The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America |  | Author: Timothy Egan
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
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Rating:  41 reviews
Sales Rank: 173
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 336
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Dimensions (in): 9 x 6.3 x 0.8
ISBN: 0618968415
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.911
EAN: 9780618968411
ASIN: 0618968415
Publication Date: October 19, 2009
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Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best of the Month, October 2009: When Theodore Roosevelt vacated the Oval Office, he left a vast legacy of public lands under the stewardship of the newly created Forest Service. Immediately, political enemies of the nascent conservation movement chipped away at the foundations of the untested agency, lobbying for a return of the land to private interests and development. Then, in 1910, several small wildfires in the Pacific Northwest merge into one massive, swift, and unstoppable blaze, and the Forest Service is pressed into a futile effort to douse the flames. Over 100 firefighters died heroically, galvanizing public opinion in favor of the forests--with unexpected ramifications exposed in today's proliferation of destructive fires. Just as he recounted the Dust Bowl experience in The Worst Hard Time (a National Book Award winner), The Big Burn vividly recreates disaster through the eyes of the men and women who experienced it (though this time without the benefit of first-hand accounts). It's another incredible--and incredibly compelling--feat of historical journalism. --Jon Foro
Amazon Exclusive Essay: "The Ghosts of 1910" by Timothy Egan, Author of The Big Burn 
Nearly a hundred years ago, a big piece of Rocky Mountain high country fell to a fire that has never been matched--in size, ferocity, or how it changed the country. I was drawn to this fire in part because of its mythic status among my fellow Westerners. But I was reluctant to try and tell this story because everyone who had lived through it had gone to their grave. With The Worst Hard Time, I could look into the eyes of people who survived the Dust Bowl and hear their stories--firsthand. They were happy to pass them on. I was the baton.
With The Big Burn, the stories would have to come from ghosts. That fire burned 3 million acres and five towns to the ground in the hot sweep of a single weekend. It also killed nearly a hundred people. So, my task was to listen to the dead--those Italian and Irish immigrant firefighters in their letters home, those first forest rangers in memories collected in volumes stashed away in mountain towns, and in the notes and diaries of two great men who founded the Forest Service. One, Teddy Roosevelt, is a voice that lives nearly as loud today as when he bestrode the world stage. The other, Gifford Pinchot, was less known, but his legacy, like that of Roosevelt, is everywhere in the public land that Americans now claim as a birthright. And what’s more, Pinchot himself was married to a ghost for nearly 20 years, one of the more fascinating things I found in the haunt of the Big Burn. (Photo © Sophie Egan)
Photographs from The Big Burn
(Click to Enlarge)  |  |  | | President Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir atop Glacier Point in Yosemite National Park | Ranger Ed Pulaski, whose actions saved many lives | Ranger Joe Halm after the fire. Like Ranger Pulaski, he helped save many lives |  |  |  | | Men standing amid downed timber after the Big Burn of 1910 | Young Gifford Pinchot, a close friend and personal aide of Roosevelt’s and the first Chief of the U.S. Forest Service | A ForestService fire patrol in 1914 |
A Q&A with Timothy Egan Q: Tell us something about that great fire. A: Well, it was the largest wildfire in American history, based on size. In less than two days, it torched more than three million acres, burned five towns to the ground, and killed nearly one hundred people. Q: Wow. How big is three million acres? A: Imagine if the entire state of Connecticut burned in a weekend--that's what you have here. Q: And yet in your subtitle you call this the fire that saved America. A: That's right. This happened in August 1910--next year will be the one hundredth anniversary. It came just after Teddy Roosevelt had left office, and left a legacy of public land nearly the size of France. But after Roosevelt was gone from Washington, in 1909, the Forest Service, the stewards of his legacy, came under attack. Gilded Age money wanted the rangers gone, the land placed in private hands. Enemies in Congress were constantly sniping at the young agency. And people out west were suspicious of the value of “Teddy's green rangers,” as they called them. They thought they were all college boys, softies, city kids. Q: So how did the fire change that image? A: It made heroes--almost mythic heroes--of the young men who led platoons of firefighters into a sea of flames. The government had marshaled ten thousand people, an army of young men, immigrants, and volunteers, to fight the fire. It was the first large-scale effort to battle a wildfire in U.S. history. The big-city daily newspapers here and abroad covered it like a war. The firefighters failed, because the Big Burn was so big and moved so quickly. But they succeeded in one respect: it turned the tide of public opinion, and Roosevelt's “Great Crusade” was saved. But at an awful cost. Those men should never have died. The fire was a once-in-a-century force of nature, and nothing could have stopped it. Q: How so? A: The fire moved faster than a horse at full gallop. It's been estimated that it consumed enough trees to build a city the size of Chicago. And it burned at nearly 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit in spots, incinerating the ground down to bedrock. No army of bedraggled men with shovels and picks could stop that. Q: After writing a book about the Dust Bowl, what drew you to a fire from 1910? A: I guess I'm working my way through the elements, going from dust to fire! Narrative history, basically just storytelling, is such a thrill to develop. You relive several lives through this drama. You inhabit their time. Like The Worst Hard Time, this book follows a dual-track story and several real-life people through this event. Q: How did you hear about the Great Fire? A: I've heard about the Big Burn since I was a little kid, camping in Montana and Idaho with my family. It had this larger-than-life status. And then, as a New York Times reporter covering the West and many wildfires, I found that this fire was a sacred text. Q: What surprised you about the story? A: I think it was Voltaire who said history never repeats itself, but man always does. As with the story I tried to tell in The Worst Hard Time, here you have a classic tale of human beings against nature. Hubris plays a huge role. In the end, nature wins, of course. Nature always bats last, as they said after the Bay Area earthquake that disrupted the World Series. Q: What else came as a surprise? A: I was hugely impressed with Roosevelt and his chief forester, a very strange and original American now nearly lost to our history named Gifford Pinchot. These were two easterners, born into wealth, who crusaded a century ago for the Progressive Era idea that a democracy and public land were inextricably linked. They always talked about land belonging to “the little guy.” It was a radical idea then, at a time when the gulf between the rich and poor was never greater. Roosevelt and Pinchot were both traitors to their class, in that sense. And both were--how to say this--odd people. Q: What do you mean by that? A: I mean it in a positive sense. They went skinny-dipping together in the Potomac, boxed and wrestled, climbed rocks and rode horses through Rock Creek Park, all while at the pinnacle of power, while hatching these conservation ideals. And Pinchot, the founding forester, on top of everything else, was married to a ghost--a dead woman, a true spiritual union--for nearly twenty years. Q: What was that all about? A: He was a quirky guy, very smart but also very spiritual. Q: And Teddy Roosevelt, did he live up to the image carved on Mount Rushmore? A: More so. He was such a...multitasker! A presidential polymorph! He wrote something like fifteen books before the age of forty. He climbed the Matterhorn after doctors told him he was doomed to a sickly, indoors life. And he took on the entrenched, powerful moguls and politicians of the Gilded Age. Q: So the story you tell is really two stories, as you mentioned earlier: the founding of American conservation and how this fire saved it? A: Precisely. I'm always interested in the collision between man and nature. But again, what struck me as unusual in this case was how the collision preserved something bigger, more lasting--the idea of conservation itself. Q: So the fire was a good thing? A: I don't think the families who lost their loved ones would say that. I try to focus on five or so people who faced this beast on the ground. You know, history is not always about Great Men. It's also about people in the margins, who rarely get recognition, who make it turn. And in this case, you had some Italian and Irish immigrants, a tough female homesteader, some African-American soldiers, some brave and young forest rangers--all of whom were heroes, as important to how this fire changed history as were Roosevelt and Pinchot. Q: Aside from the conservation legacy, why is a fire from a hundred years ago important today? A: We're entering an age of catastrophic wildfires, so the experts say. Big parts of the West will burn over the next decade. In those forests you have all this fuel built up: dead and dying trees. The land wants to burn, perhaps needs to burn. A big part of the reason why goes back to the Big Burn. I don't want to give away a story twist, but you’ll see late in the book that another lesson--perhaps tragic, certainly misguided--was taken away from the Big Burn. It's with us in a very big way. Q: How, specifically? A: We're seeing bigger, hotter, longer, earlier wildfires around the country today, and much of them can be traced to the wrong lessons of the Big Burn. Firefighting now accounts for nearly half of the Forest Service budget. This was not what Roosevelt had in mind.
Product Description
On the afternoon of August 20, 1910, a battering ram of wind moved through the drought-stricken national forests of Washington, Idaho, and Montana, whipping the hundreds of small blazes burning across the forest floor into a roaring inferno that jumped from treetop to ridge as it raged, destroying towns and timber in the blink of an eye. Forest rangers had assembled nearly ten thousand men âââ college boys, day workers, immigrants from mining camps âââ to fight the fire. But no living person had seen anything like those flames, and neither the rangers nor anyone else knew how to subdue them.
Egan narrates the struggles of the overmatched rangers against the implacable fire with unstoppable dramatic force. Equally dramatic is the larger story he tells of outsized president Teddy Roosevelt and his chief forester, Gifford Pinchot. Pioneering the notion of conservation, Roosevelt and Pinchot did nothing less than create the idea of public land as our national treasure, owned by and preserved for every citizen. The robber barons fought Roosevelt and Pinchotâs rangers, but the Big Burn saved the forests even as it destroyed them: the heroism shown by the rangers turned public opinion permanently in their favor and became the creation myth that drove the Forest Service, with consequences still felt in the way our national lands are protectedâ â âor not ââ today.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 41
 Enjoy, but beware November 19, 2009
Yalensian
Timothy Egan is a talented writer, and his book doesn't lack drama or excitement. THE BIG BURN grippingly recounts the events surrounding the Great Fire of 1910, including the response of the federal government through Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, and it offers an interesting snapshot of American life in the early twentieth century. All in all, it's a great story, nicely told. But . . . as a work of historical scholarship, the book has the weaknesses typical of "popular history." There is a good bit of supposing and psychologizing, of quotations that sound oddly modern. While Egan includes some citations at the back, the text is not footnoted, so it's difficult to trace the provenance of any particular piece of information, let alone the quotes.
I wouldn't necessarily recommend against reading the book because of these flaws. I would just say to read it primarily for pleasure and avoid taking every last detail as historical fact (which is probably good advice for reading almost any work of history).
 A fascinating story about one of our lesser known disasters November 18, 2009
R. C Sheehy (Foxboro,MA USA)
The Big Burn is a fascinating story of one of our lesser known disasters. While forest fires are big news now and we see the dramatic footage of planes and fire crews working to contain the fires, none of that was around in 1910 when this fire took place. The damage done was tremendous and the victory was in some senses a Pyrrhic one. Timothy Egan does a wonderful job of setting the stage for this terrible event, describing it in graphic detail and then following up with the reader.
Egan does a great job of telling us how the policy adopted after the fire did help to save our national forests but the idea of fighting every fire caused terrible fires in the 1980's up to today. He offers a simple and compelling story that makes the book a page turner and one easy to understand. My only concern is that he pushes the stories of the survivors at the expense of those who perished and I do think that weakens his story. Other than that I highly recommend this story.
Nowhere near as good as expected November 4, 2009
E. Jacobs
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I read a magazine review about this book that praised it to the skies. Unfortunately, it was nowhere near my expectations after reading that review. The book covered an amazingly interesting era in American history--the Roosevelt years. However, in my opinion the book was a little bit too one-sided regarding Roosevelt himself (and I am an admirer of his). All of the writing related to Roosevelt seemed very one-dimensional. I get it: Roosevelt was good, Taft was bad.
Moving on, the description of the fire was repetitive and at times confusing. The story of the fire was told from several different locations in the forest(s), but unfortunately the characters that were supposed to demarcate the stories were not compelling enough for me to differentiate between the forest locations or even the characters themselves. Therefore, the scenes from the fire seemed to drag on far too long. I believe that if an editor would've cut about 100 pages from this book it would have been eminently more readable.
I give it three stars because it does deliver useful information about the beginnings of the forest service; however, I was not impressed with the story-telling at all. With all of the luminous and eccentric characters of the time, the book had the potential to be far more compelling than it was.
 Not Convincing at all October 29, 2009
Alan Tidwell (Washington, DC)
0 out of 26 found this review helpful
I just heard an interview Egan, which left me less than likely to read this book. While it at first sounded interesting, the more the author spoke, the less interested I was. He claimed the fire in 1910 had a huge and negative impact on the US Forestry Service. When pressed by the interviewer he couldn't really come up with anything concrete. This sounded very much like wanting to make something that wasn't there. No doubt the 1910 had a huge impact on the Forestry Service, but I doubt a negative one. Furthermore he kept claiming that Roosevelt had initiated this conversion of public land into Federally owned forest land, making the assertion that it was unowned. Not to belabor the point, but it had been owned by various American Indian tribes, whose possession of the land had been eradicated by the US government. In fact, the author kept up the ongoing American love affair with Roosevelt, who would today be called a supporter of genocide. It was, after all, Roosevelt who said that the American Indian should be wiped out and that their lands all converted into national parks. The final nail in the coffin was that while recounting the conversion of land into Federal land he tried to recall the date of the Louisiana Purchase, completed in 1803, and couldn't do it. What all this says to me that he has probably not done his homework and written an engaging book that involves Roosevelt (always good for book sales) but doesn't really have much of a story to tell.
Warm but not hot enough October 19, 2009
Harry Eagar (Maui)
2 out of 10 found this review helpful
The Station fire that got so much attention this summer took two weeks to burn about 200,000 acres. The "Big Burn" in 1910 wiped out 3 million acres in two days - about 100 times more intense.
If only Timothy Egan's retelling matched the event.
The 1910 fire wasn't especially deadly. The Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire in Manhattan less than six months later killed more people. But both had lasting political effects.
The factory fire gave a boost to the union movement. The Big Burn, according to Egan, saved the Forest Service and, in a more profound sense, ratified a new view by Americans of their national endowment.
The first half of "The Big Burn" is slow going. It tells how Teddy Roosevelt, an accidental president if there ever was one, imposed, briefly, his notions of conservation on a Republican Party that before and since has been devoted to looting the public lands.
Egan's retelling is impressionistic rather than precise, with saints (John Muir, the publicist), sinners (Senator Weldon Heyburn, the lumber operator) and prophets in the wilderness (Gifford Pinchot, first head of the Forest Service). Interesting personalities all, but they are more caricatures than real people in Egan's retelling, especially the villains.
The story demands to be set in a national frame - there was a lot more to Teddy's Progressivism than trees - but Egan fails to do that. He does not, for example, mention the Triangle Shirtwaist fire.
His history of the fire itself is more satisfying although, again, Egan sets it in a small frame.
The fire raged through the Bitterroots of Idaho, but it also devastated other states and part of Canada. Egan limits himself to one valley - which he fails to describe thoroughly - and a handful of personalities.
Again, we have a saint (Ed Pulaski, whose name is attached to the firefighters' tool), a sinner (Ralph Debitt, a cowardly ranger) and a prophet (Bill Weigle, a Forest Service supervisor). These characters are more sympathetic to Egan and seem more real, less stand-ins for political movements.
There are plenty of other arresting players, too: a regiment of black cavalrymen, a pair of immigrants from Italy, a football star turned ranger. As far as it goes, this is a good story. Egan just doesn't carry it far enough.
"The Big Burn" is worth reading anyway, although the reader will have to supply some of his own facts to flesh it out - like the ascendancy of James Watt under the presidency of Ronald Reagan, contradicting Egan's blithe romance about how the fire taught America to reverence its natural inheritance.
The treatment by the government of the men who served it was shameful and is worth knowing about. Egan does treat this aspect of the story adequately.
In fact, there is a lot more about the Big Burn worth knowing than Egan puts into this interesting but superficial history.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 41
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