American culture is imbued with the belief that fire in the forest is bad. However, because early colonists in New England observed what American Indians had done through the ages, they recognized the need to maintain forests and pastures with wildland fire (Cronon 1983). Some of the earliest settlers in the Appalachians, the South, and parts of the West also grasped the logic of maintaining ecosystems with fire (Pyne 1982), but most newcomers from Europe called Indigenous Americans savages and rejected their knowledge. MAGNIFICENT FIRESHAPED FORESTS Long before European-American explorers and settlers arrived, forests in the West were largely the product of fires ignited by lightning and Native Americans. Many forests were composed of magnificent fire-adapted trees, including coastal Douglas-firs 7 to 10 feet (2–3 m) in diameter and 300 feet (90 m) tall, with corky fire-resistant bark 6 inches (15 cm) thick; the forests also had equally large thin-barked Sitka spruce. Immense western redcedars survived surface fires thanks to their wet habitat and fluted butts, where their principal roots reached out to anchor the trees to wet ground. The fluted butts prevented surface fires from girdling the trees. Fire scars on old-growth ponderosa pines and old stumps tell a story of frequent fires from the late 1400s until heavy grazing removed grassy fuels in the 1800s and fire control began in about 1900. Giant sequoias in California’s Sierra Nevada grew within a mixed-conifer forest of ponderosa and sugar pines, and fire-scarred sequoias extend the fire history record back for more than 2,500 years. The stumps of these mammoth trees logged in the late 1800s remain undamaged by decay. Using gigantic chainsaws, Tom Swetnam and his colleagues from the University of Arizona sliced sections of sequoia stumps from Big Stump Basin and other places. The team from the Laboratory of Tree Ring Research painstakingly examined the fire scars. They amassed a record of fires at average intervals of 2 to 5 years in each sequoia grove (or 20 to 50 fires per century!), a sure sign of burning by Native Americans (Swetnam 1993; Swetnam and others 2009).