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

by Timothy Egan

  Heyburn's bill was defeated. And now Pinchot went from defense to offense. With the new sentiment in the country, the time was ripe for one of the most significant changes in the law since the reserves were turned over to the Forest Service in 1905. The big conservation dream of Teddy and G.P. had included not just western public land, but eastern hardwood forests. In order to protect them, however, the government would have to buy land from private owners and make it part of the reserve system. Even at the height of Roosevelt's popularity, right after his landslide election in 1904, he could not win congressional approval for buying land for the public in the East. But after the fire of 1910, the winds shifted dramatically. It was well within the national interest, at a time when conservation had been hailed as the highest moral cause of the day, to include much of the forested East in the public-land system, Pinchot and his allies argued anew. This time, after years of rejection, a bill doing exactly that passed the new Congress and was signed into law by a dispirited and overwhelmed Taft.

  Over time, more than twenty million acres in the East were acquired and made part of the national forest system—woods along the spine of the Appalachians, leafy hollows in the Smoky Mountains, crowds of trees with brilliant fall colors in New England, rocky pockets of wooded wilderness in southern Ohio. All of this eventually became public land, thanks to passage of the Weeks Act in early 1911. The Big Burn, taking with it nearly a hundred men, had made the difference. "Opposition in the Senate to federal purchase of eastern forests had gone up in the smoke of a 1910 holocaust in Idaho," wrote the historian Harold K. Steen. The fire, as it turned out, had remade the American landscape in a much larger way than Pinchot himself could have imagined.

  Barely ten months after the fire, Congress doubled the money in the Forest Service budget for roads and trails, giving the rangers what they had begged for in previous years. The convincing story Pinchot had told of ragged young foresters fighting a sea of flame carried the day once more for a majority in the new Congress. The coming-of-age myth was in place and had become part of popular culture. Zane Grey made a forest ranger the hero of his next book, The Young Forester, the story of a well-educated Pinchot progressive who saves the day from timber thieves and flame in territorial Arizona.

  The budget win for Pinchot followed another victory: the resignation of his nemesis in the Taft administration, Interior Secretary Ballinger. "Feeling cheerful," Pinchot wrote after the embattled secretary stepped down. There remained only Senator Heyburn, who continued his tirades against the Forest Service and its founder. But in the midst of a late-night speech to a near-empty Senate chamber—a filibuster against an investigation of corrupt campaign practices—Heyburn collapsed.

  He had ruptured a blood vessel, which formed a clot in his brain. Felled by a stroke, blind in one eye, half his face sagging, Heyburn was never able to regain his form. He died a few months later, in the fall of 1912. He was sixty years old, "a stalwart who was widely known for his unyielding bitterness," his obituary in the New York Times said. The most positive thing his colleagues in the Senate could muster in a sheaf of written memories was that he was "an intense partisan." With his death, at long last, the United States Forest Service was safe.

  18. One for the Boys

  THE BITTERROOT MOUNTAINS were slow to heal. Deep, lasting scars could be seen throughout the three states where the Big Burn hit hardest—fire-branded tattoos on the land to match those on the skin that the first rangers would carry to their graves. The Forest Service tried different things, planting saplings from a Rocky Mountain nursery, shipping nearly two tons of seeds from walnuts, red oaks, and hickories in the East to see if these hardwoods would take root in the northern Rockies. But though the rangers put thousands of starts into the ground, the blaze-cleared earth was so bare—in places stripped of its already thin soil to bedrock—that heavy rains washed much of the new life downhill. The trees that had remained standing were so weakened that they fell prey to insect infestations. Broad swaths of rust-colored firs, the needles lifeless after the sap was drained by beetles or boiled by the fire, ran through the forest. It sickened many of the rangers. They knew well enough that a forest after a fire is not a cemetery, set with stones—just a change of worlds. Still, it was hard to see any tomorrow in the ashen landscape.

  "A feeling of great sorrow," Ranger Will Morris recalled of how he felt during his first good look at the land in September. "The canyons and hillsides were covered with a twisted mass of broken, blackened trees, in some places five feet deep."

  The standing, staggered trees died slowly, unlike some of the towns that had been wiped off the map in a few hours or less. Other towns, in valleys where people tried to stitch their lives back together, seemed vulnerable now to forces just beyond their front doors. People would never again look at the woods in the same way.

  After spending weeks in the hospital with little improvement to show for it, Ed Pulaski came home a different man. His energy was gone, Emma could tell. He was angry, nagged by an ulcerating bitterness; it was a struggle to button up his frustration. Despite multiple, slow-healing burns, blindness in one eye, and badly damaged lungs, Pulaski returned to work. He had to: he was not entitled to sick pay, under Forest Service rules at the time, and the family had no other source of income. He was a sad sight around Wallace, the tall ranger with the unsteady gait who seemed to avoid eye contact.

  The town, unlike others ravaged by the fire, was coming back with a flourish. The lure of good money for silver and other treasures from the mines was a draw for new capital and fresh energy. Wallace was rebuilding in iron and stone, a phoenix, while Pulaski was going in the other direction. To see him was to be reminded of two days in August when the land blew up, the walking, wounded face of the Forest Service. And to some—the men who had shoved women from the exit trains, or turned the other way when Weigle begged for help to rescue Pulaski from the mine—he was a reminder of their cowardice. Of course, he was a hero in the Coeur d'Alenes, as he was throughout the country. Everyone said so: Ranger Pulaski, such courage! But that meant little; in truth Pulaski was a broken man, best kept at a distance.

  For two years following the burn, Pulaski's days were filled with painful indoor work: answering queries from the government about those who had gone into the tunnel with him. Prodded by Pinchot and higher-ups in the Forest Service, Congress was shamed into passing a measure that would compensate people who were unable to work because of injuries suffered in the line of duty. But it was a cumbrous process for the Forest Service, and forced Pulaski to relive that one horrific night over and over again. One firefighter, John Brandon, requested money for the horse he lost in the mine on August 20 —he valued the beast at $40. The government refused to pay more than $30, and asked Pulaski for verification.

  "I was blind at the time and could not have attended to such things if I wanted to," Pulaski wrote back, clearly annoyed. Another man claimed that smoke from inside the tunnel had left him so ill he could no longer look for work—his lungs were permanently compromised, and his burns had not healed. The government had doubts about his case, asking Pulaski for more details almost two years after the fire. "Please write everything you know concerning Mr. Christensen's case," they demanded of Pulaski.

  Dutifully, he inhabited that hot, gas-filled earthen space dozens of times for dozens of cases, always signing off as "The Assistant Ranger."

  Humiliated and sick, with little money for his own medical care, Pulaski asked his supervisors for help with his case. They shared his outrage. Roscoe Haines, the ranger who had braved the still-flaming forests in the St. Joe country to find Joe Halm, took up Pulaski's cause as a claims supervisor for the region. He wrote up and down the chain of command, a vertical nag. Surely the government could not treat the hero of the Big Burn this way. Word came back from Washington via a regional forester who wrote to Haines:

  "I regret exceedingly that it will not be possible to allow this claim of Mr. Pulaski, since he is certainly deserving of remuneration
for the permanent injuries affecting his eyesight. The only method by which further compensation could be secured for Mr. Pulaski would be by special legislation through Congress. The only other suggestion which occurs to me at this time would be for Mr. Pulaski or some of his friends to place his case and the story of his saving 40 of the men at the mine tunnel before the Carnegie Commission for the allotting of medals and awards to persons of bravery."

  In the end, Pulaski did not get a dime from the government for the ravages fire inflicted on his body. The reasoning seemed to be that since he went directly back to work after leaving the hospital, he was not disabled, and therefore was ineligible for compensation for lost work time. But of course the reason Pulaski had returned to his job, despite his serious medical troubles, was that he needed the paycheck just to stay alive. His only remaining recourse, as the regional forester had suggested, was to tell his story to the Carnegie Hero Fund in the hope that it would find him worthy of some small change from the fortune of a man who once embodied Gilded Age wealth. He had to beg from the rich.

  But Pulaski would not grovel, as he showed when he scolded his neighbors for being careless with their public forests at that Chamber of Commerce luncheon. It was undignified, he felt, to try to win a hero's reward for what he had done. So Ranger Haines did it for him, collecting stories from the people who had been in the mine tunnel. When he solicited Pulaski for his own account, the wounded ranger refused to comply. Haines had to trick him; he told Pulaski he needed the narrative for Forest Service files, nothing else. Nobody would see his account. Pulaski sent along the most basic of details: the story of returning to the fire with the packers after leaving his family to certain doom, the rounding up of panicky firefighters, the retreat downhill, the offer of his horse to the obese former Texas Ranger, the dash into the tunnel, and the threat to shoot anyone who tried to leave the mineshaft.

  "I hope you will regard this letter as confidential and send it back or destroy it when it serves its purpose," he wrote to Haines. Instead, the supervisor sent it on to the Carnegie commission.

  When not doing paperwork, Pulaski tended to graves, alone, at great pain and some financial cost. It was an abomination that the dead were treated no better than the living, he thought. At the least, a memorial should be erected to those who lost their lives—eighty-five people, according to the Forest Service's official report, completed in 1911. The dead were scattered throughout the Bitterroots; some remained where they had fallen, the bodies never retrieved, left to the elements under a few feet of fire-blackened earth. Others, in Wallace, were put in graves marked by wooden slabs. Pulaski pulled weeds and mowed the lawn around these tombstones, all the while reminding his supervisors that the dead were owed a proper memorial. He did this on his own time, using his own money, though he worried that the government might frown on such a thing.

  "I would probably get called for mixing in," he wrote. "But I think the only way for me is to clear the weeds and grass off each year as I have on my own time."

  He found refuge in his blacksmith shop, sometimes working late into the night, experimenting with a tool to help firefighters. He crafted an ax and a hoe-type blade on a single handle. One side could be used to cut wood, the other to dig and scrape a fire line. It was an ingenious idea, one of those inventions that look obvious in retrospect, and it was instantly duplicated across North America. Pulaski tried to patent the tool, as yet another way to get money for eye surgery, but when faced with a blizzard of forms, he said the hell with it.

  The Carnegie commission returned the application to Ranger Haines—sorry, but no hero's reward for Ed Pulaski. "While Mr. Pulaski's act is commendable, from the facts you gave it does not appear that he did anything more than was necessary to save his own life, and for this reason his case, I regret to say, does not come within the scope of the Fund."

  Haines was livid. Pulaski could have stayed in Wallace when the woods blew up, saved his own ass. He could have fled downhill, back to town with the other firefighters. He could have retreated with the frightened packers, who escaped as soon as they dropped their loads. There was "conclusive evidence to show beyond all doubt that Edward Pulaski did risk his own life voluntarily to save the lives of fellow human beings," Haines wrote. He fired up a fresh round of queries, trying to compile overwhelming evidence to win the Carnegie money for Pulaski. Among the crew members who wrote on his behalf, Fred Libby said, "I know that he could have saved himself on more than one occasion but would not forsake his men." The ex—Texas Ranger, "Dad" Stockton, credited Pulaski with saving his life, without doubt. Haines went back to Pulaski with questions, this time letting him in on the scope of his mission. Pulaski could not believe it—who were these people to challenge his honor?

  "Do you think I would have stayed there when I knew my home and family was in more or less danger, if I did not realize that there were men being killed and that I might help them by staying at the same time staking my own life to help them?" The words were as stinging as any Pulaski ever put to paper in his years in the Forest Service. And he gave a hint, at last, at the depth of his bitterness. "I did think that U. Sam might have taken notice of me and sent me a leather medal. To show me that men put to the test are not forgotten."

  Alas, there would be no medal, leather or bronze, and no money from the Carnegie Hero Fund, and no patent for the Pulaski tool.

  By 1911, Gifford Pinchot was exhausted. The scraps of a year when he and Roosevelt were in the news nearly every day had clearly drained him. Sleep was uneasy. His stomach bothered him. His skin was splotchy; his brushy mustache was starting to grey. He stooped a bit. He looked gaunt, hollow-eyed, and had lost the glow of youth that had made him one of the most eligible single men in the capital. He still summoned his long-lost lover, though she was much harder to bring to life. And of course she was forever twenty-eight years old, an immortal beauty in the full blush of her life, while Pinchot was slipping well into middle age. Seeking restoration of body and soul, he checked himself into the Kellogg sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan, an institution founded by the breakfast cereal magnate and known for its naturopathic remedies. Pinchot was a celebrity there, and gave frequent talks to other clients. But he was lonely for Laura.

  "Not a clear day," he wrote after his first night in the sanitarium.

  "Not a clear day," the next day.

  "Not a clear day," again, through his two-week stay in Battle Creek.

  It continued like this for months, with only the occasional dream encounter, which he found unsatisfying. One note showed a hint of optimism that he could have further mystic encounters with Laura: "Not a clear day, but not blind."

  Fully rested, Pinchot immediately sought to get the wings of Teddy Roosevelt aloft once more, building on the political triumphs that came in the wake of the Big Burn. Any day without a full schedule, as before, prompted much guilt and self-loathing. "Shamefully stayed in the house all day, loafing and catching up..."

  Even with Heyburn gone, he had his enemies. A mob stormed the docks in Cordova, Alaska, and burned an effigy of Pinchot—cheering with gusto as the image of the founding forester fell into Prince William Sound. They were mad that coal in some national forests in Alaska was off-limits to mining. That protection was one of Roosevelt's final acts as president, three years earlier, but the mob blamed Pinchot because he was the easier target. Another man, Pinchot's old friend and camping mate John Muir, was the other face of this movement, in addition to Roosevelt. Muir, in failing health, had not spoken to Pinchot in some time, a breach dating to their opposing views on damming the river in the Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite. But in a gesture that showed Muir was not blinded by this dispute to what Pinchot had done for the larger cause, three hundred of his Sierra Club followers ventured into a grove of coastal redwoods just north of San Francisco and selected what they considered the most perfect of the big trees in Muir Woods. There they placed a plaque on a rock with this inscription:

  THIS TREE IS DEDICATED TO

>   GIFFORD PINCHOT

  FRIEND OF THE FOREST

  CONSERVER OF THE COMMON-WEALTH

  As Pinchot focused his energy on the second coming of Roosevelt, he initially faced stiff opposition in his own party. Many Republican insurgents had planned to back Robert La Follette, the Wisconsin governor who had taken strong early stands against the sitting president. He was a friend of both Roosevelt and Pinchot and was a driving force behind some of the major progressive initiatives. But then La Follette gave a rambling, shockingly incoherent speech in New York before a group of donors, power players, and writers. It was two hours of gibberish, which an aide attributed to fatigue and alcohol. Afterward, the consensus was that this man could not be president.

  All eyes turned to Teddy. And so in early 1912, he ended a two-year tease, declaring: "My hat is in the ring. The fight is on, and I am stripped to the buff." It sounded as if he were ready for another wrestling match with Pinchot. Using the key points of his New Nationalism speech as a platform, Roosevelt won all but one primary and one caucus—still not enough, by the undemocratic rules of the day, to become the nominee, but it demonstrated that his vote-drawing power had not diminished. He swept New England, the West Coast, and states in between.

  At the convention in Chicago, Roosevelt should have carried the Republican banner. But Taft's men controlled the national committee, and the fix was in. "Those elements were mostly rich men," William Allen White wrote, "well placed, well housed, well fed, well clad, who hitherto for a generation had been able to control American politics." And they still controlled the party of Lincoln. Roosevelt thought his popularity alone would prevail. When he arrived in Chicago, he was mobbed in the streets as his car made its way along Michigan Avenue. In a speech before supporters, Roosevelt said he stood for the underdog, though as White noted, "It was a middle-class revolt."