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

by Timothy Egan

  A few days after meeting Muir in upstate New York, young Pinchot sent the naturalist a gift: a large hunting knife. Muir had no use for it — he foraged, yes, on many of his trips in the wild, but never took so much as a fish hook—to Pinchot's astonishment. Muir said all he needed was to "throw some tea and bread in an old sack and jump over the back fence." He was Huck Finn with shoes and a notebook. A few months later, at a dinner party at Pinchot's parents' home in Gramercy Park, they found they were kindred souls. "I took to him at once," Pinchot wrote. Muir became a friend and mentor, starting when Pinchot was twenty-seven, and Muir was nearly twice his age.

  "You are choosing the right way into the woods," Muir wrote him not long after the dinner party, where Pinchot had told him about his solo excursions outdoors. Others considered it strange for a man of Pinchot's standing to take monastic trips to the wilderness. Not Muir. "Happy man," he wrote his acolyte. "You will never regret a single day spent thus." Muir liked this odd patrician in part because he was such an eager follower—at first. In Pinchot, he saw someone "who could relish, not run from a rainstorm," as he wrote. Just like himself.

  Of course, there was calculation and some cunning on both sides. Pinchot's family wanted Gifford to connect with the influential Muir, a man whose company was sought by everyone from Ralph Waldo Emerson to New York Police Commissioner Teddy Roosevelt. Muir, who had just started the Sierra Club in 1892 as a voice for the California range, could always use the Pinchot money and perhaps this bright young forester to further the cause. Together with a few other men who were starting to talk of ways to protect the land, they formed a conservation caucus that could barely fill a Union Pacific caboose. Fellow travelers included Olmsted, who was one of the first to insist that it was America's duty to put aside "great public grounds for the free enjoyment of people"; a German-American forester, Bernhard Fernow, who headed the government's first division of forestry even though he had no land under his jurisdiction; and the Boston botanist Charles Sargent. Small as the group was, their ideas were contagious, and well placed.

  On several trips in the West, Muir and Pinchot bonded under the open sky. They spent nights along the rim of the Grand Canyon, slogged up snow-coated peaks in the Northwest, tramped through the Bitterroots in Montana, sometimes moving at a clip of twenty miles a day. Pinchot's eccentricities were becoming more pronounced, even to the quirky Muir, who liked to lash himself to a tree to better understand the feeling of wind in a forest. During a rainy trek to Crater Lake in Oregon, a hollowed-out caldera high in the Cascade Mountains, Muir noted, "All slept in tent except Pinch ot."

  Pinchot and Muir did more than share hiking trips, of course. In 1896, they toured the West as part of the National Forest Commission, trying to help President Grover Cleveland decide what to do with big parts of Montana, Idaho, Washington, Oregon, Colorado, California, Wyoming, and Arizona Territory. Muir was an observer, Pinchot a leading voice of the commission, having already established himself as a pioneer voice for public forestry. They crossed the Bitterroot Mountains and thrashed through the deepest woods of Idaho, in the Clearwater River country, perhaps the wildest part of the contiguous United States — certainly the most inaccessible. In Oregon they toured the narrow green walls carved by the raging Rogue River and visited a nearby valley, the Umpqua, thick with salmon, steelhead, and coastal elk. Along the way, they spoke with hunters, homesteaders, and assorted wanderers. They ran into railroad men plotting new routes through the wild and speculators scouting for timber. Pinchot broke off and went by himself for a time, as usual most comfortable when alone. Curious. Where did he go at night? Later, Pinchot rejoined the commission when they got to the Grand Canyon.

  Muir and Pinchot were supposed to spend the evening at a hotel with other commission members, but they peeled away, pitching camp at the rim of the rainbow-colored gap in the earth—"the greatest sight this world has to offer," as Pinchot called it. That night, he felt "awestruck and silent." Not so with the gabby Muir, who often conversed with flowers. He talked until midnight without interruption, his blue eyes reflecting the fire's glare, telling stories and filling Pinchot with his wilderness philosophy. More than anything he tried to get Pinchot to let down his guard, to put aside his formal training for a moment, to allow nature to get inside him. "We all travel the Milky Way together, trees and men," Muir had said. Before dozing off, Pinchot caught a tarantula. Muir would not let him kill it. "He said it had as much right to be there as we did."

  After returning to the East, the forest commission recommended that two national parks be created, Mount Rainier and Grand Canyon, and told President Cleveland he should establish a number of forest reserves for other lands they had seen. Muir had envisioned such protection for years, but the idea was heretical to Congress and the biggest landowners of the day, the natural resource syndicates. The disposal of public land was a one-way proposition—to commerce, to settlement, to profit, with only a few exceptions. After much publicity about the beauty of Yosemite Valley from people such as Olmsted and the landscape painter Albert Bierstadt, President Abraham Lincoln had signed a bill in 1864 giving a tiny portion of the valley to the state of California — the early stirrings of the national park idea, though no such words were used.

  But grazing and all manner of commercial use continued. In a similar vein, Yellowstone, the world's first national park, was established in 1872 as a playground and tourist destination to help the railroads. Throughout the rest of the public domain, the railroads had already been given more than one hundred million acres; logging was unrestricted, the trees taken for free. And anyone could establish a mining claim on land not yet staked by another. The suggestions that Pinchot and Muir brought home in 1896 appeared to be dead on arrival. But Grover Cleveland, a Democrat and the only president to serve two nonconsecutive terms, had a mischievous side and just a few months left in his last tour of the White House. The president had been granted the power to set aside certain forests, in a sort of limbo status, by a single clause in an act of 1891 —something that Congress apparently thought was inconsequential. Cleveland used that power on February 22, 1897, Washington's birthday. Nobody in the capital saw it coming. Ten days before leaving office, Cleveland established twenty-one million acres of forest reserves, among them the Olympic and Rainier in Washington, the Flathead and Lewis and Clark in Montana, the Bitterroot and Priest in Idaho. The biggest of them all straddled Idaho and Montana, more than four million acres in the northern Rockies. Congress moved promptly to make sure the reserves were stillborn, passing a bill to nullify protection for any public land. But on his way out the door, Cleveland vetoed the bill. Pinchot was delighted to be in on the brawl.

  "It put forestry on the front page all over America," Pinchot exulted. His chosen profession was obscure no more.

  The new Republican president, William McKinley, inherited the reserves and the controversy. He immediately suspended Cleveland's order. The woods became the domain of the General Land Office in the Interior Department, a backwater of patronage hacks, industry shills, and timekeepers. There were no forest rangers, no agents to patrol the land, no professionals. Logging, homesteading, mining, and property jumping continued as if nothing had happened. McKinley turned to Pinchot for guidance, asking him to tour these orphan forests one more time to help him decide what to do. Pinchot was appointed "confidential forest agent," a spy with a green eye. The job paid ten dollars a day plus expenses. His charge was to get another look, take plenty of notes, and for God's sake keep quiet and don't stir up any trouble—no reason to rouse the land barons or their supporters in Congress.

  By now Pinchot knew who owned the West — the "feudal overlordship" of the woods by a many-tentacled timber trust, the two railroad monoliths that controlled all rail transport in the upper half of the continent, and Homestake Mine in the Dakotas and other northern states. The law in these colonies was company law. But, just given the chance to breathe nothing but outdoor air for a couple of months, Pinchot jumped at the opportunity
: up at 3:30 many mornings, hikes with mountain men and guides who added to his fishing expertise. He'd found his calling. He took a steamboat up Lake Chelan in Washington, which looks like Lake Como in Italy—"a beautiful trip up this most lovely lake"—and crossed into the North Cascades near the Canadian border, the American alps. At Priest Lake in Idaho, Pinchot awoke one morning to take in the dawn. Suddenly, gunfire rang out; a bullet just missed him, fired from across the lake. Pinchot rowed furiously across the water and went face-to-face with the errant shooter. In Idaho, he also saw up close what fire could do to a forest. Entire mountainsides were left scorched and skeletal by earlier burns around Priest Lake. It spooked him, sickened him, and stayed with him, as if he had seen a dead body for the first time.

  "Of all the foes which attack the woodlands of North America, no other is so terrible as fire," he wrote in a little primer outlining his views of forestry at the time.

  Back in Washington, Pinchot's report was buried. But McKinley was impressed by the young man's energy, and found his family connections useful. He named Pinchot his forester, head of a tiny division with no power. Cleveland's reserves would stand for now, but with no manpower to protect them. They were reserves in name only. Well, it's a start, Pinchot told friends. He was given a back office in a brick building with a staff of ten. He had no land to manage, no oversight, no authority. On many days, it was humiliating: the big timber owners "held us in amused toleration or open contempt," he wrote.

  He was invited to speak at garden clubs and universities, a harmless gadfly with some compelling ideas, and thank you very much, Giff. So by the time thirty-three-year-old Gifford Pinchot laced up his boxing gloves to face Teddy Roosevelt in the governor's mansion in 1899, he was a forester without a forest.

  As a boxer, Roosevelt was predictable. Not for him would there be lightning-quick footwork and bouncing on his toes. He was a windmill of fists, with occasional uppercuts. The strategy was simple: throw it all at the opponent at once, overwhelming him. "I believe in going hard at everything" was his stated philosophy of life. Pinchot the boxer was classically trained, as with most things in his upbringing. He played it safe, using his height, keeping his distance from the flailing pug of a governor. Teddy landed a couple of glancing blows, nothing serious. Pinchot took his time to size up his man, taking in his moves. When his opening came, he hit Roosevelt hard several times. The governor was stunned, head snapping back. He staggered, swooned, tried to recover. A roundhouse round followed from Pinchot. Snap! Snap! Boom! Dazed, Roosevelt fell to the floor. Match to Pinchot.

  Raised to be modest, keeping his thoughts to himself unless asked, the American model of Edwardian class, Pinchot still allowed himself to gloat—in private, of course. Before the year's end, Pinchot was back at the governor's mansion for a rematch—"boxed and wrestled with T.R. before dinner," he wrote, as if recording the day's weather. He and Roosevelt would maintain a brotherly, often tortured relationship for the rest of their lives, the needy and mysterious Pinchot, the ever-confident Bull Moose. It was unequal, as good friendships should not be, master and slave. They climbed rocks, swam icy channels, played tetherball on the roof of Pinchot's house and tennis on the White House grounds, rode horses at full gallop over dirt trails. But Pinchot never forgot his triumph in the governor's mansion. "I had the honor of knocking the future President of the United States off his very solid pins," he wrote.

  Nineteen months later, an anarchist shot President McKinley at the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo, on September 6, 1901. Roosevelt was summoned from the Adirondacks, where he was on a hiking trip not far from where Pinchot had gone for his winter climb. He rushed to Buffalo to be at the side of the bleeding president. T.R. had served a single two-year term as governor, and then ran as the number two man on the Republican presidential ticket in 1900. The party bosses in Albany felt the Siberia of the vice president's office was a way to get rid of Roosevelt.

  For a time, it looked as if the badly wounded McKinley would recover; Roosevelt was told he could rejoin his family back in the woods. He had just started to descend Mount Tahawus when a guide approached him in the fading light with an urgent telegram: McKinley had taken a turn for the worse. Roosevelt raced downhill, reaching his base cabin in the dark. After changing horses three times in a charge over primitive mountain roads, Roosevelt made it to a train station by dawn. There, he heard the news: McKinley was dead. That afternoon, eight days after the gunman fired at McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt took the oath in Buffalo; at forty-two, he was the youngest president, and the only native New Yorker to hold the highest office.

  "It is a dreadful thing to come into the presidency this way," Roosevelt told a friend, "but it would be a far worse thing to be morbid about it."

  Though he said publicly that little would change, in private Roosevelt wanted to steer the Republican Party away from big business and toward becoming "a fairly radical progressive party," as he wrote in his memoir. To do that, he would need Gifford Pinchot. A week before Roosevelt moved into the White House, he huddled with Pinchot, telling him to stay on as forester—and as a presidential adviser. Pinchot could be his voice on many things. He could write his speeches, help him with hostile senators. And in turn Roosevelt would try to get Pinchot oversight of the reserves, some real land, and a corps of foresters to protect it. Roosevelt urged him to be expansive, idealistic, not some spectral bureaucrat in a back office. The world was open to them. Everything they had talked about in the past — keeping the public domain out of the hands of the trusts, a model for the world—was within their reach and their power. Think of it: he could be a forester with a forest—the chief forester at that, in charge of the world's largest public forest. It was vaporous talk in 1901, but enough to win Pinchot, just thirty-six years old.

  "We dream the same dreams," Roosevelt later wrote to Pinchot; more than that, he added, they shared "a peculiar intimacy."

  2. Roost of the Robber Barons

  IF WILLIAM A. CLARK was not the meanest man in Montana, he was certainly the richest and the most hated. He was also a United States senator from the Big Sky State, a position he had initially purchased with bundles of crisp $100 bills handed out to legislators in monogrammed envelopes— W.A.C. stamped on the fold, $10,000 per vote. Clark was a sunken-faced gnomish man with a paintbrush beard and eyes that cut with a slicing stare. He had set out to corner the copper market at a time when the world most needed that commodity for two of the biggest advances in civilization: the telephone and harnessed electricity. Clark purchased cops and courts, newspaper editors and ministers, grand juries—any source of opposition or fair play. Because senators were then chosen by state legislatures, he didn't have to pretend to care about average citizens. He was above the law, because the law was easily bought, a commodity cheaper than the source of his wealth. Mark Twain hated Clark, even losing his trademark sarcasm when trying to describe him.

  "To my mind he is the most disgusting creature that the republic has produced since Tweed's time," Twain said of Clark. "He is as rotten a human being as can be found anywhere under the flag." None of this made Senator Clark blush. Who was Mark Twain but a bankrupt has-been, now in his dotage? Clark judged a man's worth by the base measurement of material accumulation. And by his value system, everyone in the Senate, and of course every writer, was beneath him: he was worth at least $200 million at a time when there were barely 4,000 millionaires in the country. As for these moralists in the Roosevelt administration with their progressive agenda, who were they fooling? Wake up and smell the new century!

  "I never bought a man who was not for sale," said Clark, shrugging off the high-minded.

  The soul-darkened senator sat a few feet away from President Roosevelt at a dinner party in Butte, Montana, on May 27, 1903. The president and the Copper King despised each other — no surprise. What each held dearest in his heart could not have been more different. "There is not in the world a more ignoble character than the mere money-getting American, insensitive to every duty,
regardless of every principle, bent only on amassing a fortune," Roosevelt said just before he became president. To him, the West was a place for restoration and a proving ground. To Clark, it served no greater purpose than his life ambition to become the world's richest man. Clark and his allies derided Roosevelt as an outsider who didn't belong in the West.

  Making his way home from a long tour of the West, Roosevelt had reason for an additional bounce in his step. Whenever his train pulled into another depot in the Rockies, he would take a sip of mountain air and wave with a proprietary sweep. At times, his bronchial troubles bothered him in the high altitude, a price he didn't mind paying for spending time on the sunset side of the country.