The book tells the story of the Mann Gulch fire, August 5, 1949. The Forest Service dropped 15 Smokejumpers under the command of Wag Dodge to contain the fire. They were caught when the fire suddenly exploded into a racing wall of fire that crossed the gulch. Dodge set an escape fire and threw himself into the ashes of his own fire. The main fire, deprived of fuel, passed around him. 13 of the 15 men who tried to outrun the fire died.
The families of some of the dead men sued the Forest Service and they blamed Dodge for their sons's deaths. They said his escape fire had caught and burned the other men. The lawsuit was dismissed on jurisdictional grounds. The families never accepted the findins of a Forest Service Board of Inquiry. Dodge died of cancer in 1954 and the story of the fire was left untold until Norman Maclean decided to tell it.
Norman Maclean was born in Missoula, Montana in 1902. Norman moved to Chicago and became a professor of English literature. Maclean returned to Montana regularly to camp, fish and hunt. His biography has become well known through Robert Redford's movie of Maclean's story of his family "A River Runs Through It".
He saw the site of the Mann Gulch fire on a visit to Montana, a few weeks after the fire, in August 1949. Years later, he became fascinated by the story, and he visited the site of the fire each summer for several years, in the late 1970's. He combed the archives of the Forest Service. He checked the records of the Forest Services' Board of Inquiry. He checked the records of the lawsuits brought by the families of the dead men. He located and interviewed the survivors, and visited the scene of the fire with them. He visited the Forest Services' fire labs and learned about the behaviour of timber and grass fires on slopes. He wrote the greater part of the book, but he left it unfinished. It was finished and published posthumously by the University of Chicago Press.
The material he left behind was a work in progress, with Maclean trying to understand and describe the meaning he found in the facts. As it is, we have the story repeated in different contexts as Maclean writes about the different parts of his personal inquisition. His overall perspective is stated in a memorable passage that this is the story of men "still so young they hadn't learned to count the odds and sense they might owe the universe a tragedy".
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