The same here in Colorado. Every state in the West has wild fires every year.
I was curious about the largest fire and it was in 1910 and burned over 3 million acres, about the size of Connecticut. It spanned over parts of OR, WA, ID and MT.
Yes, fires are only more notable today for two reasons: 1) As more of the population sprawls out into rural land, the cost of fires in homes/insurance becomes a headline, and 2) lack of forest "management" for almost 50 years has left our forests with too much dead "fuel" on the ground that fires rage out of control from forest floor to tree top and no options but to let them burn out. (Before banning BLM lands and Forrest lands from grazing, sheep, cattle, etc would keep the underbrush down, and controlled fires were actually set to prevent the build up of "fuel".)
Yes. The Great Fire of 1910. It was a situation where between 1,000 and 3,000 smaller fires with differing origins combined into one large fire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Fire_of_1910
From the wiki article: "There were a great number of problems that contributed to the destruction caused by the Great Fire of 1910. The fire season started early that year, because the spring and summer of 1910 were extremely dry[6] and the summer sufficiently hot to have been described as "like no others."[1] The drought resulted in forests that were teeming with dry fuel, which had previously grown up on abundant autumn and winter moisture.[7] Fires were set by hot cinders flung from locomotives, sparks, lightning, and backfiring crews, and by mid-August, there were 1,000 to 3,000 fires burning in Idaho, Montana, Washington, and British Columbia.[5]
Smoke from the fire was said to have been seen as far east as Watertown, New York, and as far south as Denver, Colorado. It was reported that at night, five hundred miles (800 km) out into the Pacific Ocean, ships could not navigate by the stars because the sky was cloudy with smoke.[5]
The extreme scorching heat of the sudden blowup can be attributed to the great Western White Pine forests that blanketed Idaho. The hydrocarbons in the resinous sap boiled out and created a cloud of highly flammable gas that blanketed hundreds of square miles, which then spontaneously detonated dozens of times, each time sending tongues of flame thousands of feet into the sky, and creating a rolling wave of fire that destroyed anything and everything in its path.[8] "