Smoke in the Air

This has been a summer of constant fires here. Grass fires and forest fires.  I've never seen another summer like it, and I've seen some bad ones.

As part of this, there's been smoke in the air here for so long, it's now part of the regular background smell.  Normally, most years, that'd alarm me, but this year its normal.  This morning, for example, there's a fairly prominent "camp fire" small, of the type that'd alarm me usually.  Not this year.

That caused me to ponder, in keeping with the theme of this blog, if things like this were the norm in prior decades.  In the mid 20th Century the US began a dedicated effort to fight all forest fires, but prior to that, it didn't do that, and nobody could have. For that matter, as late as the late 19th Century some Indian tribes still set fire to remote forests in order drive game out of them. A good account of one such event is given in Theodore Roosevelt's account of hunting in the Rocky Mountain West, and this would have been in the 1880s or 1890s.  As late as the 1940s and 1950s here, sheepmen set fire to the high mountain sagebrush grounds on their way out, knowing that they'd scorch and green grass would come up the next spring, which they were more interested in than sagebrush.  Now, of course, that'd be a crime.

Anyhow, I wonder to what extent summers were simply smokey in the past?