Sky-Fighters of the Forest: Smokejumpers, Masculinity, and Wilderness in the American West

This study explores the “smokejumpers,” a group of wildland firefighters who parachute to fires in remote western forests in an effort to extinguish them as quickly as possible. Because the smokejumpers represent an extreme iteration of western masculine identity, they offer a unique lens into the complicated, evolving, and often contradictory relationship between manhood and the environment of the American West. Smokejumper culture drew from and built upon a particularly Western brand of masculinity. Based on powerful masculine archetypes like the logger and the cowboy, this version of manhood entails a complicated relationship with nature, in which man is both intimately attached to and bent on conquering the forces of the natural world. Moreover, their interaction with fire brought an added dimension to this manly paradigm, as fire immersed forestry in an all-out war for the future of western lands. Just as Teddy Roosevelt did not become the embodiment of the “strenuous life” until he served in the Spanish-American War, engaging in an epic battle with fire gave the smokejumpers an additional claim to rugged masculinity: they were not only woodsmen, but soldiers.
This masculinity was hierarchically structured, as the smokejumping experiences of World War II conscientious objectors and African American paratroopers attest. White COs, who faced accusations of cowardice because of their religiously based refusal to join the military, embraced the smokejumping to prove their courage and patriotism. For them, smokejumping offered a powerful, if temporary, path to manhood. On the other hand, African American paratroopers, sent by the army to protect the West from fires ignited by Japanese War balloons, were both denied the opportunity to fight on the war’s frontlines and rejected by the Forest Service’s firefighting community.