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The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America |  | Author: Timothy Egan
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Category: Book
List Price: $27.00
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Seller: fivephoenixes
Rating:  74 reviews
Sales Rank: 3222
Format: Deckle Edge
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1St Edition
Pages: 336
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
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
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| • | ISBN13: 9780618968411 | | • | Condition: NEW | | • | Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark. |
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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. Forest rangers had assembled nearly ten thousand menâcollege boys, day workers, immigrants from mining campsâto 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.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 74
 Biased writing February 27, 2010
G. L. Tanty (American Southwest)
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
As others have pointed out, this book is written with such a bias politically and ecologically that it suffers in the telling. Those gosh darn robber barons, ancestors of all of today's Republicans, robbing the good citizens of the US from their natural resources. Well, they did that, sure. And without most of the individuals named, the country would still be huddled behind wooden stockades and starving in the winter. While not defending these people, seems to me that some of their contributions to the growth of our nation might have been acknowledged. On the other side, he paints an overly flattering portrait of Roosevelt, Pinchot and others; all of whom are the ancestors of today's Progressives.
Not surprising really when you know who Egan works for.
The other thing I didn't like was the book failed to put me into the catastrophe. I can remember books I've read about other man-made and natural disasters that made me feel as if I was there. This was cold and detached somehow. A shame really since I would love to read a better book on the subject.
 Probably one of the most thrilling histories of the past decade February 25, 2010
Cliff Graham
Egan does what few historical writers manage to pull off in the way that he gives the narrative such an intense arc. Fascinating details made all the more so in that I was listening to the audio book as I drove through Wallace, ID on I-90.
 I'm not sure how it "saved America" (3.5 stars) February 24, 2010
J. Green (Los Angeles, California)
In 1910 a large and intense wildfire burned 3 million acres over two days, destroying five small towns in Montana, Idaho, and Washington and killing about 100 people. Some of the dead were homesteaders and prospectors, but many were employees of the nation's new Forest Service, sometimes derisively known as "Teddy's green rangers" or "little GPs" after President Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, the two men who pioneered the new idea of forest conservation.
The background on the establishment of the Forest Service and the politics behind and against it was interesting, and the account of the fire was vivid and dramatic, although a bit confusing. The heroics of rangers like Ed Pulaski, Joe Halm, and others were inspiring, but the different accounts were difficult to follow and sort out. I was disappointed that it wasn't clear if the Forest Service did any good or how the disaster "saved America." Egan seems to take a conservationist agenda in that the heroes and villains are pretty obvious in his telling, but he fails to coherently summarize what lessons (if any) were learned by the Forest Service in how to manage the land. In fact, while the fire was a public relations boon, making heroes of the rangers who bravely fought it, it appears that the Forest Service later came under the influence of the very forces it was created to oppose - the logging industry - even facilitating equally disastrous clear cutting of the land in later years.
Egan isn't as masterful a history-teller as David McCullough, nor does he have a flair to insightfully analyze and interpret history like Joseph Ellis, and it's a little frustrating to wonder what lessons were learned here. The book is what I like to think of as "light" or "popular" history: interesting and at times exciting, but not especially satisfying. (I listened to the audio version read by Robertson Dean who has a deep and sonorous voice which was very difficult to get used to listening to.)
The Big Burn February 23, 2010
Joan Mcbeen
It arrived in excellent condition but was slow getting here, taking almost a month to arrive.
 Good big picture with a less-satisfactory narrative in the middle February 21, 2010
Arthur Digbee (Indianapolis, IN, USA)
As its title suggests, this book tells the story of the huge wildfire of August 1910 that burned an area the size of Connecticut on the Idaho-Montana border. As the subtitle suggests, Egan frames this as part of a larger story about forestry in the Teddy Roosevelt years.
The result is two distinct books. There are several framing chapters at the start of the book, and another couple at the end, that tell the stories of Theodore Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot, conservationism and the Progressive movement. The first group of chapters is excellent, and highly recommend; the last group does a good job wrapping up the story. Egan oversells the role of the 1910 fires in all this but, hey, it's his book and his story and he gets to do that.
The middle of the book is the story of the wildfire itself. This is an interesting but dramatically-difficult narrative. Egan tells us stories of firefighters and residents, forest rangers and railroads, evacuees and heroes, scattered over a wide area. He has a lot of information about some, especially the central figure of Edward Pulaski. If you survived and told your story, Egan knows more about you. There's less information available about working-class immigrants, homesteaders, and those who died. Some of the characters are vividly portrayed while others never quite come along.
More problematically, Egan's story jumps around from group to group, place to place, with some flashbacks and a little repetition. It's difficult to pull this off and he doesn't quite succeed. The result is that the middle of the book still readable and interesting but less compelling than it might have been.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 74
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