They say that fighting a wildfire is the closest thing to being in combat. The trees explode, the wind whips down while the oxygen disappears and the fire “sheets” along the ground, streaking sideways like rushing waters.

Today’s California fires remind me of the largest fire in U.S. history, the Big Burn of 1910, which destroyed three million acres in Idaho, Montana and Washington. One of the towns the fire destroyed was Wallace, Idaho. A lone train arrived to take people away, and panic ensued. As my colleague Timothy Egan describes in “The Big Burn,” his history of the fire, men yanked women out of their seats, taking their place.

The U.S. Forest Service had been created five years before by Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot. The 10,000 men who were rounded up to fight the fire were led by a small group of young foresters, many of them from the Yale School of Forestry, which graduated its first class in 1904.

One of the foresters, though decidedly no Yalie, was Ed Pulaski. By the time the fire hit Wallace, Pulaski had been up in the mountains fighting fires for a month. He came down to get food for his men. “Wallace will surely burn,” he told his wife and 10-year-old daughter, before returning up the mountain to care for his fighters. “I may never see you again.”