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

by Timothy Egan

  "At heart," he told people, "I am just as much a Westerner as an Easterner."

  The day before arriving in Butte, Roosevelt had stopped in Wallace, Idaho—a triumphant visit, and not just because thousands showed up to welcome the president. For on May 26, the president learned that his leading political opponent, Senator Mark Hanna, had given up the idea of challenging him. Hanna had called Roosevelt "that damned cowboy" and was horrified that he seemed to be taking the Republican Party on a different course.

  But by the spring of 1903, it was clear that the country loved the cowboy, and Hanna, in failing health, could not stop him. In Wallace, Roosevelt made an appeal to the shared humanity of all Americans, a common plea in an era when the angry poor and the predatory rich were at each other's throats. Just a few blocks away, in a big house on a manicured street in Wallace, lived one of Roosevelt's most powerful opponents—Senator Weldon Heyburn, a fellow Republican and chief ally of Clark. He fought Roosevelt on the major ideas of the Progressive Era, from the eight-hour workday and child welfare laws to direct election of senators. But most vociferously, Heyburn hated the idea of national forests, vowing to his last breath to kill the principles that were just taking root with the first rangers in the West.

  Chugging through Montana, Roosevelt had been approached by the mayor of Butte. All of Butte — the "richest hill on earth," the source of Clark's wealth, the biggest city between Minneapolis and Seattle—wanted to see Teddy, the mayor explained. The town was more often under martial law than playing host to a president. And it was also the center of timber and mining opposition to Roosevelt's forest reserves—Clark's kingdom. The Copper King used the newspapers he owned to destroy Roosevelt's "green rangers" before they could become part of the western landscape, painting them as sissies and interlopers who were in the woods on some kind of college-boy holiday. Still, Roosevelt's celebrity was enough to put public rancor aside for an evening.

  The president no sooner arrived at dinner than he spied his rival, along with half a dozen or so underlings of other barons who had been carving up the West in mockery of Roosevelt and his choirboy chief forester. Teddy could feel the hatred in the room. "There was Senator Clark with his Iscariot face," he wrote. Nearly two years into his administration, the president had been barnstorming the country and wrestling with Congress, trying to keep some of the very people who sat at this dinner from getting further control of the land. In his first message to Congress, he said preserving the nation's forests and fresh water amounted to "the most vital internal question of the United States." It seemed an odd, even esoteric selection for the top issue of the day. But as Roosevelt persisted, it became clear this would be a defining feature of his presidency. In the new century, he wanted Americans to look with fresh eyes at the natural world. For people who saw the woods in purely utilitarian terms, he offered this: "There is nothing more practical in the end than the preservation of beauty," he said in an address at Stanford. "I feel most emphatically that we should not turn into shingles a tree which was old when the first Egyptian conquerors penetrated to the valley of the Euphrates."

  To Clark, Heyburn, and many others, these assertions were laughable. They dismissed Roosevelt's crusade as nonsense. Roosevelt's task was to persuade people not just to cherish their natural heritage, but to understand that it was their right in a democracy to own it—every citizen holding a stake. In an era of free-for-all capitalism, it was revolutionary to insist, as he did, that the "rights of the public to the national resources outweigh private rights." Gifford Pinchot may have penned that line for his boss. Roosevelt liked it enough that he repeated it throughout his presidency. "The forest reserves should be set apart forever for the use and benefit of our people as a whole and not sacrificed to the shortsighted greed of a few," Roosevelt said in his first annual message to Congress. Some small ranchers and family-run logging outfits that were muscled out of good grazing land and forests by the big syndicates also wanted a green sheriff in the people's woods. But high-minded talk of preserving land for future generations and common folk was not something rattling around saloons in the West or town halls on the Great Plains. It was an argument made by two Ivy League patricians against a clique of self-made titans with an oversize sense of entitlement.

  What Teddy and Pinchot had first spoken of on that winter night in Albany of 1899 had blossomed in the White House. Ideas take on their own trajectory, but they die without people to carry them into the corridors of power. Following his words with action, Roosevelt created the nation's first wildlife refuge, Pelican Island in Florida. His executive power, he discovered, while not on par with that of creation, certainly could do the opposite—keep species from going out of existence. "Is there any law that will prevent me from declaring Pelican Island a federal bird reservation?" he asked. "Very well, then I do so declare it." And with that, one of the signature birds of the Southeast had its nesting home written onto the map. Roosevelt used executive decrees to add considerably to the forest reserve system, building in huge initial chunks on what Grover Cleveland had started in the last months of his presidency.

  Following Pinchot's lead, Roosevelt became close to John Muir, whose charisma and love of a good fight matched the feistiness of the president. Muir saw wilderness as a tonic for a frenzied era, a place to escape the "stupefying effects of the vice of over-industry and the deadly apathy of luxury," as he wrote in an influential book. "Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wilderness is a necessity and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life."

  In that sentiment, he and Roosevelt were one. During the same spring 1903 trip that took him to Montana, Roosevelt met up with Muir in California. They fled from the clamoring press on a four-day trek through Yosemite—the president having taken the naturalist's advice to heart by going to Muir's favorite fountain of life. It was a proven Muir lobbying tactic: he had escorted one of the most influential editors of the day, the urbane urban dweller Robert Underwood Johnson, on a similar camping trip to the Sierra in 1899. The editor promptly became a crusader, joining voices that led to the federal government's creation of Yosemite National Park one year later—a move that finally gave it special status well beyond what Lincoln had provided a generation earlier. Roosevelt and Muir slept under the stars, high above the valley, waking one morning to four inches of fresh spring snow. Muir was fearless. In all his wandering, he had fallen only once, down a steep slope in the Sierra, knocked unconscious. When he came to, he blamed the stumble on a recent trip to the city—too much time among the nerve-shaken and overcivilized had thrown off his mountain stride, he explained.

  Roosevelt professed to genuinely love the older man's company, a carryover from schoolboy days, happiest when he was trying to interpret the natural world with a brilliant mentor. With Muir, he delighted in pointing out birds during the day, and watching the sparks of a campfire rise to the heavens at night. Muir, in turn, was mesmerized by a president, twenty-five years younger than he, whose thoughts mirrored his own. He told reporters he fell for Roosevelt, this "interested, hearty and manly" leader. And he also fed Teddy's rage over plunderers of public land. "I stuffed him pretty well regarding the timber thieves," Muir said.

  Roosevelt needed no prodding to remind him of his biggest failure to date. "Forests and foresters had nothing to do with each other," he lamented, echoing Pinchot's almost daily complaint. Without a corps of rangers, the land went unprotected and the decrees that set it aside were largely meaningless. Outside the reserves, the bulk of the public domain remained open for the taking by the copper kings, timber barons, and railroad magnates who dominated the economy and controlled much of Congress. The railroads alone had nine of the eleven stocks listed on the precursor to the Dow Jones average. Their 240,000 miles of roads were destiny in iron, determining what towns would flourish or fail, what ports would grow or languish as
backwaters, what products would ship cheaply or face high costs. In the West, the railroad's subsidiaries and contractors cut indiscriminately in the reserves, converting whole forests into miles of underground wooden ribs for mines and aboveground ties for transportation.

  The titans were accustomed to getting land for free. The Northern Pacific Railroad, now controlled by James J. Hill and J. P. Morgan, had been given more than 40 million acres by the government as an incentive to build a transcontinental route not long after the Civil War. The Northern Pacific's main competitor, the Union Pacific, controlled by E. H. Harriman, was given 11.4 million acres as a lure to build its line. Between them, the two railroads were handed a piece of the United States nearly equal in size to all of New England. But it was not enough. They sold off much of the land to ranchers, speculators, and city builders, and then took their timber at will from the reserves.

  These western landlords swapped properties the way European dukes divided the spoils of a medieval war. The stocky Hill, known as the Empire Builder, was at the peak of his powers and his bluster. "Give me enough Swedes and whiskey and I'll build a railroad through hell," he boasted. He lived in a St. Paul mansion, next door to Frederick Weyerhaeuser, whose German-American family had clipped the choicest white pine from the upper Midwest. One day Hill made a proposition to his neighbor: Hill's railroad would sell 900,000 acres of prime western forestland to Weyerhaeuser for $7 an acre. Weyerhaeuser countered: How about $5? They settled on $6 for one of the largest land sales in the country. Weyerhaeuser paid about a dime per tree, on average, for lush forests around Mount Rainier, Mount St. Helens, and elsewhere. Weyerhaeuser then gobbled up other forests in Idaho to create Potlatch, a 400-square-mile timber empire that would own everything within its borders—towns, people, roads, forests, water, land—the western feudal ideal. Potlatch built the world's biggest sawmill, ready to cut all that Idaho white pine into dimension lumber at a rate of 350,000 board feet a minute.

  Not to be outdone was J. P. Morgan, the lonely anti-Semite with a three-hundred-foot yacht and a taste for showy European art. Though he had a grotesquely mottled nose, Morgan could sniff a bargain. He had bought a controlling interest in the Northern Pacific during one of the periodic panics that plagued the railroads. Hill had also bought a big position. Looking to end all competition at the turn of the century, they merged with their chief rival, Harriman's Union Pacific. The new monopoly, the Northern Securities Company, controlled all rail traffic for one-fourth of the United States. Everyone from sheepherders in Nevada to drugstore merchants in small-town Minnesota had to go through the trust to make their living. Freight rates went up. Protests followed. The imperious Morgan now owned the country, critics claimed. "Whenever he doesn't like it," said William Jennings Bryan, the populist presidential candidate, "he can give it back to us."

  Roosevelt too was incensed. The trusts had pushed him with double-fisted arrogance, which roused his scrappier instincts. Morgan thought he could strike a quick deal. "If we have done anything wrong, send your man to my man and they can fix it up," he said. But there would be nothing short of open war in the courts. The titans howled. E. H. Harriman warned a Roosevelt aide that the president could not stop them; the trusts would crush him. "He said that whenever it was necessary he could buy a sufficient number of senators and congressmen or state legislators to protect his interests," Roosevelt wrote a friend. "And when necessary, he could buy the judiciary."

  At the same time, the Rockefeller family started shopping out west. William Rockefeller, brother of the Standard Oil founder, John D. Rockefeller, bought into the world's largest copper company, Anaconda, also known as the Snake, just down the road from Butte. This was the smelter and mining complex originally owned by Marcus Daly, the best known of the copper kings. The Irish miners, at least, loved Daly because he paid well and was one of them — a native of Ballyjamesduff in the Ulster county of Cavan. After he died in 1900, the world's biggest copper mine and smelter, along with two company towns, fell to Rockefeller's hands, and turned the ever-opportunistic Senator Clark—once Rockefeller's fierce rival — into his water carrier in Congress. The family already controlled the nation's oil supply. Now William Rockefeller wanted to build a third rail line, the Milwaukee Road, from the Midwest to Puget Sound, a way to gain access to the riches being shipped in from Asia. But to get from the flatlands to the inland sea, the line would have to bore through the Bitterroot Mountains, the heart of the Coeur d'Alene reserve.

  John Rockefeller was perhaps the richest American who ever lived. Morgan and Weyerhaeuser were not far behind, each with a net worth roughly equal to that of Bill Gates, the Microsoft cofounder, in contemporary dollars. Rockefeller had more than four times the wealth of Gates, his stake at just under $200 billion, when adjusted for inflation. As to Roosevelt's view of these men, he was rarely discreet. He called them "the most dangerous members of the criminal class, the malefactors of great wealth," in his best-known phrase, uttered during a sharp economic downturn. And he was more cutting when he really wanted to be dismissive.

  "It tires me to talk to rich men," he said. "You expect a man of millions to be worth hearing, but as a rule, they don't know anything outside their own business." When Standard Oil donated $100,000 to Roosevelt's campaign, the president asked that it be returned. It was somewhat jarring, to say the least, that Roosevelt, from a wealthy New York family, and Pinchot, who had inherited a chateau with twenty-three fireplaces, had turned so vehemently against their class, envisioning the national forests as a way to "help the small man make a living rather than help the big man make a profit," as Pinchot said frequently. But once engaged, they never looked back.

  The dinner crowd in Butte was liquored up by the time food was ready to be served, buzzed on "every kind of whiskey," Roosevelt recalled. As he had asked that his guests be a cross-section of Butte, there were more than the usual Irish who dominated the town. Blacks, Chinese, Cornish, Italians, Greeks, Swedes, and Germans — all had a seat, in addition to pinch-faced Senator Clark and his allies. Mayor Pat Mullins summoned his waiters: "Boys, bring on the feed." Then he ordered that the window blinds be lifted so that people on the street could look inside and see what Butte had corralled. Gifts were presented. One in particular touched Roosevelt: a pair of silver scales from black miners at the table. "This comes in the shape I appreciate—scales of justice held even," Roosevelt said. He went on to discuss the bravery of "colored troops" who had served with him in Cuba. Visibly moved, he turned to the miners and said the scale — this gift — made him want to help blacks get "a square deal." A pact, of sorts, was born at the banquet table: the simple phrase "a square deal" would be at the heart of the Roosevelt social contract.

  Clark was not impressed. In a huff, the senator retreated to his manse in Butte—three stories, thirty-four rooms, stuffed with Tiffany glass lamps — fortified in his resolve to thwart Roosevelt at every turn. Since buying his Senate seat, he had rarely been home in the northern Rockies. Clark preferred the forest of chateaux in New York with the other titans now carving up the West. J. P. Morgan had a house at 219 Madison Avenue. The Astors, the Fricks, the Goulds, the Whitneys, the Harrimans, and the Carnegies each had a stone showpiece nearby. Clark started with a home on Fifth Avenue, a few blocks from Morgan. But after visiting the world's fair in Paris, he was determined to build a royalist fantasy in Manhattan. He created a 121-room palace on Park Avenue at Seventy-seventh Street. And so for the duration of his only term as a senator from Montana, Clark's principal residence was a Gotham fortress with thirty-one bathrooms—a different commode for every day of the month.

  After the dinner in Butte, there would be no truce, no letup, no middle ground. Roosevelt had to be stopped. Clark used his Senate seat to block every effort at conservation, and he used his newspapers to echo his interests and applaud his opposition to Roosevelt. At the same time, his wealth grew with a plan to start a town in the Mojave Desert built around a pit stop for a railroad he owned—Las Vegas, Nevada. The town to
ok off, and the railroad was sold to E. H. Harriman, putting Clark within reach of becoming one of the richest Americans ever. Clark was the voice of brute wealth and blunt strength—might over right, the way copper kings did their business in the West. And, as his papers told it, he was heroic to take on this radical young president. His allies, such as Herschel Hogg, a congressman from Colorado, relied on ridicule: these conservationists were "google-eyed, bandy-legged dudes from the East and sad-eyed, absent-minded professors and bugologists," in Hogg's memorable phrase.

  So long as there were no trained professionals to watch the woods and grasslands, big money prevailed. Clark could rest easy. The General Land Office existed for one reason: to transfer public property to private hands—in Clark's mind, the perfect government agency. It was staffed by bureaucrats who neither knew nor cared for wild land in the West. As for Pinchot's main request, Clark was consistently defiant: he would never agree to transfer the reserves from the land office to a forest service. As to the larger argument, he sniffed at calls from Roosevelt and Pinchot to leave something behind for the future.

  "Those who succeed us," said Clark, "can well take care of themselves."

  Everything changed in the next year, with the 1904 election, when Roosevelt at last won his own full term—a victory that would literally be landscape-altering. "It's all colossal," his firebrand daughter, Alice, wrote in her diary. Indeed it was: Roosevelt won by the largest margin of any presidential candidate to date, taking thirty-three of the forty-five states—something he could not keep from broadcasting. "How they are voting for me!" said Teddy as he skipped through the White House on election night. "I have the greatest popular majority and the greatest electoral majority ever given to a candidate for president," he wrote his son Kermit.