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

Ever hear of the wildfire of 1910? Me neither. But the fire, filed under "Great Fire of 1910" on Wikipedia, burned an area the size of Connecticut across Washington, Idaho, and Montana in August of that year. In The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America, Timothy Egan (whose Worst Hard Time was one of my best reads in 2012) reconstructs not only the fire, but the policy debate around the whole idea of national forests that preceded and succeeded the fire.

Essentially, Egan explains, the story goes like this: America in the gilded age was a boom or bust kind of place, and nowhere was this more evident than in the mining and railroad towns running across the northern spine of the country (one of the few remaining frontiers). What to do about undesirable resident prostitutes one early forest ranger asked another? Replace them with desirable ones, came the deadpan response. And why, you ask, were resident prostitutes an issue for forest rangers? Because in the early days of the U.S. Forest Service, any number of activities - including tremendous logging and also the construction of railroads - was permitted. It was one of the many compromises Teddy Roosevelt (who comes off much better in The Big Burn than in The Imperial Cruise) had to make in order to establish the badly underfunded forest service in the first place.

By the time the brutally dry summer of 1910 rolled around, Teddy had been out of office for the better part of 18 months and it fell to Howard Taft to "manage" the burning west - or at least read the reports on it - but Teddy's shadow loomed large over the events surrounding the fire. Still, The Big Burn is as much about the likes of Gifford Pinchot (American's first forester) and William Clark (crooked copper magnate and U.S. Senator) as it is about Roosevelt. All-in-all, this is an interesting read, although not nearly as engrossing as Worst Hard Time.