The Big Burn

by Timothy Egan

Ranger Debitt's life after Forest Service, from Crowell and Asleson, Up the Swiftwater.

  19. Ashes

  Missoula arrival, plans, from Pinchot diaries, several pages quoted in The Conservation Diaries of Gifford Pinchot, edited by Harold K. Steen, Forest History Society, 2001.

  Pinchot, note on Gone with the Wind, from Pinchot diaries, December 3, 1937.

  Cornelia and politics, from Miller, Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism.

  Landon comment, from Pinchot diaries, September 18, 1936.

  Defeat of Landon, from Pinchot diaries, November 5, 1936.

  Koch on lessons of fire and wilderness, from his Forty Years a Forester.

  FDR appraisal of Pinchot "conservation road," from Barker, Scorched Earth.

  First CCC camp, from Steen, The United States Forest Service.

  Pinchot quote, I have been a governor, from Gifford Pinchot: Private and Public Forester, by Harold T. Pinkett, University of Illinois Press, 1970.

  Pinchot and Henry Graves, from Forest History Society, www.foresthistory.org.

  Greeley vs. Pinchot, from "A Clash of Titans," Evergreen, Winter 1994— 1995.

  Greeley on fires, from his Forests and Men.

  Industry praising Greeley, from "A Clash of the Titans."

  Greeley on stopping fires, from Spencer, The Big Blowup.

  Mrs. Greeley quote, from Miller, Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism.

  Maclean quote, from his Young Men and Fire.

  "Absolute devastation," from Pinchot diaries, August 11, 1937.

  Jack Ward Thomas on fire, quoted in Barker, Scorched Earth.

  "Nobody seemed to know us," from Pinchot diaries, August 10, 1937.

  Death of Koch a suicide, from his son's introduction to Koch, Forty Years a Forester.

  Death of Ione Adair, from Idahoan, November 26, 1977.

  Pinchot commenting on slash, from Pinchot diaries, August 11, 1937.

  Pinchot, great days, from Pinchot diaries, August 24, 1937.

  Pinchot, greatest sight, from Pinchot diaries, August 26, 1937.

  FDR and Pinchot, conservation congress, from Cornelia Bryce Pinchot's account, first published in Forest History Today, Spring 1999, and from Miller, Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism.

  Pulaski dedication details, from the author's visit to the site, and from Spokane Spokesman-Review, August 21, 2005.

  * * *

  Acknowledgments

  Every coming-of-age story has its keepers. For the Big Burn, most of these archivists, historians, librarians, and storytellers are in warrens and backrooms of the West. I'm grateful, first and foremost, to the U.S. Forest Service, especially at the northern regional office in Missoula. Not only have they kept an exhaustive and detailed record of the 1910 fire, but they have been eager to share it—which has only increased my admiration for this agency. In particular, I would like to thank Carlie Magill, the archive manager.

  The president of the Pulaski Project, Jim See, in Wallace, Idaho, is one reason why the name Pulaski continues to find a home with new generations. He launched a conference on a snowy spring day in the Silver Valley that helped to get me started on this book. Also in Wallace, the city's fine Carnegie library and the Wallace District Mining Museum were excellent firsthand sources on the Big Burn. I owe a debt to the Museum of North Idaho in Coeur d'Alene, a great source of original homesteading documents, and the Clearwater County Museum in Orofino, which holds a trove of early Forest Service memoirs among its backroom treasures.

  Thanks to Julie Monroe and Nathan Bender, in the Special Collections and Archives Division at the University of Idaho, for pictures and other help, particularly the prints from the Barnard Stockbridge Studio Collection. I was guided to those prints and other pictures from the era by Patricia Hart and Ivar Nelson, scholars and lovers of the West. And without Ann Catt, the curator at the Latah County (Idaho) Historical Society, I never would have had the words of Pinkie Adair, as told in a series of oral histories late in her life.

  At the Library of Congress in Washington, I'm indebted to Jeffrey M. Flanner, the head of the reference and reader service section, for guiding me through the many letters and notes of Gifford Pinchot and Teddy Roosevelt, and to the library's crosstown colleague in recordkeeping, the National Archives.

  I'm certainly not the first writer drawn to the story of the 1910 fire, and won't be the last. But among the other accounts, I would like to acknowledge Betty Goodwin Spencer for her pioneering work in The Big Blowup and the historian Stephen J. Pyne, who knows more about fire than anyone, for his book Year of the Fires.

  At Stanford University, where I found an editing refuge in the Bing Wing of the Green Library, I have the Bill Lane Center for the American West to thank.

  For bookbuilding, the kind that moves ideas from thoughts to printed page, I owe much to editors Anton Mueller and Andrea Schulz, and to my longtime agent Carol Mann. Thanks also to Laurence Cooper for fresh eyes and a sharp pen. And for finding an audience, a tip of the hat to Carla Gray and Lori Glazer at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

  Finally, thanks to my brother Kelly Egan, who first took me into the St. Joe country, some of the finest cutthroat water in the land. Your secrets are safe.

  * * *

  Index

  * * *