A lot of things in life are over-reactions to legitimate problems.
(Oh, about half the "rules" of the Catholic Church, for example.)
Between railroads, casual attitudes, and (though I suspect it was more hyperbole then fact) blaming fires on immigrants out fishing...Connecticut around 1900 in a typical year would burn roughly 100,000 acres.
That was 3% of our land area each year, and since it wasn't evenly distributed it meant many areas saw destructive brush fires every 10-15 years that wiped out young trees before a forest could ever take hold.
We worked that down; the last of the really big wildfires were in the early 1960s. Today if we burn more then 500 acres in fires over an acre in size, it's a bad year.
100,000 acres was way, way excessive and caused by human indifference. That was the story in many areas that had been logged over; I suspect it probably also held true out west.
And like a lot of things, we over-reacted and went from too casual an attitude on fire to one where we keep it too bottled up.