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

by Timothy Egan

  The gutted core of the town of Wallace after the fire. Barnard-Stockbridge Studio Collection, University of Idaho Library

  An iconic photo of President Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir atop Glacier Point in Yosemite National Park during their 1903 camping trip. Roosevelt was an immense fan of Muir's, and the naturalist felt a similar admiration for the president. Library of Congress

  President Roosevelt in his element, giving a stemwinder. Both he and Gifford Pinchot reveled in conflict with the foes of conservation. Library of Congress

  Young Gifford Pinchot, a close friend and personal aide of Roosevelt's and the first Chief of the U.S. Forest Service. Library of Congress

  Teddy Roosevelt speaking outside a church in Rifle, Colorado, in 1905. At heart, he said, he was just as much a westerner as an easterner. Library of Congress

  After leaving the Forest Service, Gifford Pinchot had a stint in Pennsylvania politics. Here, as a candidate for governor, he meets with two rangers. "I have been a governor now and then," he once said, "but I am a forester all the time—have been, and shall be, all my working life." Library of Congress

  A typical lookout tower of the type constructed all over the West. After the Big Burn, the Forest Service vowed zero tolerance for wildfire, a policy doomed to fail. Library of Congress

  A Forest Service fire patrol in 1914. The average ranger had to patrol 300,000 acres, usually on foot, but also on horseback or riding the rails. Library of Congress

  Gifford Pinchot with his family. Much of his private life was a well-kept secret—mystical and mysterious, even as he moved in the highest reaches of power. Library of Congress

  Grey Towers, the Pinchot family estate in Pennsylvania. Though Gifford Pinchot's grandfather made his fortune by cutting down trees, the family name later became synonymous with forest preservation. U.S. Forest Service

  Pinchot out for a stroll. Like Roosevelt, he came from wealth and privilege, but he found his life's purpose in Progressive Era causes on behalf of public land and "the little man." Library of Congress

  Roosevelt and Pinchot, political soulmates, on the deck of the steamer Mississippi during a tour of inland waterways. Library of Congress

  11. The Lost Day

  IN THE TWO YEARS that Bill Weigle had been in charge of the Coeur d'Alene National Forest, a time when he had been snubbed by mine owners, scorned by timber thieves, and nearly killed by rebellious saloonkeepers, nobody ever needed him as much they did on the evening of August 20. He was, after all, only four years removed from that Yale graduating class when he was given oversight of the 1.8 million acres of the Coeur d'Alene. Ed Pulaski was different, of course, because he was one of them. Weigle had the stamp of Gifford Pinchot on him, which he tried to downplay—suspect until he could prove his worth in the woods. But on Saturday, as winds clocked at sixty miles an hour and flaming embers rained down on the town of Wallace, as voices were raised to be heard above the whirring and whistling of firebrands, people called the name of Bill Weigle in desperation. They could not find him.

  In town, horses chafed at the hot breath of the advancing fire, coughing and spitting to keep it out of their system. By dusk, everyone who was not eligible for evacuation was supposed to fall in line under the command of Mayor Hanson and Forest Supervisor Weigle, working in an orderly fashion to protect Wallace from the fire at its doorstep. They knew nothing of its size or power, nothing of where it had come from or where it was headed. They had no advance notice, no intelligence. All they knew was that the winds had picked up suddenly in late afternoon. Even small children understood what that meant: it was the great fear of the summer-long fire siege. Just two days earlier, Weigle had reassured people that the lines up on the ridge were holding, that Pulaski's firefighters—a collection of global castoffs on the St. Joe side of the divide, and a disorganized and dispirited crew above Wallace—had things under control. His one caveat was that they could contain the blazes only if the wind did not start to blow. If, if, if. And now it was here, a Palouser of such power that it seemed there was nothing that 1,000 men or 10,000 men or 100,000 men could do to hold it back.

  The exact timing of the evacuation was Weigle's call. Seeking firsthand information to aid him in his decision, Weigle had gone up Placer Creek Saturday afternoon on horseback. He was alone. About three miles in, he was stopped by an obstruction: heavy timber blown across the way. It was an ominous sign. If the wind was strong enough to uproot big trees that had held to the ground for ages, what would it do with fire in its embrace? He tried to get around the downed trees, but the canyon was too steep, so he tied his horse and continued uphill on foot. Five miles in, he saw flames coming down the ridge, much larger and closer than anything to date. And this was a type of fire he had never seen, a stampede. Looking up, he saw towering columns of black smoke above the treeline, and then—the strangest of things—the columns themselves would explode into flame, sending off fire hundreds of feet above the treetops, like the towering spigot of a refinery. What he saw—known as fire whirls—can reach temperatures of 2,000 degrees, with a downdraft in the center and violent updrafts on the outer rings. Weigle knew then that Wallace was doomed, and he had to get back to sound the evacuation alarm.

  He raced down the dirt roadway, running two miles through the heat and thick smoke. Halfway to town, he met a man stumbling uphill in the other direction, breathless, in a hurry to get to his family. Weigle recognized him as Speedy Swift, his first name an ironic reference to his slow movement, who had a homestead a few miles in, next to Placer Creek. Swift had been sick, and had gone into Wallace to see a doctor. He had started up the road with a two-horse carriage, but his ride was blocked by the same timber across the way that had stalled Weigle. His illness made it hard for him to walk, he explained.

  "Can you help me?"

  "What can I do?"

  "My wife and baby are up there."

  But Weigle had that other task, to get back to Wallace, where the town awaited his word. When he asked the man for specific directions, Swift pointed up beyond the smoke, where it looked as if fire was already on top of the forest. His family may have burned to death an hour or so ago. Weigle had his doubts. Swift begged the forest supervisor to save his family. Begged him.

  Weigle told him to sit. He turned back to where he had seen flames shooting above black columns. If he could do the rescue quickly, get in and help the homestead family and get out, he would still have time to make it back to Wallace and order the evacuation, or so he thought. He made a dash for Swift's ranch. There he found the charred and smoldering skeleton of the homesteader's barn. He heard voices of men. Through the haze, he followed the voices to the Swift family farmhouse. Firefighters—nearly a dozen, hired by Weigle just a few days earlier—were carrying water in buckets from a well, talking in the clipped, elliptical cadence of people in chaos.

  What were they doing here? They were supposed to be up on the ridge with Pulaski, or with the Italians, trying to hold the fire line. When the bad winds started up, with horrid howls and explosions, when the columns of smoke appeared, that's when they feared for their lives and decided to go downhill, the men told Weigle. Could he blame them? They had run down the trail and found the primitive road along Placer Creek, the road to Wallace. But as the smoke thickened and the fire gained on them, they took shelter at the Swift homestead. But see here: the family's barn had burned to the ground. Now they were trying to protect the little house, pouring water on the exterior, as much to save themselves as the structure. The space around the house was cleared. And what about the family, Weigle asked, a woman and child? They were safe for now, after being taken down to a creek and covered with wet blankets.

  With that news, Weigle turned and ran again, back down the road to where he had left the homesteader, and beyond to his horse. It was dark now, but it would not have mattered if there had been residual daylight; the smoke was too thick to see more than few feet ahead. Weigle felt disoriented, dizzy, moving through the indecipherable muddle of the
atmosphere. He took deep, steady breaths and tried to remain calm, to find his way. He called out for the homesteader, but his voice was a faint cry amid the screaming wind and the percussive pops of superheated trees exploding.

  Swift was nowhere. The heat burned against Weigle's eyes and up his nostrils. Flames all around. The back of his hand caught fire for an instant, the skin stinging, as if a dozen hornets had poked him. When his mop of red hair started to burn with a sickly smell, he reached for a handful of gravel from the road and rubbed it on his head. But now the fire was in front of him, big downed timbers engulfed by tongues of flame across the dirt road. He could descend no more. He had no choice but to go back uphill yet again. He remembered a tunnel he had passed, a mining hole. Trudging onward in the black of a burning night, Weigle found the mine about a half mile along the way. If he was to survive, he had to crawl inside and wait out the firestorm.

  In Wallace, the boy mayor, Walter Hanson, was pressed to make a decision. He had spent the afternoon organizing the exodus. Meanwhile, he hurried back to his family's frame house—his mother had already been evacuated—and hosed it down with water. Late in the day, with Forest Supervisor Weigle missing, Mayor Hanson went up Placer Creek himself for a quick look. He was turned back by heat and flames lunging from the mountains. The roar of the firestorm, more than anything, shook him. No matter Weigle's fate, the mayor now decided to act on his own. Back in town, he sounded the alarm, ordered the troops to start the evacuation, and reiterated his previous command that all able-bodied men had to assist under threat of jail or death.

  Nobody had ever heard the Bitterroot Mountains bellow as they did that Saturday night. People were chased from their homes by the screaming wind as much as by the alarm. One shopkeeper called it "a continuous staccato or rumbling crash, with cracking sounds and no let-up whatsoever." Another said it was like "heavy horse carriages crossing a wooden bridge." In the darkness, the streets were packed with people, some fleeing for the river, intending to wait out the fire in the shallows, others riding horses and carriages straight out of town, unsure of whether they were heading into the fire or not.

  They had just moments, everyone in town, to decide what was worth saving. Some put their furniture in a pile in the backyard, in the hope it would be around should the house burn. A small girl grabbed her father's Masonic dress hat. A neighbor asked for help in moving a piano to the street. A few people filled their bathtubs, creating their own water reservoirs. Nellie Stockbridge, a refined woman from Chicago who had devoted her life to photographing Wallace as it came of age, took a pair of prized glass plates from her studio and fled, leaving the rest of a life's work behind. Most people milled around the train depot, wading through rumors and cries of panic, the young women holding babies, the elderly sitting on benches, all jittery, primed to flee. They could see fire on the ridgetops that bordered town, a rippling trim of purple and yellow gases moving ever closer.

  About 9 P.M., a thick flaming ember landed just outside the Wallace Times. Buckets of oil, solvents, and grease—press lubricants — were lying about in open-lidded containers. It took just minutes for the newspaper building to catch, as the oil exploded and the wooden structures quickly fell to flame. Nearby, an old furniture store burned and collapsed, its main support timbers crumbling with a loaded thud. A new store, next to it, had just opened, filled with the latest in upholstered lounges and chairs. It soon fell. Firemen waited a few blocks away, hoses in hand, ready for battle, but the wind knocked them back and they realized whatever water they could bring forth would scatter and spray, useless. A twenty-mile-an-hour wind, blowing steadily, will toss a cowboy hat off a head. A wind of forty miles an hour hurts the eyes and makes it hard to walk without faltering. At sixty miles an hour, the air is strong enough to throw a person to the ground. That's the power of wind only. Add fire and debris to it, add thick, flaming branches or chunks of bark in an airborne stream, and it becomes a brute force.

  "The wind was blowing so strongly that more than once I grabbed onto a telephone line to keep from being blown down," said Leo Worstell, a merchant, describing how he secured himself with insulated lines strung at eye level. Word came that the bridge separating the main town from the hospital run by the Sisters of Providence was aflame. The fire department relied on horses and bicycles to get from one place to another. But before any effort could be made to rescue the nuns, the span burned, and the splintered remains crashed to the river. This meant that the hospital, with about two dozen patients, was cut off from the evacuation effort.

  "Words cannot depict the horror of that night," said a witness, Carl C. Getz. "The train whistles were screaming, the heavy boom of falling trees and buildings, the crackle of the fire, the buildings were swaying and steaming from the heat."

  Ed Pulaski found his crews scattered along either side of the ridge separating Wallace from Avery, in varying stages of panic and retreat. Any effort at organized firefighting had vanished with the approach of the storm. Moving upward, Pulaski faced wind so strong it was a struggle to stay in his saddle. Worse, his packers turned on him. They were bringing fresh supplies to the lines—vital for any effort to keep the crews in place. But now the packers dropped their loads well before they reached the fire camps, dumping blankets, food, and other supplies. Pulaski had ordered them to press on — it did him no good to drop the loads this far from the destination — but his words had no effect. The packers retreated in the direction they had come, toward Wallace.

  One fire crew was scattered all over the ridge, some of the men lost and crying for their lives, others full of adrenaline and primed to make a dash. "Out of the smoke would come Pulaski, waving his arms, hollering, 'Come on! Come on! Follow me,'" a firefighter, William Chance, recalled. Pulaski rounded up about fifty men. One idea, suggested by several crew members, was to take refuge in a nearby alpine lake. Pulaski knew the lake well; he had named it for his only child. Elsie Lake was deep, holding runoff at the basin of steep slopes, but it was not a good option, Pulaski said—they would drown or break limbs trying to find the lake in the darkness. He had a better plan. One by one, the remaining men, stricken by fear, muttering incoherently, were collected in the dark. If they could hold together, Pulaski explained, they could make a dash for Wallace, down the West Fork of Placer Creek. After the desertion of his packers, Pulaski needed to show more strength to back his authority. Strapped to his side was that .44 revolver. Thereafter, when confronted with mutinous or confused men who spurned his orders, the forest ranger put one hand on his pistol and said he intended to use it if pressed. His word was law in the burning woods.

  When he had gathered his men, Pulaski told them the plan—a brisk hump downhill. Follow him, was the order, though some wanted to stay put. They were surrounded by a wind that tossed flames from crown to crown. Big trees fell at random, and horses whinnied and bucked.

  "Try to make Wallace," Pulaski said. "That's our chance."

  They started down through the maze of fire, the ground shaking with the sound of falling trees and hissing flame. One of the men, S. W. Stockton, middle-aged and overweight, had considerable trouble keeping up. He was known as Dad because of his age; he'd talked his way onto the crew because he'd been a Texas Ranger once. But he was in no shape to be chasing fires or running from a wall of flame in the heat of August. After stumbling, he pleaded with Pulaski to stop. To stay behind was to burn to death. Pulaski dismounted. Dad said he could walk no farther. This was it.

  "Take my horse," Pulaski said.

  Stockton was stunned. "Get up," Pulaski said. "I'll help you."

  Another straggler at the rear of the column was not so lucky. He had fallen behind, unable to walk, or perhaps paralyzed by fear. Motionless, he called out for other crew members to sit with him. They would have none of it. When he started to burn, his hair and clothes aflame, his voice turned into a murderous cant, the sound of life at its end, and it only pushed the men farther from him. "They were running like scared rabbits," the Forest Service later
reported. And when, days later, the man's body was found, it was mistaken for a burned-out log.

  After a few more switchbacks on the downward trail, Pulaski's crew ran headlong into the maw of the firestorm. Now they were trapped. Pulaski froze for an instant, seeking an exit. He guided his men out of the creekbed and through unburned forest, trying to dodge the front line of the fire. But the storm moved in random rages, flames looking for fuel in all directions. The heat intensified, and the flames closed in. Trees fell behind them and ahead of them. Pulaski realized that it was impossible to reach Wallace; they would have to walk through the firestorm to go in the direction of town.

  They had but a few moments to live, perhaps, and what a way to leave the earth: skin curled up in flame, face burning, lungs scorching inside with every breath. Men fell to their knees, covered their heads, and wailed. A horse jumped and screamed, its tail on fire. Pulaski had an idea: a mine tunnel less than a mile away, a hole he remembered from his prospecting days.

  "Why not stay here?" a man shouted. "Here's safety!" He had found a hole in the side of the mountain, clearly a mine tunnel, but not the one Pulaski had in mind. Several men packed themselves inside, but there was little room for the rest of the fleeing firefighters.

  "This won't work," Pulaski said.

  He stumbled around the steep, smoking ravine, looking for his mine. The ground burned nearly as much as the trees overhead. The forest was smothering them, its gases, its heat, its searing convection winds fanning the flames upward. Next to the desiccated creekbed, Pulaski ran his hands over the timbers of an open hole—the mine he was looking for. He draped a wet gunnysack over his head and went inside, sniffing at the air, probing the ceiling, trying to determine if it was large enough to hold them all.