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

by Timothy Egan

  Pinchot won a second term as governor in 1930. Six years later, he saw one last chance at the highest reaches of power, and tried to interest Alf Landon, the Republican presidential nominee in 1936, in considering the old forester for his running mate. Vice President Pinchot—it would be a bit of a comedown, but one had to make some concessions to age. Landon brushed him aside. Pinchot then wrote several speeches for him, but they too fell by the wayside. As Pinchot recorded: "Listened to Landon's speech to the young Republicans. Mostly wind & when he said anything it was wrong. He used not a word of the speech I sent him." Landon was crushed at the polls, losing by ten million votes. Pinchot did not shed a tear.

  "I take it as a tremendous defeat for concentrated wealth," Pinchot wrote of the Democratic victory in 1936. "It means more and better national security legislation, conservation, labor and corporation control ... a smashing defeat of the few by the many." After that election, Pinchot at last decided that he was done with elective office, and appears to have been done with the Republican Party too. His true family was the Forest Service. He had been the guiding hand and the hidden hand. When the agency was wayward, it kept him up at night. When it was in trouble, he was troubled. When it seemed to be healthy, he was soothed. Lobbying, lecturing, hectoring—he never missed a chance to speak up for the Forest Service. At a public event in Washington, when someone called him Governor, Pinchot corrected him.

  "I have been a governor now and then," he said, "but I am a forester all the time—have been, and shall be, all my working life."

  ***

  In Missoula in 1937, Pinchot was stirred by the long shadow of the Bitterroots, the ever-changing light on Lolo Peak, and the three big trout streams that converged in the valley. Those closest to Pinchot knew that if there was one thing to put in his casket, like the pharaohs with their afterlife icons, it would be his fly-fishing rod. In Montana, he fished the Clark Fork, which flowed out of the scarred land of the Big Burn. In the Lolo National Forest and the Coeur d'Alene, where the winds had turned demonic on that Saturday night in 1910, the trunks of big trees still stood blackened and weatherworn. In the twenty-seven years since the fire, thousands of burned trees had come down by lightning, wind, and gravity. Yet it was surprising how many of them remained—stripped and bare and mostly hollow inside. In other places, the forest floor was covered with uprooted giants, slowly decaying where they had fallen.

  But it was not a still life. After many fits and starts, many experiments, the new forest was starting to take hold in early maturity. Deer and elk liked the young trees for winter browse, and bear gorged on huckleberries that took to the cleared land. Up higher, on the big peaks that afforded broad vistas, the Forest Service had erected a series of fire lookout posts. These were sturdy cabins of a sort, wood-framed and big-windowed, held to the ground by guy wires. From these aeries, an ever-vigilant force kept watch over the woods. Any hint of smoke was quickly reported. They had zero tolerance for this ancient agent of the natural world.

  A few of the rangers who had led the charge of men into the flaming Bitterroots were still around. Pinchot looked up Elers Koch, wearing his Forest Service greens, the pants tucked into mid-ankle boots, based as before in his beloved Montana. Koch and his wife, Gerda, now had three strapping boys in their family—Stanley, Thomas, and Peter, the youngest seventeen years old. As Koch had made his way up the Forest Service ranks, he was consistently prodded to take a job in Washington, D.C. The Chief's title was within reach. But Koch preferred to stay in Montana, with his summers at Seeley Lake next to the family cabin of Norman Maclean, and a few steps from some of the best fly-fishing waters in the world.

  Still full of spring, Koch was known among the small group of alpinists in the northern Rockies as the first person to climb Granite Peak, the highest mountain in Montana. He had the Kipling verses in his head whenever he roamed the High Lonesome — no change from his youth. And he had seen his share of forest fires. "A forester in the Northwest dates the events of his life by fire years," said Koch. Without doubt, none could match the blowup of 1910, not in size or ferocity or the way it captured the public imagination. Koch knew the fire was a once-in-a-century burn. He knew the Chief had elevated his knights to mythic status because of how they responded to the fire, knew that Pulaski's story helped save the agency, knew that generations of foresters were hearing vivid tales of hurricane-force winds and people who tried to live through a night "when the mountains roared," as Koch himself described the firestorm in his report. The story was sacred text to the still-young Forest Service, just as Pinchot had intended it to be.

  But Koch took away a different conclusion. Though he revered Pinchot, he disagreed with him about the lessons of 1910. The men may have been heroic, but they were routed, and perhaps those who lost their lives never should have been forced into battle against a fire of that magnitude. Perhaps it would have been best just to get out of the way. In that sense, the dead were not martyrs or heroes so much as victims of a flawed policy. To Koch, the fire "was a complete defeat for the newly organized Forest Service," he wrote.

  Complete defeat. That was not what young students heard around the bonfire on summer nights at Grey Towers. Bill Greeley, the regional forester, handpicked by Pinchot just like Koch, also felt that way, but he came away determined to change the central task of the Forest Service. In the view of the religious Greeley, fire had won—akin to Satan destroying God's garden. And with the full power and backing of the U.S. government behind him, Greeley vowed that fire would never win again. Never. One year after the blowup, Greeley was promoted to a high administrative job in Washington. He took with him the images of mountains stripped of their green cover, the desperate effort to round up hoboes and immigrants to beat back the flames, young men rotting in hospitals, their festering skin slow to heal. "I was spurred on by vivid memories of blazing canyons and smoking ruins in little settlements and rows of canvas-wrapped bodies," said Greeley. "This fire woke up everyone."

  As he had once been an evangelist for the Progressive Era idea of forest protection under his mentor Pinchot, Greeley now became equally fervent in his belief that foresters had one overriding duty in the woods—to keep fire at bay. Of course, Pinchot also had considered fire prevention to be a job of the service, but not the overriding mission. He had sold the public on firefighting as an idea, not a raison d'être. Greeley was taking Pinchot's earlier claims, science in the service of mastering fire, to the extreme.

  Worse for the progressives, Greeley wanted fire out of the woods not for preservation's sake, but to make sure there were plenty of trees for the giants of the timber industry to get at. Under Pinchot, loggers had limited access to public forests. What Greeley was calling for was a much bigger role, making the industry a comanager of sorts. He said logging in the national forests could increase dramatically. Much of this land was "ripe for the axe," he wrote.

  Pinchot was appalled. In his mind, the timber industry was the enemy; to partner with it would be letting the wolf in the hen house. "These are men who have already destroyed this country and reduced to desert conditions an area larger than the forests of Europe," he said. "It puts the Forest Service in the position of throwing contempt upon its basic reason for existence."

  While Pinchot attacked Greeley in the press, his former acolyte quietly worked the corridors of power. And in 1920, Greeley was elevated to Pinchot's old job, becoming the third Chief of the Forest Service. By then, Pinchot and Greeley were barely on speaking terms. Under the new Chief's reign, logging increased and fire prevention was elevated to job one—the lessons of the 1910 fire put to good use, Greeley preached. The Forest Service became the fire service, protecting trees so industry could cut them down later. And what a turnaround now followed Greeley: the big timber companies loved the Forest Service under him. It was their ally, the source of much profit, not some antagonist calling for limited tree cutting and standing seed trees—the "Koch Specials" the forest supervisor had insisted on, to much derision. Taxpayers w
ould pay for building roads, scouting the big timber, and snuffing the fires, then offer up trees more than two centuries old for a pittance to the industry. Logging doubled, tripled, quadrupled, grew tenfold. This, in the people's forests.

  Where was the Little Man to whom Pinchot and Roosevelt had promised the forests? At the least, Pinchot argued, public timber should be sold only to small, family-run logging outfits, not the big syndicates that Pinchot and Roosevelt had assailed. But Greeley thought industry giants were best suited to maintain the kind of fireproof national forests he envisioned, with the assistance of his rangers. Nearly one hundred years after the Big Burn, the timber industry was still sending out long accounts of the fire with Greeley's conversion as the central moral of the story—"his finest hour," as Idaho Forest Products put it. What's more, the legacy of the 1910 fire was written into the code that every ranger followed, or else.

  To Pinchot, "Billy was a traitor," Greeley's wife recalled. As if to prove Pinchot's point, Greeley left the top job in the Forest Service in 1928 for a position in the timber industry, becoming an executive with the West Coast Lumbermen's Association. Now the breach with Pinchot was complete, the betrayal set in stone. The 1910 fire had indeed saved much of the United States—in the sense that it ensured the viability of the Forest Service, the stewards of this great experiment. But those stewards were now engaged in a mission at odds with Pinchot and Roosevelt's founding vision.

  In Montana, Pinchot arranged for Koch and other rangers loyal to the original ideals to show him around. Pinchot had always preached of a "working forest" for working people—small-scale logging at the edge, preservation at the core. But what he saw in 1937 was not pretty. With better machinery and government roads, industrial clear-cuts had come to the woods, entire mountainsides clipped of all trees in a single sweep, the land literally scalped, a scorched-earth force. Pinchot was horrified. A picture from 1937 shows him sitting on the stump of what had been a massive tree sheared by a big saw; he does not look happy.

  On to Oregon Pinchot went, into the rich woods on the west side of the Cascades, part of what was once considered a temperate rain forest. And there he saw more destruction, mountain after mountain, clipped of its national forest trees. So this was what saving the forests was all about, as the old man saw with his own eyes.

  "Absolute devastation," Pinchot wrote in his diary. "Mostly a clean sweep, taking everything ... The men who did this are nothing less than public enemies." One week later, more of the same. Roads cut deep into the wild. Flanks cleared of the web of complex life. Slash burns. Slides. Mud and stumps. "The Forest Service should absolutely declare against clearcutting in Washington and Oregon as a defensive measure," Pinchot wrote.

  Two years earlier, in 1935, Koch had also made clear his unhappiness with the drift of his employer when he wrote an essay for a leading forestry journal. In it, he said the agency he had given his life to had lost its way. "The Forest Service," he wrote, "opened up the wilderness with roads and telephone lines and airplane landing fields. It capped the mountain peaks with white-painted lookout houses, laced the ridges and streams with a network of trails and telephone lines, and poured in thousands of firefighters year after year in a vain attempt to control forest fires." He missed the land he had first explored with Pinchot, and wondered whether large portions of the national forests scorched by the Big Burn should simply have been left alone—wilderness for wilderness' sake, a home for fire along with everything else in the wild.

  "Has all this effort and expenditure of millions of dollars added anything to human good? Is it possible that it was all a ghastly mistake, like plowing up the good buffalo grass sod of the dry prairies?"

  ***

  Building on Greeley's edicts for fire prevention, the Forest Service launched an even more demanding new policy in 1935, the ten o'clock rule. Thereafter, any fire spotted in the course of a working day must be under control by ten o'clock the following morning.

  It was a losing and futile idea; in practice it proved to be fatal. On August 5, 1949, a crew of fifteen smokejumpers leapt from a plane into a burning mountainside in Mann Gulch, Montana, acting on the ten o'clock rule. Less than two hours later, all but three of them were dead or fatally burned. They had lost their lives in the same horrid way that men in the Big Burn had gone to their deaths—trying to outrun galloping wildfire, trapped on all sides by an explosion of flames, choking on hot gas. Koch's Seeley Lake neighbor Norman Maclean spent the last fourteen years of his life trying to understand the 1949 fire and why those young men had to die. In large measure, it was because of a lesson that Greeley and others applied from the Big Burn—or as Maclean put it, "1910-on-the-brain." "Rangers for decades after were on the watch for fear that 1910 might start again and right in their woodpile," he wrote. "Some even lost their jobs because a fire got away from them."

  The ten o'clock rule would stay in effect for most of the century, until rangers who realized that fires were critical to the health of a forest started to have a voice. Budgets escalated as the fire control mission became ever bigger and more intrusive. From the air and on the ground, with chemicals dropped like bombs and with bulldozers to scrape perimeter lines, the Forest Service attacked all fires, growing into a force of nature—or against nature, depending on the view.

  "The Great Fires of 1910 shaped the American fire landscape more than any other fire in any year throughout the twentieth century," wrote Stephen Pyne, the fire historian.

  By trying to stop all major wildfires, the Forest Service had only fed the beast. The woods were full of dry, dying, aging timber and underbrush—fuel. Big swaths were unhealthy, in need of a cleansing burn. Even with their armies, their aerial support, their billions in taxpayer money to hold back the flames, rangers became increasingly helpless. As firefighting took up nearly half the Forest Service budget, it was a mission at odds with the course of the natural world, and common sense. It was not what Roosevelt and Pinchot had in mind. The years brought bigger, hotter, longer, earlier wildfires. With a warmer climate, it all added up to something catastrophic on the horizon.

  At last, a truce of sorts was declared in the final years of the century by Jack Ward Thomas, Chief of the Forest Service. Some fires would be fought, some would be allowed to burn.

  "Fire is neither good nor bad," said Thomas. "It just is."

  There is evidence that Pinchot had arrived at the same conclusion during his 1937 trip out west. In his Buick, he traveled more than five thousand miles, over single-lane roads of primitive gravel, chugging up to the Continental Divide, along roaring streams. Smoke was often in the air, despite the strongest efforts of the Forest Service. Pinchot chased trout in riffles and got up early for sunrises. When the legs felt strong, he hiked high for better views. With him was Henry Graves, one of Pinchot's oldest friends from Yale and the agency, and one of the original seven members of the Society of American Foresters, formed at Pinchot's house in 1900. When Pinchot was fired by Taft, it was Graves who took over, as second Chief of the Forest Service. They made for quite a couple in the summer of 1937, two elderly eastern gentlemen in tweed jackets and ties knotted around their necks touring the national forests they had once overseen. In Portland, Graves and Pinchot were invited to a Kiwanis lunch, but it turned into a humiliation. To Pinchot's surprise, "nobody seemed to know us."

  Like Teddy Roosevelt, Pinchot intended to have his words outlive him. It would not matter if the man who mistook his life for forestry was a mere asterisk in the storytelling of the young nation; Pinchot would have his say in at least one sphere. In 1937, he was just getting started on his conservation memoir, a book that would take nearly a decade to finish. It was encyclopedic in detail, with much settling of ancient scores and with frequent praise for the saintly Roosevelt. He never mentioned Laura. John Muir had died years earlier, in 1914, and with Roosevelt gone for nearly two decades, the book would give Pinchot the last word on the conservation ideals this trio had presented to the world. He was out west in 1937 in part to
test his beliefs as he began to summarize his life. He wanted not just to see how the legacy had held up, but to seek some of the old magic in the land. Pinchot's publisher also asked him to revive his 1914 book, The Training of a Forester. So it was really two books that he mulled while touring.

  Going over the earlier book, the old man blushed at some of what the young man professed. Did he really believe—still—that forest fires are "wholly within the control of man," as he wrote? Could generations of college-trained foresters really hope to contain something as elemental as wildfire? Was fire indeed the biggest foe of the woods—"no other so terrible"? And could man himself shape nature to his design? It appears that the younger Pinchot had made a pact with his hubris: in promising in the early days to whip wildfire, he won enough public confidence to see the Forest Service through its birthing pains. But the price of that bargain was now clear in the idea that the timber industry had embraced while co-opting the Forest Service: yes, fire would be defeated, at all costs, to keep standing trees for industry. If universal suppression meant sick, overburdened, ready-to-burn forests, that was another cost, one that would not become obvious until later in the century.

  In the last years of his life, Pinchot showed a more humble side. A forest was "a complex community with a life of its own," he would write in the new memoir. And that complexity included fire. Also, he was appalled that the public forests had become mere commodities. He could force a reflexive statement of principle — "the national forests belong to the people," as he wrote in California—but the landscape told a different story, of logging, private concessions, lodges: "Most dangerous thing I've seen on national forests." Growing increasingly cranky, he sought solace. "Even in the wild places you can't get away from people."