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

by Timothy Egan

  Finally, near the end of the tour, he was back in the High Sierra, the Range of Light, John Muir's temple—"the only spot I have ever found that came up to the brag," as Ralph Waldo Emerson had said. It was there that Pinchot had undergone something like a religious experience when he stood under a huge waterfall in Yosemite, jumping in and out of the spray. Now Pinchot ditched his companion and the crowds in Yosemite to search for a touchstone of his youth—"went off by myself. I had to." His heart beat heavy and his breath was labored as he hiked over granite, much of his dexterity gone. The closer he got to the high points in this sanctuary, the more excited he got.

  "Washburn Point—incredible."

  He pushed himself farther, risking collapse, to find another landmark.

  "Glacier Point left me all in. Went and stood on the overhanging rock where I threw my bed 41 years ago & looked down." He wheezed and gasped in the mountain air, sweating and somewhat parched. It did not matter. "If it cost me a year of my life," he wrote, "it would be worth it." Onward and upward he pushed until rock, ground, and forest came to an end, until there was nothing but a sharp edge of blunt earth protruding in the late light of the range, where he could see well beyond the park boundaries to national forest land that he had once scouted on foot and horseback. He remembered it then as roadless, the only trails being those hacked by Indians and prospectors. He had taken notes on the flora and fauna, commented on the age of the bristlecone pine trees at the highest elevations, the scrub oak in the valleys, the condors overhead, the trout in alpine tarns. He had lassoed that wild land in ink, returned to Washington, and sent the sketch to the president, who preserved it for posterity. What did Michelangelo feel at the end of his life, staring at a ceiling in the Vatican or a marble figure in Florence? Pinchot knew. And those who followed him, his great-great-grandchildren, Teddy's great-great-grandchildren, people living in a nation one day of five hundred million people, could find their niche as well. Pinchot felt God in his soul, and thanked him, and weariness in his bones. He sensed he had come full circle.

  "One of the great days of my life," he wrote. "I think the greatest sight I ever saw." Of course he had seen it before, but to an old man it had more power. For a fleeting moment, after more than five thousand miles of driving around in pursuit of something lost, Gifford Pinchot found what he was looking for.

  He lived another nine years, barely enough time to finish the book, and to feel that his life philosophy had been vindicated by the second of two Roosevelts to be president. Just before World War II ended, Pinchot and Cornelia went to see FDR at the White House. Much had changed since Pinchot roamed the halls with Teddy; the war atmosphere made it seem more like a command center. To many in Washington, Pinchot was an embarrassment—or worse, a bit of a joke. The reputations of Muir and Teddy Roosevelt had grown immensely since their deaths; they were the heroes in the fight for conservation, while Pinchot was an afterthought. The very fact that he was still around, still making speeches, still annoying his enemies, this gangly relic from the turn of the century, was a big part of the condescension. His life had spanned from the last year of the Civil War to World War II.

  For Pinchot the meeting was all about a big idea that he had carried for some time. The war would soon be over, and he wanted Roosevelt to summon the nations of the world for a conference on conservation, to take stock of a planet shattered in midcentury by iron and atomic blows of nations against each other. What people had in common was this earth, which for the first time they could destroy with the press of a button. Such a gathering had been proposed by Teddy Roosevelt in the last days of his presidency in 1909. Nations had accepted, the meeting was set—but then President Taft killed the conference. Would Franklin consider reviving such a thing?

  Indeed he would, and promised to bring it up at his Yalta meeting with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin, as postwar planning gained steam. The world was going to be reorganized after this dreadful war, and what better time to start thinking about it in different ways. In a letter to his secretary of state, Roosevelt wrote, "I repeat again that I am more and more convinced that Conservation is a basis for permanent peace. I think the time is ripe."

  Roosevelt died before the global conservation conference could take place, and Pinchot fell ill with leukemia. The forester's last day was October 4, 1946. He died at the age of eighty-one. At his funeral at Grey Towers, his son Gifford Bryce Pinchot slipped a favorite fly rod into the casket.

  Three years after his death, the Forest Service renamed the green-mantled land south of Mount Rainier as Gifford Pinchot National Forest. At the dedication ceremony Cornelia held back tears. When it came time to speak, she apologized to the foresters and dignitaries for being so emotional. Then she steadied herself and tried to give an account of her husband's legacy, a man who had already started to fade from history, a footnote. Cornelia wanted the rangers, politicians, and reporters gathered to know one thing about her dead husband: "Conservation to Gifford Pinchot was never a vague, fuzzy aspiration," she said in the forest given his name. "It was concrete, exact, dynamic." And then, summoning the voice of the old progressive and the spirit of the words Pinchot had written so many times in speeches for Teddy Roosevelt, she said Pinchot's idea of humans never taking more from the earth than they put back was simple, an American virtue. It was, she said, "the very stuff of which democracy is made."

  Elers Koch retired from the Forest Service in 1944. He spent the next five years writing his life story and advocating for protection of wilderness in the Rocky Mountain West. His children were grown and his beloved Gerda was gone; she had died of cancer in 1942. The war brought another blow to Koch: he lost his oldest son, Stanley, in the Allied landing at Normandy. The fog of depression that followed the death of his wife and his boy would not lift; it was like smoke from the summer of 1910. At the same time, he found it increasingly hard to move around, his muscles aching from the daily little cruelties of sciatica, his hands knotted by arthritis. Nobody would publish his book. On a late November day in 1954, Koch killed himself. He was seventy-three. Forty-four years after his suicide, his book, Forty Years a Forester, was published and became an instant and influential classic among people who loved the outdoors. Koch Mountain, a 9,072-foot peak in the Bitterroots, is named for him.

  Pinkie Adair outlived them all. In the late 1970s, she sat for several days with Sam Schrager, an oral historian, as part of a project of the Latah County Museum Society. Talking about her homestead in the wild Bitterroots, about foresters on horseback and stagecoach rides on moonlit nights in town, about the pet bear her father kept at the house in Moscow, she could have been recalling medieval days. She got the last living word on the Big Burn of 1910, at least among the major players in the drama. What was the fire like? She said it was chaos in the woods, martial law in town, so many people lost. Even so, a thrill.

  "It was exciting," she said. "Very exciting."

  The interviewer seemed taken aback at the words from the mouth of this old lady, with her thick glasses, curled fingers.

  "You never knew when you got up in the morning whether the wind was bringing the fire your way or taking it some other way ... very exciting."

  Pinkie died at home not long afterward, on November 26, 1977. She was ninety-four years old.

  On August 20, 2005, a day when the sun baked the Bitterroots with not much of a breeze to break the heat, top brass from the Forest Service assembled along Placer Creek, less than a mile from Wallace, Idaho. They came to the northern Rockies to remember that other August 20 nearly a century before. An honor guard in crisp green uniforms and white gloves marched in single file along the road to the creek. They carried flags and blew bagpipes, the sound filling the forest and the steep slopes of the mountains. They also carried Pulaskis, shiny and chrome-plated, holding them across their chests like riflemen clutching their weapons.

  The faces of these foresters, from members of the high command, who had taken two days to travel from the capital, to first-year rangers
just learning the ropes, both men and women, were solemn, as at a funeral. For a time, nobody said anything; the pipers blew their mournful sound into the woods and tried to imagine what it must have been like for Ed Pulaski and those people in the mine tunnel in 1910. When at last the bagpipes were stilled and the speeches began, people spoke about a man who did not sound like the one who had spent his last years feeling betrayed by this agency. To the end, Pulaski loved the land, perhaps more than some of the rangers stamped by the Yale School of Forestry. But he never could understand why the government did not love men like himself back.

  On this day, Pulaski was eulogized in mythic terms, a hero certainly, and the best kind, a selfless one. He was described as no-nonsense, and not so much a forest ranger as an old-fashioned woodsman, born to the wild. The occasion was the dedication of a trail and memorial to the man who could not get the government to do the same thing for the fallen firefighters while he was alive.

  Time had been good to Pulaski. This fire, with its force unleashing energy greater than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, had grown with the passing of the years and the telling of the story. It was not just the largest wildfire in the history of the United States, these forest dignitaries said; it was still known as the fire that gave the agency its mission. One speaker said the fire of 1910 was like the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001. "The 1910 fires gave the new agency a defining purpose," said this speaker, Mark Rey, "to demonstrate that destructive wildfire could be controlled and prevented." Rey was an odd choice to preside over this ceremony in the woods. He had been a powerful advocate for the logging industry, a lobbyist and partisan, arguing fiercely against protection for dying species and wild land in the public forests. When President George W. Bush came into office, he put Rey in charge of the very agency that he had long fought.

  There was no mention of conservation on this August day in 2005. No mention of the Great Crusade, the fight to keep forests in public hands, of Roosevelt's cry to "leave it as it is," or Pinchot's progressive passion. What Pinchot fought for his entire adult life, facing ridicule and much resistance, what Pinchot tried to institutionalize with the Forest Service, was taken for granted.

  This day was about a dead man named Pulaski, who wore a uniform, and the people who followed in his footsteps. From here on out, Placer Creek as it flowed from a thousand feet above the valley, right near the mine where Pulaski had taken refuge, would be one of the nation's sacred places — in the National Register of Historic Places.

  The people who lived in the Coeur d'Alene country never forgot Pulaski. They spent years nagging the government. And now at last there was something—a descriptive trail along the stations of the cross where Pulaski fought to keep his men alive. A hiker could set out in the chill of the morning, well before the sun reached Placer Creek, starting where Pulaski and his wife said goodbye, and move upward in the narrow canyon, reading the signs along the way, trying to fathom that Saturday night in August 1910. Some evidence of the Big Burn remained. Here at the ceremony site was a big cedar stump, charred and black. And up the trail, visible among stands of thick pine and fir, were the last remnants of standing burned timbers, midnight-black skeletons. Beyond the mineshaft and up on the ridge, a hiker could roam in peace not far from where the Italians died in that horrible pit, flaming timbers crushing them.

  The woods were quiet and largely left alone on this day, as they had been for some time. In the years after World War II, the national forests were industrialized, logged at a frenzied pace. What Pinchot the old man had seen in 1937 —green hillsides reduced to rubble, mud, and slash—had been repeated all over the West. But in the first decade of the new century, logging in all national forests was in steep decline, for reasons both economic and idealistic.

  No change in government could alter that. Timber for homebuilding came from tree farms in Canada, because it was much cheaper to ship that wood to market than to yank it from an isolated place like the Bitterroots. Communities valued their public forests for recreation and the biological mix. Yew trees were a source for a cancer treatment. Even Wallace, with a population barely a third of what it was in 1910, reinvented itself as an outdoor destination — a base for skiers, bikers, and wilderness seekers. What Elers Koch and another forest ranger, the writer Aldo Leopold, had envisioned long ago had come to pass: by 2005, about thirty-five million acres of Forest Service land were designated as official wilderness areas, land set aside by law as places where "man himself is a visitor who does not remain," never to be logged, roaded, or sold off. One of those areas was in the High Lonesome where Koch and his wife spent so much of their time, just over the divide along the Lochsa and Clearwater rivers. Another, farther south, the River of No Return Wilderness, is the largest in the continental United States. The land itself, to the eye of a beholder, can tell a story of the 1910 fire, though the marks grow harder to see with every passing day.

  When the Rockefellers and the Weyerhaeusers had pushed through these woods, it appeared that a new order was at hand. But it had not lasted. The trains are gone. Avery is a barely inhabited hamlet along a lonely road, and most of those inhabitants work for the Forest Service. It might as well be called Pinchot again. The railroad, the most costly of the transcontinental tracks, is no more, its steel lines pried from the ground and sold for scrap. That job of ten thousand workers had been dismantled, just as the ranger cabin had once been torn apart to make way for the Milwaukee Road. The tunnels remain, those big holes bored into the mountain where trains took refuge during the fire. In the summer months, the tunnels and the ground leveled for the tracks of the Milwaukee Road are open to mountain bikers who want to experience the Bitterroots on two wheels, at their leisure.

  There is nothing left of Grand Forks, not even a foundation footing from one of the saloons, nothing but grass and third-growth timber in the flat of a meadow, a little creek flowing past, bullfrogs in the shallows. Same with Taft, that roaring burg, burned to the ground, not a wisp left behind. Nature has reclaimed that ground. Up in the far reaches of the St. Joe River, where Joe Halm went for shelter from the firestorm, an angler with a few days of idle time can find some of the finest cutthroat water in the world. Up higher are bull trout in the cold, deep pools of the headwaters. There is no way to get into that country except by horse or human hoof. It has never been logged. The most remote pocket of the Coeur d'Alenes is just as Pulaski had experienced it on those Sunday picnics with Emma, just as Roosevelt envisioned it, just as Pinchot remembered seeing it for the first time, taking his breath away—there for fresh eyes, for people yet to be born, there to be discovered anew.

  * * *

  Notes on Sources

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  * * *

  Notes on Sources

  Prologue

  Details of how the fire started and how it spread, from Records of the Forest Service, Region One office, Missoula, Montana; Records of the Forest Service, National Archives, Pacific Alaska Region, Seattle, Washington; and Records of the Forest Service, National Archives, College Park, Maryland.

  Carl Getz quoted on panics, from Seattle Times, August 26, 1910.

  Fire Chief Kelly, "Let the bastards go," quoted in Northwest Disaster: Avalanche and Fire, by Ruby El Hult, Binfords & Mort, 1960.

  Edward Pulaski, family reaction, and quotes, from "Memories of a Forest Service Wife," personal notes by Emma Pulaski, on file, Forest Service Region One headquarters, Missoula.

  Additional Pulaski information, from Forest Service personnel files, Missoula, and from Early Days of the Forest Service, vols. 1—3, on file at the Forest Service Region One office, Missoula.

  Greatest force yet assembled to fight a wildfire, from Burning an Empire: The Study of American Forest Fires, by Stewart Holbrook, Macmillan, 1945.

  Theodore Roosevelt quoted on rich men, from Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography, Macmillan, 1913.

  Roosevelt quote on losing species, from his letter of February 2, 1889, Theodore Ro
osevelt—Letters and Speeches, Library of America, 1951.

  The Forest Service staff and budget around Wallace, Idaho, and the Coeur d'Alene National Forest, from files at the Museum of North Idaho, Coeur d'Alene, Idaho.

  William Howard Taft, his feelings on being president, from William Howard Taft: An Intimate History, by Judith Icke Anderson, W. W. Norton, 1981.

  Deployment of the 25th Infantry, from National Archives, Seattle, the Museum of North Idaho, and various newspaper accounts.

  How the fire spread, from Records of the Forest Service, National Archives, Seattle, and files at the Museum of North Idaho.

  Details on how Wallace, Idaho, looked, from Mining Town: A Photographic Record of T. N. Barnard and Nellie Stockbridge from the Coeur d'Alenes, by Patricia Hart and Ivar Nelson, University of Washington Press, 1984.

  President Roosevelt in Wallace, from Hart and Nelson, Mining Town.

  Anti—Forest Service sentiment, various editorials from Butte Miner.

  Death of Boyd and the parrot, from Hult, Northwest Disaster, and various newspaper accounts, Idaho Press and Spokane Spokesman-Review, August 21–22, 1910.

  Evacuation and the trains, from Wallace Press Times, August 21, 1912, story on anniversary of fire.