While his parents strolled around a hot paved path at the Missoula County Fairgrounds earlier this month, a young boy wandered toward the painted wooden shape of Smokey Bear. Ascending the two steps behind it, he was just tall enough to peek through the cutout where his face replaced that of the famous bear. He beamed.
“We’ve had Smokey at parades at Christmas and he would be more popular and get more attention than Santa,” said Mark Wiles, team leader for the national multi-agency Fire Prevention and Education Team. Wiles stood with coworkers under a small tent that offered little protection from the day’s heat. He and his team had been traveling for weeks to rural communities across southwest Montana. Those travels culminated in the familar appearance of a Forest Service ranger wearing a fuzzy Smokey Bear costume at Missoula’s Western Montana Fair in the days leading up to Aug. 9, the 80th anniversary of the date the United States Forest Service authorized the character’s creation.
Since the mid-20th century, Smokey Bear has become an icon. According to a 2018 survey by the Ad Council, the nonprofit that helped create the mascot in 1944 while still operating as the War Advertising Council, 80% of U.S. outdoor recreationists over the age of 18 can correctly identify Smokey Bear’s image. And while the brand is well-protected by the Smokey Bear Act of 1952, giving the Forest Service exclusive rights to the bruin’s name and likeness, the symbol of fire safety has appeared as a cartoon, a costumed character, a stuffed animal, a poster image, and even in the form of a 14-foot animatronic statue residing on the grounds of the Ohio Expo Center & State Fair.
Smokey Bear’s 1944 debut underscored the Forest Service’s concern about Japanese incendiary attacks on the Pacific coast along with elevated anxieties about America’s wildland firefighting capacity due to a wartime shortage of able-bodied young men. While Bambi was the agency’s initial symbol for wildfire awareness, Disney allowed the Ad Council to utilize the fawn’s image for only one year.
In 1950, six years after the creation of the Smokey Bear symbol, a live black bear cub rescued from the Capitan Gap Fire in New Mexico took on the name and fame of the icon. The living Smokey Bear was relocated to the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., where he received enough correspondence from adoring fans to warrant his own zip code. Following his death in 1976, the Forest Service buried Smokey in his home state.
But the significance of Smokey Bear has changed since he first appeared alongside World War II propaganda. In 2001, the Forest Service modified Smokey’s iconic phrase — “Remember… only you can prevent forest fires!” — by replacing “forest fires” with “wildfires.”
The shift in slogan represents both topographical and strategic distinctions.
“There’s tens of millions of acres that have burned in the last few decades that don’t have a single tree on them,” said Matthew Koehler, media director of Wilderness Watch, a Missoula-based organization focused on preserving wild lands and clean rivers. For example: Montana’s largest fire of the season so far, a July blaze known as the Deadman Fire, burned more than 74 square miles in the state’s mostly unforested southeast.
Koehler gives credit to Smokey Bear for putting the onus of wildfire prevention on individuals. According to the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, humans cause up to 75% of wildfires statewide each year.
“Smokey got that right,” Koehler said.
The DNRC lists debris burning, uncontained campfires, and lawn care and farm machinery — threats that Smokey Bear has explicitly warned about for decades — as some of the most common causes of wildfire in Montana.
The 2001 change of slogan also reflects the agency’s recognition that some wildfire is ecologically positive for the landscape — an evolution of strategic thinking regarding firefighting. But even in its modified form, Smokey Bear’s core anti-fire message draws scrutiny from some conservation experts who argue that it lacks subtlety.
According to Cindy Super, a prescribed fire coordinator with the Blackfoot Challenge, an Ovando-based community conservation group, the character’s staunchly anti-fire philosophy may be outdated. Prior to European settlement, some wildland forests burned every few decades. Some grassy plains, meanwhile, burned as often as every few months during the warm seasons. After the Great Fire of 1910 burned more than 4,600 square miles across Washington, Idaho and Montana, the Forest Service adopted a strict fire-suppression policy. By 1935, the agency had implemented a so-called 10 a.m. policy that aimed to extinguish fires within the time between when they were spotted and 10 a.m. the next day. While the Forest Service discontinued that specific tactic in 1978, stringent fire suppression efforts continue in various forms across the American West, including Montana.
“The West in particular, and in Montana especially — all of these systems had fire for centuries,” Super said. The Blackfoot Challenge established its Prescribed Fire Work Group in 2017, hoping to use it as a tool for “management, maintenance, and restoration.” Super works to “get more people comfortable with the idea of intentional fire.”
Super supports Smokey Bear’s advisories about preventing unintentional sparks that can lead to uncontrollable blazes. But with much of her work revolving around intentional burns, she wants to broaden the conversation around fire.
“There are several communities in Montana that are working really hard at trying to figure out how we can bring nuance into the discussion,” Super said.
Forest Service Public Affairs Officer Steven Bekkerus, one of the Fire Prevention and Education Team’s representatives at the Western Montana Fair, described Smokey Bear as one “outreach tool to educate the next generation,” to be used in combination with other initiatives that can help explain the varieties of wildland fires. Moreover, the team stationed at the fair emphasized Smokey Bear’s growth as an important part of his character.
“Smokey has evolved over the years,” Bekkerus said.
But one of the bear’s greatest advantages, according to Brekkerus, comes in his corporeal form.
“Kids today that came up and gave Smokey Bear a hug, they’re going to remember that experience,” Brekkerus said.