Archives West Finding Aid

The modern Forest Service was created by the transfer of the national forest reserves from the United States General Land Office to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) by Congress in 1905. The USDA's Bureau of Forestry was renamed the Forest Service and assumed management of the reserves. Six district offices were created in western states in 1908 to distribute leadership outside of Washington D.C. The national forests (formerly the national forest reserves) were divided even further in following years and by 1930 there were 10 regional offices. The Northern Region, or Region 1, encompasses Montana and North Dakota along with parts of Idaho, Washington, and South Dakota.

Devastating fires in the summer of 1910 burned nearly 3 million acres in the forests of western Montana and northern Idaho. The loss of life and economic impacts caused by these fires highlighted the need for organized fire management within the boundaries of the national forests and greatly increased support for research and development of fire control methods. This interest included collecting data on the conditions most conducive to large fires and the possibility of predicting these fires. In the 1920s, Harry T. Gisborne became a fire researcher at the Priest River Experiment Station in Missoula, Montana. Using data collected from various regional sources, Gisborne helped develop the country's first fire danger rating system. Introduced in the 1930s, his fire danger meter was a portable device that used weather and fire fuel input to predict the probability of a forest fire. Other regions adopted similar methods and technology to develop their own meters and rating systems through the 1950s. It wasn't until 1958 that the idea of a fire danger rating system for the entire country became a primary objective. In 1972, the original National Fire Danger Rating System (NFDRS) was released. The system saw various updates in subsequent years including full automation and revisions to account for climate variations. Currently, the National Fire Danger Rating System is utilized by the Forest Service to report fire danger to the public on a five level, color-coded scale. The current system uses weather, topography, fuels, and risks to determine fire danger potential.