The big burn : Teddy Roosevelt and the fire that saved America /
Timothy Egan.
- 324 pages 24 cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
In one frenzied week, Roosevelt and his chief forester, Gifford Pinchot, outlined 16 million acres of Western woodland that they felt needed to be preserved. Laying out maps on the floor of the White House, they carved out huge chunks of Idaho, Montana, Wyoming and the other Western states as inviolate preserves (on paper, anyway). A handful of executive proclamations later, the deed was done. Grover Cleveland had created the forest reserve as a legal entity a few years earlier; now Roosevelt and Pinchot had breathed life into the idea. In so doing, they kept millions of dollars' worth of land and timber out of the hands of the robber barons, the Weyerhausers and Rockefellers and Harrimans who had already laid claim to much of the rest of the West "like European dukes dividing the spoils of a medieval war," Egan writes. Congress had a fit, of course -- particularly Sen. Weldon Heyburn of Idaho, who dubbed the forest chief "Czar Pinchot" and persecuted him relentlessly in committee hearings. So did "Uncle Joe" Cannon, the House speaker, who thundered, "Not one cent for scenery!" They were not happy to have been outfoxed. And then, three years later, the forests caught fire. In "The Big Burn," Timothy Egan reconstructs the legendary great fire of 1910, which torched more than 3 million acres of woodlands in Idaho and Montana -- an area almost as big as Connecticut, encompassing parts of 10 different national forests. It was, and remains, one of the biggest fires in American history (to which I hate to have to add, so far). At the heart of the blaze lay a handful of rickety boomtowns, including Avery, Idaho; Wallace, Idaho (home of the ungrateful Sen. Heyburn); and the sinful Taft, Mont., which reportedly had one prostitute for every four residents. Like the incumbent president after whom it had been named, Taft stood as a monument to human appetites, an objective correlative for the naked greed that had defined the history of the West. When the hated forest rangers came through town, looking for able-bodied men to help fight the gathering blaze, most residents of Taft looked the other way and kept on drinking.
Presidents--United States--Biography. Conservationists--United States--Biography. Forest conservation--History.--United States Nature conservation--History.--United States National parks and reserves--History.--United States Forest fires--History.--Montana Forest fires--History.--Idaho