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As he moved across the Ookala Forest on horseback, Hawaii’s Superintendent of Public Works could clearly see that the large fire was not completely extinguished.

Superintendent J.H. Boyd was there to provide an eyewitness account on the course of the blaze to Territory Gov. Sanford Dole in letters then published in The Hawaiian Gazette.

The feet of the horses “frequently sunk their feet and legs below the surface, and unexpectedly revealed deep holes of smoldering fire which were buried … from sight,” Boyd wrote.

Despite much “good work” digging trenches, a very high wind prevailed causing sparks to fall long distances from their origin.

And there was no water.

Enormous cisterns that could hold 5 million gallons of water were bone dry thanks to drought, and there was an exodus on the roads as dozens of Portugese sugar plantation workers abandoned their homesteads seeking other work until the rains returned.

Welcome to the Big Burn of 1901 at Hamakua.

A brush burn on Big Island farmland that started around July 4 quickly spread and continued until October of that year and scorched an estimated 30,000 acres.

The , was Hawaii’s “Year Zero” for wildfires — the first recorded “disastrous” blaze in the islands — according to the authors of a including Clay Trauernicht and Elizabeth Pickett.

Other than contemporary reporting, a lot of what we understand about the timeline of wildfires in Hawaii comes from a single page of place names and numbers published on page 405 of the 1977 “Historical Statistics Of Hawaii” by R.C. Schmitt.

Schmitt’s fire data had gaps, but it did show current researchers that the total area burned across the state “increased more than fourfold from 1904 to 1959 to peaks in the 1960s-1970s and mid-1990s to present.”

One notable spike occurred during the wildfire season in 1969-1970 that saw a total 60,000 acres torched. The largest burn was 35,000 acres in October 1969 at Puu Anahulu on the Big Island.

By April of 1970, the state forester Tom Tagawa told the Honolulu Star-Bulletin that the threat of brush and forest fires had still not been reduced, despite some rainfall.

Fire was also top of mind in 1969 for Richard Vogl from the Department of Botany at the University of Hawaii because that year he in the evolution of flora and vegetation of Hawaii.

“The object of this study,” Vogl wrote “is to demonstrate that Hawaiian vegetation, in general is far from pristine; that through its existence it has been continuously besieged by catastrophes, including fire; that the Island environment is generally unstable; and much of the flora has been affected by, or adapted to, fire as well as other disturbance factors.”

Wildfire Patterns

The Vogl paper is a trove of observations on lightning strikes, thunderstorms and volcanic activity, and also contains lot of detail about the fires in the pre-WWII era that Schmitt had the numbers for.

Many of the observations caught by Vogl and his team –– some from first-hand sources –– also feel prescient because of what we have come to understand from the recent Maui wildfires.

One of VoglÊ»s students Elodee Ho-a contributed to the study and found that “there have been so many fires in some districts that it is difficult to determine when an area was last burned, how many times, and where one burn began and another ended.”

Vogl also went back and pored over issues of between 1904 and 1932 and found there had been 17 droughts in those 28 years, and, between 1906 and 1932 there were 220 forest fires reported. Elsewhere he found accounts of extended droughts on Kahoolawe, and of a three and a half year stretch without rain in Kula in the early 1900s.

At one point Vogl refers to a fire in the Olinda district of Maui in the early 1930s that residents said had burned for three months, like the Hamakua fire. “The fact that large fires have occurred, even recently despite modern equipment, organized efforts, and man-made destructions, illustrates that extensive tracts of native vegetation could have and did burn in the past, even in supposedly evergreen and ever wet areas.”

The botanistÊ»s analysis of Hawaiian wildfires includes numerous examples of slow spreading and persistent fires that would rekindle repeatedly, “sometimes springing to life days, weeks, and even months later.”

Which brings us back to Boyd and his party leading their horses for over four hours through the still fiery terrain of the Ookala Forest in late September of 1901, and literally putting their feet in it.

The Hamakua fire, while not in the Schmitt data, was consequential because it led to a system of annual wildfire reporting starting in 1904 and the creation of the state’s Forest Reserve system. Trauernicht, writing in 2018, said that the blaze “woke up the territorial government to one of the core values of our forests, namely groundwater recharge.”

But, itÊ»s no surprise that the “Scourge Of Hamakua” –– as one headline screamed –– also generated political heat in the form of allegations of a lack of government action. There was a classic “not my problem” attitude at play. “The area burned is almost wholly Government land and the people of the district cannot understand the supine indifference of the Government to a calamity of already large proportions and of constantly increasing gravity,” the Hawaiian Gazette wrote.

Maybe this telegram from Boyd to Dole on Sept. 23, 1901 had something to do with the reponse: “Just returned; forest fires still burning, but under control; government assistance is not necessary. Report later. No rain.”

The hero of the hour appears to have been Albert Horner, manager of the Kukaiau Plantation who was reported to have spent two and half months and $5,000 (equivalent to $180,000 today) battling the blaze before he was compelled to admit that the “conflagration is greater and fiercer than ever.”

Horner estimated that defeating the Hamakua fire would take 300 men a month to accomplish, and asked Dole for the money to do so. Dole sent word that Horner should proceed to extinguish the blaze and that the government was good for the bill.

When it came to raising the firefighting force “none of them would take the GovernorÊ»s promise however, so Horner has been systematically paying the men himself.”

Then, finally, the winter rains came.