This is an excerpt from the forthcoming book, Megafire: The Race to Extinguish a Deadly Epidemic of Flame. It has been edited and condensed.

It was in an almost invisible hole in the Bitterroot Mountains that America’s war with wildfire was born. There, on August 20, 1910, “Big Ed” Pulaski, a ranger with the U.S. Forest Service, led 45 scruffy, untrained firefighters to shelter in the Nicholson mine above the West Fork of Placer Creek when the “Big Blowup,” a fire the size of Connecticut, threatened to incinerate them.

“The forests staggered, rocked, exploded and then shriveled under the holocaust,” Betty Goodwin Spencer, an Idaho historian, recalled of the blaze. “Great red balls of fire rolled up the mountainsides. Crown fires, from 1 to 10 miles wide, streaked with yellow and purple and scarlet, raced through treetops 150 feet from the ground. Bloated bubbles of gas burst murderously into forked and greedy flames. You can’t outrun wind and fire that are traveling 70 miles an hour.”

With Armageddon hot on his heals, Pulaski led his crew and two horses into the mine shaft to escape the inferno he described as having “the roar of a thousand freight trains.” He kept the fire out of the prospector’s hole with water he scooped from the shaft floor with his hat. When some of his panicked firefighters tried to bolt, he pulled his pistol. “The next man who tries to leave the tunnel I will shoot,” he told them.

They all eventually fell unconscious as the inferno sucked the oxygen from the cave. Five never woke up. One survivor, finding Pulaski lying limp at the front of the shaft, announced that he was dead. “Like hell he is” was his now-legendary response.

Today the ranger’s name rings out at every wildfire. The pulaski, a combination axe and hoe that he invented after the ordeal, is the most common tool in the battle against forest fires, so even firefighters who don’t know his story shout out his name on the fire line. The ranger’s legacy looms larger in the philosophy of firefighting that followed the blowup in the Bitterroots. Firefighters on the ground saw their efforts against the Big Blowup as a “complete failure.” The fire killed at least 78 of the men fighting it, reduced much of Wallace, Idaho to ash, and torched parts of half a dozen other towns. Mining camps, farms, and more than 3 million acres of timber burned.

But the fledgling Forest Service, just five years old and already hated in much of the West, chose to focus on the firefighters’ heroic stand, rather than the futility of the battle. The American philosopher William James wrote of extinguishing wildfires as “the moral equivalent of war,” suggesting that American youth be conscripted into an “army enlisted against nature.” One of humanity’s greatest allies was suddenly one of America’s most reviled enemies.

A quarter century later, when lightning-caused fires that the Forest Service allowed to burn charred nearly a third of Yellowstone National Park, politicians and the public responded with outrage. But by time I was fighting fires, their benefit was clear. The forest ecosystems of Yellowstone were healthier a decade after the fires than they were a decade before them.

In 1995, the “Federal Wildland Fire Management Policy and Program Review” noted the need to put fire back on the land to correct what had become known as the “fire deficit” in the nation’s woodlands. “The task before us—reintroducing fire—is both urgent and enormous,” the report said. “Conditions on millions of acres of wildlands increase the probability of large, intense fires beyond any scale yet witnessed. These severe fires will in turn increase the risk to humans, to property, and to the land [with] which our social and economic well-being is so intimately intertwined.”

But the reintroduction of fire hasn’t gone quite as planned. The excess timber and the warming and drying climate have made even carefully planned burns difficult to manage. And during the century in which the nation attempted to exclude fire from forests, they filled with homes. The woodlands that were most overgrown were often those closest to communities, where past fires were most aggressively snuffed. But those are also, of course, where the greatest resistance to prescribed burns and thinning projects lie.

A 2013 study by the U.S. Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station noted that nearly a third of all U.S. homes were in the wildland-urban interface. So it should come as no surprise that four times more homes burned in U.S. wildfires in the 2010s than in the 1990s. As frightening as those numbers are, they’re likely just the beginning.

After the Big Blowup of 1910 inspired America to try to extinguish every wildfire in the country, foresters in the 2010s were finding that many of the nation’s efforts to put fire back into every forest were just as misguided. Colorado’s Front Range, for example, includes not just fire-starved ponderosa pine forests, but a much larger proportion of high country forests dominated by lodgepole pine, subalpine fir, and spruce forests, arid mesas of piñons and junipers, and even ponderosas mixed with other conifers higher in the mountains. Many of them always had big, intense wildfires. So the lesson isn’t to stop thinning and burning the woods, but to focus those treatments where they will do the most good — overgrown ponderosa forests adjacent to homes and other development.