Rain Stops the Great Pend Oreille Fire After a Firefighter Is Killed

The long-looked-for soaking rains, which came this morning, were gladly welcomed by owners of timber in the neighborhood of the big fires which have been burning throughout the country. The fire fighters have been making strenuous efforts to check the flames and were making slow progress until the rain came.

Deputy State Fire Warden Kerr returned to Colville the first of the week from the scene of the big fire down the river, which has been burning from the headwaters of Tacoma Creek to the Little Pend Oreille lakes. Mr. Kerr has had over a hundred men at work for two weeks or more, and has cleaned and slashed the underbrush in strips fifty feet wide covering a distance of more than fifteen miles. The fire was well checked by Sunday, and Mr. Kerr left for the other side of the range east of Colville, where another fire has been doing much damage.

Mr. Kerr estimates that close onto 75,000,000 feet of timber has been destroyed east of the range, and about 30,000,000 feet on the west side. Now that the rain has come it is likely that there will be little further spread of the flames.

The damage from the fire south of town has been mostly in the loss of cord wood on logged-off lands. Not much damage has been done to standing timber. The Panhandle and Humbird companies and the Idaho fire wardens have employed a large force of men, and had the fire practically out before the rain came.

Dangerous fires in the vicinity of Sandpoint have caused a good deal of alarm in our sister city, and for a time on Tuesday night it looked as if the Fernie disaster might be repeated there. The fire came within a short distance of the town, and sparks carried by the wind threatened to start a general conflagration. A steamer was sent from Spokane to aid in the fight and the town escaped. However, there was a big loss in the neighborhood of Kootenai and one death, that of a fire fighter who was caught by a falling tree and had to be left to his fate.