My whole life, I’ve made the trek into the forest to stand over his grave. I don’t know why. Remembrance, maybe. Celebration? Just plain grief? I suppose, at times, people go to graves to apologize or boast. There are those who, for the sake of their souls, seek graves on epic pilgrimages. Some go to a grave looking for a friend or for themselves or looking probably for any god at all. Some are desperate to shake a ghost. I stay at the motel named for him and eat huevos rancheros at the diner named for him and walk down the highway named for him and stand at his grave overlooking the ranger district named for him and ask what he knows about the inferno America has become. Like any good prophet, the long-dead-and-buried beast turns the query back on me, saying, “Only you…”
I guess I go to the grave to get blamed.
Here lies a black bear who, from 1950 to 1976, was the incarnation of a hope that America could end in something other than ashes. As a cub, he was burned in a 17,000-acre wildfire in New Mexico. Then he lived as a celebrity in our national zoo. When he died, he was buried back where he was found, in the Lincoln National Forest. He was an idea before he was born, before he was burned, and he’s an idea still, even if his whole actual life was just time in a cage, a hiccup in the long idea of him.
These two things are different but inextricable—one’s an idea, and one’s a bear. The idea is Smokey Bear, a cartoonish man-bear hybrid, the icon of wildfire prevention, the star of the longest-running public service ad campaign in our nation’s history. Then there’s this actual bear, an orphaned Ursus americanus who, as part of the idea of Smokey Bear, was named Smokey Bear, and whose presence at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo throughout the midcentury helped make the idea—the ad campaign—of Smokey Bear an unprecedented triumph. In an attempt to alleviate confusion, some referred to the actual bear as a “living symbol,” which seems a bit messianic, but we’ll get to that. Anyway, I say “Smokey” to mean the whole of the idea, the eight decades of posters and cartoons and toys and PSAs and brand integrations and hot-air balloons, but when I say “Living Symbol,” I mean just this one—long-dead—bear.
As wildfires have grown bigger and more frequent and devastating, I’ve become obsessed with Smokey. Lots of folks blame Smokey for megafires, suggesting that his absolutist stance on firefighting and prevention has created powder kegs, forests full of a century’s worth of fuel ready to explode and engulf our ever-expanding exurbs. This even as there is a resurgence of Smokey iconography on T-shirts, hats, bumper stickers, and backpacks. To what extent has an imaginary bear ushered us into a fresh hell of pyrocumulonimbus proportions? It’s the kind of absurd question that fascinates me, and so I’ve become an amateur collector of all things Smokey: official merchandise and folk art and plenty of unlicensed merchandise and psychedelic drug paraphernalia. I’ve joined Smokey fan clubs. I’ve dug through archives at the National Agricultural Library and the Smithsonian Institution and eaten at every Smokey Bear–themed BBQ joint I could find. I’ve visited many national forests chasing this imaginary bear. But mostly, I’ve stood here at the grave.
The grave is at Smokey Bear Historical Park in Capitan, New Mexico, not far from where I grew up. The grave is 70 miles east of Trinity, where we detonated the first atomic bomb; 70 miles west of the UFO crash in Roswell; 12 miles from the courthouse in Lincoln where Billy the Kid made his great escape; and 7 miles from Fort Stanton, where the United States waged war trying to exterminate the Apache. There is so much to untangle in our myths of the West: the seemingly incongruous valorization of both militarism and outlawry, the horror that our fascination with life beyond the frontier is accompanied always by an urge to destroy it—both themes embedded in America’s complicated relationship with fire. As we stare down yet another fire season, I wonder if maybe in order to fathom the depths of America’s growing inferno, we need a guide, an ursine Virgil.
MAD MEN
The idea of Smokey Bear was born of war. In 1944, the United States was scared Japan might ignite forests on the Pacific coast using submarines or balloon bombs. The War Advertising Council had tried wildfire prevention campaigns featuring caricatures of Hitler and Tōjō: “Our Carelessness—Their Secret Weapon.” The council tried an angry Uncle Sam screaming over a raging fire: “Your Forests—Your Fault.” The success of a less accusatory campaign—“Please Mister, Don’t Be Careless”—based on Disney’s Bambi (1942) paved the way for a gentler approach. A memo went out from Washington, D.C., on August 9, 1944, requesting “Special Art for Wartime Forest Fire Prevention Campaign”:
Nose short (Panda type), color black or brown; expression appealing, knowledgeable, quizzical; perhaps wearing a campaign (or Boy Scout) hat that typifies the outdoors and the woods.
A bear that walks on his hind legs; that can be shown putting out a warming fire with a bucket of water; dropping by parachute to a fire; reporting a fire by phone from a lookout; plowing a fireline around a new-made clearing; building a campfire in the right place and way; carrying a rifle like G.I. Joes, etc.
The rifle was overkill, so they stuck with the bucket and campaign hat and, for modesty, dressed him in dungarees. Hat of the authoritarian, britches of the working class, barefoot like any good country boy—Smokey was a true American savior.
Though the war was ending when Smokey’s first posters were distributed in 1945, the renamed Ad Council figured the cute bear could keep its propaganda-industrial complex relevant. In 1947, the group introduced the famous catchphrase: “Remember…only you can prevent forest fires.” The next year, Smokey sort of found God and was featured on posters and stamps kneeling in prayer. He quickly evolved beyond a pyrophobic bear, becoming a manifestation of the human urge toward spiritual union with nature, coupled with aspiration for dominion over it.
In the summer of 1950, the Living Symbol was rescued from a forest fire in New Mexico. The bear cub became a local celebrity and, after the AP ran photos of him bandaged up, a national hero. His trip to the National Zoo became a multicity media tour. His flight received special permission to fly over the White House. He rode in a motorcade to the zoo, where thousands of visitors lined up to see him christened Smokey Bear. The Living Symbol “was led around the grass while the children screamed with delight and photographers flashed scores of bulbs,” wrote the Washington Post.
When the Phillies played the Yankees in the World Series later that year, Smokey ads were all over television and radio broadcasts. Smokey was in Newsweek, Time, and the Saturday Evening Post, in 11,000 newspaper ads and a whopping 10 million copies of comic books, not to mention the posters ubiquitous at bus stops, train stations, and campgrounds. Smokey’s new slogan emphasized every citizen’s responsibility for safeguarding public lands, a duty that was often less about environmental concerns than economic propositions: “You can stop this shameful waste.” U.S. Forest Service press releases routinely quantified Smokey’s work in terms of how many millions of dollars in timber he’d saved.
Smokey became so commercially valuable that in 1952 Congress passed the Smokey Bear Act, which created a penalty of fines or imprisonment for using the character without a license from the secretary of agriculture. The legislation mandated the official name Smokey Bear, yet when country crooner Eddy Arnold was making a song about Smokey that same year, the lyrics didn’t sound quite right, so Arnold sang, “Smokey the Bear.” This slight rhythmic variation has led to untold waste of taxpayer dollars as seven decades of forest rangers have been forced to spend valuable time correcting tourists about his name: it is not Smokey the Bear.
It’s difficult to overstate the popularity of Smokey in midcentury America. In 1964, with Smokey regularly receiving more mail than anyone else in the country—well over 10,000 letters a week—he was awarded his own zip code, 20252. Five years later, Smokey had his own animated television show. By 1972, more than six million kids had enrolled as Smokey’s Junior Forest Rangers. Smokey was so pervasive that his slogan was largely abbreviated to “Only you…,” because Americans had fully internalized the message: Fire is bad; it’s your fault.
On November 9, 1976, the Living Symbol died of natural causes at the National Zoo. Hundreds of obituaries ran in papers across the nation: “Death of a Symbol.” “Smokey Goes to Heaven.” “Old Age Snuffs Out Life of Smokey Bear.” “Smokey Bear Is Dead—Long Live Smokey Bear!”
In some ways, this concluded the Golden Age of Smokey. The Living Symbol had been “retired” a year before he died following a Washington Post report that pointed out his unglamorous living conditions at the zoo, especially compared with the $450,000 habitat built for new pandas gifted from China. The Living Symbol’s “retirement” attempted to extricate the mortal bear from the presumably immortal ad campaign. It was for this reason, too, that although he was eulogized widely, the burial of the Living Symbol was done quietly. There was talk of stuffing him for display, but ultimately he was packed in a crate and flown in the baggage compartment of TWA 217 back to New Mexico. He was buried by a skeleton crew under cover of darkness amid unconfirmed threats that hijackers planned to steal the corpse, cut it up, and sell the parts as trophies. One reporter showed up and accused the gravediggers of burying an empty coffin. Either way, as far as the government was concerned, it was in the national interest to have the Living Symbol disappear quietly so Smokey could live on.
But it was not in the interest of the small village in New Mexico to keep the Living Symbol under wraps. Capitan built a museum around his grave and obtained permission to name a motel and diner after him. In 1984, the town even convinced the postal service to issue the 40th-anniversary commemorative Smokey stamp from Capitan Municipal School.
Beginning in the 1980s, the Ad Council created massive partnerships featuring Smokey with nearly every professional sports organization in America. He was on trading cards and throwing out first pitches at pro and Little League games. He was so omnipresent as to become invisible and almost meaningless. In the 2000s, after the Smokey Sports Program ended, the Ad Council moved away from new campaigns despite a 2006 study that placed Smokey alongside Mickey Mouse and Santa Claus as one of America’s most recognized figures and noted that “99% of Americans recognize Smokey.”
This article appears in Issue 29 of Alta Journal.
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Then, in 2010, computer graphics resurrected Smokey, making his fur photorealistic and his physique noticeably more…mythic. Smokey sported muscles and a new catchphrase: “Get Your Smokey On.” By the end of the decade, Smokey was legitimately stacked. A comparison of official Smokey Bear balloons flown in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade shows the undeniable transformation. For the original balloon, which floated from 1966 to 1981, Smokey exhibited a flabtastic, keg-like torso, while the balloon reintroduced in 2019 flaunts the ripped pectorals of a professional wrestler.
Smokey’s new image coincided with a push to approve more licensed usage of the bear—as well as, in December 2020, federal legislation eliminating jail time for unlicensed usage. Companies like the Landmark Project, Filson, and Walmart all now peddle Smokey merch. Oregon has begun offering Smokey license plates, New Mexico recently approved them, and Washington is considering them.
This year, the Ad Council is celebrating Smokey’s 80th birthday with a new PSA. The CGI Smokey appears mostly in reflection or silhouette as different humans over the decades enjoy the outdoors, some singing “Amazing Grace.” The ad features the newest slogan: “Smokey lives within us all.”
PICK YOUR SMOKEY
The people of Kern County, California, spent August 2020 raising money to replace a Smokey sign swiped from near the South Fork Wildlife Area. Smokey went missing from Deception Pass in Washington State in mid-2020 and is presumed stolen. In June 2023, Wasatch County, Utah, replaced a poached Smokey with Winnie-the-Pooh. After two thefts, Camano Island in Washington is now on its third Smokey, and the local paper reports that firefighters “took extreme measures and power tools to secure Smokey to the 12-foot pole.” Lake Tahoe had Smokey stolen in January of this year, and in April, Smokey was stolen from the Tally Lake Ranger District in Montana: “At about 3:30 a.m. April 28, a pickup truck drove up onto the sidewalk outside the Wolfpack Way district office in Kalispell and its occupants stole the two-dimensional visage of Smokey Bear.”
Possibly owing to his ubiquity, Smokey is often vandalized, mutilated, or kidnapped. In the West and Southwest in particular, he has long been a figure of scorn. As a kid hiking the Lincoln National Forest, I would often spot a Smokey shot up by hunters or ranchers, usually between the eyes and in the chest.
In John Nichols’s 1974 novel, The Milagro Beanfield War, residents of northern New Mexico routinely and ritualistically burn, smash, and “in a great many other imaginative and bestial ways” desecrate little statues of Smokey in the hope of driving out Forest Service agents they view as despots. In a 2006 ethnographic study of northern New Mexico forests, Understories, Jake Kosek explores the sentiment of Latino and Native farmers in a chapter called “Smokey Bear Is a White Racist Pig.” The title is a quote from a land-grant activist in Truchas, New Mexico, but even Kosek deems Smokey “the colonial bear,” a dupe who helps the government, on behalf of wealthy real estate or timber-industry interests, get away with all kinds of discrimination against and disenfranchisement of locals, such as stealing grazing land and criminalizing the long-standing use of fire in land management. Kosek quotes a memo from 1945, the same year Smokey first appeared on posters, in which forest rangers in New Mexico tried to limit fire prevention ads because of the “negative reaction to them on the part of the local people.”
America’s most cantankerous park ranger, Edward Abbey, also took shots at Smokey. In the 1975 novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, George Washington Hayduke and pals briefly stop near the Grand Canyon to “beautify” a Smokey, making his eyes bloodshot and painting “onto his crotch a limp pet-cock with hairy but shriveled balls.” The Monkey Wrench Gang are environmental terrorists who wholeheartedly reject that Smokey represents any kind of eco-conscience. In their eyes, he is as deserving of sabotage as the capitalist developers destroying wilderness to make way for shopping malls.
By creating a hybrid of forester and bear, the Ad Council apparently unlocked an ungodly combination of irreconcilable forces that had long been festering in the human psyche. Stephen Pyne writes in his history Fire in America that “fire control was often the first expression of administrative presence felt on what were formerly open lands.… In England, the forester had been a hated official since medieval times.”
Smokey the Brand
And if the forester is loaded with a few millennia’s worth of cultural suspicion, then bears carry even more baggage. “The bear has for thousands of years been the master of souls, bodies, and minds in transition,” write Paul Shepard and Barry Sanders in The Sacred Paw. As early as 30,000 years ago, bears drew human attention “to the theme of cosmic renewal. Parallels in the disposal of bear and human bones suggest an analogy, perhaps the concept of immortality in which the bear was both metaphor in its hibernation cycle and ritual instrument in the earliest human funerary practices.”
Smokey, in other words, was fated to run amok, to go rogue, because his very nature was a contradiction. The bear, a symbol of renewal and vitality, became an enforcer of the state who demanded obedience through personal responsibility (“Only you…”), touting the American ideal of individualism only to recruit people, and their behavior, to absolute conformity. I doubt that in 1944 those admen sat around with their highballs and cigarettes discussing such things. The record pretty clearly indicates that their primary concern was whether or not to put pants on the bear. But, however unconsciously, they tapped into something they would never be able to fully control, not with reams of manuals about the usage of Smokey’s likeness or the wearing of a Smokey costume, not even with acts of Congress.
That there was something dangerously volatile at the heart of Smokey is evident not just in the wild success of the ad campaign but also in his rogue incarnations. One devastating example emerged in 1962 when, as America fawned over the Living Symbol, Smokey became the unofficial mascot of the U.S. military’s Operation Ranch Hand. This rogue Smokey was on posters in barracks, and American pilots, in planes nicknamed Smokey Bears, dropped 19 million gallons of Agent Orange and other herbicides all over South Vietnam, destroying millions of acres of forests and exposing millions of Vietnamese plus a few million U.S. troops to poison. Operation Ranch Hand riffed hauntingly on the famous slogan: “Only you can prevent a forest.”
By 1969, Smokey’s wartime origins had resurfaced in his official campaign: A television ad featured a fiery mushroom cloud as a bell tolled ominously. The narrator said that American forest fires destroyed “more land than 90 hydrogen bombs” and that most “were started by carelessness, by people like you and me.” Fire was again framed not as an ecological reality to understand and manage but as a weapon of war—and Americans were aiding and abetting the enemy.
That same year, rogue Smokey took the opposite tack when he was portrayed as the Buddha by poet Gary Snyder in “Smokey the Bear Sutra.” Snyder composed the sutra “when the nascent environmental movement was trying to stop the spread of nuclear power.” He writes of the Buddha 150 million years ago prophesying that he will be reincarnated as a bear wearing overalls and the wide-brimmed hat of the West, a bear as interested in “smashing the worms of capitalism and totalitarianism” as he is interested in preventing fires, but interested most of all in “harmony of man and nature.”
Other rogue Smokeys took over head shops across the nation during this era. Hippies worshipped nature, loved drugs, and hated authority; co-opting Smokey by putting a joint to his lips perfectly encapsulated all of these things. I have a black light poster from 1973 where Smokey lounges among psychedelic shrooms and sports bandoliers like Pancho Villa as he passes a joint to Bambi. Rogue Smokey’s toking face also appeared on blotter paper that dissolved LSD onto the tongues of a generation, some of whom were likely Junior Forest Rangers in the ’50s—and so Smokey rewired their brains twice! At times, the embrace of rogue Smokeys in American counterculture has been as fervent as the government’s insistence on official Smokey, and that’s part of his staying power, too.
In the early 2010s, one rogue Smokey finally went full G.I. Joe when the brand Article 15 sold $1 million in T-shirts featuring Smokey holding a machine gun and the slogan “Only You Can Prevent Terrorism.” This brand was a forerunner of Black Rifle Coffee Company, which eventually abandoned the bear and slapped the machine gun directly onto an American flag, a logo worn by some who stormed the Capitol on January 6.
In 2016, after the election of President Donald Trump, a company out of Pittsburgh had equal-but-opposite success with a rogue Smokey T-shirt on which the bear frowns and his iconic hat reads “resist.” Variations on the resist rogue Smokey have remained popular, including Smokey raising a fiery Black Power fist.
It is not beyond the realm of possibility that a liberal wearing rogue Smokey resist merch has crossed paths with a conservative wearing their own popular rogue Smokey branding, currently the bear in a MAGA hat and the slogan “Only you can prevent socialism,” even as both individuals camped in a forest whose government Smokey sign was long ago, out of scorn or recreation, stolen or defaced in the Hayduke manner of penile denudation.
The multiplicity of Smokeys in (counter)culture is as vast and diverse as that of another mythic figure of the West, the cowboy, who also refuses to die but is reincarnated with new values by every generation (see “Reckoning with the West(ern)”). So, as with the cowboy, let there be stoned Smokeys and zombie Smokeys and queer Smokeys and cyberpunk Smokeys and crotchety old Smokeys, because there already are. At its best, this is what the 80th-anniversary ad campaign reaches for with its new slogan: “Smokey lives within us all.” But the PSA clings to that messianic portrayal of Smokey as he travels through time and campers sing “Amazing Grace” to him. If decades of Smokey have taught us anything as our fires have exploded in size, it’s that he’s no savior; he’s just American.
So then, without a messiah, what is to be done about our megafires? Quit fighting them and let what will burn become ash? I don’t know, but I guess that’s why I keep coming to this grave. When our Living Symbol retired a year before his death, the announcement came in the New York Times edition with a front-page headline anticipating another end, “A Saigon Question: Stay or Flee?” For all the Agent Orange rogue Smokey had helped spread, there was no winning the war. Our country had largely realized the absurdity of the strategy encapsulated by one major’s claim: We had to destroy the town in order to save it.
By 1973, the notion of salvific destruction had crept into Smokey’s philosophy back home. In September, the New York Times asked, “Has Smokey Bear been fibbing to us all this time?” It reported on a new Forest Service policy of not suppressing natural fires and “letting Mother Nature do her whole thing when it doesn’t threaten inhabited private areas.” The Times concluded that “an updated Smokey Bear might say ‘Burn, baby, burn.’ ”
That same year, an official from the American Forestry Association was forced to give a speech defending Smokey against claims that his policies erased Indigenous knowledge of fire and land stewardship. The official said, “We can’t afford to tear down a whole century of progress for a half truth. Perhaps fire was a natural part of the environment before the white man came to this country, but we have so altered land patterns and land use that adequate control of wildfires is an ecological necessity.”
That was 51 years ago but, except for the part about progress, it seems pretty much the whole tragic truth of the matter. When I was a kid visiting the bear’s grave, rangers would give us a comic book called The True Story of Smokey Bear, which laid out the official narrative: the Living Symbol was plucked from a smoldering tree by soldiers from nearby Fort Bliss. That narrative was always a little too tidy, especially considering just how many hundreds of men came from across the Southwest to fight the fire at Capitan Gap. These included the Mescalero Apache Red Hats and the Taos Pueblo Snowballs, two crews fighting a major fire off their respective reservations for one of the first times. It was the beginning of a period that would see Native firefighting crews, and the Mescalero Red Hats in particular, become the gold standard for traveling seasonal firefighters.
For all the publicity the Ad Council derived from that little bear and the Capitan Gap Fire, the contributions of Apache and Pueblo firefighters were mostly ignored. The Taos Pueblo Snowballs have recently tried to reclaim that narrative with a story of rescuing the cub who would become our Living Symbol. Theirs is one of many stories vying for credit in this regard. About the only thing all these stories agree on is where the cub was found. It’s a difficult spot to reach, more than 10,000 feet in elevation and accessible only via a grueling hike.
A TREE IN THE FOREST
I once spent a few days in those mountains hoping to photograph the fir or aspen to which that burned cub clung. I thought it might show the great resilience of nature: the tree, still thriving, that had delivered our Living Symbol from the inferno, an image more inspirational than a cartoon or a grave. I searched through more recent burn scars, around slash piles, and up into the densest areas that will one day ignite again and burn until rain comes. I photographed many trees even though surely none of them was the right tree. Facing west, I looked out over the missile range where the first atomic bomb was tested in 1945. Its fiery mushroom cloud was something our Living Symbol’s mother likely witnessed.
I don’t know if a mother could ever prepare her cub to become the Living Symbol, but I wonder if she was able to warn him about that fire, the big fires humans could make. That would be an origin story worth telling. Either way, I guess it was in his blood from the start, the fallout of American hubris.
My last visit to the grave was in June, days after two fires ignited in the Lincoln National Forest. They torched more than 24,000 acres around Ruidoso and the Mescalero Reservation, burned 1,400 buildings, and killed two people. As with the Capitan Gap fire that bore our Living Symbol, there was little hope of containing these, but then the monsoon came early. The rains fell and did not stop, and then, of course, there was flooding—19 flash flood emergencies in the burn scar in the month after the fires, homes that had barely escaped flames now swept away on sudden raging rivers.
I left the grave but turned back, and there, over mountains for miles and miles, was a thick rolling cloud like I’d never seen, smoke mixed with steam from rain dousing wildfire, all caught up in a fog. I thought of the fiery mushroom cloud, but this one was different, not a symbol of instantaneous apocalypse but something slower and older, a familiar tale of the West: nature as something we’d rather conquer than understand.•
Joshua Wheeler is the author of Acid West: Essays. His first novel, The High Heaven, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press.
