New West Book Review

Young Men and Fire: Timothy Egan’s “The Big Burn”

By Jenny Shank, 11-21-09

The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt & The Fire That Saved America
by Timothy Egan
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 324 pages, $27

In August of 1910, the largest fire ever to sweep across forests in the United States claimed trees, buildings, and lives across a stretch of three million acres in the Rocky Mountains.  Timothy Egan writes in his follow-up to The Worst Hard Time, his National Book Award-winning exploration of the Dustbowl, that this blaze was known as “The Big Burn,” and it stretched “from central Idaho, east into Montana, west into Washington, north into British Columbia.” The smoke drifted as far away as Chicago.  “It was as if a volcanic blast had disgorged the airborne remains of the forested northern Rockies into disparate parts of the United States.” Besides destroying several towns in the region, this fire had a lasting effect on the course of the country’s conservation movement, initiated by Theodore Roosevelt and his close confidant Gifford Pinchot, first head of the United States Forest Service.

Egan shows that many of the lessons derived from the Great Fire of 1910 were still followed by foresters a century later.  People on both sides of the conservation movement tried to use it to achieve their political ends.  To demonstrate the larger set of circumstances in which this fire played out, after a vivid opening chapter set in the midst of the fire, Egan steps back to February of 1899, when the 34-year-old Gifford Pinchot visits the Governor of New York, Teddy Roosevelt, who invited him to engage in a wrestling match and a boxing bout.  This afternoon of roughhousing cemented their friendship. 

“Both were adrenaline addicts and thrill seekers, the longer the odds, the better,” Egan writes.  Pinchot was born into wealth in Connecticut, but found his calling in the forests of the Western United States.  He studied the concept of forestry in Europe, and began to try to convince people that American forests should be managed, and that lumber interests, mining companies, developers, and speculators should not have the sole say in the fate of America’s forests.  When Roosevelt became Vice President in 1901, and President McKinley’s assassination later that year installed him as President, he brought Pinchot and his ideas with him to the White House.

Egan lays out the story of Pinchot and Roosevelt’s conservation efforts clearly and concisely, interspersing it with entertaining and insightful quotes from diaries and newspapers.  (Some readers might have reviewed parts of this history recently through Ken Burns’ The National Parks: America’s Best Idea.) At the time the 1910 fire hits, Roosevelt had been out of office for a year and his successor, the incompetent Taft, had allowed congress undo much of Roosevelt’s efforts at establishing national forests and a ranger system to oversee them.  The rangers were under-funded, overworked, and little respected at the time the fires break out.

But Egan really excels at creating a gripping narrative out of the events of the fire itself.  Egan introduces key figures, such as the Wallace, Idaho-based U.S. Forest Service Ranger Edward Pulaski, and the young Washington State football star-turned ranger Joe Halm, and holds readers in suspense while we wait to find out what happened to them in the fire.  One of the most memorable characters is Ione “Pinkie” Adair, a red-headed 25-year-old single woman living in a cabin in the Coeur d’Alene forest, trying to establish it as a homestead that she could then sell to a timber company.  She ends up cooking for a crew of firefighters during the fire, and makes a daring escape from the burning forests.

Another great character that Egan introduces is the deplorable town of Taft, Montana, filled with worthless drunks, whorehouses, outlaws, and reprobates.  Egan writes:

“Carved inside a national forest, the village of Taft frightened most anyone not used to humanity with its raw appetites exposed…One nearby shop advertised ‘shoes, booze and screws,’ and they weren’t talking about hardware.  It was an easy place for an outlaw to hide, because everyone in Taft provided camouflage; a decent man would stand out like cactus on an ice floe…A reporter visiting from Chicago described Taft as ‘the wickedest city in America.’”

When the fire hits, no one from Taft will volunteer to help the rangers fight it.  Instead, they all get enormously drunk so that they won’t mind as much when the flames catch hold of them.

The fire of 1910 gripped the imagination of people across the country, and ended up politically bolstering the existence of the U.S. Forest Service, even though the individuals who lost their lives or health in the fire were barely compensated.  Egan concludes The Big Burn by reflecting how the fire of 1910 led to a “zero tolerance” approach toward wild fire containment that the U.S. Forest Service followed until very recently.

In The Big Burn, Timothy Egan once again demonstrates his skill at collecting the individual stories of eyewitnesses to a historical event and weaving them into a fascinating narrative that provides readers with a wider view that is relevant today.

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