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

The Bitterroots heal slowly. The blaze cleared sections of the earth bare. It is a difficult sight for the rangers to behold. Pulaski returns to work. He is not entitled to sick pay, and he is his family’s only income source. He comes to symbolize the fire’s destruction:

To see him was to be reminded of two days in August when the land blew up, the walking, wounded face of the Forest Service. And to some—the men who had shoved women from the exit trains, or turned the other way when Weigle begged for help to rescue Pulaski from the mine—he was a reminder of their cowardice. Of course, he was a hero in the Coeur d’Alene, as he was throughout the country. Everyone said so: Ranger Pulaski, such courage! But that meant little; in truth Pulaski was a broken man, best kept at a distance (250).

Pulaski works inside answering calls from the government seeking information on the fire and his crew in the tunnel. Congress agrees to compensate those unable to work because of injuries suffered fighting the fire, but they design a cumbrous, retraumatizing process which eventually denies Pulaski remuneration. Without his knowledge, Haines writes to the Carnegie Hero Fund on Pulaski’s behalf. He, too, is denied.

Pulaski tends to the graves of the fallen, “alone, at great pain and some financial cost” (252). He works long hours in his blacksmith shop and designs a unique firefighting tool: “an ax and a hoe-type blade on a single handle” (253). He tries to patent the tool to finance eye surgery, but soon gives up. The tool is called the “Pulaski Axe” and is now used by firefighters everywhere.

In 1912, Roosevelt again runs for president. He splits the Republican party in two: Roosevelt supporters forming the Progressive, or Bull Moose Party and Taft supporters remaining Republicans. Pinchot writes the party platform, “a contract with the people” (257). Faced with a multiparty election ballet, the country elects a liberal majority, splitting its votes between three left leaning candidates: Woodrow Wilson (Democrat), Roosevelt (Progressive), and Eugene Debs (Socialist). Wilson wins the nomination with 42% of the vote. Egan elaborates, “The Bull Moose Party faded away almost as quickly as it came to life […] But many of those self-described Progressives never went back to the Republican Party, a break that shaped the GOP for the next hundred years” (257).

Taft is appointed a Supreme Court justice, a job he wanted from the outset. Roosevelt leaves for South America, then returns home to Oyster Bay, Long Island, and rediscovers writing. He dies in 1919 from an embolism. Pulaski retires from the Forest Service in 1929 and dies in 1931. Lone Adair moves home to Idaho after losing her homestead to the blaze. She lives until 1977. Weigle remains with the Forest Service and works in the Alaska Territory while living on a boat, then in Washington State until 1933. Debitt leaves the service shortly after the fire amid controversy. Accused of misappropriating funds for personal use and other infractions, he leaves his post and disappears. Egan adds, “People in Avery say he became a cult leader in a nudist camp” (261). Halm remains a ranger while studying engineering at night. He passes a federal civil service test and becomes a Forest Service survey engineer, a position he holds for three decades. The creek where he kept his men alive is renamed Halm Creek. 

Pinchot makes a final trip west in 1937. By now, Roosevelt, Muir, the early rangers, Heyburn, Cannon, Clark, and Taft are all gone. The Nevada county in which Las Vegas sits is named for Clark, its founder. Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), Teddy’s cousin, is now president. Pinchot married a woman named Cornelia Bryce and they have a son, now grown. Between the fire and now, Pinchot has served two terms as Pennsylvania governor, where “he tried to do for the commonwealth what he and Teddy Roosevelt had attempted to do for the entire nation” (265). He also advised FDR “on restoration in the natural world” (265), creating a federal jobs program and launching the Civilian Conservation Corps that put as many as 600,000 people to work during the Great Depression conserving public lands. FDR implements other elements of Roosevelt’s progressive vision for the country, completing the work his cousin began decades prior: “Social Security for the elderly. Workers’ compensation for people knocked out of a job by injury or sickness. Regulation of the stock market and banks. A minimum wage. A graduated income tax” (266).

Many stumps of burned-down trees and other remnants of the fire remain, but “new forest was starting to take hold in early maturity” (268). Koch and Greeley remain in the forest service. Koch expresses an intimate relationship with the land and rejects promotions within the service that would send him from his beloved Montana forests to Washington D.C.

Greeley has matured differently. Now the head forester in the service, he emerged from the fire “determined to change the central task of the Forest Service” (269). In the fight of man versus fire, Greeley vows to never again let fire prevail. This determination is “not for preservation’s sake, but to make sure there were plenty of trees for the giants of the timber industry to get at” (270). Pinchot is appalled by Greeley’s newfound ideology. Under Greeley’s stewardship, logging increases and fire prevention becomes the sole priority of the Forest Service. Big timber companies love the Forest Service under Greeley: “Taxpayers would pay for building roads, scouting the big timber, and snuffing the fires, then offer up trees more than two centuries old for a pittance to the industry. Logging […] grew tenfold” (271). In 1928, Greeley leaves the Forest Service to become an executive for the West Coast Lumbermen’s Association.

What Pinchot finds in the forests is disheartening. Government roads, better machinery, and lax regulation have permitted industrial clear-cuts and “entire mountainsides clipped of all trees in a single sweep, the land literally scalped, a scorched-earth force” (272). The Forest Service’s objective of stopping all wildfires makes them more likely to burn: “The woods were full of dry, dying, aging timber and underbrush-fuel” (273). It won’t be until the end of the century that the Forest Service realizes fire is necessary and decides to tolerate some burns.

Over the next decade, Pinchot writes a conservation memoir that he finishes shortly before his death in 1946. Egan says of Pinchot’s transformation on the issue of fire:

It appears that the younger Pinchot had made a pact with his hubris: in promising in the early days to whip wildfire, he won enough public confidence to see the Forest Service through its birthing pains. But the price of that bargain was now clear in the idea that the timber industry had embraced while co-opting the Forest Service: yes, fire would be defeated, at all costs, to keep standing trees for industry. If universal suppression meant sick, overburdened, ready-to-burn forests, that was another cost, one that would not become obvious until later in the century (275).

Roosevelt and Pinchot’s goals have been realized in the 21st century. Logging in the national forests has all but ceased, mostly by way of market forces: “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” (282).

Most people value the nation’s public forests, but they remain under assault by industry interests. President Trump’s administration has opened public lands to the energy industry. He repealed a rule that prohibited mining companies from dumping waste in rivers, shrank the size of two national monuments, granted increased oil and gas industry permits, and opened Arctic waters to drilling. He is pushing to allow logging in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest. Egan writes, “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” (282).

All that work, all that fighting, all that destruction of a pristine ecosystem—the objective is now gone; time rendered it obsolete. The railways that wrought so much destruction are gone. Big money interests now push for similar destruction in the name of industry: oil, natural gas, coal-industries that are either now obsolete or soon will be, yet their advocates are making the same arguments as Senators Clark and Heyburn.