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

by Timothy Egan

  During a lengthy inquiry, the American consul, Albert Michelson, found that the two immigrants had been supporting their families for at least five years, sending money home from the mines in Wyoming and Arizona, regular income. "The letters of the two deceased men demonstrate a willingness and desire to keep their parents from want," Michelson wrote his superiors in Washington. "That is admirable and convincing."

  Yet nothing came from the United States. The families checked regularly with the mayor, who checked with the consul, who checked with his government, and all of them were given half promises and uncertainty, but no money. "The family is in great want," Michelson wrote after one of the visits from the mayor of Rivara. By now Michelson was angry, sharing some of the indignation that forest ranger families felt in the northern Rockies. These grieving parents were "peasants," he wrote in one cable, living hand to mouth, and the least his government could do was to give them some small compensation for what the boys had done on behalf of the United States. "In ten years of service, there has not been a case more deserving," Michelson wrote. At last, two years after the fire, Domenico Bruno's parents were paid $200 for the loss of their son's life. There is no record of the Viettone settlement.

  Families of the Americans who died were not treated much better. A few days after the seventeen-year-old boy Val Nicholson fell in the Bullion Mine, his father hiked up through the smoking debris and retrieved the boy's body. Young Val was dragged down to Wallace and buried. The grief overwhelmed his father, though — two weeks later, he died of a heart attack. That left the widow Nicholson, a mother with young children underfoot, and no money. She pleaded with the Forest Service for compensation after losing the two men in her life, but the government turned her down. There was nothing in reserve, no funds for the fallen American warriors in the Bitterroots. She then asked for something simpler: a stone slab for her son's grave. Government officials said they would look into it.

  PART III

  What They Saved

  17. Fallout

  AS THE SUSTAINING cause of his life and the men who shepherded that cause were engulfed in flame, nobody in the public arena was angrier than Gifford Pinchot. He had joined Roosevelt on the road, getting daily fire updates during the last week of August. For him, the dispatches were like hearing, blow by blow, of his hometown burning to the ground. He knew the Bitterroots better than most of the transient firefighters. By horseback or on foot, with rod and rifle, with surveyors' tools and primitive maps, he had been all over the land that had just collapsed. The news reports left him hollow, furious, and stunned. He and Roosevelt had all but written off fire, and now this: at least a hundred dead, the fate of some rangers still unknown, the destruction of an area big enough to hold their most outsized ambitions. His knights had never faced such a test. And yet, in the crucible of a wildfire of unseen magnitude, in the face of great loss, they performed as true heroes, he felt.

  Anger and indignation in his voice, Pinchot went on the attack before the rains had yet put out the fire, seizing this calamity as a rallying cry in the same way that a band of Texans used the disastrous defeat of the Alamo. He blamed enemies of the Forest Service for leaving the agency so vulnerable. He had preached that forests must be preserved, in part to prevent a coming timber "famine." And by the early estimates of the rangers, the fire had burned enough wood to provide timber for the whole nation for fifteen years — an inexcusable waste, in Pinchot's telling. It could all be laid at the feet of people who had gone after the Forest Service since its infancy and were taking advantage of Taft's feeble presidency to kill it. On August 26, papers around the country carried on their front pages an Associated Press dispatch that had originated in the New York Times.

  PINCHOT PLACES BLAME FOR FIRES

  The immediate causes of the fire were drought, lightning, and locomotives — and of course a wind for the ages, that Palouser. But the Big Burn did not have to happen as it did. The fire was not inevitable, not a pure force of nature. It was "the ironbound reactionaries," led by Senator Heyburn of Idaho, who had left the people's forests without adequate stewardship, Pinchot said. They had blood on their hands. "The men in Congress like Heyburn," Pinchot said, "who have made light of the efforts of the Forest Service to prepare itself to prevent such a calamity as this, have in effect been fighting on the side of the fires against the general welfare. If even a small fraction of the loss from the present fires had been expended in additional patrol and preventive equipment some or perhaps all of the loss could have been avoided."

  Pinchot's conclusion was a reach, to say the least. If ten times the manpower had been on the fire lines, if the entire nation's standing Army of roughly eighty thousand men had been in place in the forest, it's doubtful they could have done anything when the northern Rockies blew up in the face of those winds, with the woods so dry. But even if Pinchot knew it was absurd to claim that "some or perhaps all of the loss could have been avoided," he had another motive for going on the attack. Schooled in heroic mythology and his years with Roosevelt, Pinchot knew that public policy revolutions needed more than outrage — they needed a master narrative. With the Big Burn, Pinchot sketched the blueprint of a coming-of-age myth for an agency just five years old. If the Forest Service had lost the battle, it would now try to win the war behind the ousted Chief, using the martyrdom of his wounded Little G.P.s as a call to arms.

  "The Forest Service has done wonders with its handful of men," he said. "Many of them have given their lives to protect the homes of settlers and the forests on which the prosperity of the Western people depend. To my mind their conduct is beyond all praise." Give them tools, money for trails and telephones, and funds to build lookouts, and the Big Burn would never happen again.

  "Forest fires are preventable," he said. "It is a good thing for us to remember at this time that nearly all or quite all of the loss, suffering and death the fires have caused was wholly unnecessary."

  Pinchot spread the word through extensive interviews. "For the want of a nail," he told the popular Everybody's Magazine, "the shoe was cast, the rider thrown, the battle lost. For the want of a trail, the finest white pine forests in the United States were laid waste and scores of lives lost. It is all loss, dead loss, due to the pique, the bias, the bullheadedness of a knot of men who have sulked and planted their hulks in the way of appropriation and protection of these national forests." Three other national magazines, Collier's, Harper's, and American Forestry, also took up the theme, lashing out at Congress. "This national calamity is blamable to the petulance and vindictiveness of certain men," Everybody's declared.

  Roosevelt, whose every utterance was being recorded as he toured a country curious about whether he might take on President Taft, reinforced Pinchot's cause. He saw in these green-uniformed men out west something of what he had seen in the Rough Riders who stormed into a hail of bullets with him in Cuba. Few remembered the cause of that war, already an asterisk barely ten years after it ended. What they remembered were those brave souls who charged up San Juan Hill. In similar fashion, Roosevelt saw courage, selflessness, and strength in battle in the men who faced movable mountains of fire in August 1910. Teddy sent a telegram to Greeley, lavish in praise for the Forest Service, which was forwarded to every employee of the agency. What the rangers had done was enough to "make an American proud of having such a body of public servants," Roosevelt said. They had acted with valor and competence, he added, despite being undermined by Congress.

  Senator Heyburn was taken aback. "Pinchot's charge is ridiculous," he said. "I won't need two-hundred words to answer it." He groused about efforts to portray the Forest Service as heroic, and then decided, after double volleys from G.P. and Roosevelt, to make a claim of greater absurdity. He blamed the rangers for the fire.

  It was not that they didn't know what they were doing, or lacked funds, tools, men, or support services. The problem, Heyburn believed, was the very existence of the Forest Service as a force of preservation—enabling nature to run wild, as it
were. This fire would never have happened had the Forest Service not tried to hold back the controlling forces of civilization, he said. The great national forests of the West needed loggers, miners, city builders, farmers, and ranchers to cut them down, thus preempting any big fire, because the fuel would be gone. In setting aside these vast public reserves, Heyburn implied, Roosevelt had all but torched the trees himself.

  He pronounced Teddy's national forests a monumental failure. Of course, Heyburn had long opposed the very idea of public forests, just as he had worked against child labor laws and direct election of U.S. senators. But see here, this conservation idea, in practice, was a disaster! Here, in the biggest wildfire in American history, was proof of a point he had long argued, he claimed. The rangers themselves, from Greeley to Pulaski, all these Little G.P.s with their leather-bound book of rules of the woods, handed down from the great Pinchot himself—they were a menace, an impediment, interested only in collecting their paychecks.

  "The exclusion of responsible settlers and the substitution of irresponsible persons as rangers account in a large measure for the fires," Heyburn said. "The presence of thousands of men in the forest whose principal industry is to establish the necessity for their employment will always constitute a menace to the forest." And then Heyburn went one step further. The fires, he said, were God's will—an angry God, enraged by the Forest Service. In letting so much land burn, God was doing what the Forest Service would not let industry do, clearing the land of its tangle of wildness to prepare for cities, industry, farms, and settlers. Heyburn won few converts, with the West still smoking, with men still nursing wounds in hospitals, with stories appearing daily of heroic and selfless acts by the young rangers.

  Paired again on the road, Roosevelt and Pinchot grew stronger in daily battle with the enemies of conservation, coasting on a full tank of outrage after the fire, a righteous wind at their backs. The highlight of their tour was an address in Osawatomie, Kansas, ten days after the Big Burn. Pinchot wrote the speech, once again finding the words that fit the oratorical style of the man he worshiped. It had been eleven years since they boxed and wrestled together on a winter night in the governor's mansion in Albany, eleven years since they shared a dream of persuading Americans to see their land as something worthy of holding on to for the ages, eleven years since they dared to think that the Gilded Age's powers who controlled natural resources at the cusp of the twentieth century could be brought to heel. Over that span, they had set aside more than 230 million acres, freed the Republican Party from the grip of a handful of big trusts, and created an agency that embodied the spirit of progressive government—young men in the service of country, some of whom were dying in hospitals in a part of the northern Rockies stripped of its forest cover.

  A massive crowd stretched to the horizon on the prairie. Roosevelt climbed atop a table placed in the midst of the audience, barely high enough for most people to see him. He launched into a declaration of "new nationalism," a creed that stressed people power over corporations, and conservation over hands-off capitalism. If there was ever any doubt that Roosevelt stood with the burgeoning insurgents in his party, he removed it on August 31. First he went after Taft, essentially labeling him a man who broke his pact with the voters, though he never named him. Then he called for "a graduated income tax on big fortunes," and an inheritance tax as well. He stood up for his Square Deal, urged passage of child labor laws to curb abuse of young children working in mines and factories, and said there should be government protection for workers knocked out of the job market because of physical disabilities. He urged further prosecution of the trusts, and regulation of banks, insurance companies, and railroads. As for the big swath of land left over from America's western expansion—it was your land, he said.

  "I believe that the natural resources must be used for the benefit of all the people, and not monopolized for the benefit of a few," he said. Here, in the midst of an hourlong speech, Roosevelt's voice rose, and he punctured the air with his fingers. Of "all the questions which can come before this nation," he thundered, "there is none which compares in importance with the central task of leaving this land even a better land for our descendants than it is for us." Such a notion, he said, was still counterintuitive to many Americans—"another case in which I am accused of taking a revolutionary attitude." But he saw this cause as something vital to the United States' remaining a land of equals.

  "Conservation is a great moral issue!"

  In its dispatch from Osawatomie, the Associated Press wrote that the crowd's enthusiasm made it hard for Roosevelt to get through the speech. Standing near the makeshift stage, Pinchot was mesmerized—after a lonely year, here were the forester's words brought to rousing life by Teddy, every sentence a cannon blast at the enemy. "I've never seen a crowd that affected me as much as that one did," Pinchot wrote. Roosevelt's friend the writer William Allen White also witnessed the spectacle in Kansas; it took several decades for him to fully understand its ramifications. "It is hard to bring back today the sense of excitement, almost of tumult, that was in the air over this land in the summer and autumn of 1910," White wrote. "It was revolutionary."

  Roosevelt had not yet declared his intention to challenge Taft for the Republican presidential nomination. But Taft, plowing through a round of golf at his summer retreat, was said to be so angry upon hearing Roosevelt's words that he threw his club twenty-five yards—one of his better shots. Later, he told his brother the speech made it clear that he and his mentor no longer shared the same political beliefs. And in a rare show of defiance, Taft vowed not to be rolled by a fresh Teddy juggernaut. "I will not step out of the way of Mr. Roosevelt when he is advocating such wild ideas," Taft wrote his brother.

  Two weeks later, building on the momentum of the New Nationalism speech, Pinchot and Roosevelt spoke at the second National Conservation Congress, in St. Paul, attended by governors, leading politicians, and members of Taft's inner circle. The president himself made an appearance. Taft's remarks were tepid, greeted by blank stares. "Whatever conservation may mean," he said, "there is one thing it should never mean, and that is the mere tying up of resources." In Taft's mind, the nation should pursue a sober, business-minded version of protecting the natural world. "The time has come for a halt in general rhapsodies over conservation," he said. Politically tone-deaf as always, Taft could not read the mood of the crowd or sense that the country had changed. The Big Burn had stirred the blood of many Americans, and for them conservation was no longer an abstract debate. Roosevelt and Pinchot had personalized it—boys out west had died for it.

  So what the crowd got from Roosevelt and Pinchot, by contrast, was the most tumultuous of rhapsodies over conservation. The fires in the Rocky Mountains, Roosevelt said, should prompt a renewal of the idea of protecting public land with a corps of young foresters. He urged Americans to seize the moment: expand the Forest Service, enlarge its domain, set more land aside. Pinchot gave perhaps the most energetic expression of the principles he and Roosevelt had enshrined with the Forest Service, and at the end he struck a valedictory note. "There are but a few moments in a man's life like this," he said. "I have fought for many years for conservation, and conservation has won."

  In November, in the off-year elections, Taft's Republican Party was wiped out at the polls. The Democrats took control of Congress, pleasing Pinchot; he felt that Taft deserved to be repudiated, even if it meant the party that had been Pinchot's home since he came of age was trounced. "An overwhelming rebuke to the reactionaries," Pinchot said. Taft was adrift as never before. "Roosevelt was my closest friend," he said, describing the "agony of my spirit." But no sitting president could let such abuse stand and still be respected as a man, or a leader. Taft had to return fire. Pushed by his aides, Taft criticized Roosevelt in public, something he had never done. But the words no sooner left the mouth of the big man, now pushing 360 pounds, than he felt a stab of guilt over betraying the person who had essentially made him president. After his broadside agai
nst Roosevelt, Taft retreated to his sleeping quarters in the White House, threw himself on the bed, and wept.

  Not long after the election, Senator Heyburn took one more stab at the Forest Service. Despite the public's renewed sympathy with the agency, he plowed ahead, proposing that much of the land that had been burned in the fires of August be taken out of the national forest system and given to private owners. He did not precisely state that nearly three million acres would no longer be in public ownership, but his bill set up a system by which burned-over land would be removed from the reserves—effectively doing what he had long intended. In this latest campaign, at least, he was supported by one of his hometown newspapers, which added a suggestion that had been a favorite remedy of Heyburn's: to clear-cut healthy standing forests as a drastic form of fire prevention. "It would really be better to cut down all the trees than to incur the imminent risk of such vast destruction and mortality as has accompanied these fires," the Idaho Press editorialized. "For it is better to devastate forests than to devastate settlements."

  Pinchot sprang into action yet again, giving a flurry of interviews, lobbying senators, prompting thousands of telegrams protesting the plan. Here was Heyburn, he said, "who for years has tried in every way he could to injure or destroy the national forests" with a proposal to take millions of acres away from the public. It was a robber barons' renaissance. Pinchot had long advocated "a little rioting" to move public opinion along; now he was back in his element. "It was effective, and great fun," he wrote in his diary. "Like old times."