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

by Timothy Egan

  The lightning that split the Republican Party came during five days in June. In the face of certain defeat in the fall, and despite Roosevelt's preeminence in the primaries and his superior popularity, Republican power brokers declared that the beleaguered and unpopular sitting president would be the nominee.

  A riot seemed at hand. More than a thousand police officers rushed to control the convention. But rather than storm the stage, Roosevelt's forces walked out and marched over to a nearby auditorium, Orchestra Hall. There, they broke away from the Republican Party and declared a new group, the Progressive Party, with Teddy Roosevelt at the head of the ticket.

  Roosevelt gave a speech that "tore the roof off," the press reported. And when asked how he felt, he responded, "I feel as strong as a bull moose!" Thereafter his Progressive Party was more commonly known by that favorite T.R. term. Pinchot wrote the party platform, which he described as "a contract with the people." It was also a contract with Roosevelt's will, which faced an extreme test when Teddy was shot in the chest while campaigning in Milwaukee. Blood dripping through his suit, he continued with the speech for ninety minutes before leaving to see a doctor. The bullet had missed his vital organs.

  On Election Day, the country chose a liberal majority, but split its votes between three left-center candidates: a Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, who was president of Princeton University; the fiery Roosevelt, on the Progressive ticket; and the perennial socialist, Eugene Debs. Taft was routed, winning only two states, Utah and Vermont, the worst showing ever by an incumbent president. Roosevelt, with 27 percent of the vote, set a mark for third-party candidates that would not be surpassed through century's end. Debs peeled off 6 percent. Wilson won with 42 percent.

  The Bull Moose Party faded away almost as quickly as it came to life, built as it was on Roosevelt's personality. But many of those self-described Progressives never went back to the Republican Party, a break that shaped the GOP for the next hundred years.

  Taft returned home to Ohio, to practice law, to eat in peace, to putter around the golf course every now and then. In 1921, he was named to the Supreme Court, the job he had always wanted. At the same time, his weight fell to 259 pounds—down a hundred pounds from the peak of his presidency. Of the four years when he occupied the White House as the nation's most powerful man, he wrote: "I don't remember that I ever was President."

  Teddy Roosevelt went off to South America to explore an uncharted waterway, the River of Doubt, in the center of the Amazon rain forest. The trip nearly killed him, an epic of illness, food shortages, disease, and danger on a river that swallowed boats and men. "I had to go," Roosevelt said. "It was my last chance to be a boy." He came home ill and underweight.

  He retreated to Oyster Bay to be with his big family. His public career was over, though he was only in his mid-fifties. "I am having a horrid, unimportant time," he wrote to a friend, eight years out of office. He found solace in the profession that had sustained him before he entered politics—writing. His sight was nearly gone in one eye, after taking too many punches during White House boxing matches, but he was as prolific as ever, producing as much in a few years' time as some professionals do in a career. At the start of American involvement in the Great War, Roosevelt tried one last time to enter the arena—"to warm both hands before the fire of life," as he put it—requesting permission to lead an infantry division in France. He was turned down. Two years later, on January 6, 1919, this most vigorous of presidents died a relatively young man, at the age of sixty, from an embolism.

  Pinchot took the loss hard. No man would ever inspire him so much, and no man's friendship would have greater value. With Roosevelt, every day was an adventure, part of a journey toward something finer, Pinchot felt — "life at its warmest, and fullest and freest, at its utmost in vigor, at its sanest in purpose." Without Roosevelt, the world was smaller, the causes less animating. In Roosevelt's autobiography, Pinchot was mentioned often, which gave the ever-needy forester the love in print that he required in regular doses from his old boxing mate and political partner. Pinchot would remind people that Roosevelt had once said it was G.P. himself who was the "true keeper of his conscience." And for the rest of his life, Pinchot took particular comfort in an additional compliment, this a single line about him from Roosevelt's autobiography:

  "Among the many, many public officials who under my administration rendered literally invaluable service to the people of the United States, he on the whole stood first."

  Six years after the fire, Pulaski still tended the graves, still struggled to get through the day without pain, still lobbied for a proper memorial for the dead. He wrote a memo to the government outlining the costs of his proposal: Concrete, $200. Granite slabs engraved with the names of the dead, $215. Soil and grass, $20. But for this $435, the Forest Service would need an act of Congress, he was told.

  Eleven years after the fire, in 1921, Congress appropriated $500 to the Coeur d'Alene National Forest "for the markings of the graves in Wallace, Idaho." Pulaski used the money to get the names of the dead etched in stone. But other bodies were still scattered, and it bothered him. Finally, in 1933 —nearly a quarter century after the Big Burn — a central graveyard was established on a grassy slope in the dreamy little town of St. Maries, Idaho. Remains were dug up from different locations and moved to the burial ground, at rest in one place at last.

  Pulaski didn't live to see the memorial. He retired from the Forest Service in 1929, full of scars, inside and outside, and no small amount of bile. His poor vision never improved, and it was perhaps responsible for a severe car accident. He died in 1931, from complications related to the accident and from other troubles. His name lives on; to this day, there is hardly a firefighter among the millions of men and women who have fought flames in the woods who is unfamiliar with the Pulaski—the favorite tool of the trade—and the story of the man who invented it. The Forest Service keeps more than ten thousand Pulaskis in ranger stations across the United States. And many in the agency credit their very existence to a pair of men: Gifford Pinchot and Ed Pulaski.

  "His personal story of heroism on August 20 became the saga on which the future of the United States Forest Service was built," wrote Rocky Barker, the western natural history writer.

  Ione Adair moved back to Moscow, Idaho, her homestead lost to flames. She found a job teaching elementary school students, then got elected county treasurer and tax collector. Often, at Sunday dinners, she would regale people with stories of the walk to safety from the creek at the height of the Great Fire of 1910. It was odd to some that Pinkie always turned up her nose at one dish served at these big meals. It was something that stayed with her after the Big Burn, she explained: the commandeered cook of prisoners and roustabouts could not eat another potato.

  "Do you have any idea how many potatoes men eat?" she said.

  Bill Weigle left the Coeur d'Alene country one year after the fire. The forest supervisor needed to get far, far away, and the posting for a chief ranger up north, overseeing the fjords and rain forest of watery Alaska Territory, fit the bill. The Tongass National Forest may be the wettest place under the American flag, with ten times the rain of Idaho, home to moody islands of ancient spruce, 1,200- pound brown bears, and salmon runs so bounteous they allowed the native Haida to live well and refine a stylized art form, carvings on big cedar poles. It was a green refuge for Weigle, a place for a fresh dawning of the Great Crusade. In that part of Alaska, with more than ten thousand miles of coastline, Weigle became one of a new breed of forest rangers to travel exclusively by boat. The sixty-four-foot Than, with its well-stocked bookcase and well-used writing desk, was Weigle's home on water for a decade.

  Over the years, Weigle was repeatedly asked to tell his story of the Big Burn. After he completed the official report in 1911, he turned his back on the fire—he'd had enough—until late in life, when he wrote a recollection for a journal run by Idaho forestry students. His third and final act with the agency was in Snoqualmie National Forest
in Washington, outside Seattle, where he worked for the service until 1933. Afterward, as superintendent of Washington state parks, he helped to develop a public-land system, much used to this day, and a scenic alpine road — the Mountain Loop Highway — through the wet, thick-timbered lowlands of the Cascade Mountains. Like the Tongass, the west side of the Cascades is one of the rainiest places on earth, something Weigle was never heard to complain about.

  The hapless ranger Ralph Debitt, Weigle's colleague in the Coeur d'Alene, ended his brief marriage to the Forest Service shortly after the fire. He was accused of taking funds for personal use, and a host of other misdeeds big and small. He was faulted for being indecisive during the two days in August, at best an errant commander, at worst a liability. A few months after the fire, Debitt left his ranger post and disappeared, leaving no trace in Forest Service records. People in Avery say he became a cult leader in a nudist camp.

  His sometime neighbor in Avery, Spike Kelley, got a $10,000 insurance payment for the big log home that was burned down in the backfire to save the town. After getting his check, he also left, with his wife and servants.

  Joe Halm flourished in the Forest Service. He kept his ranger job while studying at night, learning enough about engineering to pass a federal civil service test. For the next three decades, he was a Forest Service survey engineer, one of the best-paying jobs in the agency. Halm Creek, where he kept his men from dying, was named for the ranger, and later added to the National Register of Historic Places—a lonely dell in the reborn forest of the upper St. Joe country. Halm never tired of recalling how he survived the Big Burn. He especially loved all the obituaries printed about him, including that story in the New York Times. In his telling of the nation's largest wildfire, written in 1944 —one of the last exhaustive accounts written by a survivor—Pulaski was the only real hero.

  For the new men moving into ranger shacks throughout the West, there was one overriding lesson to come from the Big Burn, and it would be applied in every district. Gifford Pinchot's name would be honored by generations to come, and so would that of Ed Pulaski. The Forest Service would summon these ghosts in green for a great cause, a new, sustaining mission. But it was a cause that Ed Pulaski might not join, and one that Pinchot, living out the later years of a remarkable life, came to doubt.

  19. Ashes

  THE LIMBS WERE STIFF, the eyesight starting to fail, the back sore. Old age was not for a man who lived by the tenets of the strenuous life. Still, action was what Gifford Pinchot craved, as he said from the time he shed the insulation of Manhattan wealth to study forestry. So there he was in Missoula, 1937, ready to revisit the West he had tried to shape to his principles, ready to tramp through national forests whose boundaries he had drawn, ready to see what nature had done to bring back life snuffed by the fire of more than a quarter century ago.

  Once again he would sleep on cold ground, wade through icy streams, try to find God in the earthly heavens—his second home. And so what if he was seventy-two years old and many of his friends were dead. The early leaders of the Forest Service were also gone, most of them, their names now attached to mountains and lakes, a type of immortality that would please a forester. The enemies, Joe Cannon and Weldon Heyburn, William Clark and Will Taft, were in the ground as well. Clark, the graft-peddling senator and lifetime opponent of conservation, had died at the age of eighty-six in his mansion in New York City, leaving an estate worth $200 million and a city he helped to found, Las Vegas. The most populous county in Nevada is named for him.

  With Teddy long gone, another Roosevelt, his distant cousin Franklin, was president and a Pinchot confidant — though not nearly on the level of intimacy that he had shared with T.R. Laura had disappeared, no communication from the spirit for more than twenty years. This freed Pinchot to fall in love with another woman. And a year before his fiftieth birthday, Pinchot had married Cornelia Bryce, a woman sixteen years younger than he, an heiress and a crusader, a suffragette and politician. No longer would Pinchot talk to Laura at an empty dinner table; with the effervescent Cornelia, politics was always on the menu—"the best of all indoor sports," as she said. They had a son in 1915, a year after their wedding.

  The Gilded Age parties seemed so long ago now that one in four Americans were out of work, the soup lines a regular feature in the cities, life itself a slow-motion stumble to an early grave. Pinchot had seen America change its face and personality a half-dozen times since the Big Burn—from the Great War, all those men lost in a meaningless conflict, including Quentin Roosevelt, the youngest of Teddy's six children; to the frothy heights of the Jazz Age; to Prohibition and the Depression, eras defined by mood. And looming now was war in Europe, Nazi Germany on the prowl. But age was just a number, as the vigorous elderly always said. Pinchot read Gone with the Wind, not the kind of tome that usually found its way onto his tower of bedside books. He liked it quite a bit, particularly one line he found resonant: "What better way can an old man die than doing a young man's work?"

  His plan was to spend the rest of the summer touring the mountains, from the Cabinets in Montana to the Cascades in Oregon to the High Sierra in California. Reacquaint himself. He had first been there after coming home from Europe in 1890, footloose and full of youthful gloom. Shortly afterward, he'd returned as a confidential forest agent, looking over the big land for a president with a plan. In his eighth decade, Pinchot wanted a long, last taste of the wild before knees became too arthritic to move uphill, before hip joints felt rusted cold, before he lay dying with regret that he had not made one final expedition to see what became of the Great Crusade. For this trip, Pinchot shipped his touring Buick out to Missoula by rail, and from there he would launch his adventure—free again in the High Lonesome.

  They called him Governor now, after two terms as the executive of Pennsylvania. In the Keystone State, he had been somewhat of a pioneer, sending an army of young workers into the woods, overhauling Pennsylvania's forestry system by buying land and putting it into public trust. On a small scale, he tried to do for the commonwealth what he and Teddy Roosevelt had attempted to do for the entire nation. After the presidential election in 1932, FDR had asked Governor Pinchot to advise him on restoration in the natural world. The new president considered himself a tree grower, getting his hands dirty on the family estate in the Hudson River valley; it was one of his small hobbies. He was also a fan: a Pinchot lecture on deforestation "started me on the conservation road," Franklin Roosevelt said. The High Plains were just starting to blow, wracked by drought and poor farming, the grass stripped away. And big pieces of the national forests were cut over, as Roosevelt had seen on his own tours out west during the campaign. Perhaps there was a jobs program—taking young men from the cities and putting them to work planting trees and grass or building trails—along the lines of what the forester had done as governor.

  Pinchot sent the president several reports, delighted to be of use. And in his first hundred days in office, Roosevelt launched the Civilian Conservation Corps, with a camp in the George Washington National Forest in Virginia. Within four months, 250,000 men were put to work in the woods. By 1935, the corps had grown to 600,000 nationwide. Forestry once again was in the headlines and at the center of public discussion. Restoration was seen as one way out of the Depression.

  There was more. The meat of the progressive agenda that Teddy Roosevelt had spoken of in his years in office and campaigned on during the Bull Moose run of 1912 found its way into law through the younger Roosevelt. Social Security for the elderly. Workers' compensation for people knocked out of a job by injury or sickness. Regulation of the stock market and banks. A minimum wage. A graduated income tax. On these issues T.R. had been ahead of his time; it took his cousin, advised at times by Pinchot, to make them stick. And as the soil blew on the plains, another of Teddy's insights looked prophetic, something Pinchot pointed out. "When the soil is gone, men must go," T.R. had said, "and the process does not take long."

  Pinchot's passion, his zeal
otry in battle, and of course in feuds, had not diminished. He had been an enthusiastic supporter of Prohibition, often chasing bootleggers himself alongside Pennsylvania cops. What fun! Though the dour Pinchot was a zesty Dry, his wife kept a stash of house whiskey for special guests at Grey Towers. The smart set laughed at him behind his back, as always. Still a bit odd, this gangly formal millionaire, the mustache as brushy as ever, but snow white, giving his face a somewhat ornithological look.

  Since Teddy's death, he had nourished a dream of being president himself. Yes, why not run for the presidency? As he asked his brother Amos one winter night while sitting before a fire in the family castle: Who was better qualified for the highest office in the land? After eight years of Woodrow Wilson, would not the country desire a return to a Republican from the party's glory years? But party bosses wanted no part of Pinchot's progressive revival—no surprise to anyone but Pinchot. In order, Republicans turned to Warren Harding, a dreadful president who died in office; Calvin Coolidge, a presence so benign that when he passed away Dorothy Parker famously said, "How could they tell?"; and Herbert Hoover, who found a place deep in the cellar of failed presidents.

  Pinchot's comeback was impressive nonetheless; he made the cover of Time magazine, the height of prestige at the peak of the print era. In 1929, the year of the Wall Street crash, he left the despair of the United States and sailed to the South Pacific on a three-masted schooner with his wife, son, and an old college mate. Once again he was following the advice John Muir had given him as a young man: "Radiate, radiate, radiate far and wide as the lines of latitude and longitude on a globe." In crossing oceans, he visited the Galápagos Islands, Darwin's living laboratory and inspiration for his great work. After returning home, Pinchot urged protective status for the Galápagos, fearing that this fragile, accidental refuge of biodiversity would not survive heavy human visitation.