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

by Timothy Egan

  It was not just outlaws who had it in for the Little G.P.s. Timbermen were outraged at having to answer to kids just out of college—"Teddy's Green Rangers," in the derisive term of Senator Clark's newspapers. Home at last in Montana, Elers Koch hiked under cathedrals of big cedars, feeling a spiritual attachment to his beloved Big Sky Country. But he also had to sell off much of that same virgin forest to industry, as part of the new operating rules of the national forests. National forests were not parks or wildlife refuges; they were "working forests," as Pinchot said, there for the ages, but also not tree museums. Anaconda, a logging branch of the copper trust, tried to intimidate Koch, but he did have some power. He insisted that loggers leave the largest of pines standing as a seed source. A big upright tree in the middle of a ravaged, logged-over hillside became known as a "Koch Special." He was damn proud of them, despite the ridicule from Anaconda.

  Everywhere, the woods were thick with timber cruisers—people hired by logging companies to stake out homesteads. Pinchot called them "as competent a body of land thieves as e'er the sun shone on." Homesteaders were pouring into the Far West; the twentieth century saw a frenzy of people seeking free land, more so than in the previous century, many from distant shores. But it was a different game in the forests. "Homesteading was not farming in those days, but just a subterfuge to gain possession of timber on land that has since proven worthless for farming," wrote Nancy R. Warren, who came to Idaho from Chicago in the boom years with her relatively well-off family. The basic scheme was to find 160 acres, patent it with a shack that could be labeled a home on "agricultural" ground, and then sell the land for a big profit to one of the timber companies, which were prohibited from homesteading. These claims were neither homes nor farms, but in this way, big sections of the new national forests were nibbled away and came under the control of timber companies. In the Bitterroots, nearly 90 percent of the homesteads were frauds set up by agents of industry, in the estimates of people on either side of the game.

  A young woman, Ione Adair, hacked her way along a game trail to find a piece of land in the heart of the Coeur d'Alene. Ione was twenty-five years old, nicknamed Pinkie because of her shock of red hair and freckled nose. When Pinkie set off to establish her own homestead, people were making up to $8,000 selling their 160-acre claims to timber companies—a fortune, equal to nearly a half-dozen years at a good-paying job. Pinkie claimed her piece of ground in a meadow above the St. Joe River, just east of the Montana border. In her cabin, the walls were lined with unbleached muslin cloth, and the mattress was stuffed with beargrass. She stored canned goods in the attic, along with sealed sacks of flour and salt. Pinkie traveled with a .38 on her belt. The shack was inaccessible during the winter, but in the warm months Pinkie made frequent visits. Once, while she was eating breakfast on the steps of the cabin, a little man surprised her from the brush.

  "Oh—somebody's here," he said.

  "Who are you?"

  "They call me Dynamite. I'm working on the railroad—on the tunnel. I do the drilling for the holes for the dynamite. I'd been living in your cabin while you were gone." She invited Dynamite in for breakfast, though she kept her pistol strapped on.

  Like other homesteaders in 1909, Pinkie Adair had no use for Gifford Pinchot's rangers. The foresters had cautioned her about making claims for profit on land not fit for legitimate homesteads. She heard them out, then continued as if no national forest had ever been established. She told everyone there was room enough in the upper St. Joe for a real homestead farm, and if the rangers thought otherwise, they'd just have to come after Pinkie. For the time being, they left her alone.

  Trying to be useful, the rangers warned people about fire, and they attempted to enlist timber cruisers as lookouts. Of course, they were also trying to prosecute some of those same cruisers, but if they could be helpful in early fire detection, everyone could have a short-term benefit. Most of the land hunters had no incentive to help. If fire came to the forest, it was every man for himself. Plus, nobody in the new towns had ever seen a fire of any significant size in the northern Rockies, and they certainly had not been there long enough for a typical thirty-year fire cycle—a good-size burn every generation or so — which bred a sense of complacency. The timber in these mountains did not need protection, one Idaho newspaper editorialized in 1908, "because it was not subject to fire."

  Deep in the emerald drainage of the St. Joe River, about thirty miles from Pinkie's cabin, the Forest Service was building a homestead of its own — a ranger station — to win people over. With little money to build trails, roads, or lookouts, Bill Greeley was struggling to get control of the forty-one-million-acre expanse of national forests in Region One. His rangers were swallowed by the enormity of the place. "One man in such a tract of land, without roads, trails or a telegraph is absolutely helpless," said Ranger Emery Wilson, who worked for Greeley. It was bad enough that his men had to pay for their own uniforms, their own horses, their own food and supplies, but living conditions, for most of them, were primitive. Greeley and Koch had homes in Missoula—an oasis of culture in a fine valley cut by three rivers. Weigle lived in the mining town of Wallace. The other rangers were footloose for much of the year, living out of tents in the warm months. If Greeley could establish permanent ranger stations, he could put an imprint of the Chief in the woods, something to show that the Forest Service was not going away.

  As the new century dawned, the valley carved by the St. Joe was still undisturbed, one of the nation's most isolated places. This tunnel of wild land was so remote that the only way to get to the upper St. Joe was by canoe. The Indians had a network of trails along the river, which they used to hunt elk and deer, and to fish. The big river pulled snowmelt in from an arc of broad-shouldered mountains, and it was flush with cutthroat and big bull trout that could rival salmon in size. Enormous trees, some more than five hundred years old, hugged the floor of the valley, and the upward slopes were thick with white pine as straight as a beam of sunlight. People who had poled upstream to have a look at the valley came away struck by its dreamy beauty and stillness. In this lost world, rangers started work on a shining outpost of the Forest Service in 1908.

  The station would have to be built with scraps from the forest and detritus from railroad construction, using the manpower of Little G.P.s with their limited carpentry skills. Lucky for Weigle, he had just hired a local man, Ed Pulaski, as an assistant ranger — a man who knew nothing about the science of silviculture and probably could not find Yale on a map. But Ed Pulaski was just what the beleaguered Forest Service needed. He was nearly twenty years older than most of the Little G.P.s, a middle-aged master of carpentry, metal forging, riding, route finding, and other skills that had allowed him to survive in the Rocky Mountain West at a time when it was being fully opened up.

  His father had immigrated to the United States from Poland, settling in Ohio. For most of his life, Ed was thought to be a descendant of Count Casimir Pulaski, the Revolutionary War hero who served under George Washington. No sir, he told anyone willing to listen, the count was only a distant ancestor. Big Ed was from the poor Pulaskis, without money or title. But people believed what they wanted to believe, and so he went through life as that Pulaski, even to some of his closest friends. At age sixteen he had left school in Ohio for the Rockies, tramping around the big hill of Butte, the copper lodes of Arizona, the Silver Valley of Idaho—the mining tour, but he never hit it big. He worked as a plumber, a steamfitter, a blacksmith, an outfitter. He tried to join the Army to fight in the Spanish-American War, but was rejected. He married once, divorced, and then married again. Pulaski was respected around Wallace and throughout the Bitterroots, something that could not be said for most of Gifford Pinchot's boys. It was one of his selling points, as a supervisor noted in his personnel file: "He is a very good man in a district at the center of a community none too favorably inclined toward the Forest Service."

  For several months, the rangers hammered and sawed, cut and felled, fitted a
nd shaved, as the ranger station along the St. Joe took shape. It had big windows, a broad porch, loft space for guests upstairs. It looked permanent. Soon the new station was home to a forest ranger, a married man with two young children. Next door, the government built a post office and established the ranger's wife as postmistress. A few other cabins rose in the cluster. To look at it now was to see the shaping of a real town. Inspired, the Little G.P.s incorporated their burg and named it for Big G.P. At the new town of Pinchot, Idaho, nestled in the St. Joe River valley, the Forest Service had made its mark, a brand on the raw hide of the Bitterroots.

  But upriver, the railroad bosses had another idea. Soon the coal-fired locomotives of the Milwaukee Road would come roaring through—all fire and steel, sparks and combustion, chugging out of a nearly two-mile-long tunnel in the mountains and wending their way down until the road found the silent, sylvan valley of the St. Joe. At a clearing next to the river, just upstream from Pinchot, railroad workers assembled in the usual pattern, brothel and bar first, followed by a general store, a few hundred cabins, and a three-story hotel whose chief attraction was a black bear purchased from a railroad employee. The chance to wrestle with the bear, on a bet, provided a little side income for the hotel. In this village, people ignored the nearby town of Pinchot, because they wanted their own town with their own rules. Life was cheap, and death could come and go like a spring shower. A typhoid epidemic swept through in 1908, killing dozens of construction workers. But the enterprise had its upside. The railroad's president, Albert J. Earling, and his corporate confidant and benefactor, William Rockefeller, said this new line would be unrivaled in the United States for speed, power, and modern touches.

  When one of Earling's wealthy friends asked him if there was something he could do about his sons, a pair of hard-drinking, skirt-chasing, recent college graduates—the Kelley brothers, Spike and Bill — Earling recommended sending them out west to get in on the bonanza following his new rail line. The Kelley brothers showed up in the St. Joe Valley, cartons of liquor, raccoon coats, and fine possessions in tow, and took to it like hounds on a rabbit hunt. They loved the bawdy life of the wide-open tent towns and the chance to make an easy buck. The brothers opened general merchandise stores in Taft, Grand Forks, and the new town taking shape next to Pinchot. Spike Kelley was the most industrious. He oversaw construction of a two-story mansion across the river from the other cabins—the biggest house in the valley—and hired servants from among the Japanese who had also moved there. When the manse was finished and fitted out with antiques, Spike disappeared for several months. He returned with the socialite daughter of a California judge—his bride, Mrs. Spike Kelley. She arrived on the St. Joe with eighteen trunks.

  The town of Pinchot had to go. The Milwaukee Road was coming through, and they wanted the land on which the new ranger station had been built. They had their legal right of way, awarded in an earlier land grant. Worn down, the fight drained away, the Forest Service retreated. And so Weigle's rangers took their hammers, saws, and crowbars to the outpost they had so lovingly constructed in honor of the Chief, and tore it apart. Off came the roof, the porch, the well-crafted loft space, the perfectly cut timbers. They would move the station upriver to join the rowdies at the edge of the new town. The people there had no use for them, of course, and reminded the rangers of it daily. At the least, the rangers thought, the town, now with about 250 people, would keep the name of the founder of the Forest Service. Sorry, they were told: this cluster of humanity on the St. Joe River was now a projection of the very Gilded Age powers that Pinchot and Roosevelt had been fighting for nearly a decade. The name of the town would be Avery, after William Rockefeller's grandson. Pinchot, the town, was erased from the map. Pinchot, the man, would be the next to fall.

  5. Showdown

  ON ONE OF THE LAST days of Teddy Roosevelt's time in the White House, the president called in his handpicked successor to talk about plans to run the nation in the second decade of the American century. Despite his girth, William H. Taft was always the smaller man when in Roosevelt's presence, or so he felt. Roosevelt was the human volcano; Taft was a putting green. Roosevelt sucked the air out of a room; Taft tried to be invisible. Roosevelt barked; Taft had a low monotone, punctuated by a random and annoying chuckle. Roosevelt burned two thousand calories before noon and drank his coffee with seven lumps of sugar; Taft was the picture of sloth: multiple chins, a zest for five-course meals and long baths. Sleeping Beauty was the nickname his wife, Nellie, gave him, and oh, how he loved to nap. But on the question of how and where to lead the country, they did not differ, the president believed.

  Taft had spent the past three years observing Roosevelt's likes and dislikes, his private quirks and public persona. He took it all in carefully and then projected it back to him, hitting the right notes as Roosevelt probed him on his political beliefs. As such, he seemed to be the perfect successor. Roosevelt was full of energy, at the peak of his power and popularity, but he felt duty-bound to keep the promise he had made to serve only two terms. More than any guiding philosophy, Will Taft simply was driven by the desire to please the man he considered his closest friend. And so when Roosevelt asked him to the White House in late 1908, after a campaign in which Taft won with the full backing and expert advice of the still-young Roosevelt, the incoming president again said all the right things. Taft had won in a landslide, crushing the perennial Democratic populist William Jennings Bryan. For this meeting in the old cabinet room upstairs Roosevelt invited Pinchot along. The three men talked late into the night.

  Roosevelt was convinced that conservation and the rest of the progressive agenda would have a central place in the Taft administration. No need for the big man to be bold; just keep the ship going forward, even keel. Fighting the trusts, holding firm to the idea that natural resources belonged to the public, setting aside unique pieces of land for future generations, trying to do something about nine-year-old girls working twelve-hour days in cotton mills down south—on all of these issues Taft would be solid. But Pinchot thought otherwise. He considered Taft superficial, somewhat silly, and malleable. He didn't trust him. Taft, in his view, "had successfully followed and chuckled his way through life."

  The country was bursting at the seams, people buying automobiles and feathering the insides of gabled houses, on a roll with the downturn of 1907 behind them. In Pinchot's eyes, Taft had been carried into office by the tail wind of T.R.'s popularity. Pinchot thought of quitting. How could he work for a man he didn't respect? But Roosevelt talked him out of it, inviting him to come to the White House to hear out Taft in the cabinet room. Their work was not finished, the president reminded the forester; stay on for the good of all the Little G.P.s if nothing else.

  That night in the White House, Taft made a promise. "Then and there Taft pledged himself to T.R., and incidentally to me, to stand by and carry on the conservation fight," wrote Pinchot. "It was no perfunctory promise ... He bound himself, as completely as one man can to another, to stand by and go forward with the T.R. conservation policy."

  In his final months as president, Roosevelt tried to ensure that his policies had a permanent place in the country. That meant conservation was to be as lasting an American principle as free speech. Three weeks before leaving office, he requested that the world's great powers meet in The Hague to do an inventory of the world's resources. Far ahead of his time, and to the criticism of isolationists in his own party, Roosevelt tried to get the major nations of the world to come together and take stock of the globe they shared.

  In barely five years' time, many of these same powers would be at war, in a drawn-out conflict of nationalistic frenzy with repercussions for the rest of the century. But for now Roosevelt wanted only to get other nations to see their rivers, their forests, their farm fields, their oil and coal, their wildlife as valuable assets that would not last if they failed to become good stewards. There was a limit to what the world could bear. His idea was not a complicated notion, he said—"all of thi
s is simply good common sense." At home, Roosevelt's legacy was intact: he had added about 230 million acres to national forests, parks, wildlife refuges, and other lands managed for future generations—an endowment 50 percent bigger than all of Texas. In one of his last acts as president, Roosevelt presented a report on what conservation had meant for America—and what it could mean for the world. People living in 1909 were obligated to the future, he wrote.

  "It is high time to realize that our responsibility to the coming millions is like that of parents to their children, and that in wasting our resources we are wronging our children."

  In the final hours of his presidency, Roosevelt gathered his closest confidants for a self-congratulatory lunch, excluding Taft. He spoke of their achievements, how they had altered the American landscape, changed its politics, its view of itself in the world. Not all of their goals had been achieved, but the United States was a nation transformed — for the better, he believed. As a parting present, Teddy's friends gave him a bronze lion; it brought him close to tears.

  Early on, there were clear signs that Congress would have its way with Taft, simply because he so loathed conflict. With Roosevelt out of the way, the spark-eyed, cigar-chomping Speaker of the House, Uncle Joe Cannon, was back in full form, a force that Taft tried first to avoid and then to please. Senator Heyburn was ginning up complaints from powerful constituents in the West, preparing to cripple the Forest Service with a thousand little blows. His bully pulpit gone, Roosevelt left for Africa on a long-planned safari. "To the lions!" his enemies toasted. Like a fresh college graduate who has waited years to hit the road, T.R. lighted out for adventure in distant parts of the big continent, with plans to make his way up through Egypt, the Mediterranean, and much of Europe. He was free. Pinchot hated to see him go. Two days before he left the White House, Roosevelt penned a farewell to G.P.