisions to be made by mostly uniformed politicians who were well removed from the forests they were charged with protecting. Pinchot believed that decision‐making should be done in the field. He accomplished this by creating forest districts and assigning District Foresters to monitor specific geographical areas (Williams 2005).
As part of his overall strategy, he hired and placed District Foresters in Denver, Colorado; Ogden, Utah; Missoula, Montana; Albuquerque, New Mexico; San Francisco, California; and Portland, Oregon. These District Foresters were charged with caring for these forests, based on the needs of the geographical locational, rather than using standing orders from a distance place. The previous method of standing orders inevitably protected some forests in the United States, while damaging others (Williams 2005). Pinchot believed that the newly formed districts would be more familiar with the unique needs of their geographical location, and those District Foresters would more familiar with local resources that could be utilized to meet those needs.
As part of the decentralization process, Pinchot built the forestry services first warehouse in a centralized location, Ogden, Utah. He filled it with a cache of equipment that might be needed to protect the forests, including firefighting equipment. Not long after creating the warehouse in Ogden, he began building other strategically located warehouses across the nation. He continued to build and fill warehouses in each of the forestry districts. In order, these additional warehouses were built in Ogden, Utah; Missoula, Montana; Albuquerque, New Mexico; Denver, Colorado; San Francisco, California; and Portland, Oregon. This ongoing strategy allowed the forestry service to have the firefighting equipment they needed within the district, and because they were located in locations with rail lines, supplies could be shipped to where it was needed in a relatively short amount of time (Williams 2005).
One of the District Foresters that Pinchot hired was William Greeley. Greeley, who was given the District Forester job in the Rocky Mountains, hit the ground running. Upon his arrival in the Rocky Mountains, he immediately tried to make agreements with lumber companies to help preserve and protect forests, much to the chagrin of Greeley's supervisor, Gifford Pinchot. Pinchot wanted to continue the practice of making verbal agreements with landowners in order to provide for the protection of forest lands, while Greeley wanted the forest industry to take a vested interest in protecting these lands (Williams, 2005).
Greeley continued down the path of trying to secure lumber company partners, and it did not take long before Greeley found a lumber company that bought into this strategy. George Long, who was running the old Weyerhaeuser Timber Company, was convinced that it was in the best interest of lumber companies to help preserve the forests. This decision by Long was partly based on the unbelievable loss of timber that Weyerhaeuser suffered a few years earlier. Because of losses, the company suffered in 1902. Long, and the company, were dedicated supporters of forging large private firefighting cooperatives. In June 1909, Long and Greeley made a formal agreement for cooperative forest management and firefighting efforts (Williams, 2005; “William B. Greeley,” n.d.).
To the best of our knowledge, this was the first formal mutual aid agreement for firefighting (other than landowner agreements) ever made in the United States. This campaign of mutual aid agreements soon spread across the American West. Oregon, Washington, and California soon began creating more forest protection associations, and they looked more at collaborative and cooperative efforts to protect America's landscape.
Greeley also worked to forge agreements with the train companies. Through his efforts, and partially because he tied some fires to trains, Greeley worked to create expedited delivery of firefighting supplies whenever forest fires occurred. Agreements were signed that essentially encouraged those operating trains to provide a quick response of equipment, and if need be, the personnel needed to fight fires. This allowed Greeley to place the equipment near rail lines, as Pinchot envisioned, but it provided priority service, so the trains could rapidly transport equipment to where it was need, much like (Pinchot) envisioned (Williams, 2005).
If another forestry district had an emergency, both manpower and tools could be quickly shipped by rail in a relatively short amount of time. In the grand scheme of things, Greeley felt that animosity should not be at the center of protecting forests. His goal was to protect forests through cooperation and communication among those that had a vested interest in protecting the forests, the stakeholders of the Great American West (“William Greeley,” n.d.).
Looking at IMS methods of today, it does not take much of a stretch of the imagination to see how these historical incidents fit into our modern‐day IMS methods. The first similarity is that Greeley incorporated stakeholders, those with a vested interest in the protection of forest. This is a common practice that is currently used to ensure that planning, response, and recovery is entirely comprehensive. Second, the five basic components include command, control, cooperation, collaboration, and communication. In the years prior to the Big Burn of 1910, Greeley took command and control of the resources he had at his disposal, and he used cooperation, collaboration, and communications to build a method of dealing with almost any major fire. In a nutshell, Greeley worked to provide for the basic principles that make up IMS methods, and he was preplanning for a major event. In times prior to this, the standard procedure was to wait until the resources were needed, in place of preplanning.
These preplans that Greeley worked on would become the key in saving many lives, and in preserving massive amounts of property. In the spring and summer of 1910, the Great American West was suffering a severe drought. According to Petersen (1994–1995), there were either 1736 or 3000 fires in Montana and Northern Idaho prior to 20 August 1910. Many of those fires were blamed on the embers of passing locomotives and various lightning strikes that had occurred over the previous months. Due to the unusual amount of fires, Greeley being desperate for help proceeded to hire everyone he could to work fighting forest fires. While some would question the ethics of his hiring process, it was reported that he would hire anyone capable of fighting a fire. According to reports, this included hobo's, bums, and criminals. In some instances, local felons were released from jail early, or used in a form of work release to assist in fighting the fires (Pollak & Ives, 2015). The fires that plagued the region prior to the Big Burn were so taxing, that all fire crews, including the lumber company crews, were becoming exhausted.
Because of the exhaustion from fighting hundreds of smaller fires, Greeley made the unusual request for soldiers from the federal government to assist with firefighting operations. A group of Buffalo Soldiers from the United States Army's 25th Infantry Regiment, also known as the “Crack Black Regiment,” were sent to the area to assist Greeley with firefighting operations (Pollak & Ives, 2015).
These soldiers were African‐American men who were given the name Buffalo Soldiers by Native Americans. The Native Americans coined this name because of the fierce, brave, nature in which they fought. The Buffalo Soldiers arrived on or about 14 August 1910, with Company G arriving at Avery Idaho, and Company I arriving in Wallace Idaho (Cohen, 2010; Pollak & Ives, 2015).
In comparison to modern‐day IMS Method, this request for soldiers mimics the request for National Guard troops and the military that is sometimes used in modern days disasters. We only need to look at incidents like Hurricane Katrina to see how the military can integrate into almost any disaster response. If we look at the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, we also see that the US Coast Guard was the lead agency, and they too integrated other agencies into
