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The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America, by Timothy Egan
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In THE WORST HARD TIME, Timothy Egan put the environmental disaster of the Dust Bowl at the center of a rich history, told through characters he brought to indelible life. Now he performs the same alchemy with the Big Burn, the largest-ever forest fire in America and the tragedy that cemented Teddy Roosevelt's legacy in the land.
On the afternoon of August 20, 1910, a battering ram of wind moved through the drought-stricken national forests of Washington, Idaho, Montana, whipping the hundreds of small blazes burning across the forest floor into a roaring inferno that jumped from treetop to ridge as it raged, destroying towns and timber in an eyeblink. Forest rangers had assembled nearly ten thousand men�-- college boys, day-workers, immigrants from mining camps�-- to fight the fires. But no living person had seen anything like those flames, and neither the rangers nor anyone else knew how to subdue them.
Egan narrates the struggles of the overmatched rangers against the implacable fire with unstoppable dramatic force, through the eyes of the people who lived it. Equally dramatic, though, is the larger story he tells of outsized president Teddy Roosevelt and his chief forester Gifford Pinchot. Pioneering the notion of conservation, Roosevelt and Pinchot did nothing less than create the idea of public land as our national treasure, owned by every citizen. The robber barons fought him and the rangers charged with protecting the reserves, but even as TR's national forests were smoldering they were saved: The heroism shown by those same rangers turned public opinion permanently in favor of the forests,�though it changed the mission of the forest service with consequences felt in the fires of today.
THE BIG BURN tells an epic story, paints a moving portrait of the people who lived it, and offers a critical cautionary tale for our time.
- Sales Rank: #14931 in Books
- Published on: 2010-09-07
- Released on: 2010-09-07
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .88" w x 5.31" l, .74 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 352 pages
Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best of the Month, October 2009: When Theodore Roosevelt vacated the Oval Office, he left a vast legacy of public lands under the stewardship of the newly created Forest Service. Immediately, political enemies of the nascent conservation movement chipped away at the foundations of the untested agency, lobbying for a return of the land to private interests and development. Then, in 1910, several small wildfires in the Pacific Northwest merge into one massive, swift, and unstoppable blaze, and the Forest Service is pressed into a futile effort to douse the flames. Over 100 firefighters died heroically, galvanizing public opinion in favor of the forests--with unexpected ramifications exposed in today's proliferation of destructive fires. Just as he recounted the Dust Bowl experience in The Worst Hard Time (a National Book Award winner),� The Big Burn vividly recreates disaster through the eyes of the men and women who experienced it (though this time without the benefit of first-hand accounts). It's another incredible--and incredibly compelling--feat of historical journalism. --Jon Foro
Amazon Exclusive Essay: "The Ghosts of 1910" by Timothy Egan, Author of The Big Burn
Nearly a hundred years ago, a big piece of Rocky Mountain high country fell to a fire that has never been matched--in size, ferocity, or how it changed the country. I was drawn to this fire in part because of its mythic status among my fellow Westerners. But I was reluctant to try and tell this story because everyone who had lived through it had gone to their grave. With The Worst Hard Time, I could look into the eyes of people who survived the Dust Bowl and hear their stories--firsthand. They were happy to pass them on. I was the baton.
With The Big Burn, the stories would have to come from ghosts. That fire burned 3 million acres and five towns to the ground in the hot sweep of a single weekend. It also killed nearly a hundred people. So, my task was to listen to the dead--those Italian and Irish immigrant firefighters in their letters home, those first forest rangers in memories collected in volumes stashed away in mountain towns, and in the notes and diaries of two great men who founded the Forest Service. One, Teddy Roosevelt, is a voice that lives nearly as loud today as when he bestrode the world stage. The other, Gifford Pinchot, was less known, but his legacy, like that of Roosevelt, is everywhere in the public land that Americans now claim as a birthright. And what’s more, Pinchot himself was married to a ghost for nearly 20 years, one of the more fascinating things I found in the haunt of the Big Burn.
(Photo � Sophie Egan)
Photographs from The Big Burn
(Click to Enlarge)
President Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir atop Glacier Point in Yosemite National Park Ranger Ed Pulaski, whose actions saved many lives Ranger Joe Halm after the fire. Like Ranger Pulaski, he helped save many lives Men standing amid downed timber after the Big Burn of 1910 Young Gifford Pinchot, a close friend and personal aide of Roosevelt’s and the first Chief of the U.S. Forest Service A ForestService fire patrol in 1914
A Q&A with Timothy Egan
Q: Tell us something about that great fire. A: Well, it was the largest wildfire in American history, based on size. In less than two days, it torched more than three million acres, burned five towns to the ground, and killed nearly one hundred people. Q: Wow. How big is three million acres? A: Imagine if the entire state of Connecticut burned in a weekend--that's what you have here. Q: And yet in your subtitle you call this the fire that saved America. A: That's right. This happened in August 1910--next year will be the one hundredth anniversary. It came just after Teddy Roosevelt had left office, and left a legacy of public land nearly the size of France. But after Roosevelt was gone from Washington, in 1909, the Forest Service, the stewards of his legacy, came under attack. Gilded Age money wanted the rangers gone, the land placed in private hands. Enemies in Congress were constantly sniping at the young agency. And people out west were suspicious of the value of “Teddy's green rangers,” as they called them. They thought they were all college boys, softies, city kids. Q: So how did the fire change that image? A: It made heroes--almost mythic heroes--of the young men who led platoons of firefighters into a sea of flames. The government had marshaled ten thousand people, an army of young men, immigrants, and volunteers, to fight the fire. It was the first large-scale effort to battle a wildfire in U.S. history. The big-city daily newspapers here and abroad covered it like a war. The firefighters failed, because the Big Burn was so big and moved so quickly. But they succeeded in one respect: it turned the tide of public opinion, and Roosevelt's “Great Crusade” was saved. But at an awful cost. Those men should never have died. The fire was a once-in-a-century force of nature, and nothing could have stopped it. Q: How so? A: The fire moved faster than a horse at full gallop. It's been estimated that it consumed enough trees to build a city the size of Chicago. And it burned at nearly 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit in spots, incinerating the ground down to bedrock. No army of bedraggled men with shovels and picks could stop that. Q: After writing a book about the Dust Bowl, what drew you to a fire from 1910? A: I guess I'm working my way through the elements, going from dust to fire! Narrative history, basically just storytelling, is such a thrill to develop. You relive several lives through this drama. You inhabit their time. Like The Worst Hard Time, this book follows a dual-track story and several real-life people through this event. Q: How did you hear about the Great Fire? A: I've heard about the Big Burn since I was a little kid, camping in Montana and Idaho with my family. It had this larger-than-life status. And then, as a New York Times reporter covering the West and many wildfires, I found that this fire was a sacred text. Q: What surprised you about the story? A: I think it was Voltaire who said history never repeats itself, but man always does. As with the story I tried to tell in The Worst Hard Time, here you have a classic tale of human beings against nature. Hubris plays a huge role. In the end, nature wins, of course. Nature always bats last, as they said after the Bay Area earthquake that disrupted the World Series. Q: What else came as a surprise? A: I was hugely impressed with Roosevelt and his chief forester, a very strange and original American now nearly lost to our history named Gifford Pinchot. These were two easterners, born into wealth, who crusaded a century ago for the Progressive Era idea that a democracy and public land were inextricably linked. They always talked about land belonging to “the little guy.” It was a radical idea then, at a time when the gulf between the rich and poor was never greater. Roosevelt and Pinchot were both traitors to their class, in that sense. And both were--how to say this--odd people. Q: What do you mean by that? A: I mean it in a positive sense. They went skinny-dipping together in the Potomac, boxed and wrestled, climbed rocks and rode horses through Rock Creek Park, all while at the pinnacle of power, while hatching these conservation ideals. And Pinchot, the founding forester, on top of everything else, was married to a ghost--a dead woman, a true spiritual union--for nearly twenty years. Q: What was that all about? A: He was a quirky guy, very smart but also very spiritual. Q: And Teddy Roosevelt, did he live up to the image carved on Mount Rushmore? A: More so. He was such a...multitasker! A presidential polymorph! He wrote something like fifteen books before the age of forty. He climbed the Matterhorn after doctors told him he was doomed to a sickly, indoors life. And he took on the entrenched, powerful moguls and politicians of the Gilded Age. Q: So the story you tell is really two stories, as you mentioned earlier: the founding of American conservation and how this fire saved it? A: Precisely. I'm always interested in the collision between man and nature. But again, what struck me as unusual in this case was how the collision preserved something bigger, more lasting--the idea of conservation itself. Q: So the fire was a good thing? A: I don't think the families who lost their loved ones would say that. I try to focus on five or so people who faced this beast on the ground. You know, history is not always about Great Men. It's also about people in the margins, who rarely get recognition, who make it turn. And in this case, you had some Italian and Irish immigrants, a tough female homesteader, some African-American soldiers, some brave and young forest rangers--all of whom were heroes, as important to how this fire changed history as were Roosevelt and Pinchot. Q: Aside from the conservation legacy, why is a fire from a hundred years ago important today? A: We're entering an age of catastrophic wildfires, so the experts say. Big parts of the West will burn over the next decade. In those forests you have all this fuel built up: dead and dying trees. The land wants to burn, perhaps needs to burn. A big part of the reason why goes back to the Big Burn. I don't want to give away a story twist, but you’ll see late in the book that another lesson--perhaps tragic, certainly misguided--was taken away from the Big Burn. It's with us in a very big way. Q: How, specifically? A: We're seeing bigger, hotter, longer, earlier wildfires around the country today, and much of them can be traced to the wrong lessons of the Big Burn. Firefighting now accounts for nearly half of the Forest Service budget. This was not what Roosevelt had in mind. From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Egan, National Book Award winner for The Worst Hard Time, spins a tremendous tale of Progressive-era America out of the 1910 blaze that burned across Montana, Idaho and Washington and put the fledgling U.S. Forest Service through a veritable trial by fire. Underfunded, understaffed, unsupported by Congress and President Taft and challenged by the robber barons that Taft's predecessor, Theodore Roosevelt, had worked so hard to oppose, the Forest Service was caught unprepared for the immense challenge. Egan shuttles back and forth between the national stage of politics and the conflicting visions of the nation's future, and the personal stories of the men and women who fought and died in the fire: rangers, soldiers, immigrant miners imported from all over the country to help the firefighting effort, prostitutes, railroad engineers and dozens others whose stories are painstakingly recreated from scraps of letters, newspaper articles, firsthand testimony, and Forest Service records. Egan brings a touching humanity to this story of valor and cowardice in the face of a national catastrophe, paying respectful attention to Roosevelt's great dream of conservation and of an America for the little man. (Oct.)
Copyright � Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Bookmarks Magazine
Most reviewers thought that The Big Burn equaled or exceeded Egan's last book in both its prose and its historical synthesis. The majority were impressed by his ability to balance a riveting story with strong characters and an original analysis of the American conservation movement. A few reviewers, however, found the story unbalanced, preferring one side or another. Some found the policy history dull. But others felt that while Egan had fully committed his creativity to the story of Roosevelt and his allies, his actual descriptions of the fire were somewhat cliched. Nevertheless, all reviewers recommended The Big Burn as a fine piece of writing, a powerful history, and a great read.
Most helpful customer reviews
176 of 182 people found the following review helpful.
Like a raging wildfire
By Connie (She who hikes with dogs)
This book reads like a growing, raging wildfire: it starts out slow, then builds up to a spellbounding climax and finishes with a lengthy cleanup of loss and grief and the realization that the Forest Service is needed.
Timothy Egan is a gifted writer who knows how to keep readers spellbound. I started reading the book yesterday "just to get a feel for it" and a few hours later couldn't put it down. He does a great job of pulling the reader into this subject, introducing the main characters of TR, Gifford Pinchot (first Chief Forest Servicer who met an early demise when Taft took over) and Bill Greeley (District Ranger), and all the wealthy New Yorkers who resented wild lands being put in reserves for future generations. In the background is John Muir, this country's first passionate nature advocate and preservationist.
TR created the Forest Service in 1905 and Congress passed the first laws for its agency. With the buffalo, grizzly bear and wolf practically killed off from most lands, the last great fear was the wildfire. History has proven that even in the young United States, a ravaging fire could wipe out entire families, entire towns. After a brutally cold and wet winter in early 1910, the weather warmed up, drying the forests of the eventual burn area by April. Over 1000 smaller fires were already burning by late July. By then Roosevelt was out of the White House and a new man, William Taft, his successor.
This book is divided into three parts: 'In on the Creation," which describes the characters who were for and against the creation of the Forest Service and the western lands; the young underpaid progressives who were picked by Pinchot to be the first forest rangers, and all the wealthy senators and businessmen who were opposed to open lands for the public. The first rangers were more than just office administrators (like they are today), but young men who had to endure a two day grueling exam to prove that they could survive in the wilderness, hunt and cook their own food and build thir own cabin. Part II describes in vivid detail the frantic attempt to recruit forest fire fighters among Westerners who were still more interested in logging, mining, hunting and whoring and opposing anyone and anything that would prevent them from doing so. But then those smaller 1000 forest fires bled into one humungous inferno in late August that ravaged so much of eastern Washington, northern Idaho and western Montana in a matter of two days. The actual fire is described starting in the chapter "Men, Men, Men!" on page 110 out of this 297 page book. Part III winds down with the postfire days and months in "What They Saved" with the realization that the Forest Service is a necessary evil for the landowners and corporations that do business from and in the wilderness. The reader sees how the complete story of all the characters falls into place.
Egan knows how to make popular history interesting without dragging down the story with too many details. Describing the people involved in this story is no easy feat, yet reading "The Big Burn" is excitingly fast, highly entertaining and most interesting. Egan does an extraordinary job describing the constant tug and pulls that were going on during Roosevelt and Taft's administrations between Congress and especially Senator Weldon Heyburn from Idaho, wealthy railroad owners and businessmen on one side, and the growing young progressives pushing for reform across the country on the other. The reader becomes familiar with all the corruption, crimes, lies and stalls that went on for years in the early 20th century between land owners and land conservationists. (Preserving land for public use was unheard of at a time when large corporations were given it free to exploit for its natural resources.) Add in the popular yellow press at the time and all the many social changes going on in the working class, the final product is a well written social history that deserves to be read, enjoyed and passed on. A reader who enjoys history will gain greater insight into all the behind the scenes bickering that went on not just because of the Big Burn, but in society as a whole. Many of those progressive changes are with us today.
This book is Timothy Egan at his best.
64 of 67 people found the following review helpful.
Big country, big people, big problems: an epic American tale
By Long-Suffering Technology Consumer
Even though Teddy Roosevelt figures prominently in the title of this book, he has left office by the time of the August 1910 wildfire in the Bitterroot Mountains (along the Idaho-Montana border) at the true center of this story.
Roosevelt has left behind Gifford Pinchot to lead the conservation efforts of the nascent US Forest Service. Pinchot's efforts are underfunded and unpopular with influential senators, congressman and powerful industrial figures who want to leverage western timber and mineral reserves to enhance their personal empires. By the time the fire strikes, William Taft is serving ineffectually as president, essentially leaving Pinchot to do the best he can with what he has.
Timothy Egan lays out the political and historical scene setting in animated detail, providing well documented insights. He adds life and personality to the central players in the coming conflict between powerful people (with vastly differing agendas) and nature (with just one).
He then shifts to the fire itself. In 1910, the towns of the Bitterroots were populated by a diverse group of immigrants with social issues that could have come from today's op-ed pages. Writing about an influx of Italians, Egan says: "The Italian surge, in particular, angered those who felt the country was not recognizable, was overrun by foreigners, had lost its sense of identity. And they hated hearing all these strange languages, spoken in shops, schools and churches."
The events of this book take place at the intersection of many disruptive influences in America; railroads, telephone, freed blacks (the Buffalo Soldiers play a prominent role in the firefighting in this book). As we watch western fires threaten lives and property today, challenging even our advantages of aircraft (the US government owned two airplanes in 1910), communications and road transportation, it's hard to imagine the odds faced by those on the front lines in this book.
The final third of this book is an emotional look at hard men and women making hard choices in the face of fire fueled by dry timber and spread with hurricane-force Palouser wind. Some were deliberately heroic, others purely self-serving, and some simply met their end as they ran out of options while doing their duty. Egan captures the time and place with honesty and respect, and leaves you in awe of their pioneering spirit and the power of nature over humanity. The next time you see video of a woodland firefighter wielding a "Pulaski Axe", you'll appreciate its history...and know something about the man who gave it its name.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Excellent Writing
By S. Carney
I bought this book for my husband to read before a trip to the Northwest. He insisted that I read it as well ....but I was sure I would not be interested. The writing is excellent and the story very interesting. I was happy to have read it before we visited the area. I highly recommend it.
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