Autumn is here and it won’t be long until the 2026 fire season is officially mopped up, two stragglers being the remote Silvertip and Camp Creek blazes that together charred 17,000 acres of the Bob Marshall Wilderness.
Closer to home, hundreds of firefighters battled the extensive Deer Creek and Skillet fires—near Happy’s Inn and Olney, respectively—which helped contribute to August’s “Code Purple” air quality.
The good news: not a single serious firefighter injury was reported in our immediate region, which would certainly bring a smile to the face of Montana forester and conservationist William “Bud” Moore, who died in 2010.
In 1934, at the age of 16, the western Montana native signed up with U.S. Forest Service fire crews. And when the smoke cleared, he’d take on the additional duties of fire lookout and dispatcher.
Subsequently surviving three years of major (and bloody) Marine Corps campaigns—Peleliu, New Britain and Okinawa—Moore returned home and made forestry his career. Upon his retirement in 1974, he was Division Chief of Fire Control and Air Operations for the Forest Service’s Northern Region of Montana.
Not nearly finished being outdoors he’d purchase land in the Swan Valley, weighing various conservation and ecosystem management ideas, even open his expansive property to the public, while sharing his forestry knowledge with the Swan Ecosystem Center, Upper Swan Valley Historical Group, and Montana Wilderness Association.
He forged a friendship with celebrated Montana author Norman Maclean, of A River Runs Through It and Young Men and Fire fame, the latter bestseller delving into Montana’s tragic Mann Gulch Fire of 1949 that resulted in the deaths of 13 firefighters—twelve of them USFS Smokejumpers.
In fact, it was in the wake of that catastrophic blaze and several others that Moore, while working as a district ranger, was dispatched to Washington, D.C.—assigned to a federal task force seeking resolution to the recent spate of forest firefighting fatalities.
It was out of that committee—still held close by firefighters today—that the nation’s 10 Standard Firefighting Orders were born.
Allow me now to reveal the rest of the story.
Like many of us today with our cellphones, Moore enjoyed snapping photographs, especially in the backcountry. One of his photos, though, that particularly caught my eye—taken the same year and only a few miles from where I was born in 1957—shows a well-dressed African-American mother and her three children enjoying the sunshine from a park bench in the nation’s capital.
“These are pictures that I took [during] my first trip to Washington, D.C.,” the retired forest ranger explained in one of several recordings of his life and career, each of them preserved—with his photographs—in the Montana State Library’s Montana History Portal.
Families “like that that you don’t see out here [in Montana]. That’s why I took those pictures,” he reflected, adding that the pleasant family encounter left him “impressed and kind of proud of our nation.”
It was while expanding on that same photo that Moore recalled being in Washington on a six-week assignment, because the “chief of the Forest Service got concerned, very concerned, about why we were losing so many firefighters on fires.
“There was quite a few crews that were burned up and he wanted a task force to study this situation and see if we could find any factors that would help and recommend countermeasures for all these people that were burning up,” he said.
“I was sort of the ‘junior’ in all this power,” added the ranger. “They came and went quite a bit and I did lots and lots of work on it.”
Here now is the amusing part of the story.
During one of their meetings, a senior forestry official observed that the U.S. military had its own “general orders,” as Moore explained the “basic things you must internalize and remember.”
“Because if you can’t recite your general orders to a senior officer, why you might end up in the brig. They’re real strict on that because they want those things built in to every act you do. Just like eating with a knife and fork, you don’t have to think about it you just do it.”
The senior official told the group that he would personally approach the Pentagon for guidance, to “pattern our standard firefighting orders after [the military’s orders],” Moore remembered.
Wouldn’t you know, the Pentagon brass dismissed the forestry official.
“Over there I don’t think they would hardly recognize us as people,” Moore laughs.
Not to be outranked, the Montana ranger had his own idea.
“On my way [to my hotel] there was a bus stop,” he said, “and there were always Marines there. And I know Marines. So that night as I went by there the first Marine I saw I just asked him to recite his general orders. And he recited them. And I wrote them down. And then I brought them back that next morning.
“That’s kind of a humorous start,” Moore concluded, “but it’s kind of worth telling. So then we started putting those 10 Standard Firefighting Orders together and they have served well.”
- Keep informed on fire weather conditions and forecasts.
- Know what your fire is doing at all times.
- Base all actions on current and expected behavior of the fire.
- Identify escape routes and safety zones, and make them known.
- Post lookouts when there is possible danger.
- Be alert. Keep calm. Think clearly. Act decisively.
- Maintain prompt communications with your forces, your supervisor, and adjoining forces.
- Give clear instructions and be sure they are understood.
- Maintain control of your forces at all times.
- Fight fire aggressively, having provided for safety first.
John McCaslin is a longtime journalist and author who lives in Bigfork.