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

by Timothy Egan

  Back in Washington for the new year, Pinchot geared up for congressional hearings on the Ballinger affair. The story dominated the news and preoccupied the Taft administration. Pinchot was rested and ready for battle; he not only felt renewed, he felt more than ever that the country was with him. Taft could not bear the thought of another year with a chief forester in unbridled defiance. And then Pinchot pushed him to the edge. He arranged for a letter to be read in Congress that was openly critical of the president, saying his boss had misinterpreted the facts in the Ballinger imbroglio. The next day's headlines—"Forester's Letter Creates Sensation" was typical—foretold the logical outcome. On January 7, 1910, just as Pinchot was leaving the family home on Rhode Island Avenue to go to a dinner party, he was approached by a messenger with an envelope, a long, formal letter from the president. Pinchot, dressed in evening clothes, silk hat in hand, hastily read it. He turned to his mother.

  "I'm fired."

  "Hurrah!" she replied, clearly relieved.

  In his letter, Taft wrote, "By your own conduct you have betrayed your usefulness as a helpful subordinate of the government."

  For Pinchot's enemies, the firing was received like news of a large inheritance from a rich uncle. Syndicates that fought for free grazing on millions of acres of public land were holding a national meeting in Denver at the time. They had battled Pinchot for nearly a decade. In the forests of Colorado and Arizona, they ran rangers out of the woods, hiring killers in some cases to threaten their lives. When that didn't work, they tried to bribe the Little G.P.s, reasoning that it was still cheaper to pay off a ranger than pay a grazing fee. The convention was interrupted with a bulletin, read from the podium: Pinchot is gone! Great cheering and whistling broke out, lasting several minutes.

  It took a few weeks for the news to reach Roosevelt in Africa. "We have just heard by runner that you have been removed," he wrote to Pinchot. "I cannot believe it. I do not know any man in public life who has rendered quite the service you have rendered; and it seems to me absolutely impossible that there can be any truth in this statement. But of course it makes me very uneasy." With time to reflect, Roosevelt was more than uneasy. He was angry. Pinchot, he said in his letter, was a fighter who stood for good causes. Taft was jelly. "You were the leader among all the men in public office—and the aggressive, hard-hitting leader—of all the forces struggling for conservation," he said in his letter to Pinchot. He had started to think of Taft as a "puzzlewit," as he put it later, and wondered if he had made a terrible mistake in choosing him. Yes, Pinchot, his friend since they boxed together in Albany, the man with whom he built the conservation dream from scratch, had all but asked to be fired. And no doubt Pinchot could be too zealous, too eager for a fight, too full of his own self-righteousness. A pain! But for Roosevelt, the forester always had a special place: Gifford Pinchot, he told a friend, was the true keeper of his conscience.

  When Pinchot arrived at Forest Service headquarters the day after his firing, some rangers were weeping. Others expected him to bivouac inside this fortress of foresters, forcing Taft to remove him at the barrel end of a gun. Pinchot acted the gentleman. First he met with top associates and urged them to stay on and fight for the life of the Forest Service. "You are engaged in a piece of work that lies at the foundation of the new patriotism of conservation and equal opportunity," he told them. "You are creating a point of view that will in the end control this and all other nations." Next he spoke to a larger group, rank-and-file forest rangers, black and white, janitors and executive assistants, about three hundred people in all, a very boisterous, defiant crowd. When Pinchot started to talk, the ovation was so loud and sustained that passersby outside thought an entire government agency was in revolt. "Don't let the spirit of the service decline one-half inch," Pinchot said. "Stay in the service. Stick to the work."

  In the northern Rockies, the late winter of 1910 was one for the records. Storm after storm rolled out of the Gulf of Alaska, over the mountain hurdles in the western Pacific Northwest, and into the Bitterroots. Furious blizzards dumped snow over the whole range, from the lowest valleys to the highest peaks, sometimes a foot a day. The towns of Wallace and Grand Forks, Taft and Avery, continued their honky-tonk ways, their squeals muffled by heavy snow. Ten feet of it covered the valley where Wallace was built.

  In late February, the weather warmed, and rain and higher temperatures made the snow heavy and prone to movement. A tug of gravity, a shrug and a roar, brought the snow down. The avalanche was loud enough that it shattered windows in a school hundreds of feet away. The slide rolled over a big rooming house, killing a family and several boarders. The Forest Service was called to the rescue. The rangers came and dug out the house buried by snow. To the west, in the Cascades, trains were smothered and swept away in another slide, killing dozens of people. But in early spring came a dramatic change, as if a switch had been turned off. Bluebird days were the rule.

  Where was the spring rain? The snow melted early, all of it. Creeks withered and stilled, the forest leathered and baked. Pine needles and twigs on the floor cracked underfoot, dry as sun-crisped bread chips. The shiny cars of the Milwaukee Road screamed through the heart of the Bitterroots on the way to Puget Sound for loads of silk, making another generation of Rockefellers rich on a gamble that looked as if it was going to pay off big. Whenever the forest supervisors, Koch in Missoula and Weigle in Wallace, heard whistles in the woods they thought of showers of sparks trailing the trains and landing in a very dry public forest.

  They had other concerns, of course. With the founder ousted, the Forest Service was in extreme peril. "We used to call you our Greek god," a Forest Service colleague wrote to Pinchot. "None of us had any idea how much of Jove's thunder there really was in you, but I assure you that you have made us proud of you time and again. We have grown to like your thunder and its loudness, too, because that has always told us the lightning has struck something!" The Little G.P.s felt orphaned and glum without the Chief. "I feel as if attending a funeral," one regional forester wrote of an upcoming meeting. "I hope somebody in Congress can be brought to see the other side of the shield." Another forester wrote a memo summarizing "the complete demoralization of the service" and a "widespread state of unrest." Senator Heyburn and others were closing in for the kill, backed by newspaper owners who had long hated the Forest Service and Roosevelt's idea of land preservation. "It is criminal folly to preserve the forests merely to placate Gifford Pinchot," one newspaper, a mouthpiece for the corrupt Senator Clark, had editorialized on the front page. The national forests "are an expensive and useless burden to the public," another paper wrote that summer, adding that "this Pinchot troop of foresters now infesting the West should be called in, paid off, and abolished. If they are not a nuisance, they are of no practical use."

  And then smoke started to fill the woods. There had been no rain since early spring, a drought worse than any in nearly a generation's time. Typically, mornings were windless. In the afternoons, parts of the sky darkened with the formation of thunderheads, followed by lightning strikes and claps of thunder echoing through the canyons—dry storms, all sound and fury from the sky, but no water. It did not take much for these electric forks to light the forests. Greeley, the northern Rockies supervisor, soon had his hands full dispatching men to put out numerous spot blazes, as they were called. This became all part of a day's work—a dozen men with shovels dashing after an acre or two on fire, trying to corral the blaze before dark. By midsummer, lightning-sparked fires were breaking out every day: a pile of brush here, a hillside of pine there, a meadow of heat-withered grass smoking through a week. It was a nuisance and wearing, but the rangers took to it stoically. If this was the cost of keeping the Great Crusade alive, so be it. But they were afraid, many of them, for the first time since joining the service. A single question dominated talk: What if it all blows up?

  PART II

  What They Lost

  6. Summer of Smoke

  UP AT FIRST LIGHT on the
half-lidded side of 5 A.M., Ed Pulaski grabbed his shield, his gun, his knife, his compass, and his leather-bound book of notations, laced his tattered boots, packed some food, and set out for another day of fire patrol. Every morning in July 1910 dawned with smoke to chase. Pulaski would round up a small crew of civilian firefighters, find the blaze, then try to contain it within a hand-dug perimeter. It was very primitive and wearing—dig and snuff, dig and snuff—swatting firebrands, struggling for footing on steep slopes, the picks and shovels snagging on roots, the crew coughing on dust and haze, their clothes crusted with sweat-sticky grime.

  Just now, in the dim light before most of Wallace began to stir, drunks staggered home to bed and miners loaded with dynamite trundled off to extract silver from inside the mountains. Even during the longest days of the year, the sun did not find the town, a triangle set in a deep crease of the mountains, until well into the morning. At times Pulaski could imagine the valley before the railroads, mines, and sawmills — the way the South Fork of the Coeur d'Alene River cut through the mountains on its meander west, the blue-green rise and fold of the forests, summits of salt-and-pepper granite holding the alpenglow at day's end. Though he was not a Little G.P., never knighted at Yale or the Pinchot castle of Grey Towers, and not one of the original "forest arrangers" who had drawn the boundaries, he shared the ousted Chief's love of the High Lonesome as it once was — empty, wild, unpredictable. Some nights in open meadows he could see Halley's comet streaking across the sky, with its blaze and tail of light that made so many people remember 1910 as a year of wonder—and fear.

  Pulaski had gone west on his own as a teenager, rode horseback over country still in the hands of Indian people, and slept on ground never touched by a fellow human. Now the conveniences of early-twentieth-century America had found the isolation of Pulaski's home. Backfiring, stuck-in-the-mud Model T's were all over town, causing trouble. "Automobiles—a Menace," one headline had it. Many families had a telephone, which they used for six calls a day on average, the overhead lines cluttering the sky. The river close to town was a paradise lost, a wasteland of mine tailings, tree stumps, discarded barrels, and assorted bits of garbage, from rusted tin cans to torn scraps of clothing. Pulaski was considered a local, a man of the people, but he was blunt and seldom diplomatic at a time when the Forest Service needed every friend it could get. At a Chamber of Commerce luncheon he was asked what measures were necessary to prevent thoughtless visitors from setting the woods on fire.

  "None," Pulaski answered. The room went cold. "The residents of this city have less respect for the forest fire laws and are more trouble than any tourists." That was not what the bankers, shopkeepers, saloon owners, and mine operators of Wallace, Idaho, wanted to hear from their public servant.

  But Ed Pulaski was at an age where he didn't care what people thought about him. Ten years earlier, when he tried to enlist in the Spanish-American War, the Army told him he wasn't needed. Too old, even then. He shrugged it off, returning to odd jobs, cutting railroad ties, packing supplies for store owners, working shifts at the mills, crafting tools in his little blacksmith shop. He had been hired by the Forest Service in 1908. Listing his qualifications to be a ranger, he cited practical skills: "Built house and barn at Montgomery Creek. Worked in woods in Owyhee Mountains." Most rangers were young; he was in his forties. At six foot three, with rugged good looks, he was compared, later, to Gary Cooper in earnest middle age. They were college kids, these rangers taking up posts in the Rocky Mountains; Pulaski had dropped out of school at sixteen, making his way west with pockets stuffed full of letters that a wandering uncle had written years before about opportunities in the big land. This West was magical, full of chance — the young Pulaski had only to reach into his pocket for one of the letters, his reinforcement when he felt low. Other foresters tended to be single men; Pulaski was on his second marriage by the time he was hired. Other rangers sometimes made literary allusions, scientific references, or political observations in their reports. Pulaski wrote elliptical, meat-and-potatoes prose, first in his four-by-six-inch book—stamped E. G. PULASKI, U.S.F.S. on the outside—and then more formal notes to his supervisor in Wallace, Bill Weigle. In two years as a ranger, he had built trails, hung telephone lines, constructed cabins, and smothered numerous small fires, often with nothing but shovel and ax.

  What Pulaski lacked in formal forestry training he made up for with practical knowledge of the woods. Never cut cottonwood for firewood: the ax will twist up and bind like a comb in witch hair. You can always tell a grand fir, growing into three centuries, by that Christmas tree fragrance, and the Indians relied on gum pinched from the tree's resin blisters for healing. Those scrubby little Pacific yew trees most everyone overlooked—same thing, healing powers. A slice of yew made a great archery bow or canoe paddle as well. And on summer afternoons when warm air rises from the valleys and heated slopes, the sky may look as clear as infinity itself, but it can quickly turn on you. The air cools as it rises, forms thunderheads, and inside those clouds, positive charges collide with negative charges. When it doesn't produce any rain, what follows is trouble.

  ***

  By July 1910, Pulaski was feeling worn down by the stale hot breath of summer and the constant little flareups—fires started by coal-burning trains, fires started by mine operators, fires sparked by lightning. There hung in the air that summer a personal question of just how long he could continue humping over brush and loose rock in the Bitterroots, pursuing flame fourteen hours a day.

  The woods had been sylvan and lovely during Pulaski's first summers married to Emma, his second wife. He built a house in Wallace with a broad porch and a second-story dormer, snug against the mountain walls that rose so sharply from town. In the center of Wallace, four-story buildings of brick and stone were rising, and no fire would ever penetrate their walls, the owners boasted. Pulaski had to make do with planks and the polish of good paint; it was all he could afford. He knew he wasn't going anywhere on a salary of $80 a month. He wasn't a full ranger—he was an assistant—and if the Little G.P.s wanted to put him in his place, they had only to remind him of that. After so many false starts, Pulaski was at a stage in life where he wasn't going to find his own mother lode in the valley that had made so many other men rich; a government job in the woods was just fine.

  That summer, Pulaski could not get over how quickly the green had been bled out of the Bitterroots. The heat, the domino of days without rain—everyone remarked on how strangely dry it was. The combined rainfall for June and July was not even one-tenth of an inch, a mere whisper of rain. The wind sucked moisture from the forest, blowing hard in the afternoons, leaving all that standing timber as if it was just hung out to dry. Balsamroot, blossoming big butter-colored flowers in late spring, had wilted early; the mountain meadows, the puffy white balls of beargrass, the sprightly lupine and Indian paintbrush—all had faded quickly. Spring was so easy, so warm, no rain or chill. And then summer came without advance notice, wildfires in April! Nobody had seen that before. By late July, the big flume at the edge of Wallace, source of the town's drinking water, still carried a clear trickle of runoff down from the mountains, but it was a withered little spray, barely enough to slake the town's thirst.

  Fire was on everybody's mind. When? How big? How bad? Bill Weigle could not walk the streets of Wallace without some miner, railroad boss, or timberman stopping him with a poke in the chest: What happens if the woods near town catch fire, Bill? Are we going to be trapped here? They had their investments now, their hold on the forest. And yet few of these people in the woods or in town were willing to lend a hand to help the Forest Service defend the land. Leave it up to the green rangers, they said with a shrug. Hadn't they promised to protect the woods? Weigle would go into a lunch counter at midday, make a few jokes and choke down a meal, then snap his suspenders a few times in a cajoling effort before dozens of able-bodied men. The red-headed ranger gave his talk: The situation is urgent, boys. We need to save Wallace, not just the woods
outside of town. He left with nothing to show. Nothing! Not a man. "While there are plenty of idle men in Wallace or vicinity, they refuse to accept work of any kind," he told reporters in late July.

  So when Weigle sent a message to Pulaski, saying he needed him to abandon one fire and turn his attention to another one, a gnarly little blaze threatening someone's private clutter, it was an insult. Enough! Rangers were openly suspicious of these fires: they heard numerous stories that the blazes had been deliberately set — as a way to clear land, to get title, to ensure that a patch of woods not remain for long as part of Roosevelt's reserves.

  Truth be told, some rangers already had their fill of these button-popping towns and their dirty, clanking, pushy timber and mining start-ups in the mountains. Five years into the formal foundation of the Forest Service, many still feared for their lives. A ranger had been killed by a hunter in Montana in 1907; the killer said he mistook the forester for a deer, which nobody in the service believed. "We never knew when a bullet might meet us in a thicket or on the trail," Joe Halm recalled. He was a rookie ranger, just out of Washington State College in Pullman, paired with Pulaski for his first year on the job. Adding insult, was what happened over the ridge in Avery, where folks had just taken down Gifford Pinchot's name on the town, about the same time the Chief was fired. That was the ultimate snub, and a power grab too. The eastern rich kids working for Rockefeller's railroad, the Kelley brothers and their buddies, made it clear they did not need the piddly-ass United States Forest Service. Spike Kelley had his mansion on the St. Joe, his Japanese servants, his new bride, and all the fine antiques that arrived on the Milwaukee Road. Up above the St. Joe Valley, nestled amid thick woods where the towns of Taft and Grand Forks squatted, saloons were roaring again, as if the bust that Supervisor Weigle had put together never happened. It was summer, peak season, and thousands of people were in the mountains for one reason: to squeeze money from the place as quickly as they could push themselves. It was the people's forest, by God, just as Gifford Pinchot said, and folks intended to get something while the getting was good.