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

by Timothy Egan

  "We better move on," Koch said. The decision probably saved their lives, for Koch heard later that a lookout, his rifle trained on the forest rangers, had kept guard over the cache with orders to shoot anyone who came near it.

  Recruiting in the string of towns downslope from Taft, Koch found that people would rather chip away at a silver vein for twelve hours a day than go into the woods and stomp smoke. The money from the Forest Service was not bad, especially for someone out of work. In 1910, the average American wage earner took home $13 for a sixty-hour week. Koch was authorized to pay 25 cents an hour, so that same sixty-hour week, which most people worked, could bring $15. He had Greeley's promise that the government would back its word with cash, eventually. What kept men from signing up was fear of the unknown. They knew about danger in the mines. They knew about felling trees or laying railroad ties or blasting tunnels in the rock with explosives. But fire — that was a mystery predator in this part of the world.

  In Missoula, scraping the bottom of the barrel, Koch grabbed anybody who disembarked from the train. At least half of the newcomers were drunk on arrival, he reported, and had no firm plans. But if a man stood upright in the morning light and had a blanket to call his own, Koch would put him in service to Gifford Pinchot's agency.

  "Got a bed?" he asked one greenhorn.

  "Yep."

  "Bring it."

  He noticed during his first days with these novice crews that they lacked basic outdoor common sense. "Punks, stew bums and pool hall boys," Koch called them. When they shivered at night, ignorant of ways to keep warm, Koch would make a huge bonfire to comfort his crews. Their talk late into the evening was mostly of the various jails they had known, and rumors of riches still to be found here or there. Many demanded payment up front. But Koch's Lolo forest was tapped out, same as Weigle's Coeur d'Alene.

  The Forest Service was buying supplies on credit — food, mules, and axes. Koch did have a little savings of his own, just under $500, money he and Gerda had put away to raise a family. He'd promised her that life in a tent was temporary, and followed up on that when they moved into the fine house in Missoula. They wanted children, educated, with means enough to visit Gerda's relatives in Europe. But the heavier the smoke that settled on Missoula, the more Koch was nudged toward a hard decision. Should he use his own money to pay for fire crews? As one of the original "forest arrangers," Koch had a love of the Lolo that was deep and complicated — like his feelings for Gerda. He'd selected much of this land under Pinchot's guidance, and in that sense he had a bit of immortality, provided he could get through this season of flame.

  Up on the front lines, his rangers were crying for help, working in ambient heat well above 100 degrees, trying to beat back flames but losing everything they'd gained whenever the winds picked up in the afternoon. To the east, as smoke settled in Helena and Great Falls around the front range of the Rockies, some rangers complained that they had stopped receiving their regular paychecks. Congress, a year earlier, had given the Forest Service authority to pay firefighters after the fact—basically, hiring on credit in a national emergency. But in practice, funds did not flow from Washington to the burning woods. "I was told there was no money to pay my salary," said one ranger, Albert Cole.

  In the first week of August, Koch went down to his bank in Missoula and withdrew his personal savings. Gerda would understand: it was an emergency. He turned to his rangers, Haun, the skilled outdoorsman, and a twenty-two-year-old rookie, Ferdinand A. "Gus" Silcox, the dew of Yale still on him, filled with the gospel of Gifford Pinchot. Koch asked the older ranger and the kid to follow his example. Haun complained some: he was getting on in years and didn't have much to spare. He had a bit of a gut, unusual among the sinewy rangers. Koch poked him, kidded him about his extra load. C'mon! Gus Silcox pleaded poverty; he was just out of school, with the smallest of savings accounts. But both men gave in. Even after three years without raises, after Congress had ratcheted down the budget until it was a pittance, after the newspapers of the copper kings and timber barons had called for the Forest Service to be run out of the woods—after all of that, the rangers reached deep into their own pockets to try to save the land.

  "Men, men, men! Is the frenzied cry of forest officials," The Missoulian reported on the third of August. "The available supply is now almost exhausted, or so it seems."

  Finally, all the rangers had left were the jails. Early on, the Forest Service had considered prison labor, but delayed the move, hoping to build its fire lines from other sources. The service also floated a plan to have state legislatures pass emergency laws that required people to assist the rangers when a fire was imminent—essentially a draft, like forced military conscription. But it never got off the ground. The first week of August, Koch and Greeley arranged to get sixty prisoners released from jail in Missoula. That move, a very public release of criminals, started a chain of gossip, feeding a story that the firefighters rounded up by the Forest Service were the scum of the earth—criminals, bums, and foreigners—and should be shunned. Missoula added extra police officers, fearing the newcomers would raise hell in town.

  By August 10, what had been one thousand fires was more than double that amount. The rangers sent another round of requests to the hiring halls of the West—to Bozeman and Butte, Denver and Rapid City, Albuquerque and Phoenix, Portland and Seattle. From Butte, several hundred miles to the east, came a trainload of broken miners who had been out of work for months. They were middle-aged, many of them, with bad habits, grumpy and prone to cutting corners. Koch and Weigle took them.

  Among those who arrived from Butte was an Irishman, Patrick Grogan, a few months short of his sixtieth birthday. He was a sight when he stepped off the train—jowly, with a bindle of ragged clothes, and his dog. A dog! How could a man like this fight a fire? Grogan said he had done a little bit of everything in Butte: labored in the copper mines, put down railroad track, worked in restaurants. Butte was the most Irish city in America at the time, with more than one in four inhabitants tracing their ancestry to the island across the Atlantic. Many were famine Irish, the sons and daughters of those who had first left County Cork, Limerick, and Galway when a million people starved to death and another million fled their homeland. The stories—of hollow-bellied children with teeth stained green from eating grass, of old men shivering with tin cups outside castle doors, of British authorities turning away food aid from the harbor at Dublin—were ingrained in the Irish who settled in Butte. In the United States, they had been called flannelmouths and compared to apes and savages. How could a wildfire deter them? Grogan needed the money to help his large family back in Butte, more

  than a dozen children and grandchildren. He and his dog were not in the best of shape, not exactly ready to charge up a steep slope with ax in hand. But he could cook. Cook? Surely, lad. That was it, then. A cook in a fire camp was invaluable. Anyone who could feed two hundred people at a sitting, with little more than sacks of potatoes, onions, and sourdough for pancakes, was worth putting on the Forest Service payroll. Grogan was hired on August 6.

  That same day, another electrical storm rumbled through the forests. It made the rangers shudder. August was the driest month since 1894. Every clap, every boom brought the potential for something horrible on a grand scale. And by morning, sure enough, the total number of fires had reached 2,500. Even after emptying the saloons, trains, jails, and hiring halls of men, Koch felt that he was not making progress. The Forest Service had less than one man for each fire burning in the northern Rockies. Koch was exasperated: one man per fire!

  "For every fire we put out," he told the newspaper in Missoula, "a new one is reported. The rangers have been fighting fires steadily now for 10 days and they are about worn out."

  At the summer house he rented in Beverly, Massachusetts, President Taft was immersed in his annual five-week vacation, one that was continually interrupted by the fire alarms out west. Telegrams from the Forest Service, from governors and congressmen, from big timber o
wners, had grown more pressing with each day of August. Five states had requested federal troops to fight wildfires. They implored him to do something quickly to intercede. Taft's agriculture secretary, James Wilson, who oversaw the Forest Service and had a strained relationship with Pinchot, had just returned from Montana. He feared that the collapse of entire western forests and many towns would happen on his watch. "I was confronted with the problem of either putting out the fires or being directly responsible for what would have been one of the worst disasters in the history of the country," Wilson wrote later.

  Taft was in the second year of a troubled presidency, and had become ever more sensitive to the caustic criticism of him. The Great Postponer, he was called, one of the less cruel nicknames. Pinchot considered him a traitor to the progressive cause, and said so in public now that he was "freed for the larger fight," as he had told his mother when Taft fired him in January. Indeed, Pinchot was giddy in his liberation, full of fight. Taft had become "the accomplice and the refuge of land-grabbers, water-power grabbers, grabbers of timber and oil — all of the swarm of big and little thieves," Pinchot wrote. Much of the year had been dominated by congressional hearings on Pinchot's charges against embattled Interior Secretary Ballinger, which had grown to a larger rift. During testimony, Ballinger said he had felt duty-bound to thwart some of the Roosevelt-Pinchot agenda, saying he had acted to stop "certain overzealous persons from converting the public domain into a national preserve." This confirmed everything Pinchot had suspected of the interior secretary, and he took up the cause on behalf of his beloved Forest Service and against the anticonservation forces with gusto.

  For the most part, the press still sided with Pinchot. They mocked Taft, with his multiple jowls and walrus mustache, his waddle and his summer "yachting costume" of white pants and black jacket. Taft dressed up in silly outfits and planted himself on a deck chair of his yacht, the Sylph, in the morning and took long naps in the afternoon. A highlight of his day was a regular massage. As always, he took refuge in food. He also suffered from gout, and like most men in the presidency, seemed to age quickly. Friends noticed the deep lines in his face, the folds of fat, and they urged him to diet or go for daily walks. But exercise, he complained, made him moody; he would rather eat, and say the hell with it.

  Always, there was the shadow of Teddy Roosevelt. "When I am addressed as Mr. President," Taft had said to Roosevelt shortly after the election, "I turn to see whether you are at my elbow." But for most of 1910, Teddy could not have been farther from the big man's arm. His trip abroad, now nearing its end, was triumphant, judging by the speaking invitations, the glowing press from reporters who followed his every move, the letters home about big game hunted or foreign dignitaries consulted. Privately, he referred to Taft as a "flubdub," a "floppy-souled creature," and a "fathead." The sacking of Pinchot had angered him. And as the Ballinger affair dragged on through 1910, Roosevelt came to believe that Taft had betrayed all that he and Pinchot had started — as evidenced by Ballinger's testimony and the near gutting of the Forest Service.

  At last, Taft could postpone no more. On August 7, he wired his war secretary, authorizing him to "lend every assistance possible in suppression of forest fires." The government would send troops, a total of 2,500, to the front lines of the burning West—an extraordinary commitment, given that the standing Army of the United States comprised barely 80,000 men. In an era of invention and material expansion, a time that had seen innovations from Marconi's wireless to telephones in every middle-class neighborhood, many a well-stuffed parlor evoking the Edwardian Age of comfort, here was a primitive, timeless battle of man against elemental nature. It was a war and a reminder that this new country sprawling from sea to sea was still trying to settle its surroundings. Blue-shirted soldiers armed with rifle magazines and revolvers would be put at the call of the Forest Service. The rangers were relieved. Weigle said his Coeur d'Alene would now have sufficient manpower to save the town of Wallace.

  "I'm mighty pleased to hear of the order of President Taft," Weigle told reporters. "We need the men."

  The call came to the 25th Infantry while it was bivouacked at Fort George Wright, in stifling barracks on a hill above the river in Spokane. It fell to the infantrymen to be the front line of the troop commitment, though fire duty was a first for the 25 th. Part of an all-black regiment established after the Civil War, these Buffalo Soldiers—so named by the Indians for their hair—had done much of the government's dirty work while garrisoned in Army ghettos throughout the West. In Texas, they fought the Comanche and Apache on behalf of white settlers who, in the state's post—Civil War constitution, had banned blacks from full citizenship. In the Dakotas, they were dispatched to clean up lingering problems with the Sioux Nation, whose members had been slaughtered at Wounded Knee. In Idaho, during the labor wars around the turn of the century, the black soldiers were sent to keep guard over militant strikers, on the assumption that white miners would never bond with their black captors. As labor strife spread from Idaho across the West, the 25th Infantry was called on repeatedly to put down civil unrest.

  But the soldiers also strung telegraph lines, built roads, and constructed military forts. They were part of the bicycle corps, riding two-wheelers over bad terrain from Fort Missoula to St. Louis as a test. Other black soldiers served as the first park rangers, patrolling Yellowstone and Yosemite well before these reserves had a formal national park service. Using soldiers as rangers was not that much of a stretch: while putting together the Forest Service, Pinchot considered an idea to recruit all of his rangers from West Point. While on duty in California, the Buffalo Soldiers named a grove of giant sequoia trees for Booker T. Washington.

  In the summer of 1910, the Negro troops were a curious presence in Spokane, a fast-growing city larded by riches from mining and railroad and timber interests, an hour from the fires by train. The city was undergoing its biggest growth spurt, with terracotta-surfaced bank buildings and stores rising downtown along the falls and mansions designed by renowned architects in the leafy cocoons of South Hill. New money was conspicuous. Blacks, on the other hand, were almost invisible—that is, until the troops arrived. In Spokane, the two battalions at Fort George Wright comprised the majority of blacks in the city. In Idaho, they would stand out even more: the state had only 651 African Americans among its population of 325,000 in 1910.

  The call to the fire lines was a chance for the 25th to prove itself again, to its own men, to the rest of the nation, and to Teddy Roosevelt. They were still under probation of sorts, in the eyes of many. A few years earlier, a handful of soldiers from the infantry had killed a bartender in Brownsville, Texas, after they were refused service in town—a last-straw insult in a place where they complained about being treated like dogs despite wearing the uniform of their country. Books such as The Negro: A Menace to American Civilization were popular throughout the nation, not just in the South, and the sexual drive of black males was said to be uncontrollable when they were around young white women. Dark-skinned men were always "pulsating with the desire to sate their passions upon white maidens and wives," as the white supremacist senator from South Carolina, Ben Tillman, said at the time. Tillman was proud of taking away the vote from black men. "We have scratched our head to figure out how we can eliminate the last one of them," he said. "We stuffed ballot boxes. We shot them. We are not ashamed."

  When questioned about the Brownsville violence, the soldiers closed ranks, refusing to name names within their division. Reaction was swift and strong, going all the way up the chain of command to President Roosevelt. Some of the same soldiers stationed in Brownsville had served under Roosevelt during the charge up San Juan Hill. He never forgot their valor, as he reminded the black miners who gave him the scale at that dinner in Butte. But he felt the soldiers were far out of line in Brownsville.

  After several investigations, 167 men were dishonorably discharged from the ranks of the storied Buffalo Soldiers. Those who stayed with the 25 th carried a loa
d of resentment heavier than anything on their backs; all of them had been punished for the actions of a few. They were railroaded, they felt, betrayed by Roosevelt to appease southern whites. What happened in Brownsville was the largest summary dismissal in the history of the U.S. Army.

  Going to Idaho and Montana to protect some isolated mountain towns was seen as a way to win back their honor. The soldiers who had served as makeshift park rangers were now back in the role of patrolling the land, this time enlisted to protect Roosevelt's greatest domestic policy experiment. They were dispatched to Wallace, to Missoula, to the Flathead Valley near Glacier Park, moving as always under the motto that had carried them for half a century: Onward. When they arrived, it soon became clear that the soldiers of the 25 th Infantry shared at least one thing with the members of the Forest Service: none of them knew a thing about fighting a big wildfire.

  For President Taft, his time away from Washington was supposed to be a tonic for his problems, but the fires kept intruding, even after he dispatched the troops. Newspaper cartoons showed a grotesquely obese figure in a yachting costume, ear cupped to the distant, burning West. The cursed Pinchot was never out of the news. "I have had a hard time of it," Taft wrote Roosevelt in one of his self-pitying moods. "I do know that thus far I have succeeded far less than have others." He had taken office with one of the bigger majorities in the history of the presidency— 321 electoral votes to 162 —and yet he felt that the country was not with him. When the press described him as "foggy" and "bewildered," he couldn't just slough it off. When Collier's, which broke the Ballinger story and stoked it for nearly a year, asked for an interview, Taft's response was intemperate. "Condemn them all to hell and eternal damnation!" he said. And the wealthy, who were relieved to have Taft in office after taking seven years of abuse from Roosevelt, had quickly grown tired of him. The railroad magnate James J. Hill, an informal Taft adviser, called him "a platter of mush."