This post is part of the Tracking the Effects: Environmental History and the Current United States Federal Administration series edited by Jessica DeWitt, Shannon Stunden Bower, and Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles. Submissions for this series are being accepted on an ongoing basis. Learn more here and here.
American forests have been under assault the last few years, and not only because of fires; indeed, perhaps the biggest fires they have faced are not natural but political. On January 20, 2025, President Donald Trump established via executive order the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) on his first day in office of his second term. In the months that followed, DOGE, headed by the world’s wealthiest man, took an axe to government agencies, including the US Forest Service (USFS), to reduce federal spending. Despite these cuts, however, recent evidence shows that DOGE only succeeded in making the government more inefficient and increasing government spending. Around this same time, in March 2025, Trump announced “an immediate expansion of timber production” in national forests. Most recently, in late-March 2026, the Trump administration announced a massive overhaul characterized as “common sense forestry” that shifts the USFS headquarters to Salt Lake City, closes 57 of its 77 research centers, and shutters all nine regional offices in favor of 15 politically-appointed state directors. These highly-controversial actions are all part of a broader political sweep aimed at rolling back environmental legislation for the sake of economic development on America’s public lands, a persistent conservative strategy going back a half century to the Sagebrush Rebellion.1
While these policies are peddled as innovative reforms, they echo an earlier era when weak governmental oversight, inadequate funding, and deference to extractive industries contributed to devastating forest fires across the Upper Midwest. More than a century ago, devastating fires in northern Minnesota helped convince state policymakers that forests could not be left to private interests and underfunded public institutions alone. Hinckley (1894) and Cloquet (1918) burned their names into the nation’s history along with other great fires like Peshtigo and the Big Blowup. But between these two deadly fires, in each of which more than 400 people perished, were two less well-remembered, less deadly, but no less influential burns. The 1908 Chisholm Fire and the 1910 Baudette Fire reveal why forestry institutions were created in the first place, and why weakening them today carries significant risks. The forestry institutions built in their wake emerged from hard-won lessons that remain relevant today.
Forestry was a controversial topic at the turn of the twentieth century. Minnesota established its fire warden system in 1895 following the Hinckley disaster, which in 1905 reorganized as the Forestry Commission, yet it was always woefully underfunded and undermanned. This system deputized local residents to act as fire wardens in their communities, an imperfect program that sometimes led to corruption due to overseeing neighbors and community members. Compounding the issue was the minimal fines that the state placed upon loggers who did not burn their slash piles.2 The idea that expending money on forests, whether for preservation or for fire prevention, was novel at the turn of the twentieth century and met vocal political opposition. No individual understood these weaknesses better than Christopher Columbus Andrews, Minnesota’s Forestry Commissioner, who for decades advocated for more sustainable forestry practices and logging regulation.3
Just two years before Chisholm, in 1906, the drought-stricken Mesabi Iron Range was “a veritable furnace” with fires blazing and settlers lighting backfires. The relative lack of wind was the only thing protecting millions of dollars’ worth of property in the richest iron-producing region in the world from devastation.4 Those winds shifted two years later in the summer of 1908.
Overall dry seasons persisted through 1907 and into 1908. Fire Commissioner Andrews reported that “Since the Hinckley forest fire of 1894, in which 418 persons perished, there have been several very dry seasons in Minnesota, but none so dangerous as during 1908.”5 Despite the dry conditions, what befell Chisholm was not natural: it was started by a fishing party, augmented by prolonged drought and wind gusts, and fueled by wasteful logging practices that left unburned slashpiles littered through much of the cutover.6 One of numerous fires burning throughout northern Minnesota over a period of six weeks, the costliest of these was a 20,000-acre blaze that completely destroyed Chisholm, an upstart mining community of 3,000 inhabitants on the quickly growing Mesabi just north of Hibbing, causing damages close to $1.5 million.7 Despite destroying entire towns and leaving thousands homeless, the Chisholm Fire did not claim a single human life; Minnesota, it seemed, narrowly escaped a second Hinckley.
Chisholm served as a wake-up call for Minnesota. Fire Commissioner Andrews had long decried the lack of funding and government support for effective forestry reform and fire policies, though his concerns had been ignored.8 In Chisholm’s wake, the Minnesota State Legislature passed H.F. No. 76 to better “promote the public welfare to have safeguards for the prevention of such fires.”9 Most notably, this act divided the state into districts overseen by employed rangers and increased the state’s annual fire budget to $21,000. While these were welcome changes, Andrews believed the legislature did not go far enough, hoping that Chisholm would inspire the state legislature to be “much more liberal than it had been with money for the prevention and suppression of forest fires.”10 The Fire Commissioner still had to operate on slim margins, allotted only $21,000 to patrol more than a million acres susceptible to fire in Minnesota; Andrews cited New York, which had a smaller area susceptible to fires, but whose legislators granted a budget of nearly $100,000 for fire prevention and suppression in 1903. Despite the improvements made following the Chisholm disaster, Minnesota’s fire protection system remained understaffed, underfunded, and ill-equipped for another dry season.
An additional problem with Minnesota’s forest policy was that the overwhelming majority of forested land was privately owned. On September 5, 1910, just a month before the Baudette blaze, President Taft spoke at St. Paul to the National Conservation Congress. Taft warned that “The usual destructive waste and neglect continues in the remainder of the forests owned by private persons and corporations.” Yet, Taft explained that these privately owned forests were beyond the jurisdiction of the federal government, and that “If anything can be done by law it must be done by the state legislatures.” Nationally, 75 percent of forested land was privately owned, and, according to Taft, only 3 percent of the private forest landowners actually adhered to the law.11 A 1911 government report by the Bureau of Corporations found that six private holders owned 54 percent of all of Minnesota’s pine forests.12 Stricter state laws and the ability to enforce them was, Taft believed, not only in the states’ constitutional power, but also “in the general public interest, as to fire and other causes of waste in the management of forests owned by private individuals and corporations.”13
Unrelenting droughts persisted in Minnesota after Chisholm. Until it was destroyed by the fire in October, the weather station at Baudette reported having received only about ten inches of rain the entire year of 1910, a figure less than half of what Baudette received during that same nine-month period the previous year.14 Andrews proclaimed that 1910 was “the driest in Minnesota of any year of which there is a record…[and] has been the most dangerous in respect to forest fires that has occurred.”15 George Chapin, who served as a ranger in the Rainy River district during 1909 and 1910, was recalled from the field on September 1, 1910 when the Forestry Commission ran out of funds. “The [Rainy River region] is a tinder box,” Chapin attested. “Much of the country has been cut over for a dozen years and is filled with slashings that will burn like matches.”16
A series of massive fires broke out in northern Minnesota a little more than a month after the Forestry Commission exhausted its funding. In total, Commissioner Andrews estimated that more than a million acres of forests burned in Minnesota during 1910, the most notable being the blaze that raged through Chapin’s Rainy River district. The Baudette Fire burned between 300,000 and 360,000 acres near Lake of the Woods, completely leveling the logging towns of Baudette and Spooner, home to several thousand inhabitants. The fire claimed anywhere between 29 and 42 human lives and left thousands homeless in rugged and remote northern Minnesota with winter fast approaching.17 Thousands of refugees huddled onto relief trains, including dozens of box cars sent by the Canadian National Railway, which carried at least 2,000 victims to Rainy River “like cattle.”18
The 1910 fire season burned millions of feet of lumber laying in northern Minnesota mill yards, along with a cumulative total of one million acres of forest and prairie. As the fire burned, one lumberman estimated that the loss in standing timber would “be about $6,000 a square mile.” Suddenly, in the wake of catastrophe and economic peril, Minnesota was “sparing no expense in fighting the flames.”19 In his report following the Baudette disaster, Andrews explained that “There must be some spirit of sacrifice all around if we are to succeed in averting the terrible forest fires that discredit our civilization.”20 Andrews once again vied for stricter fire policies, advocating that “The thousands of settlers in the forest regions of Minnesota should not be made to live in fear and terror of forest fires. The dignity and humanity of the State demand that every reasonable means of protection be provided.”21 Andrews called for what would have been the most progressive forestry and fire prevention plan in the United States: a whopping $200,000 annual appropriation to pay rangers, prosecute lawbreakers, and work to prevent and expediently suppress fires. To Andrews and many others, responsibility for the 1910 disaster fell squarely on the state legislature. As Andrews explained, had the last legislature granted his funding request of $38,000 per year (and not the $21,000 they gave him), “It is probable that if there had been means for continuing ranger service in that locality the calamity would not have occurred.”22 Unlike Chisholm, Baudette finally generated the political momentum necessary for substantial institutional change.
The Baudette Fire succeeded in furthering the ambitious work of forestry in Minnesota. Two months later, in December 1910, forestry leaders from Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota met at St. Paul for the Lake States Forest Fire Conference, a meeting that fire historian Stephen Pyne regarded as “probably the first national meeting devoted exclusively to the fire question.”23 In April 1911, the Minnesota legislature passed the Minnesota Forestry Act, which formally established the Minnesota Forest Service, a precursor to the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, and granted an annual appropriation of $75,000. While Andrews and William T. Cox, the state’s first Chief Forester, both regarded the $75,000 figure as inadequate, Minnesota’s forestry budget nearly quadrupled from what it had been in 1910.24
In 1910, the problem was largely that governments lacked both capacity and the authority over privately owned forests. Today, the danger is that governments possess authority but are losing the capacity to exercise it effectively. Hinckley (1894), Chisholm (1908), Baudette (1910), and Cloquet (1918) taught Minnesotans two expensive lessons. First, that private ownership alone could not manage landscape-scale fire risk and, in fact, typically worsened conditions, and second, that effective fire governance required durable public institutions. In 1910, the federal government lacked the jurisdiction over vast private timberland holdings, and state governments slowly established jurisdiction over them after disaster struck. These policies were the fruits of, as Andrews put it after the Baudette Fire, “a costly tuition.”25
Over the twentieth century, governments responded by expanding both regulatory authority and public ownership. The modern USFS, state forestry agencies, ranger systems, research stations, and public forests are all products of that historical process. The great fire era decisively settled the question of whether or not the government should have a role in land management. Today, the issue is whether those institutions will retain the personnel, expertise, and resources necessary to fulfill the responsibilities that earlier generations created for them after witnessing the consequences of inadequate governance. Today, the federal government possesses authority over large swaths of public forests, but layoffs and funding cuts may lead to a lack in the necessary personnel and resources to manage them effectively. These cuts are particularly concerning given the increasing frequency and scale of wildfires in North America, with human-induced climate change shifting the firescape eastward and making humid areas more apt to burn. The effects of these megafires are not only local or regional, but national and global. More megafires means more smoke, which kills tens of thousands of people every year and has shown to reverse the progress made toward repairing the ozone.26
Upfront costs–in research, in personnel, and in deployment–are essential for fire prevention. That is a rule that is as true today as it was in 1910. New research has shown that every $1 invested into the US Forest Service prevents nearly $4 in damages. Yet today, as in the early twentieth century, the federal government, despite possessing knowledge indicating the opposite, would rather spend money in disaster relief than in disaster prevention. The danger today is not a return to the ownership patterns of the early twentieth century but the erosion of the governmental capacity that those historical disasters slowly helped create.
Notes
1. In this century, conservatives have struggled to overturn President Clinton’s push to pass the Roadless Rule in 2001 during his final few days in office, which protected nearly 60 million acres of designated wilderness area from road development. Many of the areas upon which the Trump administration seeks to increase logging activity have been protected by the Roadless Rule. For the inception of the Roadless Rule and its background, and how it fits within broader conservative politics and their decades-long efforts to reverse it, see James Morton Turner, The Promise of Wilderness: American Environmental Politics since 1964 (University of Seattle Press, 2012), pp. 351-373; James Morton Turner and Andrew C. Isenberg, The Republican Reversal: Conservatives and the Environment from Nixon to Trump (Harvard University Press, 2018), pp. 75-81, 94-97.
2. As Andrews lamented following the 1908 Chisholm Fire, “there is no minimum penalty in the Fire Warden Law…the highest fine imposed was $50.00, but in some cases the fine was as low as $5.00 and $1.00.” Andrews recommended a minimum penalty of $50. Christopher Columbus Andrews, Short Special Report on Forest Fires in Minnesota, 1908, Office of the Forestry Commissioner, 12. Accessed online May 31, 2026 via https://firearchive.omeka.net/items/show/50.
3. Andrews first appealed to Congress in 1880 to grant 300 sections of land at St. Paul for the establishment of a forestry school, modeled upon those in Europe. Congress declined his request with some citing such a school and professional forestry as unnecessary. Had this bill passed, the school would have been the first in the US specifically dedicated to forestry, predating Biltmore by 16 years. For Andrews and his appeal for a forestry school, see US Senate Committee on Agriculture, Letters, Reports, Etc. on the Establishment of a School of Forestry (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1880).
4. “Mesaba Forest Fire,” The Oconto Falls Herald (Oconto Falls, Wis.), August 23, 1906.
5. Andrews, Short Special Report on Forest Fires in Minnesota, 1908, 1.
6. Andrews, Short Special Report on Forest Fires in Minnesota, 1908, 6.
7. In total, the 1908 fire season burned across more than 400,000 acres of Minnesota forest and prairie. Andrews, Short Special Report on Forest Fires in Minnesota, 1908, 10-11; Agnes M. Larson, The White Pine Industry in Minnesota (repr., 1949; University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 341-342. Andrews wrote that “Fourteen years ago the country around Chisholm was a silent forest solitude. To-day, within a radius of ten miles of Chisholm is an active population of 12,000.” This would have included at least part of Hibbing, the leading ore producer on Minnesota’s Mesabi Iron Range, located about 7 miles southwest of Chisholm. Andrews, Short Special Report on Forest Fires in Minnesota, 1908, 10-11. See also “Floods of Flame Surge Over Northern Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan; Millions of Dollars’ Worth of Property Destroyed,” St. Paul Pioneer Press (St. Paul, Minn.), September 6, 1908.
8. In 1905, Andrews presented a bill to the state legislature that mandated slash burning in the state. If logging companies did not burn their own slash they produced, the state would do it for them “and the expense be a lien on their property.” Had this passed and been enforced, Andrews believed, “neither the Chisholm nor the Baudette calamity would have occurred.” Andrews, Special Report of the Forestry Commissioner of Minnesota on the Forest Fires in 1910, 8; “Andrews Urges New Forest Laws,” St. Paul Pioneer Press (St. Paul, Minn.), January 29, 1911. See also R. Newell Searle, “Minnesota Forestry Comes of Age: Christopher C. Andrews, 1895-1911,” Forest History Newsletter 17, no. 2 (July 1973): 19.
9. H.F. No. 76, Chapter 182, in General Laws of the State of Minnesota passed during the Thirty-Sixth Session of the State Legislature (Minneapolis: Harrison & Smith Co., 1909), pp. 198-205, quoted on p. 204.
10. Christopher Columbus Andrews, Special Report of the Forestry Commissioner of Minnesota on the Forest Fires in 1910 (St. Paul, Minn.: Pioneer Co., 1911), 6.
11. William Howard Taft, “Address to the National Conservation Congress in St. Paul, Minnesota,” September 5, 1910, accessed online June 2, 2026 via https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-the-national-conservation-congress-st-paul-minnesota.
12. Herbert Knox Smith, “Letter of Submittal of February 13, 1911,” in The Lumber Industry, Part 1: Standing Timber (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1913), xxi.
13. Taft, “Address to the National Conservation Congress in St. Paul, Minnesota.”
14. For a seven-month period, from March through September, most of northern Minnesota had received, at best, two-thirds of their annual expected rainfall. Report of the Chief of the Weather Bureau, 1910-1911 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1912), 43,199; Report of the Chief of the Weather Bureau, 1909-1910 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1911), 237.
15. Christopher Columbus Andrews, Special Report of the Forestry Commissioner of Minnesota on the Forest Fires in 1910 (St. Paul, Minn.: Pioneer Co., 1911), 3-4.
16. “No Use to Fight Flames–Andrews,” St. Paul Pioneer Press (St. Paul, Minn.), October 10, 1910.
17. Initial reports placed the death toll from the hundreds to as high as one thousand, with as many as 5,000 refugees. “Over 300 Die in Forest Fires,” The New York Times (New York, N.Y.), October 10, 1910; “Flames Along Border Still Rage Unchecked,” The Minneapolis Journal (Minneapolis, Minn.), October 10, 1910; “Fire Zone Covers an Area of 85 Miles,” The New York Times (New York, N.Y.), October 11, 1910. In his 1910 report, Andrews claimed 29 people perished. In his 1911 report, Cox claimed that “these fires destroyed forty lives, and probably more, since several people have been unaccounted for.” The Lake of the Woods County Historical Society claims that 43 people died. For Andrews’s figure, see Christopher Columbus Andrews, Sixteenth Annual Report of the Forestry Commissioner of Minnesota for the Year 1910 (St. Paul: Pioneer Press Company, 1911), 6; for Cox’s figure, see William T. Cox and Dillion P. Tierney, First Annual Report of the State Forester (Minnesota Forestry Board, 1911),26; for Lake of the Woods County Historical Society’s figure, see https://lakeofthewoodshistoricalsociety.com/archives/.
18. “Two Towns Burned by Forest Fires,” The New York Times (New York, N.Y.), October 9, 1910. Somewhat ironically, George Chapin, the fire ranger overseeing the Rainy River District, suspected that sparks from the Canadian Northern caused the Baudette burn. The fire that befell Baudette was actually four smaller fires that morphed into a firestorm: the best evidence shows sparks from railways caused three of the four fires. For Chapin’s suspicion of the CNR, see “No Use to Fight Flames–Andrews,” St. Paul Pioneer Press (St. Paul, Minn.), October 10, 1910. For the best historical treatment of the Baudette Fire, see Stephen J. Pyne, Year of the Fires: The Story of the Great Fires of 1910 (Missoula, Mont.: Mountain Press Publishing, 2008), 228-235; Marlys Hirst, ed., The Great Minnesota Forest Fire of 1910 (Baudette, Minn.: Lake of the Woods County Historical Society, 2010).
19. “Flames Along Border Still Rage Unchecked,” The Minneapolis Journal (Minneapolis, Minn.), October 10, 1910.
20. Christopher Columbus Andrews, Special Report of the Forestry Commissioner of Minnesota on the Forest Fires in 1910 (St. Paul, Minn.: Pioneer Co., 1911), 8-9.
21. Andrews, Special Report of the Forestry Commissioner of Minnesota on the Forest Fires in 1910, 4.
22. Andrews, Special Report of the Forestry Commissioner of Minnesota on the Forest Fires in 1910, 6.
23. Stephen J. Pyne, Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fires (Princeton University Press, 1982), 213. Proceedings of the Lake States Forest Fire Conference, Held at St. Paul, Minn., Dec. 6-7, 1910 (Chicago: The American Lumberman, 1911).
24. Cox and Tierney, First Annual Report of the State Forester, 80-81.
25. “More Money Needed for State Forests,” St. Paul Dispatch (St. Paul, Minn.), December 7, 1910.
26. See Hayden L. Nelson, “Smoke from Their Fires; Or, Environment and Region in Canada and the Upper Midwest,” Middle West Review 11, no. 1 (Fall 2024): 89-111, see esp. pp. 98-103.
Feature Image: Preparing to bury the victims of the Baudette Fire in a mass grave. Haakon Bjornaas, Carrying bodies of Spooner-Baudette fire disaster, Silver Creek, Minnesota, 1910. Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
Latest posts by Hayden Nelson (see all)
- The Past, Present, and Future of Forest Fires - June 13, 2026
- Call for Proposals – The Extractive Midwest - June 8, 2026