Six Days Ablaze

Twelve people and ten thousand cattle died in the fire, the worst ever to sweep through the Lone Star State. One rancher’s localized record of the incident gives a snapshot of events that were replicated across a million acres.
read part II

PART ONE IN A TWO-PARTER

By John R. Erickson

Editor's Note: Longtime readers of this magazine will recognize the author, John R. Erickson, as a past contributor to American Cowboy and (in his better-known role) as the author of the Hank the Cowdog series of books for young people, a collection that will soon surpass the 7 million mark in books sold. Erickson and his family own and operate the M Cross Ranch, southeast of Perryton, Texas.

Sunday, March 12, 2006
When the sun came up that Sunday morning, the wind was already howling out of the west. As the day went on, it grew worse and it was exactly what we didn't need in the Texas Panhandle, another day of hot, dry wind. Around eight that night, our son Scot called from Amarillo. We don't have television and he knew we hadn't been watching the news. "Dad, there's a huge fire in Roberts County and you need to find out where it is. If it's close, you'd better get out of that canyon." We lived on a ranch in northeast Roberts County, and our house sat in a deep, tree-lined canyon north of the Canadian River. We loaded up in our Excursion (me, Kris, her mother, and two of our grandchildren) and drove up to a high spot in the east pasture, where we had a good view of the country to the south.

There, we saw an astonishing sight, a line of flames that lit up the entire southern horizon and appeared to be 50 miles long. The reports on the radio said that the towns of Miami (our county seat, about 20 miles south), Wheeler, Canadian, McLean, and Allanreed were being evacuated. In such a high wind, any fire is beyond control. You feel utterly helpless and fear begins to gnaw. This fire was a killer. Since the fire seemed to be south of the river, I thought we were safe to spend the night at the ranch. In the days that followed, I began to realize that in such dry conditions, our canyon could be a death trap if the wind shifted, as it often does, and as it did in days to come.

We had an abundance of huge cedar trees in our canyon, many of them 40 to 50 feet tall, and some of them stood dangerously close to the house. In normal times, we see them as objects of beauty but they are also fuel. We probably should have left. I woke up many times in the night, went out on the porch and checked for smoke. If I had smelled smoke, we would have evacuated, but there was no strong smell and in the night, the winds subsided.

Monday, March 13
The news in the morning was grim. Two huge fires had swept across the Panhandle and had destroyed over half a million acres of rangeland. Seven people had died (the final count was twelve), homes and thousands of miles of fence had been burned, and nobody could guess at the loss of livestock. Monday morning, I drove up to a lookout point in my east pasture. I could see that big fires were still burning above the caprock on the south side of the Canadian River.

I couldn't judge their location but they appeared to be south of the Payne and McMordie ranches along the river. I tried to call some of the neighbors on my cellular phone, but the service was out. Later, I learned that the fire had burned the power lines to the tower across the river. Around four o'clock several Forest Service bombers began dropping red fire retardant chemical around the Payne west camp. The house was partially shrouded in smoke but it appeared that the fire had been contained south of the house and that it would not make it into the heavy vegetation along the riverbed. We felt that the worst had passed for us, if not for those ranchers further south. The weather forecast was calling for a day of fairly calm winds on Tuesday.

Tuesday, March 14
Tuesday morning I drove up on top and scanned the country south of us. It appeared that we might be all right, except that the weather forecast called for strong winds out of the southwest on Wednesday. That was a bad direction for us. In the afternoon, we drove up the river and talked to Starla Nicholson on the C Bar C ranch. She caught us up on all the news, including the report that four burned bodies had been found north of Miami, oil field workers who had gotten trapped in the fire.

Wednesday, March 15
Wednesday morning I got up at 4:30 and drove up on top. I saw only one glow of fire on the Payne ranch. By ten o'clock, the winds had picked up again and created an eerie scene. The air was filled with haze, and it was hard to determine if it was fresh smoke or a mix of ash and dust blowing off the burned country to the south.

I didn't want to take any chances. Randy Wilson, my son-in-law, took the day off and came out to help me. We spent all day cutting down big cedar trees near the house and dragging them into a dry pond. Some of those trees had stood there for 50 or 75 years, but I tried not to think about it. Around four o'clock, Jason Pelham called and said the fire had roared back to life and had jumped the river. Moments later, a sheriff's car came up our road, its lights flashing. The deputy recommended that we evacuate. By this time, we could see billows of smoke to the east, above the canyon rim.

The fire appeared to be in my east pasture and on the Tandy ranch that joined us on the east, way too close for comfort. Kris had about 15 minutes to decide what she wanted to save from a house we had occupied for 15 years, then Randy and I led them through 13 miles of pasture roads to Highway 70. At that point, I didn't know the extent of the fire and whether we might find more fire between our ranch and the highway. If we encountered fire, we might be trapped in the valley. But we were lucky. All the fires were east of us. The radio news said that fire crews were massing in southeast Ochiltree County, where they hoped to stop the fire when it came out of the canyons north of the river. Randy and I drove to a high spot in the east pasture and watched as the fire raged across the Tandy ranch. From the high ground, we could see that it was on a path that took it within 300 yards of my east fence, and it was heading to the northeast, away from our place.

After dark, we could see the flashing lights of emergency vehicles all across the wide Canadian River valley and up on the flats to the north. I didn't count them, but there must have been 50-75. I didn't know it at the time, but we were watching the single largest mobilization of firefighters in Texas history, with more than 700 professional and volunteer firemen involved. (Canadian Record, March 30, 2006). Clearly, the people who knew about fires were taking this one very seriously. They weren't doing much except waiting. There isn't much a fire truck can do to stop a fast-moving wildfire. The forward surge has to be stopped by fireguards and backfires. Experienced crews stay out of its path, wait for the initial charge of the fire to pass, then go in and put out the lingering flames, smoldering cow chips, yucca, and mesquite trees.

The fire raced northward and entered Bourbonese Canyon on the Tandy ranch. This was the biggest canyon in the area, very similar to the canyons on my ranch but longer and wider. It contained an abundance of big cedar trees, as well as cottonwoods, elms, hackberry, and soapberry. In other words, that canyon was loaded with dry fuel. When the fire got into the canyon, we couldn't see it directly, but the red-orange glow that showed above the canyon rims was spectacular and frightening. A massive column of billowing gray smoke rose above the fire and disappeared into the night sky. Randy and I had already loaded the pickup with sleeping bags, food, and water. We didn't know where we would be, if we would make it back to the house, or if there would be any house left. We made our way down a dark twisting road from the high country, drove to the barn, and loaded my track loader onto a flatbed trailer. The track loader is a kind of tractor, a skid loader that runs on rubber tracks like a bulldozer. It works well in rough and sandy country.

We hauled it over to a pasture on the Tandy ranch that joined us. There, fire was burning through catclaw and cedar brush on the sides of several big mesas, sending up clouds of black and gray smoke, moving against the wind in a long line, toward my mesa pasture. At some point (events and time had begun to blur) we encountered a crew from the C Bar C ranch, parked in the darkness on Hank's Road: Billy DeArmond, Dave Nicholson, Clint DeArmond, and Jody Chisum. For three days they had been fighting fire on the south side of the river and now they had brought their ranch fire truck over to the north side. They were in good spirits but their eyes showed deep fatigue. We talked for a while, then they were called down to the River Road. Randy and I stayed to monitor the fire on the western front. We were the only ones there. Most of the crews and equipment were working the biggest fires to the east of us on the Tandy.

Two fire rigs from the Gruver Volunteer Fire Department arrived in our area, including two men I knew: Jake and Benny McCullough. They had worked all day on windmills. Now it appeared they would be fighting fire all night. They drove out into the pasture toward the line of fire. This was quite an act of courage. It was dark, those men didn't know this pasture, and the terrain was rough, even for a four-wheel drive vehicle. They drove along the line of fire and sprayed it with water. That killed the flames so that I could go behind them in the track loader, knocking down smoldering mesquite trees and covering them with dirt. They made their way along the base of the mesa and somehow managed to keep from getting stuck. Randy and I kept a close eye on them, in case we had to pull them out with the track loader.

Around ten or eleven o'clock, the wind shifted around to the northwest. Fire crews on the flats north of the valley had thrown up fireguards and backfires to stop the blaze when it came out of the canyons, and to prevent it from spreading into an ocean of tall CRP grass in Lipscomb County to the northeast. That would have been catastrophic and would have put in jeopardy the five small towns in the county. The crews did stop the fire, but if the wind hadn't shifted to the northwest, I'm not sure they could have done it. In days to come, I would see that they had graded fireguards three miles to the north of the blaze, an indication of just how worried they were about this fire. Once the wind changed, the fire turned and started burning back through the Tandy ranch, this time moving southeast, through rough canyons and mesas. Randy and I kept watch until 2 and went to bed. It had been a very long day and I was shot. I had been up since 4:30.

Thursday, March 16
We got up around seven Thursday morning and drove up on top to check the situation. The winds had died down in the night but were still fairly strong out of the northeast. Several big fires were still burning around Tandy Mesa, about two miles east of my place, and dozens of smaller fires still burned across the valley. During the morning, big four-engine airplanes from the Forest Service swooped down and dropped loads of fire retardant chemical on these fires, putting out the worst of them. A big Chinook helicopter was also working the fire. It would hover over a pond or stock tank, lower a snorkel, and suck up water, then discharge it over a hot spot. The fires in the roughest country just burned themselves out. During the day we saw crews and equipment from Perryton, Canadian, Higgins, Hoover, Gruver, Tarrant County (300 miles to the south), and even some Forest Service crews from Oregon. Other firefighters had come from South Dakota, towns in Oklahoma, the Dallas area, and Midland.

Friday, March 17
Friday morning a slow sizzle of rain began to fall and for the first time in five days, we felt that the monster had finally been killed. Kris and her mother returned home in the evening. The damp weather continued on into Saturday and Sunday. On Monday, it turned into a snowstorm. To the south of us lay the death and destruction of the worst wildfires in Texas history. We had survived but the memory is not likely to fade.

John R. Erickson maintains a website at www.hankthecowdog.com. Additional bio information on the author is available on the site. In his next installment, Erickson shares more of the aftermath of the fire, including an account of the star-studded benefit concert that raised support for the fire's victims.