Before we get into it, a note. We named one of our coffees "Big Ed". If you're new here and wondering why a bag of Full City+ dark roast carries a man's name, this is the story.
Don't skim it. It's worth reading.
August 20, 1910. Wallace, Idaho.
The summer of 1910 was the driest anyone in the northern Rockies could remember. Fires had been burning across Idaho and Montana for months; hundreds of them, small and large, running through timber that hadn't seen rain in weeks. The Forest Service, which had only existed for five years, had men spread across the mountains doing what they could.
Ed Pulaski was one of them. U.S. Forest Service Ranger, based out of Wallace, Idaho. Forty-four years old. Former miner, ranch hand, blacksmith. A man who knew the country because he'd worked it with his hands.
On August 20th, hurricane-force winds hit the panhandle. Sixty-mile-an-hour gusts turned manageable fires into something else entirely. Pulaski later described it: "The wind was so strong that it almost lifted men out of their saddles, and the canyons seemed to act as chimneys, through which the wind and fires swept with the roar of a thousand freight trains."
The fire blew up around his crew on the west fork of Placer Creek. Forty-five men. Most of them unfamiliar with the terrain. All of them in immediate danger.
He Didn't Ask. He Moved.
Pulaski knew the country. He knew there was an abandoned mine nearby; the Nicholson tunnel. He gave his horse to an ex-Texas Ranger who was limping from rheumatism and led the crew on foot through burning timber. Trees were exploding into flame around them. One man went down on the trail. A black bear ran alongside the group, the fire pushing it in the same direction as the men.
They reached the mine tunnel. Six feet high. Five feet wide. Two hundred fifty feet deep. Forty-five men and two horses crowded inside.
The fire closed in. Timbers near the entrance began to smolder. Smoke filled the shaft. Men started to panic. Some tried to leave.
Pulaski drew his revolver.
"The next man who tries to leave the tunnel I will shoot."
He hung wet blankets over the entrance. There was a small stream running through the floor of the tunnel; he used his hat to carry water and keep the blankets wet, over and over, while the fire burned outside. He kept doing it until the smoke took him down. He was unconscious on the tunnel floor when one of the men said, "The boss is dead."
Pulaski opened his eyes.
"Like hell he is."
The Morning After.
When the men crawled out of the Nicholson tunnel the next morning, five hadn't made it through the night. Forty survived; including the man who had given up on the boss.
The Big Blowup burned more than three million acres across Idaho, Montana, and Washington in 36 hours. At least 85 people died. It remains one of the largest wildfires in American history.
Pulaski survived, but the fire had done its damage. His lungs were scarred from the smoke. His eyes were badly injured. He petitioned the government for compensation for his wounds. They turned him down. In 1923, he entered an essay contest to raise money for eye surgery. He won five hundred dollars.
The Pulaski.
In 1911, while he was still healing, Pulaski went to his blacksmith shop and started tinkering. The result was a combination axe and mattock; one side for chopping, one side for digging; built for the kind of work that fire lines actually demand. His supervisor had asked him to help develop a new tool for forestry work. What Pulaski built went further than that.
Every wildland firefighter in America has carried a Pulaski to work ever since. The design hasn't changed in over a hundred years because there's nothing to change. It's right. His original tool, initialed E.P. in the steel, is at the Wallace District Mining Museum; the same town he served, the same country he walked into a burning mine to save his crew.
He was never compensated for it. The Forest Service never paid him. The government never acknowledged it formally. He just built the thing because it needed building.
Why Big Ed.
We named our Full City+ dark roast after him. Not because it's a clever branding move. Because this brand came out of the Idaho and Montana backcountry, out of the fire line, out of the people who did the work and asked for nothing and got exactly that.
Big Ed Pulaski was Wallace, Idaho. He was the northern Rockies. He was a man who knew the country, kept his head when the fire came, and then went home and built the tool that would help the next crew survive the next fire.
Every bag of Big Ed ships from Post Falls, Idaho, Craft roasted by Evans Brothers Coffee Roaster in Sandpoint, ID, and named for a ranger who earned it.
Drink it black.
Spike Camp Outpost, Post Falls, Idaho
Sources: U.S. Forest Service historical records, Wikipedia (Ed Pulaski), Wildfire Today, PBS American Experience, Museum of Idaho, Wallace District Mining Museum.
0 comments