The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture

PRAIRIE FIRES.

Oklahoma’s prairie lands historically comprised vast, treeless, mostly flat areas covered primarily by a variety of grasses. These grassy lands were found in the central and western parts of the state. Prairie fires shape and maintain prairie ecosystems. Causes of fires in the grassland were and are both natural (lightning) and human generated, but historically and today most are started by humans. Some are accidental, but many have been purposeful burns, set to keep woody plant intruders out of the grassland and to improve the quality of the grass for grazing animals. Traveling through the prairies of the future Oklahoma region in 1832, Washington Irving described numerous prairie fires, some set by Indians and others by his men’s cooking fires. In 1853 U.S. Army Lt. A. M. Whipple, exploring southwest Oklahoma, noted in his journal that a party of Kiowas had been encountered as they set fire to prairie grass.

American Indians intentionally burned the prairie for multiple reasons. Fire was a land management tool that cleared away old grass so new growth could flourish. It was a weapon in war, was used to drive herds of bison, and, through smoke signals, was even a communication device. During the Civil War (1861–65) Confederate partisan Opothleyahola, a Mvskoke (Creek) chief, set fire to grass to impede the advance of the Union Army and cover his fighters’ retreat. When Indigenous peoples used prairie fire, they made their lives on the grassland more predictable.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as Americans colonized Oklahoma and it achieved statehood, prairie fires remained, but their meaning, as well as their consequences, shifted. Ranchers, who were dependent on the grass for grazing, maintained much of the American Indians’ fire-use strategies. Farmers, however, did not make their living from native grasses, but from domesticated crops. Those fields, as well as fences, barns, and houses, were threatened by large-scale prairie fires. Farmers, therefore, worked to suppress prairie fire in the Great Plains region, including Oklahoma.

Many early-day Oklahomans’ first night in the territory involved prairie fires. During the 1893 Cherokee Strip land run individual men on horseback rushed ahead of homesteaders traveling by wagon, dismounted, and set the prairie on fire, hoping to force those lagging behind to turn back from the rush to claim the most valuable land.

While fires were, ecologically, a positive environmental agent on the grassland, they could also be dangerous, and many settlers believed they should be eliminated from the landscape. In 1891 the Norman Transcript lamented the “immense lot of damage” done by the fires in April of that year. In 1893 Baker Tomlinson left his family and wagon on the prairie west of Enid while he went into town to file his land claim. While he was gone a prairie fire destroyed the wagon, loaded with his worldly possessions, and burned his wife and children so severely that two of the three later died. In that same year, 1893, the Assembly of Oklahoma (the territorial legislature) passed a law designed to curtail human-caused prairie fires. The law provided detailed descriptions of actions that were legal and illegal and provided penalties such as fines and imprisonment as well as remedies for property damage.

On March 3, 1904, a prairie fire threatened the town of Lawton. An “army of men,” according to the local paper, moved to the edge of town to fight the fire by hitting it with wet gunny sacks or other cloths. In addition to citizen action, another thing that saved Lawton, ironically, was the strength of the wind. While the wind pushed the fire toward the city, it also blew so hard that hot cinders blown ahead of the fire line had no opportunity to lodge in building crevices, which would have ignited the buildings.

The rural areas outside of Lawton were not so lucky. “It came up so suddenly we did not know what to do,” attorney and farmer R. E. Trosper recalled. Sparks fell like snow, and Trosper and his family ran to safety on fuel-deficient plowed ground, where they spent the night. Everything on Trosper’s farm burned, including the storm cellar. “How it could possibly have caught [the cellar] I know not, but it seemed that the fire would simply burn through the earth.”

The shift in land-use strategies between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries changed how Oklahoma peoples used and reacted to prairie fires. Once seen as a source of environmental renewal, in the twentieth century prairie fire became an obstacle to economic development of Oklahoma and the Great Plains. Fire suppression, rather than use, became the norm. The absence of fire, however, significantly changed the landscape. Dick Rice, whose family settled in Oklahoma in 1908, remembered that transformation on his father’s land. “There used to be big fires. . . . That was one thing that fooled my dad. He thought he was getting a prairie place more or less. After he started pasturing it . . . why the trees commenced to growing [and] in 8 or 10 years it all turned to brush. But when we first come here it all looked like prairie land almost.” As Rice learned, a prairie without fire eventually ceased to be prairie at all. Prairie fires are not a feature of the past. They still occur regularly in nearly every part of Oklahoma.

Julie Courtwright