Set in Yacolt, Washington, in the first days of September 1902, the play follows Essie Garner, daughter of one of the first homesteaders in the area. After losing her fiancé in a tragic fire, she's come back home to care for her ailing father. But along comes Jamie Walsh, a land buyer for Weyerhaeuser company with a scheme to force the Garners to sell their well-timbered homestead to him for a pittance. Essie takes up a scheme to get Jamie to wed her and therefore keep the land in the family...but when their town and their homestead is threatened by a forest fire of epic proportions, more than simply trees will be burnt away in the process.

Historical Note: The Yacolt Burn forest fire began in northern Oregon and spread north over the course of three days, even leaping over the mighty Columbia River.  The flames leapt to 300 feet high and the smoke was so dense steamboats on the river had to use their searchlights to navigate. The blaze traveled 30 miles in less than 36 hours and consumed over 239,000 acres of southwest Washington. (It also kickstarted the local timber industry in producing over thirteen and a half million board feet of lumber the following month, and changed Weyerhaeuser Company's business from real estate speculation into logging.)