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The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America, by Timothy Egan
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On the afternoon of August 20, 1910, a battering ram of wind moved through the drought-stricken national forests of Washington, Idaho, and 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 the blink of an eye. Forest rangers had assembled nearly ten thousand men — college boys, day workers, immigrants from mining camps — to fight the fire. 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. Equally dramatic 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 and preserved for every citizen. The robber barons fought Roosevelt and Pinchot’s rangers, but the Big Burn saved the forests even as it destroyed them: the heroism shown by the rangers turned public opinion permanently in their favor and became the creation myth that drove the Forest Service, with consequences still felt in the way our national lands are protected — or not — today.
- Sales Rank: #149963 in Books
- Brand: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
- Published on: 2009-10-19
- Format: Deckle Edge
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 1.08" h x 6.38" w x 9.14" l, 1.20 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 336 pages
- Great product!
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
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
The Bitterroots Inferno!
By LastRanger
Commonly called The Great Fire of 1910 this devastating natural disaster burned over 3 million acres of public and private land and is considered one of the biggest, if not the biggest, forest fire in US history. The other contender is the 1825 Miramichi Blaze that also consumed over 3 million acres in both Maine and New Brunswick, Canada. In his thrilling book "The Big Burn" journalist Timothy Egan documents the 1910 fire that torched the Bitterroot Mountains along the border between Montana and Idaho. In the early 20th Century President Teddy Roosevelt and his chief forester Gifford Pinchot went toe to toe with Private Lumber Companies, the Railroad Industry and the US Congress to protect million of acres of virgin wilderness from the dangers of uncontrolled logging and wasteful land use by wealthy industrialist and the greedy politicians that they supported. Above all Roosevelt and Gifford wanted our forests and grasslands to be treated as a Renewable Resource and preserved for future generations to use and enjoy. The first part of the book provides vital back ground information on the industrial and political climate of the early 1900s when Roosevelt's Presidency was coming to an end and William H. Taft's term in office was just beginning. Turned out that Taft was no fighter and, while TR was off hunting in Africa, he mostly caved in to the pressure from Big Business and their Congressional Cronies. Moving on to the fire itself "The Big Burn" takes the reader on a speeding roller coaster ride through the Gates of Hell to face this devastating wildfire. Egan's prose are fast moving and exciting, giving the reader a taste of what it was like for these forest rangers battling this terrifying enemy, only to be abandoned, scorned and largely forgotten by their own government. With no support from Congress, or the President, they were left to face the Bitterroots Inferno on their own. The author's research was extensive, and comprehensive, as indicated by his Acknowledgments and the Notes on Sources. The book is illustrated with several archival photographs of the people and places in the text, there is also an excellent map of the area involved (kinda small on the Kindle but just right on my iPad). As the fire became increasingly "out of control", Taft and Congress finally stepped in and assigned the US Army to assist the Forest Rangers in fighting the blaze and evacuating the homesteaders and townspeople. Many people would be evacuated by way of the local train services or, in some cases; on horseback, by wagon, or just by walking. Either way, it was not always clear that their escape route was any safer than just staying put. Most of the Army's work seems to have been done by the 25th Infantry's famous "negro soldiers" who went by their adopted name "The Buffalo Soldiers" and who were instrumental in keeping order while saving many, many, lives. All in all this book is a fast paced, exciting read on how people, from all walks of life, would face, and overcome, this flaming apocalypse. You will also get an in depth look at early 20th Century Politics and the Corporate Giants who controlled it all, for better or for worse. I had no downloading or technical problems with this Kindle Edition.
Last Ranger
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Thank God for TR!
By Donna L. Schumacher
I love reading about TR. Did not know about this fire in 1910. I love Montana, Idaho and Wyoming and our Natonal Parks, especially Yellowstone and Glacier and the history behind them. I knew that the lumber barrons and mine owners detested the idea of national parks and the formation of the Forest Rangers but this book really gives an indepth look of the people who wanted to preserve the lands in the western part of our country. I highly recommend this book!
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Egan is a good writer. Did a better job in his Worst ...
By rlamazon
Egan is a good writer. Did a better job in his Worst Hard Time, but you look forward to every page. After you read this, read McCullough's Johnstown Flood. Both stories tell of an era, like today, where wealth wanted all things of value, and to be able to sell or use or keep for their own purposes, the resources of America without concern as to how their misuse could affect others not in that upper layer of fortunates.
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