The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America

by Timothy Egan

  The public knew that this energetic leader was no mere keeper of the dead President McKinley's name. His Republican Party stood for public ownership of natural resources, among the pillars of the progressive cause. At a time when the gap between rich and poor was never greater, Roosevelt called for a national inheritance tax on wealthy families. And looking to remedy a situation where 26 percent of all boys aged ten to fifteen spent their days working full shifts away from home, and less than 5 percent of all workers had graduated from high school, Roosevelt asked for wholesale changes in child welfare laws. He said people had a right to a safe food supply, to regulation of prescription drugs. And for the sake of future generations, he called for a broad range of measures to protect land and wildlife. He was eager to slay any foe. "I felt his clothes might not contain him, he was so ready to go, to attack anything, anywhere," wrote the muckraking journalist Ida Tarbell.

  "We are the heirs of the ages," Roosevelt said in his 1905 inaugural address, signaling that he intended to use that inheritance.

  In one of the first orders of business after Roosevelt's landslide, Congress agreed to transfer the reserves to Gifford Pinchot's fledgling agency, and gave him a small budget to train rangers who would have stewardship of the forests. The General Land Office, that hidebound bureaucracy, service station for the syndicates, was pushed aside. Outmaneuvering Clark and Heyburn, Roosevelt promised that legitimate homesteaders would be allowed to claim 160 acres of land within national forest boundaries if they could prove that it was right for farming. There was not much arable land for homesteading in the reserves, but this move silenced critics who said the president was sealing off the land from opportunity.

  With the transfer, the newly named United States Forest Service was created in 1905, with Pinchot as the first Chief—a job "worth more to me than all the treasures of all the pirates of history," he wrote. His domain was sixty million acres. Having fulfilled his promise to his friend, Roosevelt now gave Pinchot simple marching orders: "It must not be forgotten," he wrote to him, "that the forest reserves belong to all the people." Pinchot felt the same way; if anything, he was more militant in his belief that the essence of Progressive Era ideals could be manifest on the land, guided by his new agency. Pinchot and Roosevelt also knew that they had only a short time to prove their worth. Congress was skeptical, and the leash was short; legislators could kill the Forest Service simply by defunding it.

  "The transfer meant a revolutionary change," Pinchot wrote. "We had the power, as we had the duty, to protect the Reserves for the use of the people, and that meant stepping on the toes of the biggest interests in the West. From that time on, it was fight, fight, fight."

  To win that fight, he now took on a greater one — against something as old as the earth itself. Fire was an enemy, a force feared by settlers, loggers, ranchers, and outdoorsmen. "Fire has always been, and seemingly will always remain, the most terrible of elements," said Harry Houdini, perhaps the most popular entertainer of Pinchot's age, who knew a thing or two about tricking an element. The natives had used fire for selective purposes. But the new stewards of this land wanted nothing to do with it. Wolves had been wiped out, erased like the bison herds that once blotted the landscape. The grizzly bear was nearly gone. What remained in the wild to stir primordial fear was wildfire. Organized firefighting was an oxymoron at the time. Pinchot promised to bring a plan of attack.

  Pinchot's thinking had evolved from five years earlier. He knew then, though he seldom said so in public, that wildfire was part of nature, even essential. He knew that some species in the West needed fire to proliferate—"gaining ground by the action of its enemy," as he said. But he put the science aside and chose to believe the words he used to sell Congress on his big idea.

  That was the pact, the price of existence for his rangers. Certainly, he could count on people being terrified. Some still brought up two disasters: the Peshtigo fire of 1871, which killed 1,182 people and burned more than a million acres in Wisconsin, and an 1894 fire in Hinckley, Minnesota, where 413 people perished. Big cities—San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago—were leveled in the hot sweep of a night, and it was the same story in midsize burgs. In the way that people anthropomorphized it, fire was the final menace of the frontier, as if the land itself were sloughing off all attempts at establishing order in the woods. And now, at long last, here was a protector, green-shirted insurance from Gifford Pinchot. So even if he didn't believe it in his heart, perhaps the only way Pinchot could bring his grand vision to life was to promise that his foresters could whip fire.

  Pinchot the missionary now professed that wildfire was akin to slavery—a blight on the young country, but something that could be wiped out by man. While nature could never be conquered, it could be tamed, tailored, customized. "I object to the law of the jungle," Pinchot always said, a philosophy that applied to predatory capitalism as well as the unruly extremes of the physical world. He assured Congress that his legion of rangers—men he would select himself, stamp with progressive principles, and train in the finishing school of the wild—could manage fire. And in controlling fire, they could win the confidence of skeptical westerners. One simply had to apply the principles of the newborn study of forestry to the reserves. Of this, Pinchot professed to have no doubt.

  The moody, self-lacerating young man was no more. The man who had been greatly influenced by the book given him on his twenty-first birthday, The Earth as Modified by Human Action by George P. Marsh, had changed. Here was a titan in his own rank, lord of the outdoors. His deference to the complexity of the world seemed gone. He certainly knew his place: at the top.

  "The first duty of the human race is to control the earth it lives upon," he wrote, flexing his muscles as a forester with a forest. But in a short time, a wildfire would make a mockery of Pinchot's certainty.

  3. The Great Crusade

  ELERS KOCH WAS JUST a few years out of college when Gifford Pinchot summoned him into his office and asked him if he wanted to scout an area nearly half the size of the Louisiana Purchase. On the Chief's office wall was a map of Montana and Wyoming—a big land pushed to the sky, the Continental Divide running through it, forests of tamarack, pine, fir, and aspen, high rock covered with snow for all but a month or so each year. Koch knew it well. He was a Montana boy, the son of Danish immigrants, raised in the Rockies. He grew up fishing in the Gallatin River and hiking in the Crazy Mountains.

  Koch had been laboring for the fresh-minted Forest Service in Washington, D.C., going over land surveys in a small brick building at 930 F Street. Once a month on Friday night, Pinchot would have a dozen or so of the young foresters over to his palatial family home at 1615 Rhode Island Avenue, where he lived with his parents and an Irish maid who had been with him since age eleven. Sometimes President Roosevelt would drop by. They ate baked apples and cream, talking up the big dream in the wood-paneled library. Later, a select few would sneak down to the basement with Pinchot for marksmanship with pistols, the target placed in front of a steel wall; in Pinchot's home shooting range, it was rare for anybody to beat the Chief.

  Koch liked his time in the capital. Still, the summers were hazy and steamy and there were no big mountains to climb, no horizons without end. Here was a way to go home, back to Montana. By executive decree, Roosevelt was adding millions of acres to the new forestry system, as fast as the land could be surveyed. At the same time, Pinchot was trying to transform an office with a staff of ten and no forests into the largest public land agency the world had yet known. He set about building his corps, first pruning the deadwood from the old land office—relatives of senators, people who had never seen a forest, "human rubbish," in Pinchot's words—then handpicking his men as if they were knights.

  Koch was one of the first to be chosen. He had met Pinchot one summer on Mount Rainier; Koch was a teenage student assistant, and Pinchot spent several nights there as part of his forest commission tour of the West. In the crowd of old cedars around the volcano of Rainier, Koch stood out, in
part because he was the only westerner among nearly two dozen Ivy Leaguers. Pinchot saw something in the boy from Bozeman. In turn, Koch was mesmerized by Pinchot. He had never met anyone so charismatic, so full of passion for the outdoors. When the chance came for Koch to do graduate work at Yale, studying at a new forestry school endowed by Pinchot family money, he jumped at it. If possible, Pinchot wanted the Forest Service to be manned by westerners, but first they had to have his imprint on them, and that usually meant the Yale School of Forestry.

  Koch had never been to the East. Everything was new to him—the people, the dress, the social rituals. He learned to smoke a pipe and mix a martini, habits he would find useful at Koch family dinner parties in Missoula. This inaugural group of American forestry students, about twenty young men in all, was special, and they knew it, stamped from the start for greatness. At Yale's bicentennial in 1901, they dressed in Robin Hood costumes, parading around campus in green tights and hoods for all the old Yalies to see—uniformed brothers of the woods. It was New Haven, Connecticut, but it could have been Sherwood Forest.

  Also in the class was Bill Greeley, who had come to Yale by way of Stanford and the University of California. When other students went out for nights of chugging ale and chasing women, Greeley stayed back and studied the cellular structure of poplars and deconstructed Bible verses. The son of a Congregational minister, he found the fullest expressions of creation in the intricacies of the natural world—the church of the outdoors. Like Pinchot, he'd been taught to "see God in nature," as the founding forester put it.

  Greeley finished at the top of that first Yale forestry graduating class of 1904, which meant he was an easy pick to be another of Pinchot's knights of the woods. Pinchot told Greeley he was being tapped to be part of the "Great Crusade"; he could shape boundaries of land his great-grandchildren would one day walk through, a legacy that appealed to the responsibilities Greeley felt as part of his Christian faith. Indeed, he soon started calling himself "a forest missionary." He was flattered to join such a select group. Pinchot and his acolyte took a train out west, where they surveyed land in California, terrain to be included in the rapidly expanding national forests. They spent long days on horseback in country without trails. "My admiration for the boss grew with every mile," Greeley wrote. "I got to know Gifford Pinchot as men can know each other only in camp and on the trail."

  Returning to Washington, back inside the building on F Street, they reviewed the same ground by map, drawing boundaries. If the land passed muster, it would be included in a new round of forest reserves, by Roosevelt's executive order. Most of Pinchot's early rangers performed a task similar to Greeley's, and they did it at a sprint.

  "There was no time to lose, and G.P. was sending his young men to ride the forests and mountains of all parts of the West," Koch recalled. "I doubt if there has ever been such a wonderful job in the world as the early days of forest boundary work. One was given a state map of say California, or Montana or Wyoming, with an area of a few million acres roughly blocked out in green. One proceeded to the nearest point by rail, and then rode all summer, seeing thrilling new wild country every day."

  In years past, wars had been fought and rivers of blood shed for far less land than that which was under consideration by the select group of "forest arrangers," as they called themselves. Never before had the fate of so much territory been determined by a small, mostly unarmed group of tree specialists. They were in on the creation, transforming by surveys, mapping, and suggestions areas larger than some eastern states. Thereafter, to all succeeding generations of forest rangers, the arrangers grew in legend. Anything a modern forester did was small by comparison, and how could it not be?

  Pinchot was known as the Chief, or G.P. And his charges were called Little G.P.s. They bought into the Chief's vision that working for the Forest Service was the most noble thing a young American could do for his country in the new century. Like the other G.P.s, Bill Greeley worshiped the Chief, this patrician who could "outride and outshoot any ranger on the force." Teddy Roosevelt moved him in the same way. He went to see the president speak one night in 1905. Midway through his speech, Roosevelt put aside his prepared remarks. He went silent for a few seconds as he moved away from the podium. Unleashed, Roosevelt strode across the stage, looking out at his audience. "I am against the man who skins the land!" he bellowed. That was all Greeley needed to hear, and bully for you, T.R.

  A few years out of college, Greeley was summoned down the hall by Pinchot to look at another of the Chief's maps. This one showed an even bigger part of the Rocky Mountain West than had been presented to Koch — all of Montana, much of Idaho and Washington, and a corner of South Dakota covered with pine. The Forest Service was breaking down its domain into regions. This was a map of the largest, Region One—forty-one million acres, twenty-two national forests in four states. How would Greeley like to be in charge of all of it, based in Missoula with Elers Koch? All of it? Yes. He would be regional forester. It was a dream job, of course, though it didn't pay much. Greeley packed for Missoula.

  The two Yalies were joined in the Rockies by a third man from Sherwood Forest, William Weigle. He was also one of the first forestry students to be schooled at Yale, and had completed an office rotation under Pinchot in Washington, D.C. Whereas Greeley was pious, Weigle could tell a joke, a dirty one at that; he was equally at home in a roadhouse saloon and a New Haven classroom. A big redhead with a hound-dog face, Weigle was known for his toughness and his pragmatism. Smart, yes. But people knew not to push him. With these qualities, Weigle was thought to be a perfect fit for the most wide-open, challenging forest in the system, the Coeur d'Alene, headquartered in Wallace, Idaho.

  When the Chief offered him the job, Weigle knew Wallace only by reputation. It was a battleground, as most Americans understood, for one of the biggest labor wars in the nation's history: sabotage, bombings, and hijackings of trains led to a massive roundup of miners, who were held in a makeshift jail for months without basic legal rights. The class war around Wallace was the focus of world attention at the turn of the century; who was America to lecture people about democracy when it held hundreds of its own citizens in a pen without habeas corpus? When the ex-governor of Idaho, Frank Steunenberg, was assassinated in 1905, the man who confessed to the killing said he was simply a pawn in a larger conspiracy. A trial in Idaho, with Clarence Darrow on the unions' side and the great silky-voiced orator, and later senator, William Borah on the other, was a spectacular show, ending in triumph by Darrow and the union officials accused of complicity in the governor's assassination. Any federal official, even one from a progressive administration, was suspect.

  Things had settled down some since the assassination, Weigle was assured. People in the Coeur d'Alenes were back to moving precious metal out of the ground. And the woods were full of timber thieves, even with the Forest Service as the new sheriff in the land. Weigle took the job. The Yale School of Forestry, its graduating class dispatched across the continent, was in place in the Rockies. Koch had charge of the Lolo, Bitterroot, and Missoula national forests. Weigle ran the Coeur d'Alene. And overseeing all of it was Greeley.

  "It was a wonderful thing to have a government bureau with nothing but young men in it," Koch said.

  Though a degree from Yale was not required, Pinchot wanted his foresters to be able to write well, for the numerous reports that their enemies in Congress would be second-guessing. But as someone who had spent many summer days in the high Rockies without trail or road to guide his way, Pinchot also required aspiring forest rangers to pass a rigorous test, lasting two days, that showed they could survive on their own in the woods.

  Most of them would be riding solo in a region they called the High Lonesome. They had to know how to navigate by compass and by the stars, how to cut wood and do basic carpentry, how to saddle a horse, how to tie a knot for lassos, how to throw a rope, how to shoot, how to cook. What's more, the food had to be more than gruel. As Pinchot said, one test was to cook a
meal, the other was to eat it. Many of them would have to build their own cabins and their own outhouses. The written test would usually weed out illiterates, Pinchot recalled, and the practical test would cull people who could never shake their bookishness. One recruiting poster said, "Invalids need not apply."

  As a complement to the Ivy Leaguers, the ideal hire was someone like Frank Herring, a cowboy who had worked with Roosevelt on his ranch in the Dakotas and then served under him in Cuba as one of Teddy's Rough Riders. In his crisp Forest Service uniform, pants tucked into high-top boots, a .44 holstered to his belt, and a silver-studded bridle, Herring made an imposing figure on his bay horse. Tough-nutted western men like Herring were often ill at ease around Bible-quoting college kids like Greeley. What they had in common, among other things, was miserable pay— $900 a year for an assistant ranger, barely half of what a grade school teacher makes in today's dollars. Rangers had to supply their own horses, their own saddles, their own rifles and hobnailed boots. At the same time, Senators Heyburn and Clark plotted to keep the Forest Service on a diet that would ensure malnutrition, if not starvation, slashing away at the budget and seizing on any excuse to humiliate the service.

  At first it hardly mattered. Pinchot and Roosevelt had their way. Morale was high, Pinchot believed, because his boys had a great purpose: they were fighting to level the field for average Americans in the West. "The Forest Service stood up for the honest small man and fought the predatory big man as no government had done before," he wrote. "Big Money was King in the Great Open Spaces, and no mistake. But in the national forests, Big Money was not King."

  Pinchot made frequent excursions out west for inspections and to make speeches in places packed with his enemies. On a trip to Idaho, he chose to go directly to Wallace, the lair of his chief antagonist, Senator Heyburn. His visit reinforced his view of Heyburn as a bought politician, owned by "the great lumber syndicates," he reported back to Roosevelt. One state over, in Montana, Pinchot scolded Greeley for letting those syndicates get away with too much timber cutting at giveaway prices. Logging was permitted in national forests—these weren't parks or pockets of pristine wilderness. But it was supposed to be limited, orderly, at a pace that would not deplete the timber supply or threaten the health of a forest. "The chief expected us to be supermen," Greeley wrote.