25th Infantry Regiment

The soldiers were a Black regiment, most of them men from the South, stationed at Fort George Wright in Spokane, and the regiment had done strike duty in these same mountains in 1892. A company reached Avery on August 17, 1910, and when the fire bore down on the town four days later the men set the backfire that saved it, then had to fight their own way out. Residents who first met them warily ended up grateful, in the historian John MacLean's account. For decades many histories of the Big Burn left them out.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Pulaski Tunnel Trail — 9.3 mi
  The mine tunnel where a ranger held his crew at gunpoint while the 1910 fire burned over them.
• Sunshine Miners Memorial — 15 mi
  A steel miner raises his drill at the mouth of Big Creek, above ninety-one small headstones.

More markers nearby

• Willow Creek Slide — steps away
• The Big Blowup — steps away
• Land of the Schitsu'umsh (Schitsu'umshu'lmkhw) — 1.1 mi
• Schitsu'umsh — 1.1 mi