A quick look at some papers indicates that prehistoric California burned much more acreage than the modern variety.
We also forget that pre-european cultures in the Americas seem to have regularly practiced deliberate forest burning, for several reasons. They were much more measured and careful than the idiots who arrived after the 1500s, but American human-driven forest management didn't started with Europeans.
I doubt it. There just weren't nearly as many of them.
Human nature is one of the few things that seems to be consistent throughout all of history across all civilizations. The natives probably had just as many idiots as every other civilization.
If one person can cause a tragedy by mistake, you have a systematic failure, not a failure of the individual. A sign of a good system is that the occasional fool doesn't end up with the horizon burning.
> By the act of March 3, 1875, all land-grant and right-of-way railroads are authorized to take timber from the public lands adjacent to their lines for construction purposes; and they have taken it with a vengeance, destroying a hundred times more than they have used, mostly by allowing fires to run into the woods.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1897/08/the-ame...