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

by Timothy Egan

  The book also showed that Pinchot had continued to see wildfire as a mere hindrance to controlling the garden of America's native ground. Still full of confidence when it came to how man should look at the land, he was completely dismissive of fire as a threat. "I recall very well indeed how, in the early days of forest fires, they were considered simply and solely as acts of God, against which any opposition was hopeless and any attempt to control them not merely hopeless but childish. It was assumed that they came in the natural order of things, as inevitably as the seasons or the rising and setting of the sun. Today we understand forest fires are wholly within the control of men." That was as far as he had yet gone—wildfires were now virtually a thing of the past, no longer part of the cycles of the land, because of the march of green-shirted arborists into the woods. As an act of hubris, Pinchot had all but invited nature to strike back. And in a few short weeks, it would.

  Pinchot now plotted openly to bring down Taft. The wild, near-hysterical reception for Roosevelt upon his return had only galvanized him further. Roosevelt advised caution, telling Pinchot to hold his fire. He felt that Taft "was rather a pitiful failure" and that he "evidently is a man who takes his color from his surroundings." The press played up Roosevelt's vigor around the Sagamore Hill house, in contrast with the brooding and slothful Taft. Roosevelt cut trees, walked, engaged in "great exercise," all subject to prominent news stories, while Taft could not get through a round of golf, as it happened, without spraining an ankle. What made news from the Taft family was a story of his college-age son hitting a blue-collar worker with his car, seriously injuring the man.

  Three weeks after Roosevelt sailed into New York, the two men met at Taft's summer place in Massachusetts. The meeting was tense by some accounts, though the president assured reporters that everything was fine between the nation's leading Republicans. Taft's loyal press organ, Leslie's Weekly, reported that there was no rift. The Ballinger affair and the firing of Gifford Pinchot were not deemed "casus belli" for Teddy to take down Taft. Instead, the magazine noted, the two men chatted amiably while sitting on the veranda of Taft's retreat. A few weeks later, Roosevelt announced that he would soon be off on his speaking tour, slowly wending his way west. By August, just as Taft had ordered troops to the northern Rockies to fight wildfires, Roosevelt boarded his train.

  WILL TEDDY RUN AGAIN?

  The headline from a wire-service story in mid-August showed the grip that Roosevelt had on the country. His every inflection was parsed for larger meaning, ending typically with a question: What will he do? The Colonel, as he was called by the press, downplayed suggestions that he intended to attack Taft. What Taft was doing with public land angered him, but he kept it to himself. But just days after meeting Roosevelt, Taft issued a proclamation eliminating nearly a half million acres of land from the national forest system. Eliminating acres! Here was another stab at the Great Crusade. If Taft was trying to get the attention of the man he professed to love as the closest of friends, his slap at the Bull Moose just before his western tour would certainly do that. Roosevelt would have something to say about the fate of burning, orphaned national forests, about removing land from the public domain, about fighting the foes of conservation, but not just yet. He told reporters he was simply going out to the land he loved, land that had restored him, land where the conservation experiment was a living, breathing thing. Land that was about to blow up.

  9. Firestorm's Eve

  THE FIRST TIME a shower of flaming embers pounded the streets of Wallace it changed everything for those who lived there. People could tolerate the ever-present smoke, though it wasn't good for children and the elderly, made eyes redden and throats scratchy and brought on a ragged cough. Some days it was so thick that Bill Weigle could not see more than two blocks down Bank Street. Other days, the smoke settled at different tiers, like a multilayered mist, and it took a scramble five hundred feet up the mountains to find a pocket of clean air. They could also put up with that mass of hot air that had been sitting on them like an oversize village bully, though it was oppressive, lingered far too long, and what a family wouldn't do for a cool breeze just one afternoon to break this siege. Some people said they didn't even mind the ash that fell from the sky, needles of fir and pine burned to dust, lighter than air, settling on rooftops and brown lawns. They put up with these low-grade tortures because shorter days told them summer was almost over, and they had lived through a humdinger, and soon the rains would come and wash the town clean.

  The constant chatter of fire and heat would be replaced by talk about canning vegetables and hunting deer and checking to see whether Andrew Carnegie was going to make good on his promise to put a library in their town. That's what he said: a Carnegie library, a trophy home for books, built of the finest marble and timber, was coming to Wallace, Idaho. The town could count seven churches, two schools, nine doctors, twelve hotels, and two hospitals, but not a decent library. Carnegie had decided to give away his fortune well before the other titans of the age. His idea was to plant libraries—as gateways to knowledge and citizenship—across the country, as missionaries had put churches on the frontier. At a time when the very rich and the very poor were engaged in open warfare, Carnegie said, "It would be a great mistake for the community to shoot the millionaires. For they are the bees that make the most honey and they contribute the most to the hive, even after they have gorged themselves full." As people in Wallace wondered about the fate of their town in the third week of August, the word from Carnegie was confirmed: Wallace would get its library, from a very big honeybee.

  The news passed with scant notice, because on August 19 that first big ember came whistling out of the sky and set fire to an awning at the edge of town, making it difficult to think of anything but wildfire moving steadily closer. The flying combustible consumed the cloth, and was put out before it spread. A few hours later, another volley came from beyond the ceiling of smoke and torched a canvas overhang in the middle of town. These flaming fusillades meant townsfolk were vulnerable to an unseen terror, something bigger, more distant, and less predictable than anything that had threatened Wallace over the past month. They meant that the people had to think seriously about getting out, or losing everything.

  Within days, several hundred gathered what they could carry, by carriage or on horseback or in the compartment of a train, and fled. Insurance companies had been writing policies with a flourish, like ice cream vendors on the hottest day of the year. But that nineteenth of August, a Friday, they stopped issuing policies. The bet was no longer worth it; the smart money said Wallace would burn. Yet most people stayed behind, counting on a change in the weather that would end the shelling of fire from the mountains, knowing full well, as the Seattle Times reported in a long front-page story, that "should the wind become much stronger nothing can save the town."

  When Emma Pulaski walked outside of town to greet her husband, and all the vegetation crunched underfoot, brown and crisp to the touch, she knew that everything and everybody in this pocket of people in the mountains had been reduced to fuel. One of Ed Pulaski's young charges, Joe Halm, the ex—football player who had been working the Coeur d'Alene for barely a year, said as much. He was a forestry student, full of fun, trained to see the woods without anthropomorphizing, but he felt a nervousness that matched the jitters of the town. "All of nature seemed tense, unnatural and ominous," Halm wrote.

  Halm had been dispatched into the Coeur d'Alene forest, sixty-five miles from the nearest road or rail line, as far up the St. Joe River as a person could travel. A spotter from high on a peak had identified a fire near the headwaters of the river, on the evening side of the divide between Montana and Idaho. It took Halm's crew several days to hack their way through thickets of devil's club, nettles, and calcified scrub brush.

  Halm was strong, with a body built by four years of varsity sports. He had set a hammer-throw record of 139 feet 3 inches at Washington State College, put a heavy metal shot 40 feet, pitched for the baseball team
, and played two positions on the football team. He was known throughout the state as the kid who drop-kicked a winning field goal against a hated rival, the Huskies of Washington, on a rocky, muddy field in Seattle. On his way up to the St. Joe headwaters, he had passed deer and elk, black bears and birds — all looking to be in desperate retreat from the smoke and heat of the upper mountains. The forest floor itself was blighted, as he noted, "withered ferns and grasses covered by a hoar frost of gray ashes."

  His crew found their fire lapping against alpine fir near a mountain wall and proceeded to dig a trench around it. After a few days, the blaze at the lifespring of the mighty Joe was contained. Halm's crew split up, some heading down the St. Joe for rest, others camping in an opening next to big pines and spruce for mop-up duty. Halm feared something catastrophic that night of August 19, but also — because his crew was so far in, so distant from any place to replenish their supply lines — he was worried about getting cut off should a fire start downhill. He had the mountain wall at his back, a sheer vertical scramble. It would be difficult to climb in the best conditions. And as good a shape as Halm was in, he knew he could not outrun a fire with the wind at its back.

  Halm's boss in Wallace was also fretting over an exit strategy—but for an entire town, not just a fire crew. Bill Weigle had been working with soldiers from the 25th Infantry and the mayor on the evacuation plan for the three thousand or so residents of Wallace who remained behind. Like Halm, his concern was that people would get trapped. There were only two ways out of town: downriver, to the west and Spokane, or uphill, to the east and Missoula. Each of those exits was a narrow slot in the mountains. The passageways were funnels, and should one or both of them catch fire, they would force flame up the narrow byway like peas through a straw shooter. It was agreed that the two trains from two different lines that came through Wallace would evacuate all the women and children. The men would stay and fight for the town.

  Weigle had his doubts. Despite pleading for assistance for a month, he had not been able to find enough men among the citizens to help his Forest Service fight the fires as they closed in on Wallace. What made the mayor think people would stay and fight now? Mayor Walter Hanson's answer was the lethal force of the law. To back his plan, the mayor was empowered to declare martial law; he would use the soldiers if needed. Hanson now ordered the men to be prepared to light a backfire, a way to scorch the ground ahead of any blaze coming down from the mountains. Anyone who refused to help, he said, would be put in jail—and there they might roast to death. The mayor was just twenty-five years old, and lived with his parents, and it's hard to say whether his words carried much weight.

  Across the river, where the Sisters of Providence ran a hospital, was a problem. The four-story brick facility had about forty patients (some not long removed from surgery), fifteen nuns, a priest, and a doctor. A small bridge over the river was all that connected them to the main part of town. Another railroad, the Northern Pacific, had a branch line that ran close to the hospital and traveled east. But people feared that the line's big-timbered rail trestles would burn in the canyon crossings.

  By Weigle's reckoning, the nearest big fire was five miles from the city, in the Placer Creek drainage to the south—a lumbering advance of flame pushed along by the prevailing winds from the south and west. Those breezes had died down of late; the air, slow and heavy, smelled like piles of wood chips that had smoldered for days. All told, the forest supervisor had 1,800 men on fires in the Coeur d'Alene—immigrants, vagabonds, prisoners, and soldiers, led by a handful of Gifford Pinchot's rangers. Weigle had sent one company of troops from the 25th south to protect the town of Avery and help it evacuate, should it come to that. The rangers had no love for the motley assortment of roustabouts in the Milwaukee Road watering stop, especially after they'd stripped the town of its name for the beloved Chief. Weigle sent another company out to take a look at the small fire a few miles away from Wallace, the blaze that threatened a cluster of cabins, blacksmith shops, and two mines near Placer Creek.

  By August 19, the soldiers had been in Wallace for five days. Their first job was to try to induce rain from the skies. For sixty straight hours, they aimed dynamite and cannon fire overhead, but no relief came from above, no moisture. The papers called the men of the 25th "dusky dough boys," and marveled that they seemed so orderly, curious mainly for their singing and gambling at night. "The men of the company surprised many Wallace people by their remarkably good behavior," the Idaho Press reported. The Swedes and Irish, Greeks and Italians, the felons let loose to fight fire—they crowded the saloons and caused many a fight. But the black soldiers kept to themselves, camped on a baseball field, occasionally playing craps with people from town who ventured their way.

  In that year of 1910, Jack Johnson reigned as the heavyweight champion of the world, the first African-American boxer to hold the title. When he fought to retain his title on the Fourth of July, Jack London noted with approval in the San Francisco Chronicle that "the negro showed no yellow." London was one of the more tolerant writers. Many headlines called Johnson "the Dusky Fighter" and a wire-service feature told how happy he was with watermelon and fried chicken, using a shambling southern inflection in the story. "Mammy Greets Him with a Mighty Fine Chicken and a Watahmelon" was a subheading. And when Robert Peary claimed to have reached the North Pole a year earlier—a moon landing, essentially, in the age of geographic firsts—he "had with him a negro at the time of this great discovery," a leading magazine noted. But they never named the companion who shared this world-shaking feat, Matthew Henson. Whether blacks had the stomach for any kind of prolonged fight was a subject of much debate, bordering on ridicule. Looking for help to protect its own private timber holdings, the Potlatch Company of Idaho told an employment agency to send anyone but blacks. "If you cannot get white men, you may send five or six good Greeks or Italians" was their request. And the black soldiers had no sooner been dispatched up the Placer Creek drainage than four of their men disappeared. It didn't look like desertion, more like confusion. The tangle of smoke and burning brush, the lack of trails and clear directions, made it difficult to keep their bearings.

  The soldiers would be better off helping defend Wallace, perhaps digging the fire line, Weigle decided. A search party was sent out for the missing men, while the rest of the company was sent back to Wallace. Everyone in town expected Weigle—now—to have all the answers. He knew something of how different tree species reacted to blight and disease, and how a forest aged through the stages leading to decay, and about species diversity. But the course and character of a big fire? Heat? Intensity? Creation of its own weather? Not in the books. The pressure mounted on him and the other Little G.P.s. Weren't they supposed to be insurance against catastrophic wildfire? Hadn't Pinchot and Roosevelt promised as much? Wasn't that the main selling point—at least in the West—for putting so much public land in the forest reserves? Weren't these rangers both stewards and protectors? Common sense told Weigle that most of the timber at the edge of Wallace was green—second growth, coming up after the first citizens had leveled the big cedars to build the town. Because it was young timber, on downhill slopes, it should not catch fire easily should a swoop of wind come through. When the mayor asked him again for a prediction, Weigle was noncommittal.

  "God only knows what's going to happen next," he said. "I don't."

  Late on Saturday afternoon, August 20, Weigle rode up alone toward Placer Creek, past soldiers wandering in retreat amid the heavy smoke. He intended to get a quick look, to aid him in making his evacuation call.

  Weigle's best ranger, Ed Pulaski, had divided his firefighters, about 200 men in all, between two sides of the mountain ridge separating Wallace from Avery and the drainage of the St. Joe. Because they had two towns to defend, it made sense to split them up— 50 men for the St. Joe side, 150 to keep the fires from spilling into the much larger city of Wallace. The ridge was ablaze over a distance of about ten miles, a series of persistent but still rel
atively small fires on its flanks. Men were dispatched in crews, each with a fire to control. At night, they retreated to a big camp for a dinner of beans, rice, potatoes, and meat.

  Domenico Bruno and Giacomo Viettone were part of the crew sent to the St. Joe side of the ridge. The Italians had been on fire duty since August 4, and if working the flame-spitting ground of the northern Rockies was supposed to be easier than the deep mining pits of the Arizona Territory, they had been misinformed. The job was brutal—seventeen-hour days, circling fire, digging trenches, gasping on smoke, with little sleep. It was cold at night, and during the day they often became dehydrated and cramped. By August 20, the boys from Rivara Canavese had worked sixteen days in row, at a location within five miles of a place known as Dago Creek. They were making good money—more than $60 apiece for their labors in August, which could keep each of their families going for a year. But they had yet to see a paycheck. The fire suppression budget for the Coeur d'Alene National Forest was $30,000 —for an entire year. With 1,800 men on fire duty, that year's money was gone in less than two weeks. What kept men on the front line going was the promise of a fat paycheck by month's end. A promise.

  Their crew was international, the woods thick with a babel of languages from people forced to the edge of the new America because the cities were deemed less hospitable. "The Italians, the Hebrew and the Slav, according to popular belief, are poisoning the pure air of our otherwise well-regulated cities," the immigration commissioner, E. A. Goldenweiser, wrote of a prevailing view, based on a survey of ten thousand American households. Facing a fire, all men were equal. Serbs. Croats. Greeks. Italians from the north. Italians from the south. Austrians. Montenegrins. A Brit who had fought in the Boer War. Irishmen who hated the Brits. Two men from South Carolina with thick accents. Two fresh arrivals from Ohio, flatlanders disoriented in a vertical world. At least one Italian American, from a large family down in the valley, worked with Domenico and Giacomo; he could have told them it was easier earning money from a desperate Forest Service than finding stability down below. The Italians had a saying: "I came to America because I heard the streets were paved with gold. When I got here, I found out three things. First, the streets weren't paved with gold. Second, they weren't paved at all. And third, I was expected to pave them."