When the federal government used the military to fight fires in Yellowstone National Park in 1886, it marked the beginning of wildland fire suppression in the United States (Pyne 1982). Organized fire suppression in the Territory of Alaska began almost 60 years after the emergence of this first federal effort in the contiguous states. The state's first fire control agency, the Alaska Fire Control Service, was established in 1939. It Faced a vast, remote, and largely unknown territory where wildfires burned millions of acres every year.