Constrained by a small pool of informants—arsonists are not often appre-
hended ( just as Jack Camp had declared two decades earlier) and are sel-
dom convicted when caught—Bertrand and Baird still developed a work-
ing set of motivations. First, they offered, was a traditional folk aesthetic:
the sight, sound, and smell of burning woods pleased many people (men,
women, and children). Forests with burned-away underbrush looked better
and cleaner to them. Second was comfort and safety: burning killed and/or
frightened away snakes, varmints, and insects. Third was (to the authors)
a surprising persistence of the open range: poor folks unwilling (or more
likely unable) to raise or buy feed for cattle burned other property owners’
woods in order to admit sunlight and induce growth of pasture grasses for
free-ranging cows and steers. Fourth was revenge, a big category of behav-
iors both traditional and quite modern: quarreling neighbors fired each
other’s woods. Hunters resentful of exclusion from forests now posted by
clubs protested with the torch. Squirrel hunters resented pine monocultur-
ists’ killing of nut-bearing deciduous trees. Bertrand and Baird discovered
a s ditty from Livingston Parish, Louisiana, long an arsonists’ haven,
sung to a popular tune:
You’ve got the money
We’ve got the time
You deaden the hardwoods
And we’ll burn the pine.Other fire-setters lurked in national forests out of resentment for Forest
Service policies. Yet more arsonists had employment grievances against
wood products companies. During the s, for instance, three men set
thirty-six fires around Drip Rock, Kentucky, when a tree-planting firm de-
clined to rehire them for another year. And two Florida women spent a day
setting fires on the plantations of a paper company that would not give
jobs to their sons. Finally, Bertrand and Baird presented a model ‘‘commu-
nity’’ of potential and actual arsonists: Formally ill educated and ‘‘identif[y-
ing] with lower social classes,’’ members disliked foresters, and they open-
ranged livestock.
Such communities were, statistically, most likely grouped in Louisiana,
the epicenter of American forest arson. According to the Forest Service, be-
tween and there were no fewer than , woods arsons there.
Other Gulf states followed: Mississippi, ,; Alabama, ,; Georgia,
,; South Carolina, ,. The Sabine River must have been the western
border of forest arsonists, since Texas had only cases. The upper South,