Bad Smoke, Good Smoke: A Texas Rancher's View of Wildfire

Voice in the American West

by John R. Erickson

From his home on the Texas Panhandle, John R. Erickson, rancher and author of the bestselling Hank the Cowdog series, saw firsthand the raw power of two megafires that swept across the high plains in 2006 and 2017. “These were landmark events that are etched onto the memory of an entire generation and will be passed down to the next. They made the old-time methods of fighting fire with shovels, wet gunny sacks, and ranch spray rigs a pathetic joke.”

Yet Bad Smoke, Good Smoke, while relating a tale of gut-wrenching destruction, also provides a more nuanced view of what is often a natural event, giving the two-sided story of our relationship with fire. Not just a first-hand account, Bad Smoke, Good Smoke also synthesizes and explains the latest research in range management, climate, and fire. Having experienced the bad smoke, Erickson tries to understand a rancher’s relationship to good smoke and to reconcile the symbiotic relationship that a rancher has with fire.

Evocatively chronicled, Erickson tells what it is like trying to stop the unstoppable: Bad Smoke, Good Smoke gives voice to the particular pains that ranchers must face in our era of climate change and ever more powerful natural disasters.

208 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2021

About the author

John R. Erickson, a former cowboy and ranch manager, is gifted with a storyteller's knack for spinning a yarn. Through the eyes of Hank the Cowdog, a smelly, smart-aleck Head of Ranch Security, Erickson gives readers a glimpse of daily life on a ranch in the West Texas Panhandle. This series of books and tapes is in school libraries across the country, has sold more than 7.6 million copies, is a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, and is the winner of the 1993 Audie for Outstanding Children's Series from the Audio Publisher's Association. Publishers Weekly calls Hank a "grassroots publishing phenomena," and USA Today says this is "the best family entertainment in years."

Hank the Cowdog made his debut in the pages of The Cattleman, a magazine for adults, and when Erickson started getting "Dear Hank" letters, he knew he was onto something. So in 1983, he self-published 2,000 copies of The Original Adventures of Hank the Cowdog, and they sold out in 6 weeks.

When teachers began inviting Erickson to their schools, Hank found his most eager fans. Teachers, librarians, and students alike love Hank. According to some Texas Library Association surveys, the Hank the Cowdog books are the most popular selections in many libraries' children's sections. The lively characters make excellent material for reading and writing lessons, and turn even the most reluctant readers into avid Hank-fans.

Erickson was born in Midland, Texas, but by the age of 3, he had moved with his family to Perryton, Texas, where he and his wife live today on their working cattle ranch. They have 3 grown children and 4 grandchildren. His advice to young writers is, "Write about something you know. Try to leave your readers better off than they were before."

Reviews

[Natalie Bright · Rating 5 out of 5]

You know him as the quick witted creator of Hank the Cow dog series. In the style of part journal, part memoir, Erickson delivers a terrifying visual of Texas Panhandle prairies fires and how they can devastate lives and property. More particularly the fire of 2017 when Erickson lost everything. Typical of his ability to paint a vivid picture of the setting, BAD SMOKE, GOOD SMOKE is also surprisingly honest and raw with emotion. I can't even imagine how he put into words their experience. This must have been an unbelievably difficult book to write.

[Avis Black · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Bad Smoke Good Smoke, Erickson gives you a history of prairie grass and prairie fire. Most people have the impression that the tallgrass prairie existed for thousands of years before the arrival of white settlers. This is actually wrong. Why? Because the vast herds of bison which used to roam the plains ate the grass shorter, that's why. They cropped it down enough that it made poor fire fuel. Erickson quotes old accounts written by men who lived on the prairie in the days when the buffalo still ruled the plains, and they reported that the grass was short.

When the bison vanished, the grass lost its most important natural predator, as it were, and it grew to the maximum height that it could biologically achieve. Thus the tallgrass prairie was born, the grass that became a legend to the first waves of white settlers who encountered it. But the tallgrass only predated the arrival of the settlers by a few years.

Early ranchers also reported another phenomenon of the tallgrass prairie. Godawful, massive fires. The sea of tallgrass was perfect fire fuel, especially after it had dried a bit in a drought. Erickson quotes men who knew of megafires that burned as much as a hundred miles of prairie. These fires were common in those few years after the bison vanished and before the farmers' plows broke the soil up for farms, inadvertently creating natural firebreaks, and then filled up the prairie with domestic cattle to crop the grass short again.

John Erickson wrote this book as a piece of soul-searching. He is a ranch owner in the Texas panhandle. He has had near misses with fires before, and then one day in 2017, the Big One came.

A massive fire blazed across his ranch. Erickson and his wife lost almost all their possessions, including their dream house, and Erickson himself lost his writing office with all his personal diaries, unpublished manuscripts, treasured memorabilia, and his extensive collection of books on the American West, which was a cherished collection started by his grandfather. As a bitter cap to this experience, one of his grandchildren was killed in an accident only days after the fire. Much of Bad Smoke, Good Smoke is a diary of the days leading up to the fire and an account of having to cope with the destruction--and his decisions--afterwards.

Two years later, Erickson says he still wakes up in the middle of the night haunted, wondering what he could have done differently. Would controlled burns have kept the fire fuel down enough to have prevented the disaster? Erickson then gives you a glimpse into the ecology of the prairie. Controlled burns have been done in the spring for decades by ranchers in areas such eastern Oklahoma and Kansas. But they have been avoided in Texas. Controlled burns make Texas ranchers paranoid.

Ranches are huge in the Texas panhandle. Roads are rare, and the terrain is laced through with rugged canyons that are impossible for fire trucks to drive through. Old fencing is at times made of cedar posts which can burn. Burnt barbed wire becomes brittle and fragile, and it costs thousands of dollars to replace a single mile of fencing. Wind shifts make fire unpredictable, and the speed of a fire makes it likely that cattle could be killed and human lives lost. Hence the paranoia.

This situation makes it impossible for Texas ranchers to protect their lands using the methods that ranchers in other states do. Erickson seriously considers trying controlled burns after his terrible experience, but he has to give up, musing on the impossibility of taming the Texas landscape.

Erickson was 74 when his house burned down. He and his wife are left wondering if they have the strength and motivation to rebuild everything at their advanced ages after such a disaster.

Erickson is also the author of Panhandle Cowboy, Through Time and the Valley, LZ Cowboy, The Modern Cowboy, Prairie Gothic, Cowboy Country, and Catch Rope, all very good books about ranch life in Texas that I enjoyed reading quite a bit. He's more well known for his Hank the Cowdog series for children. Be warned that anyone unwary enough to search Goodreads for more of Erickson's nonfiction will be overwhelmed by about a hundred Hank the Cowdog books, and it's almost impossible to find his nonfiction works on this site. I wish he had used a different writing name for his Hank books, but it's too late to fix that now.

Bad Smoke Good Smoke is a solid work that I recommend. It's available at Hoopla:
https://www.hoopladigital.com/title/1...

[Nathan Ellzey · Rating 5 out of 5]

As usual Erickson's style is easy to read. This topic, however, is much more difficult, too say the least. Wildfires are terrifying and destructive... and natural. Erickson's account of his own experiences with this devastated power is written in an easy to read, informative, and vulnerable way. I'm sure many Hank the Cowdog fans will want to read about the trials his author suffered in 2006 & 2017.

[Sequoyah Branham · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bad Smoke, Good Smoke is such a powerful book, because it holds not only facts, but real story from real people. By reading this you walk through two mega fires with Erickson, one of which his home was burned.
In the following chapters you read about how they came back from that and facts about fire.
This book will get your wheels turning.

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was as an excellent read. His telling the story brought back memories of being a n power lineman in fire season!

[Margaret Mechinus · Rating 3 out of 5]

A friend who met Erickson at a library event loaned me her signed copy. I put off reading it, not thinking I really wanted to read it. But once I got started, I read through to the end (skipping over the many names of people he wanted to mention and thank for their help.) A personal look at the effects of fire- both devastating and beneficial.