Native Americans set a huge forest fire in about 1800.

  • By David Wilma
  • Posted 8/01/2003
  • HistoryLink.org Essay 5497
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In about the year 1800, oral tradition holds that Native Americans set a huge forest fire that consumed as much as 250,000 acres in the area between Mount Rainier, Mount St. Helens, and present-day Centralia.

The fire may have been started by the Cowlitz tribe against the Nisqually tribe or its purpose may have been to bring rain during a year of drought.


Sources:

James K. Agee, Fire Ecology of Pacific Northwest Forests (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1993), 57.


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