The Big Burn - book

The Big Burn, Timothy Egan (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009)

This is a truly fine book. For a book of its type it is probably about as good as it can be. The major focus of this work is a description of the huge and devastating 1910 forest fire that ravaged some 3.2 million acres of prime forest lands in Idaho, Montana, and Washington, and completely destroyed several small towns as well, including my hometown of Wallace, Idaho (no, I did not live there then). This fire is widely regarded as the largest forest fire ever to occur in the United States. Egan’s prose is up to the task of giving us an insider’s view of this once in-more-than-a-hundred-year’s event, a vicarious experience of all the fear, panic, terror, horror, destruction, and even madness, as well as the pathetic cowardice of many and the unbelievable bravery of a few. When it was clear that Wallace could not be saved, and the order to evacuate was given, there were two trains, one going east toward Missoula, Montana, and one going west toward Spokane, Washington. Both of them had to pass through very narrow mountain passes and it was by no means certain they would make it through. In spite of the order than only women and children could be so evacuated, grown men, some of them the most solid citizens, boarded the trains and even usurped the seats of the women and children. As little could be done to stop this, those in charge finally said, “Let the bastards go.” At the same time the Forest Rangers and a few volunteers were working heroically to save what could be saved of lives and property, at serious risk of their own lives. It is an account of the best and worst of human behavior in times of major disasters.

Several smaller towns were also completely destroyed: Taft, Saltese, DeBorgia, Grand Forks, and Mullan. Ironically, the only town that was saved was Avery, Idaho, saved by the bravery and discipline of the 25th Infantry, an all black unit that was not welcome in North Idaho. Their actions brought them some welcome respect they had previously lost when ordered into Wallace as strikebreakers a few years earlier. Unhappily, the greatest hero of all, Ed Pulaski, who saved the lives of some forty others at the barrel of a gun and great risk to his own life, and who was recognized as a hero by the locals, was spurned by the Federal Government, never received a penny of aid or compensation, and was forced to live out his ruined life in pain and bitterness.

There is much more to this book than the fire itself, it is also the story of how the National Forests and the Forest Service came to be. It is a rather incredible story itself, of how two very wealthy Easterners, Teddy Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, both fell in love with nature, the forests, and the West, and conspired to create what we now accept as the Conservation Movement. These two men, I think kindly described as somewhat eccentric, were great friends and spent much time together, wrestling, boxing, fishing, hiking, camping, boating, hunting, and exploring, and out of this conspired to conserve vast amounts of public land that became our Public Parks, and create a Service dedicated to their maintenance. This was by no means an easy task, they were fought every step of the way by vested interests, the “robber barons,” supported by Senators and Congressmen, who were intent on making their short term profits at the expense of the public and generations to come. This was perhaps best expressed by Idaho Senator Weldon Heyburn, who, when asked about conservation, replied to the effect, “Let future generations look out for themselves.” Heyburn despised the idea of conservation and mocked the first Forest Rangers as little more than sissy boy scouts. He fought against any and all appropriations for the new agency, for the most part successfully, the first Rangers were very poorly paid, had to furnish their own horses and equipment, and so on. Thus when the big fire began there were not enough shovels or other tools to adequately fight it, not enough personnel, not enough of anything. Ironically, Heyburn himself lost property because of this. He was the worst kind of anti-conservationist one can imagine, so terrible that he makes ex-Senator of Idaho, Larry Craig, who was often sarcastically referred to as “The Senator from Boise Cascade,” look like a rabid environmentalist.

Of course it is unlikely that any amount of manpower or equipment could have stopped this monumental fire, which came after months of drought and was fed by gale force winds from the Palouse (this kind of windstorm was called a “palouser”). But it became evident that much of the problem was due to the lack of preparation, manpower, and equipment, which Pinchot soon drew upon to make the Forest Service and fire suppression a much higher priority than it had been previously. Whether this was “The Fire That Saved America,” the subtitle of The Big Burn, is a bit of an overstatement, it was the fire that finally changed the opinion of the Forest Service and the National Park Service, and made them into what we have today. Gifford Pinchot, the first head of the Forest Service, and Teddy Roosevelt, the first conservationist President, must be respected for what they accomplished against great odds.

Unhappily, we still have elements of our society that would gladly cut all the remaining forests if they could, pollute the rivers and lakes, destroy the salmon, the caribou, the grizzly bears and wolves, tear up the environment with their machinery, and salute the likes of Heyburn whose memory still lives in bumper stickers and environmental policy: “Hungry and out of work, eat an environmentalist,” “Wilderness, land of no use,” “Anti-hunters should be spayed and neutered,” and other mindless admissions of greed and ignorance. You should read this fine book, what is transpiring now around the world has not progressed far enough from what was happening then.