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

by Timothy Egan

  He reserved a special wrath for Pinchot, regularly calling him before committees to explain the Forest Service and its budget. He questioned him as aggressively as a prosecutor would go after a man on trial for murder. When it came out that Pinchot was working without a salary and distributing to his clerks the money that should have gone to him as Chief, Heyburn tried to get the appropriation withdrawn. The very idea of forestry was a joke—it had no bearing in science, the senator believed. "Forestry," Heyburn said at one hearing, "has been fostered as a policy to uphold the leisurely, lazy dignity of a monarch," a reference to a man he called Czar Pinchot. To this remark, several senators hissed.

  "Geese!" Heyburn shot back. "Geese! Hiss! Don't try that with me. I'm too old to be scared by that process."

  After years of back-and-forth clashes with little to show for it, Heyburn and his allies finally came up with a way—they thought—that would stop Roosevelt. In 1907, an amendment was tacked onto a spending bill, a bit of dynamite in a small package. The add-on took away the president's authority to create new national forests in a huge part of the West without congressional approval. Every tree in the public domain in that area would be subject to the whim of key members of Congress like Heyburn. At the same time, Heyburn took to the Senate floor for a marathon attack, questioning whether the Forest Service had a right to exist, implying that it was a treasonous agency, unsanctioned by the Constitution.

  Roosevelt felt cornered. Not so with Pinchot. To the forester, the Senate amendment was no defeat; it was an opportunity—but only if they acted quickly. The president had a week to sign the bill, and it had to be signed because it kept the government in operation. Pinchot had an idea. Why not use the seven-day window to put as much land into the national forest system as possible? Just go full bore and do in a week's time what they might normally do over the course of four years.

  Roosevelt loved it. He asked the Forest Service to bring him maps—and hurry!—a carpet of cartography, every square mile in the area Heyburn was trying to take away. A messenger ran into agency headquarters with a two-word command from the Chief: "Get busy!" For a week, a huddle of Little G.P.s worked nonstop to outline valleys and rivers, mountain ranges and high meadows, ridge after ridge of forestland that might qualify. The floor of an entire room in the White House was covered with maps; Roosevelt, on his knees with Pinchot, went over individual sections, recalling hikes and hunting trips on land where he had mended a broken soul.

  "Oh, this is bully!" said the president, in full nostril-snorting charge on the floor. "Have you put in the North Fork of the Flathead? Up there once I saw the biggest herd of black-tailed deer."

  At the end of the week, Roosevelt issued executive proclamations covering sixteen million acres of land in half a dozen states, bringing them into the fold of the national forest system. And then he signed the bill that prevented him or any other president from doing such a thing again.

  "The joke was on them," said Pinchot.

  Heyburn and his allies seethed. "The opponents of the Forest Service turned handsprings in their wrath," Roosevelt wrote, "and dire were the threats to the Executive." A Senate delegation marched over to the White House to demand a change. In advance of the meeting, Roosevelt summoned Pinchot. Caught up in the euphoria of their triumph, they started laughing, loudly enough that the senators could hear them as they approached from the hallway. Heyburn was apoplectic, steaming. These new national forests were nothing but "midnight reserves," he said in a rant to the president. After the meeting, he arranged to cut off any funds that would allow the Forest Service to publicize them. By his reasoning, if the public did not know they existed, then perhaps they wouldn't exist at all.

  But the forester and the president now had most everything they wanted. In just a few years' time, they had tripled the national forest system, to nearly 180 million acres. They had introduced a new term to the public debate—conservation—and it was here to stay. They had shifted oversight of public land from patronage bureaucrats to professional foresters. In battle, Pinchot seemed to be at his most exuberant. Work was joy; the thrust and parry over ideas gave it life. "I am very happy tonight," he signed off his diary just after the midnight reserves were created.

  Embedded in Idaho and Montana, in Colorado and the Dakotas and Wyoming, in Washington, Oregon, and California, in the territories of Arizona and New Mexico and Alaska, were hundreds of Little G.P.s, keepers of the conservation dream. Their job was to make sure the land was in good shape, to convince people who lived nearby that they could prosper with national forests as their neighbors, to prevent the agents of timber companies from stealing public resources, and to fight fires.

  Fire was the less formidable task, Pinchot believed. He already had a rough plan in place, a new gospel for the Little G.P.s. "The one secret to fighting fires is to discover your fire as soon as possible and fight it as hard as you can and refuse to leave it until the last ember is dead," he told the New York Times. And the first two summers of the Forest Service under Pinchot seemed to bear him out. Only one-tenth of one percent of Forest Service land burned in each of those years—a huge confidence booster that had Roosevelt feeling sure of the rangers' ability to control wildfire.

  "It had a great task before it, and the Forest Service has proved that forest fires can be controlled," the president wrote Pinchot in late August 1906. Pinchot had set up the monumental task: ensure that nature could be subdued even as it was preserved, an inherent contradiction. And Roosevelt now gave him a passing grade on this earth-changing score. Still ahead was the sizable job of wresting control of the land from the syndicates, who vowed continued defiance of the forest rangers, and convincing average people that this land was theirs. The challenge was to show homesteaders, grubstakers, immigrants, and others that the Forest Service worked on their behalf.

  "Finally, a body of intelligent, practical, well-trained men, citizens of the West, is being built up," Roosevelt wrote. But as the Little G.P.s would soon find out, many a poor man had a different idea in a land that was wild in all ways.

  4. Deadwood Days

  IN A THICKET of dark Montana woods just downslope from the Idaho divide, a town sprang up with one prostitute for every three men and a murder rate higher than that of New York City. Carved inside a national forest, the village of Taft frightened most anyone not used to humanity with its raw appetites exposed. You could buy the basics in Taft: a woman, a man, a horse, a place at a card table or a spin of a roulette wheel, a fat steak for $1, a quart of whiskey for $1.25, a bunk for 25 cents. One nearby shop advertised "shoes, booze and screws," and they weren't talking about hardware. It was an easy place for an outlaw to hide, because everyone in Taft provided camouflage; a decent man would stand out like cactus on an ice floe. People drifted into town by day and just as easily faded away at night, never to be seen until the snow melted in the spring. During one thaw, eight bodies were found. A reporter visiting from Chicago described Taft as "the wickedest city in America."

  The townsfolk took their amusement wherever they could find it, and so they didn't miss a beat when the churchgoing, well-fed secretary of war, William H. Taft, came for a visit in 1907. At the time, the town was nameless—just a sheltered place in the woods to get a bunk and a boff or to sleep off a hard night. Secretary Taft, who was on the shortlist to succeed Roosevelt as president, lectured the whores and saloonkeepers, the fugitives, timber thieves, claim jumpers, and cardsharps about morality and their wretched ways. This town was a blight on the idea of national forests. This sewer of sin was a defiance of how American settlements had been founded, dating to the Puritans' "city upon a hill." From atop their tree stumps, people cheered, whistled in approval, and hoisted their jugs. Here, here! And then, just after the future president left, they decided to name their town for the big man. That spring, there were eighteen murders in Taft.

  The town of Taft was part of the public land domain of Elers Koch, the twenty-five-year-old supervisor of three national forests and a fresh-m
inted Little G.P. Pinchot never told him his empire would include some of the most openly lawless places in the country. Pinchot always looked past the gambling dens or the mining claims to the trees. "The forest is as beautiful as it is useful," he wrote in his Primer of Forestry. "The old fairy tales which spoke of it as a terrible place are wrong."

  He had not visited the open sore of Taft, Montana. When Koch and his crew of young rangers first showed up in town to have a look, the saloons, card dens, dance halls, and whores' cribs were going full throttle. "The bars were lined with hard-faced dance hall girls," Koch wrote, "and every kind of gambling game going wide open." The rangers spent the night, but were unable to sleep because of the din. Koch got out of bed, dressed, and went down to one of the saloons. He dropped a coin in a slot machine—and it hit! As his winnings flowed out, painted women were instantly drawn to the forest supervisor. "One big blonde in a very low-cut dress had her arm tightly around my neck," he said. Koch ordered up drinks for the house, on him, and then gathered his coins, ducked under the arm of the blonde with the free-flowing cleavage, and made a retreat for his bunk. Welcome to Lolo National Forest.

  Koch hired crews of seasonal rangers to go with his full-time assistants. They strung telephone wire, built trails, rescued hunters and hikers. In the winter, they snowshoed deep into the forest, traveling for days at a time on little but tea, sugar, raisins, and hardtack. They felled dead, standing trees for firewood and tried to stay warm wrapped in wool blankets—years before anyone had sleeping bags. Koch learned to read the sky and the human heart. He made some mistakes. One hire of his set up shop in the remote forest with his wife and daughter. Not long into this arrangement, the ranger's wife showed up at Koch's office in tears. Her husband had been sleeping with their little girl, the wife said—incest. Koch called the ranger in and told him he knew what he'd been doing. The man twitched, and Koch grew nervous looking at the gun in his pocket. Koch slid a resignation letter across the desk.

  "Sign that," he ordered. He kicked the man out, then reported him to the authorities.

  His colleague just over the ridge in Idaho, Bill Weigle, had a bigger problem: inside his national forest, the Coeur d'Alene, were three towns animated by debauchery and lusts of all kinds. The worst was Grand Forks, where muddy streets thick with filth and feces were lined with burned-out stumps of big cedars, like nubs on a half-shaven face. Saloons were held together by rough-cut planks, with canvas-walled cribs out back or on a second story for quick paid sex. If a wagon broke down in the middle of the street, it remained there until somebody burned it or picked it apart for scrap.

  The Little G.P.s were horrified and perplexed by what they found in the people's land: instead of honest homesteaders they confronted land thieves, instead of Pinchot's vaunted Little Man Who Would Be King they found whiskey peddlers, instead of enlightened merchants they found six varieties of pimps—all operating in open defiance of the U.S. Forest Service. One man cut a swath in the woods just outside Taft, a half acre or so, and opened a bar with a few whores. He did this under the eyes of several rangers. A flummoxed ranger sent a telegram to Missoula, no idea how to proceed.

  "Two undesirable prostitutes established on government land," he wired. "What should I do?"

  Another ranger wired back: "Get two desirable ones."

  ***

  The railroad that William Rockefeller financed—the Chicago, Milwaukee & Puget Sound Railway, called the Milwaukee Road for short—was going full bore, trying to cut through the solid vertical flank of the Bitterroots, straight into the wild heart of the Roosevelt reserves. Other magnates were moving on the mother lode of white pine, the largest uncut forest of that species in the world. In just three counties of northern Idaho, seventy-two sawmills were in operation. To the west, a rail line serving Potlatch—Frederick Weyerhaeuser's company town, the biggest timber complex in the nation—was moving farther into the forest on land purchased at a huge discount from the bigger railroads. All of this took place in an area where, just a few years earlier, a human being could have wandered for days without bumping into another. Idaho had not even two people per square mile at the start of the century—the entire state meeting the census classification for "frontier." Montana was similar. They were the least settled states in the nation, along with Nevada.

  For sheer percussive onslaught, nothing could top the Milwaukee Road, the nation's sixth transcontinental route, using a right of way that preceded the forest designation and gave the railway power to move through the reserves. The line hired thousands of men to dynamite holes in the granite, to sluice away gravel, to cut timber for ties and trestles, some of them running three hundred feet above the forest floor. No railroad had ever spent as much, $75,000 per mile, to lace ties across the Rockies. The toughest section—entirely roadless, with steep peaks, enormous snowdrifts and blizzards in winter, raging floods in spring, swarms of mosquitoes and yellow-jackets in summer—was in the high mountains shared by Idaho and Montana. To cross that stretch of merely twenty-two miles, workers would need to build twenty-one bridges and sixteen tunnels. But flush with Rockefeller money, the Milwaukee Road had the cash, and so the once empty reaches of the Bitterroots clogged with people rushing to make money off the latest boom in the West. By day they clawed away at the mountains, by night they indulged their cravings in towns newly sprouted in the public woodlands.

  In the Coeur d'Alene National Forest, a prostitute robbed and poisoned to death one of her customers. Trying to destroy the evidence, she burned down the building. The fire spread. By evening, Grand Forks was a smoldering heap and the whore had disappeared. Required to hold an inquest, people in the town hauled the bent and blackened shell of her bed out to the rutted byway in the center of the ruined town. The charred body was still on the bed. In Grand Forks it was just another entertainment; people pulled up seats atop beer kegs to have a look, jugs in hand. The town was rebuilt within a week, this time as a tent village. As darkness settled in with the evening, gas lamps lit up canvas walls and music poured into the woods from fiddles. The roar of laughter and brawling, the screech of off-key tunes, and the ring of gunshots fired at random filled the national forest.

  It was a struggle, to say the least, for Bill Weigle to control Grand Forks. From Yale and Washington, D.C., he had been dispatched to a state with two time zones, a state where it was nearly impossible to travel from north to south without leaving it, a state with an odd boundary only 45 miles wide at the top that expanded to 479 miles at the bottom, a state where forests covered 82 percent of the landmass.

  At first Weigle had politely informed merchants that they were selling liquor and lust on government property—a violation of federal law, gentlemen. They laughed at him; that is, those who didn't ignore him or threaten to kill him. Weigle had a ribald sense of humor and found the towns darkly comic at times. But he also had his orders. From Wallace, he wired pious Billy Greeley in Missoula: What should we do? Weigle felt helpless. There was nothing in Pinchot's little manual that rangers were required to carry — the Use Book —on how to tame a town that made Deadwood seem sedate. Nor had anyone at the Yale forestry school prepared the rangers for this. The Bible-quoting, bespectacled Greeley, who had once considered a career teaching the word of God, told Weigle he had no choice but to close the saloons and arrest the operators. This was a public forest! Not some haven of piracy in the high Rockies. Weigle sent a ranger to put the merchants on notice.

  "Upon our return, we found most of the saloons still running full blast," recalled Joe Halm, who had been hired out of college in 1909 by Weigle to help patrol the Coeur d'Alene. "This went on for several weeks and we became extremely unpopular. When one saloon was closed, another sprang up next door under new management." Halm and two other men tried to arrest a saloonkeeper; the barkeep fingered a shotgun, threatening to kill the rangers. They backed away, muttering to the owner a promise to return in the morning with a warrant. As forest supervisor, Weigle felt duty-bound to make the arrest. He rode all night fro
m Wallace. Just before dawn, Weigle assembled a posse of six armed forest rangers. They galloped into Grand Forks and took up positions outside the saloon. They banged on the door. No answer. Long, deadly silence. Weigle and another ranger then pushed open the door, walked in, and edged slowly forward, facing the bartender.

  "Are you ready to go?" Weigle asked.

  The saloonkeeper reached for a towel. The forest supervisor winced. The fear was that the man had a pistol under his cloth. Instead, he wiped his hands and surrendered. He was handcuffed, along with another saloon owner. There was no jail in Grand Forks. The closest lockup was through the woods and over the Idaho-Montana divide, at Taft—a long hike, too steep, rocky, and narrow for horses. It took the better part of a day for Weigle to guide his prisoners to Taft. Once there, they had a meal and a drink and then boarded the train for the biggest town in the region, Missoula. The prisoners were uncuffed for the ride, and Weigle settled into an easy conversation with one of them, the window open to let air circulate on a hot day. Weigle was a bachelor; he liked women and a drink; he looked like a lumberjack; with his pants up high-water style and his red suspenders, he looked like one of them. He could see why the townspeople catered to the tastes of roustabouts. But it was a public forest, this pragmatic Yalie tried to explain, not a grubstake. The bartender got up to stretch. In a flash he dove out the window into the passing woods. Weigle looked out: no sign of him as the train pushed on through the mountains. His prisoner disappeared, never to be seen in the Coeur d'Alene again. Later, Weigle found out that the man was an escaped convict with a long criminal record, currently wanted for several murders.