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

by Timothy Egan

  "The will to grow was everywhere written large, and to grow at no matter what or whose expense," Henry James wrote of a decade when people rushed to fill the last of the nation's empty places. In barely a hundred years' time, the United States had gone from a fledgling set of former colonies with 2.9 million people to an ocean-to-ocean country of 91 million. This first decade of the twentieth century exceeded all others for the volume of new people, the nation adding 16 million residents to its forty-six states and two territories by decade's end. Passed over for years, no states grew faster during this spurt than Idaho and Washington. Their populations doubled in less than a decade. Idaho went from 162,000 to 325,000, and the biggest city in the region, Seattle, tripled—from 80,000 to 240,000.

  Pulaski told his boss he would try to get to the mine and their little fire, but he was tired to the bone, reluctant to start fresh on another flareup. "I have about all the fires I want for a day or two," Pulaski wrote to Weigle, not trying to disguise his disgust.

  As it was, conditions were so dry and hot that Pulaski could never really leave one fire to tend another. A ranger could feel it: the woods wanted to burn. The great challenge of the summer was to hold down the fires until the fall rains came to close out the combustible season. August looked as though it was going to be an eternity. Time and again, Pulaski had to circle back to make sure a patch of ground he had worked over did not reignite. These little fires would smolder for days, only to be kick-started anew by a sneeze of wind. The towns in the Bitterroots had telephones and telegraphs, after the rangers had spent the spring of 1910 stringing wire between Avery, Grand Forks, Taft, Wallace, and other towns. But outside the villages, communication was primitive. Foresters often went days without contact.

  Unlike the transients in town, the Pulaskis weren't planning to go anywhere when the summer ended. They liked the valley in north Idaho, and could see spending the rest of their lives there, maybe downriver from Wallace, away from the racket of mining and logging. On soft Sunday afternoons in the wild upper reaches of the St. Joe, Emma would wash her hair and lie in the sun while her husband and his dog hunted birds. Once she was taking a nap on the grassy bank of the river when a group of natives came upon her. The Indians startled Emma, scaring her to death. When Pulaski returned, he had a good laugh over his wife's fear. He had friends among the Coeur d'Alene tribe. The St. Joe served as summer fishing camps for them, he explained; they were looking for big bull trout—seven pounds or more—that moved upstream when the weather got hot. The Indians could remember years when their homeland caught fire; sometimes they set blazes themselves to clear a patch of land. Cresting the ridge not far from here, a hundred or so years earlier, Lewis and Clark saw land that had been burned deliberately to open up the country, and the Indians entertained them at night by setting fire to tall trees.

  This year, the Indians' world had been taken away from them: their 600,000-acre reservation, to the west of the Idaho panhandle's national forests, had been opened to settlement by President Taft. The Coeur d'Alenes were a Salish-speaking people, the Schitsu'umsh—the Ones That Were Found Here. French trappers had given them another name, Heart of the Awl—Coeur d'Alene — because they had a reputation for hard bargaining. Early on, the Indians had welcomed black-robed Jesuits into their land, and a mission had been established at the mouth of the St. Joe. The Jesuits showed them how to grow lowland crops, to supplement a diet of camas and bitterroot bulbs, deer, elk, birds, and huckleberries with farming. The tribe had been promised, by treaty in 1887, the vast headwaters of the Spokane and Clearwater rivers—most of the Idaho panhandle. But with ten thousand or more new people clawing at the land, and the upstart Milwaukee Road bringing in hundreds by the day, the pressure was too great. "Why are you in such a hurry?" Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce had wondered as he watched Idaho and Montana fill with Anglo settlers.

  Taft's proclamation meant a fresh bonanza for the settlers in the twentieth-century West. Indian families would get small individual allotments, most of which were quickly bought by speculators. To everyone else would go the big drainages of the St. Joe and Coeur d'Alene rivers that bordered the national forests. By May 1910, 167,000 people had registered for a lottery to get a piece of the newly opened reservation. The selloff was ritualized by three little Indian girls outfitted in tribal gear who picked names from a big bowl—the winners getting their choice of land to claim from the Ones That Were Found Here.

  To the Forest Service, the latest homesteaders from the Indian lottery only added to their headaches — more sourdoughs who didn't know jack about the woods stumbling around the forests, carving out their piece. It meant fires from timber clearing; it meant disputes over title and surveys; it meant more scouting, trading, and speculating of fraudulent homesteads. When the year started, it looked as though sorting these land disputes would be the primary task of a strained Forest Service. But by July, everybody was on fire duty. A few of the Little G.P.s, some of the Indians, and a handful of old-timers said these woods needed fire—could not flourish without it. Take a look at a stand of lodgepole pine, a veteran of the woods would try to explain: eighty, ninety, one hundred years old, starting to show some wear. It'll live another thirty years at most, but the trees must have fire to carry on the species. The cones stay on limbs, tight and closed, until the heat of a big fire comes along and opens them up, starting the next cycle of life again. In that sense, lodgepole was like the Pacific salmon that made their way to the Continental Divide on the Idaho-Montana border—giving it up at death, in the high Rockies, for the next generation.

  On July 26, the night sky over the Bitterroots exploded—not an isolated thunder boomer or two clapping around the valleys, but a rolling, continuous, full-throated electrical storm. It sounded like breaking glass amplified a hundredfold, and could be heard in the higher reaches of three states. The fireworks spread across the range, one supercharged bolt after the other. Entire mountain flanks came to life with the pulsing skeletal arms of the storm, shooting down crooked until they hit a big rock outcrop or grounded into the blunt edge of a summit.

  The next day, hundreds of wildfires were reported to Supervisor Weigle. And that was in the Coeur d'Alene alone. There were twenty-one other national forests in the northern Rockies region, and they all had fires. Glacier National Park was burning. The Cabinets, north in Montana, were ablaze. Slopes above Priest Lake had been torched. The Kaniksu National Forest, in Washington near the Canadian border, burned out of control. Same with the Pend Oreille, the Kootenai. The Lolo, under the watch of young Elers Koch, was so choked with flame the fires were visible from Missoula, causing a stir in the town. South in the Clearwater drainage, along either side of the wild and tricky Lochsa, and farther south around the River of No Return — fires all around. Most of the land was roadless, inaccessible by horse, vast and burning. Regional Forester Greeley sent a high alert out to his supervisors.

  "Strengthen the patrol. Retain a strong guard. Keep on hand a strong force of experienced firefighters who can be brought together quickly and relied upon to do good work."

  A few days later, he wired them again, ramping up the orders: Start looking for men, anywhere you can find them. Scour the mines, the logging camps, the hiring halls. Round up horses, mules, and supplies. Find cooks, horsemen, ditch diggers, packers, sawyers. The Forest Service may have been demoralized, defunded, adrift, and mourning the loss of its founder, but it was determined to save a big part of what had been set aside during the Great Crusade. The problem was, forest supervisors didn't have the money to pay for all these emergency services. And the men they did have knew little about fighting big fires. Could they raise an army on a promise, from communities where they were not liked, not trusted, ridiculed?

  "I will be responsible for finding the necessary funds," Greeley wrote his rangers. He had never seen the woods so ready to explode. Low humidity, always a key indicator, "had dropped to the level of the Mojave Desert," Greeley noted.

  The newspapers attacked the For
est Service again. The one thing it was supposed to be good for was fire protection, and here it did not seem up to the task. "The present fires are the first severe test to which Mr. Roosevelt's green rangers have been put and it clearly indicates that something is radically wrong," one paper said. People had no respect for a ranger. "They evade him, disobey him, play jokes on him. Probably he is a good-natured college boy who got his job through a pull, or is riding the reserve for his health and the incidental federal vouchers. It's a gay life, that of many of these foresters—until the fire starts." Another paper urged President Taft to "abolish the forester and put the soldier in charge of the timber wealth."

  Smoke penetrated Wallace for the first time, and with it came a whiff of real fear, a quickening of the collective pulse. How were these rangers going to keep the town from catching fire? Did the Forest Service have a plan? A clue? Supervisor Weigle had scrambled to put a couple of things in motion even before he got Greeley's orders. Working with the mayor, fire chief, and police, he arranged for a general evacuation by train. The exodus would start when an alarm was sounded by Weigle, time to be determined. But people wondered about the routes in and out of town. Which way should the evacuation trains go, east or west? The wrong decision could lead into the heart of a fire.

  Overall, the job of keeping fire from stomping Wallace fell to big Ed Pulaski. He knew the region better than anyone and could put a crew to task quicker than most. Some of the rangers, the Little G.P.s, didn't know what they would do with a troop of seasonal firefighters. Where would they sleep, how would they feed them, what was the plan of attack?

  "Just bed them down anywhere," Pulaski told a fellow ranger. "The country's all vacant." The government would try to rustle up two hundred men for Pulaski, and if it wasn't enough, maybe the military could be brought in to help. But with two hundred men he should have sufficient force, it was thought, to knock down a string of fires not far from Wallace, a row of nasty flames, small but intense, whipped up by the big electrical storm of July 26. It would take a few days, maybe a week at most, to round up his crew — time enough to prepare for one big battle.

  7. Men, Men, Men!

  ELERS KOCH WENT into the saloons and sex cribs of Taft, Montana, without warrants or cuffs. This time he had his hand out, begging for help. As supervisor of the Lolo, he needed firefighters, following Greeley's order. He would take almost anyone: people without experience in the outdoors, immigrants from all countries, strong women for logistical chores. In Taft now, as in Wallace fifty miles to the west, smoke snaked into the bars and rooming houses, not yet heavy, but it didn't go away. People slept with it, ate with it, woke up to it, never quite got used to it. The sunrises were clouded by a veil of smoke; the sunsets were blood red.

  After the electrical storm of July 26, 1910, nearly a thousand fires raged in the northern Rockies. This snapping horsetail of blazes was bigger than anything nature had yet thrown at the young Forest Service. If every ranger in all twenty-two national forests in the district were put on the fires, it would not be enough. Not by any stretch. The Forest Service needed at least five thousand people, in the most recent estimate of Bill Greeley, the regional forester—and maybe double that amount.

  Although Greeley knew he didn't have the money to protect many areas, he acted as if he did. His first job, he told other rangers, was to save the people's land. Congress would surely reimburse him. Glacier Park, on the northern border of Montana, was ablaze when Greeley arrived for a look, the fire scaring tourists and prompting many frightened letters and cards back east. To those who saw the harried Forest Service as a backward parade, all brass and fuss but no progress, Greeley tried to explain the strategy, such as it was. "The method most commonly and most successfully used is called backfiring," he told reporters. "This is fighting fire with fire and this is the way it is done: a trail is cut across a part of the fire, between it and the direction toward which the wind is blowing — that is, on the leeward side of the fire. This trail cut right down to the mineral soil, and then fires are started at short distances from each other on the windward side of the trail, that is on the side toward the forest fire."

  To many, it sounded counterintuitive. Start a fire to kill a fire? What did these soft-handed Yalies know about a burn running up a steep slope in Montana? What they knew, of course, was informed by Pinchot's belief that man could control fire. After all, the agency had "proved" that it could control wildfire, as Roosevelt had written in that early assessment, with satisfaction. Such an assertion did not seem out of place in a year when headlines proclaimed, "Cure for Cancer Is Found" and "Experts Declare Bald Heads Show Brains." A car had driven at sixty miles an hour in 1910, for more than twenty miles nonstop, and the government would soon double its fleet of airplanes—from two to four.

  They had been lucky, the rangers now realized, that the first years of the Forest Service were largely free of big fires. This had allowed them time to fall in love with the land, to get acquainted with its storms and quiet periods, its seasonal quirks, to realize the enormity of what Pinchot and Roosevelt had entrusted to them. Most rangers had never been on a war footing, never looked up at columns of dark smoke and felt their throats tighten, never been asked to organize from scratch hundreds of men to march into a wall of flame-hissing trees. Supervisor Koch, the youngest of the Little G.P.s in charge of his own forests, felt protective about his five million or so acres, even proprietary. He understood—as Pinchot had preached on many nights at the family mansion, as Roosevelt had sermonized in his epistles on the outdoor life—that Americans needed wilderness to be fully alive. Needed it this year, as people poured into cities back east already saturated with humanity's opportunity refugees.

  Overseeing three national forests was everything Koch wanted. After returning home to Montana, he had met a dark-haired woman from the old country, a Dane named Gerda Heiberg-Jurgensen, on a postgraduate visit. A friend of Scandinavian monarchs and other elites, she left a life of European sophistication to become a forester's wife in the Montana wilds. Koch considered her a full partner: she joined him on horseback, riding the High Lonesome, cleaning fish, sleeping many nights on hard ground. The first summer of her life with Koch, in fact, was spent in a Forest Service teepee, nine feet by nine feet, on the floor of the forest. With a broad floppy hat, knickers, and knee-high boots, she moved through the pathless expanse of the Lolo like a native.

  They made a home in Missoula near a field of bunchgrass for Koch to graze his three horses. Any Anglo with an open mind could see why the Salishan natives had cherished this broad valley where Missoula was built, where three mighty rivers converged under mountains of thick forests, a temperate climate most of the year. The streets were mud in the spring and dust in the summer, but indoors, the Koch home was stocked with artwork and quilted pillows from Copenhagen, with a library heavy on poetry and history books. Koch was a Rudyard Kipling fan; he memorized long verse passages and recited them to pass the days in the Rockies. He also liked Robert Browning, and one of his favorites was:

  Oh, the wild joys of living! the leaping from rock up to rock,

  The strong rending of boughs from the fir tree, the cool silver shock

  Of the plunge in a pool's living water...

  Koch was eager to apply all that he learned at Yale and the school of Gifford Pinchot to the land beneath the big sky. But early on, he found he had more pressing concerns: his Lolo National Forest was a frontier. The shortage of tools to fight fires had become the subject of can-you-top-this tales. When Koch complained about his lack of shovels and picks in the Lolo, Weigle countered that he had but two crosscut saws to keep fires from burning the town of Avery. Koch certainly had the bawdiest of towns, for Taft at one time had nearly 500 prostitutes among its 2,500 people, in the estimate of a journalist, and 30 saloons. By contrast, there was just a single drugstore and one grocery outlet. The hospital was portable, subject to the railroad's need to keep men patched up and vertical. One of the current patients was a man with a
bullet lodged in his tongue. He'd been in a gunfight at a card table and had killed the player across from him, but not before the deceased got off a single shot through the chin. Koch had tried to keep his distance from the town, a festering sinkhole in the middle of his national forest.

  One of his first hires was Frank Haun, a seasoned woodsman, tough as bark, with intimate knowledge of the outdoors, but with a bit less caution than the college-trained Koch. Patrolling the woods one day, Koch and Haun stumbled upon a huge cache of liquor — cases of bourbon, Scotch, champagne, and rye, enough to supply a small town. Haun wanted to have a closer look, but Koch held him back.