The Ninemile Remount Depot

By editor

Huson, Missoula County, Montana

Wildfire suppression in the northern Rockies once ran on mule power. After the Big Blowup of 1910 taught the young Forest Service how little it knew about organizing men against a crown fire, the agency spent the next decades building the logistics that fire camps required: tools, food, canvas, and animals that could carry all of it into country without roads.

The Ninemile Remount Depot, established in the late 1920s west of Missoula, became one of the service’s answers. Here the Forest Service bred, broke, and conditioned pack stock for fire and trail work across Region One. Strings of mules left Ninemile for remote fires, lookouts, and trail crews; they came back leaner, and the depot’s handlers started the cycle again. In an era before smokejumpers and helitack, the remount was infrastructure as essential as a ranger station.

The depot’s landscape still reads as a working place—barns, pastures, and the particular geometry of a facility designed around animals rather than automobiles. Visitors who know only the modern fire world of engines and aircraft can miss what Ninemile represents: a time when the Forest Service’s ability to fight fire was limited by how many sure-footed animals it could put on a trail before the wind shifted.

Ninemile also sits in the long shadow of 1910. The East Portal markers up the line tell the story of a battle that could not be won. The remount depot tells the story of what the agency built afterward—an institutional memory made of tack rooms and breeding records, aimed at never again sending unprepared crews into a mountain fire with no way to supply them.

See also

• Building From the Ashes: The 1910 Fires
• Fort Missoula Post Headquarters at Missoula, Missoula County
• A Battle That Could Not Be Won at East Portal, Mineral County