HELENA — The scars some wildfires leave behind go beyond what you can see on the landscape. Families of the firefighters that died in the Mann Gulch Fire know that well. It has been 75 years since 12 smokejumpers and one former smokejumper died in the blaze, and the impact of their loss still echoes today.
“I don’t want anybody to have an August 5,” Bruce Diettert said. “The impact on the families is just devastating.”
Bruce Diettert, Scott Diettert and Carol Knieper’s uncle, Eldon Diettert, was one of the smokejumpers who died in the Mann Gulch Fire. Although they never met him, the three say he was a presence in their lives. As children, they visited his grave in Missoula and they knew he died in a fire, but they didn’t know many details beyond that, it was too painful for their family to talk about.
“For dad, even up until the last days, it was hard to watch him talk about Eldon at times because of the emotion,” Bruce Diettert said. “You could still see the pain in his eyes when he would talk about his brother.”
Like the Dietterts, the family of smokejumper Stanley Reba did not talk about his death.
“I knew my grandmother had a brother,” Ace Reba-Jones said. “But, there was never really any discussion about it.”
Reba-Jones didn’t learn the details of his great uncle’s death until he moved to Helena in 2020 and his grandmother suggested he learn about the fire.
“I did, I read the books, I tried to do all the different things like going to Gates of the Mountains,” Reba-Jones said. “It’s been really powerful, I’m constantly learning a new fact.”
Similarly, Knieper learned the details of her uncle’s death from Norman Maclean’s ‘Young Men and Fire,’ and from a box she found when cleaning out her grandparent’s house after the death of her grandfather.
“One the very back of one of the shelves was a box titled ‘Mann Gulch,’” Knieper said. “That’s where we found all of the mementos of Mann Gulch.”
Inside the box were photos of Eldon Diettert and his fellow smokejumpers, negatives of pictures he shot, letters to and from Eldon, notes, newspaper clippings and items from Eldon’s memorial service.
“I wish families would talk about this a little more and history wouldn’t be lost between families after a tragedy,” Scott Diettert said.
Eldon Diettert’s family works to keep his memory alive. Knieper and Scott Diettert have hiked in their uncle’s last footsteps.
“It was sacred,” Knieper said. “We carried a picture of Eldon and some of his mementos, and we carried our parents’ ashes and we spread a few up there. We had eight or nine people with us, it was very emotional.”
Bruce Diettert will join them this year to hike Mann Gulch.
Reba-Jones will also hike the site of the tragedy for the first time.
“Those are heroes,” Reba-Jones said of his great-uncle and the others lost in the fire. “Those are true-to-the-core heroes.”
The memories of those lost also lives on in how fires are fought today.
“(Eldon) ended up saving a lot of lives through the years because of what we learned in Mann Gulch,” Bruce Diettert said.
According to the National Wildfire Coordinating Group, the Mann Gulch Fire generated interest in the science of fire behavior, which led to the development of the Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory. The tragedy also influenced the 10 standard firefighting orders—a set of best practices wildland firefighters use to stay safe today.
