Wildfires bring jobs to reservations

By Blaine Harden
The Washington Post

BLAINE HARDEN / THE WASHINGTON POST Francis Cahoon, right, with sons Daniel, left, and Brian, sit on one of their four-wheel-drive pickups that they rigged with water tanks to fight fires in Montana last year.

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Last year, when fires burned a quarter-million acres in Montana, Cahoon said he and his three sons grossed $250,000 fighting them. Most of that came from leasing three wild-land fire engines — four-wheel-drive pickups that Cahoon had rigged with water tanks — to the state at $1,300 per engine per day. This year he has added a bulldozer ($1,685 a day) to his fire-suppression armada.

If all goes well — if the federal government's forecast for another "above normal" fire season proves correct and parched Western forests explode into flames as they have for the past five summers — Cahoon and his sons will have steady work for months, making as much as $5,675 a day.

"That's pretty good wages for little Indian boys on the reservation," said Cahoon, who celebrated the end of last year's lucrative fire season by trading in his Corvette for a new $43,000 Ford Expedition SUV. "I'm not the typical smart white businessman who wears a suit, but I still make as much as doctors or lawyers around here."

From northern Montana to southern Arizona, half a decade of drought and wildfire has offered Native Americans something they have rarely, if ever, experienced — a sustained economic boom. "Fire has become steady work," Cahoon said.

Not everyone, of course, is making serious money the way Cahoon and his sons are.

But federal fire managers and tribal officials agree that an abnormally long run of "good fire years" has visibly improved lives and lifted spirits on Indian reservations.

These are among the poorest places in the country, with four in 10 residents living below the poverty line and unemployment rarely falling below 40 percent.

"Fire money is paying bills, buying vehicles, and we see a lot of college students depending on firefighting to stay in school," said Leon Ben Jr., assistant fire manager in Phoenix for the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

The federal government and Western states have, in turn, become extraordinarily dependent on Indians as shock troops to contain forest fires. While Indians make up only about 1 percent of the country's population, they account for about half the firefighters on the front lines of wildfires in the United States, said Dale Glenmore, assistant fire manager in Billings, Mont., for the Rocky Mountain region of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

"It is the high unemployment," Glenmore said. "This is a population you can tap into fairly easily."

The Montana Indian Firefighters program, which Glenmore runs, paid a record $12 million in wages last year to 2,500 firefighters, Glenmore said. That's more than $4,500 each.

"Most of that went to young people who otherwise might not be working," Glenmore said, adding that on several reservations in Montana, firefighter wages exceeded the combined income of all other tribal members.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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