Historic Forest Fires

Many references to extensive forest fires in Siberia, Alaska and northern Canada are found in the writings of eighteenth and nineteenth century explorers. Some recognized that lightning was the cause of forest fires, but the explorers frequently attributed the fires to native peoples. Authorities on forest fires, including H. J. Lutz of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, have concluded that early native peoples were, in fact, responsible for many fires.

Some fires were intentionally set to get rid of mosquitos or possibly to increase moose browse. Others were accidental from signal fires or camp fires going out of control.

Indians were not the only starters of fires. In 1915 the "Kennicott fire" was intentionally set by a woodcutter to create fuel wood for use at the Kennicott mine. Sixty-four thousand acres (100 square miles) was burned. In the same year, sparks from a train set a fire that burned 384,000 acres near Chitina.

Prior to 1940, there were a number of large fires in Alaska and Yukon that each burned more than 100,000 acres. Among the biggest were the 1,900,000-acre fire at Lake Iliamna in 1935, the Sheenjak River burn of 312,000 acres in 1937 and the Mosquito Fork Flat fire along the old Valdez-Eagle trail that burned over 900,000 acres in 1922.

In Alaska alone it is estimated that there are about 200 million acres of "burnable" land, of which about half is actually forested. Only about seven percent of the burnable land can be considered commercial forest capable of producing 20 cubic feet per acre (1.4 cubic meters per hectare) or more of wood annually.

Virtually all the northern forest has been burned over during the last 200 years. It is estimated that a million acres each year is burned, on the average.

The worst year of all seems to have been 1940. That year, fires in the Yukon, Tanana and Porcupine watersheds and on the Seward Peninsula burned 4.5 million acres.

Less serious was a 38,000-acre fire near Fairbanks in 1926 created when a group of children set a tree afire to drive out a squirrel. The next year another Fairbanks district resident started a 5,000-acre fire in an attempt to scare away bears that were muddying the water hole used by his horses.