The tragic Mann Gulch Fire happened back on August 5, 1949 in Montana. 13 of 15 U. S. Forest Service smokejumpers who parachuted in to fight it were killed when the fire surrounded them. Norman Maclean (who had written the novella A River Runs Through It that became a 1992 film) wrote a whole posthumously published book about it titled Young Men and Fire.
The U. S. Forest Service video about it, Mann Gulch: The Wrath of Nature, takes ten minutes to describe what happened. Could you tell that story in a five-to-seven-minute speech at a Toastmasters club? To do so you would need to pick a viewpoint, and eliminate lots of details. James Keelaghan did it in a folk song titled Cold Missouri Waters, originally on his 1995 album A Recent Future. He told it in just five verses, as a confession by the foreman, Wag Dodge hospitalized with terminal Hodgkin’s lymphoma. At YouTube you can watch a 5- 1/ 2 minute lyric video of that song it by Wolf Loescher, and another 10-minute lyric video by the Fiddlin’ Foresters.
The image of a sign came from Wikimedia Commons.
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