The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America
ISBN:9780618968411 read summary

When President William McKinley died of gangrene after being shot in September 1901, Vice President Teddy Roosevelt had to make a middle-of-the-night dash for Washington from a remote spot deep in the Adirondacks. This was a fitting start for a presidency that established the conservation movement in U.S. politics and placed 230 million acres of land under Federal protection as national parks, preserves and forests.

In its first section, The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America details Roosevelt's love of wild places and his relationship with Gifford Pinchot. Pinchot was a McKinley appointee in the Department of Agriculture, a Yale man from a wealthy family, among the first professionally educated foresters. Roosevelt and Pinchot had a vision of the American wilderness as a sacred trust belonging to all Americans. The country was being gobbled up by grazers, miners, and especially the timber industry. Homesteading, the great opportunity for settlers spreading west, was often a front for big business acquisitions; fortunes were being made by a few at the expense, Roosevelt believed, of Americans yet to be born. He was determined to protect our heritage for those future generations. Pinchot and Roosevelt both came from privileged backgrounds but enacted populist policies, often infuriating the wealthy industrialists who had their eyes on the great spaces.

Under Roosevelt's presidency Pinchot tried to manage the vast Federal forests on the pittance Congress allowed him, staffing the service with a corps of committed young foresters, most of them from the Yale forestry program. Pinchot did not believe in removing the Federal land from commercial use; his vision was to lease cutting rights and regulate heavily to preserve the health of the forests. His greatest hubris was in his attitude toward fire: he believed that an agile, adequately funded Forestry Service could control and effectively eliminate forest fires. As fires were started by lightning, by sparks from trains, and by the many other works of man, the foresters used trenching and back-burning to contain them. The forests aged and filled with combustible debris, and it was inevitable that one day it would burn and burn, and not be stopped.

It was just chance that led me to this book exactly one hundred years after the furious fire that burned vast forested sections of Washington, Montana and Idaho. This great fire destroyed three million acres of forest--parts of the Bitterroot, Clearwater, Coeur d'Alene, Lolo, St. Joe's forests, and gobbled up several towns. Author Timothy Egan devotes the second section of the book to a detailed play-by-play of the two-day inferno and the courageous foresters, army troops and woodsmen who fought to contain it. In August 1910 the woods were tinder dry, clogged with brush and dead trees, and wanting to burn. Several smaller fires were fanned together by high, dry winds and became a "kinetic engine" that burned until the wind stopped and rain fell.

The third section of the book covers the political demise of Gifford Pinchot, Roosevelt's attempt to return to national politics with the Bull Moose Party in 1912, and the changing fortunes of the Forestry Service. Egan's somewhat dramatic title is to a certain extent substantiated by the change in forestry management policies, and now logging in the national forests is in decline because it's cheaper to farm trees and import them for construction than to log under forestry maintenance policies. There is mention of the modern acknowledgement that the forests MUST burn to some extent, to allow their renewal in the aftermath of fire.

I enjoyed this book very much but you can see that like Caesar's Gaul, it's divided sharply into three parts, and that gives it an uneven quality. The extreme detail in the first section, and particularly in the description of the two-day fire and its aftermath, leaves too little space for the arc of public policy in the last hundred years--it's a disaster novel set between bookends of serious history. Four stars; I listened to the ten-hour audio production from Audible, narrated by Robertson Dean.

Linda Bulger, 2010

Sometimes reading true stories is more amazing than what could be told in fiction. Here Egan has crafted a short and interesting book that merges the human stories behind the biggest national forest fire in history in 1910 with the origins and politics of the National Forest Service. The fire involved 10,000 fire fighters as it spread across 3 million achers in Washington, Idaho, and Montana. Imagine its size as if everything in the state of Connecticut was burned to the ground. Eagan's narrative goes back and forth between the fire fighters and forest service on the ground and the Washington DC politics and its impact on them. I found the story of the actual fire and the individual human stories of those on the front lines to be the most interesting and compelling as their individual stories were all knew to me. We do get to follow Teddy Roosevelt and his chief forester Gifford Pinchot trying to sell the public on the need for conservation. They fought the "robber barons" and their bought and paid for politicians who mostly came from their own Republican party. (President Taft was to say conservation had gone too far.) One of the really unbelievable arguments used by anti-conservationists in the Senate after the fire was that industry should now go ahead and strip bare all of the trees on public lands. This before future fires destroyed all the trees before they could be cut and used to fuel economic growth. The real heroes (and there are some cowards) of the story are those who fought the fires as well as those who fought to survive the fires. Eagan does a great job of following several individual stories in detail and keeps returning to them as the fire approaches and consumes all in its path. He ends with an epilog of sorts following the fire and how it was used to promote the forest service and also how the government let down those who fought the fire. I recommend this for both the information and the interesting human stories it tells.

This well written book details the politics around conservation in the early twentieth century. In addition it tells of the great forest fire that swept through the Northwest, as experienced by several rangers in the newly formed Forest Service. It also presents limited biographies of Theodore Roosevelt and his adviser Gifford Pinchot. It reads like a novel.

Gripping tail of the unsung heroes of the US Forest Service and the under appreciated Roosevelt political adviser/conservationist, Gifford Pinchot. Egan does a masterful job of weaving the real life drama of the fire with the political climate that helped created it. Highly recommend to anyone interested in American conservation history. Also recommend The Worst Hard Time from Egan.

This book was excellent on several fronts...The burn itself, the problematic start of the Forest Service, President TR and his life, each of the characters and the politics of the era.