15 Men Died, Remembering Wyoming’s Blackwater Fire

Cody, Wyo., August 21, 1937, in the afternoon, 15 firefighters were killed. U.S. Forest Service in Wyoming. It was the fire and the deaths that changed everything about firefighting and forest management.

Fifty years later, Bob Johnstone could still remember the screams of the young men at Blackwater Creek about 35 miles west of Cody, Wyo., August 21, 1937. We are now 89 years after an event that changed forest firefighting worldwide.

It was a Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps that was on the Blackwater fire line. "We could hear those people below us, but we couldn't get down there to help them. ... It was a terrible thing. I hate to tell you some of the grisly things about it."

The Blackwater Creek fire was started by a lightning strike in the pine-filled Shoshone National Forest on Aug. 18, 1937. By the time it was controlled four days later, it had consumed 1,700 acres.

Aug. 20, seven CCC enrollees returning from a work detail saw the fire crowning into the treetops and decided to head down to fight it.

Eventually, 70 CCC enrollees and rangers from the camp were in the fight. They used hand tools to clear away anything that might be fuel for the fire. Back then, it was the only way to fight a forest fire.

Communication was hard back then, with no radio or cell phones. The fire was creeping up behind them.

A 71-foot-long memorial to the firefighters who lost their lives on Blackwater Creek west of Cody, Wyo., was dedicated in August 1939, two years after the fire. Park County Archives.

You can read the full story at WyoHistory.org.