The Big Burn (11 page)

It was a struggle, to say the least, for Bill Weigle to control Grand Forks. From Yale and Washington, D.C., he had been dispatched to a state with two time zones, a state where it was nearly impossible to travel from north to south without leaving it, a state with an odd boundary only 45 miles wide at the top that expanded to 479 miles at the bottom, a state where forests covered 82 percent of the landmass.

At first Weigle had politely informed merchants that they were selling liquor and lust on government property—a violation of federal law,
gentlemen.
They laughed at him; that is, those who didn't ignore him or threaten to kill him. Weigle had a ribald sense of humor and found the towns darkly comic at times. But he also had his orders. From Wallace, he wired pious Billy Greeley in Missoula: What should we do? Weigle felt helpless. There was nothing in Pinchot's little manual that rangers were required to carry — the
Use Book
—on how to tame a town that made Deadwood seem sedate. Nor had anyone at the Yale forestry school prepared the rangers for this. The Bible-quoting, bespectacled Greeley, who had once
considered a career teaching the word of God, told Weigle he had no choice but to close the saloons and arrest the operators. This was a public forest! Not some haven of piracy in the high Rockies. Weigle sent a ranger to put the merchants on notice.

"Upon our return, we found most of the saloons still running full blast," recalled Joe Halm, who had been hired out of college in 1909 by Weigle to help patrol the Coeur d'Alene. "This went on for several weeks and we became extremely unpopular. When one saloon was closed, another sprang up next door under new management." Halm and two other men tried to arrest a saloonkeeper; the barkeep fingered a shotgun, threatening to kill the rangers. They backed away, muttering to the owner a promise to return in the morning with a warrant. As forest supervisor, Weigle felt duty-bound to make the arrest. He rode all night from Wallace. Just before dawn, Weigle assembled a posse of six armed forest rangers. They galloped into Grand Forks and took up positions outside the saloon. They banged on the door. No answer. Long, deadly silence. Weigle and another ranger then pushed open the door, walked in, and edged slowly forward, facing the bartender.

"Are you ready to go?" Weigle asked.

The saloonkeeper reached for a towel. The forest supervisor winced. The fear was that the man had a pistol under his cloth. Instead, he wiped his hands and surrendered. He was handcuffed, along with another saloon owner. There was no jail in Grand Forks. The closest lockup was through the woods and over the Idaho-Montana divide, at Taft—a long hike, too steep, rocky, and narrow for horses. It took the better part of a day for Weigle to guide his prisoners to Taft. Once there, they had a meal and a drink and then boarded the train for the biggest town in the region, Missoula. The prisoners were uncuffed for the ride, and Weigle settled into an easy conversation with one of them, the window open to let air circulate on a hot day. Weigle was a bachelor; he liked women and a drink; he looked like a lumberjack; with his pants up high-water style and his red suspenders, he looked like one of
them.
He could see why the
townspeople catered to the tastes of roustabouts. But it was a public forest, this pragmatic Yalie tried to explain, not a grubstake. The bartender got up to stretch. In a flash he dove out the window into the passing woods. Weigle looked out: no sign of him as the train pushed on through the mountains. His prisoner disappeared, never to be seen in the Coeur d'Alene again. Later, Weigle found out that the man was an escaped convict with a long criminal record, currently wanted for several murders.

It was not just outlaws who had it in for the Little G.P.s. Timbermen were outraged at having to answer to kids just out of college—"Teddy's Green Rangers," in the derisive term of Senator Clark's newspapers. Home at last in Montana, Elers Koch hiked under cathedrals of big cedars, feeling a spiritual attachment to his beloved Big Sky Country. But he also had to sell off much of that same virgin forest to industry, as part of the new operating rules of the national forests. National forests were not parks or wildlife refuges; they were "working forests," as Pinchot said, there for the ages, but also not tree museums. Anaconda, a logging branch of the copper trust, tried to intimidate Koch, but he did have some power. He insisted that loggers leave the largest of pines standing as a seed source. A big upright tree in the middle of a ravaged, logged-over hillside became known as a "Koch Special." He was damn proud of them, despite the ridicule from Anaconda.

Everywhere, the woods were thick with timber cruisers—people hired by logging companies to stake out homesteads. Pinchot called them "as competent a body of land thieves as e'er the sun shone on." Homesteaders were pouring into the Far West; the twentieth century saw a frenzy of people seeking free land, more so than in the previous century, many from distant shores. But it was a different game in the forests. "Homesteading was not farming in those days, but just a subterfuge to gain possession of timber on land that has since proven worthless for farming," wrote Nancy R. Warren, who came to Idaho from Chicago in the boom years with her relatively well-off family. The basic scheme was to find 160 acres, patent it with a shack that could be labeled a home on "agricultural" ground, and then sell the land for a big profit to one of the timber companies, which were prohibited from homesteading. These claims were neither homes nor farms, but in this way, big sections of the new national forests were nibbled away and came under the control of timber companies. In the Bitterroots, nearly 90 percent of the homesteads were frauds set up by agents of industry, in the estimates of people on either side of the game.

A young woman, Ione Adair, hacked her way along a game trail to find a piece of land in the heart of the Coeur d'Alene. Ione was twenty-five years old, nicknamed Pinkie because of her shock of red hair and freckled nose. When Pinkie set off to establish her own homestead, people were making up to $8,000 selling their 160-acre claims to timber companies—a fortune, equal to nearly a half-dozen years at a good-paying job. Pinkie claimed her piece of ground in a meadow above the St. Joe River, just east of the Montana border. In her cabin, the walls were lined with unbleached muslin cloth, and the mattress was stuffed with beargrass. She stored canned goods in the attic, along with sealed sacks of flour and salt. Pinkie traveled with a .38 on her belt. The shack was inaccessible during the winter, but in the warm months Pinkie made frequent visits. Once, while she was eating breakfast on the steps of the cabin, a little man surprised her from the brush.

"Oh—somebody's here," he said.

"Who are you?"

"They call me Dynamite. I'm working on the railroad—on the tunnel. I do the drilling for the holes for the dynamite. I'd been living in your cabin while you were gone." She invited Dynamite in for breakfast, though she kept her pistol strapped on.

Like other homesteaders in 1909, Pinkie Adair had no use for Gifford Pinchot's rangers. The foresters had cautioned her about making claims for profit on land not fit for legitimate homesteads. She heard them out, then continued as if no national forest had ever
been established. She told everyone there was room enough in the upper St. Joe for a real homestead farm, and if the rangers thought otherwise, they'd just have to come after Pinkie. For the time being, they left her alone.

Trying to be useful, the rangers warned people about fire, and they attempted to enlist timber cruisers as lookouts. Of course, they were also trying to prosecute some of those same cruisers, but if they could be helpful in early fire detection, everyone could have a short-term benefit. Most of the land hunters had no incentive to help. If fire came to the forest, it was every man for himself. Plus, nobody in the new towns had ever seen a fire of any significant size in the northern Rockies, and they certainly had not been there long enough for a typical thirty-year fire cycle—a good-size burn every generation or so — which bred a sense of complacency. The timber in these mountains did not need protection, one Idaho newspaper editorialized in 1908, "because it was not subject to fire."

Deep in the emerald drainage of the St. Joe River, about thirty miles from Pinkie's cabin, the Forest Service was building a homestead of its own — a ranger station — to win people over. With little money to build trails, roads, or lookouts, Bill Greeley was struggling to get control of the forty-one-million-acre expanse of national forests in Region One. His rangers were swallowed by the enormity of the place. "One man in such a tract of land, without roads, trails or a telegraph is absolutely helpless," said Ranger Emery Wilson, who worked for Greeley. It was bad enough that his men had to pay for their own uniforms, their own horses, their own food and supplies, but living conditions, for most of them, were primitive. Greeley and Koch had homes in Missoula—an oasis of culture in a fine valley cut by three rivers. Weigle lived in the mining town of Wallace. The other rangers were footloose for much of the year, living out of tents in the warm months. If Greeley could establish permanent ranger stations, he could put an imprint of the Chief in the woods, something to show that the Forest Service was not going away.

As the new century dawned, the valley carved by the St. Joe was still undisturbed, one of the nation's most isolated places. This tunnel of wild land was so remote that the only way to get to the upper St. Joe was by canoe. The Indians had a network of trails along the river, which they used to hunt elk and deer, and to fish. The big river pulled snowmelt in from an arc of broad-shouldered mountains, and it was flush with cutthroat and big bull trout that could rival salmon in size. Enormous trees, some more than five hundred years old, hugged the floor of the valley, and the upward slopes were thick with white pine as straight as a beam of sunlight. People who had poled upstream to have a look at the valley came away struck by its dreamy beauty and stillness. In this lost world, rangers started work on a shining outpost of the Forest Service in 1908.

The station would have to be built with scraps from the forest and detritus from railroad construction, using the manpower of Little G.P.s with their limited carpentry skills. Lucky for Weigle, he had just hired a local man, Ed Pulaski, as an assistant ranger — a man who knew nothing about the science of silviculture and probably could not find Yale on a map. But Ed Pulaski was just what the beleaguered Forest Service needed. He was nearly twenty years older than most of the Little G.P.s, a middle-aged master of carpentry, metal forging, riding, route finding, and other skills that had allowed him to survive in the Rocky Mountain West at a time when it was being fully opened up.

His father had immigrated to the United States from Poland, settling in Ohio. For most of his life, Ed was thought to be a descendant of Count Casimir Pulaski, the Revolutionary War hero who served under George Washington.
No sir,
he told anyone willing to listen, the count was only a distant ancestor. Big Ed was from the poor Pulaskis, without money or title. But people believed what they wanted to believe, and so he went through life as
that
Pulaski, even to some of his closest friends. At age sixteen he had left school in Ohio for the Rockies, tramping around the big hill of Butte, the copper lodes of Arizona, the Silver Valley of Idaho—the mining tour, but he never hit it big. He worked as a plumber, a steamfitter, a blacksmith, an outfitter. He tried to join the Army to fight in the Spanish-American War, but was rejected. He married once, divorced, and then married again. Pulaski was respected around Wallace and throughout the Bitterroots, something that could not be said for most of Gifford Pinchot's boys. It was one of his selling points, as a supervisor noted in his personnel file: "He is a very good man in a district at the center of a community none too favorably inclined toward the Forest Service."

For several months, the rangers hammered and sawed, cut and felled, fitted and shaved, as the ranger station along the St. Joe took shape. It had big windows, a broad porch, loft space for guests upstairs. It looked permanent. Soon the new station was home to a forest ranger, a married man with two young children. Next door, the government built a post office and established the ranger's wife as postmistress. A few other cabins rose in the cluster. To look at it now was to see the shaping of a real town. Inspired, the Little G.P.s incorporated their burg and named it for Big G.P. At the new town of Pinchot, Idaho, nestled in the St. Joe River valley, the Forest Service had made its mark, a brand on the raw hide of the Bitterroots.

But upriver, the railroad bosses had another idea. Soon the coal-fired locomotives of the Milwaukee Road would come roaring through—all fire and steel, sparks and combustion, chugging out of a nearly two-mile-long tunnel in the mountains and wending their way down until the road found the silent, sylvan valley of the St. Joe. At a clearing next to the river, just upstream from Pinchot, railroad workers assembled in the usual pattern, brothel and bar first, followed by a general store, a few hundred cabins, and a three-story hotel whose chief attraction was a black bear purchased from a railroad employee. The chance to wrestle with the bear, on a bet, provided a little side income for the hotel. In this village, people ignored the nearby town of Pinchot, because they wanted their own town with their own rules. Life was cheap, and death could come and go like a spring shower. A typhoid epidemic swept through in
1908, killing dozens of construction workers. But the enterprise had its upside. The railroad's president, Albert J. Earling, and his corporate confidant and benefactor, William Rockefeller, said this new line would be unrivaled in the United States for speed, power, and modern touches.

When one of Earling's wealthy friends asked him if there was something he could do about his sons, a pair of hard-drinking, skirt-chasing, recent college graduates—the Kelley brothers, Spike and Bill — Earling recommended sending them out west to get in on the bonanza following his new rail line. The Kelley brothers showed up in the St. Joe Valley, cartons of liquor, raccoon coats, and fine possessions in tow, and took to it like hounds on a rabbit hunt. They loved the bawdy life of the wide-open tent towns and the chance to make an easy buck. The brothers opened general merchandise stores in Taft, Grand Forks, and the new town taking shape next to Pinchot. Spike Kelley was the most industrious. He oversaw construction of a two-story mansion across the river from the other cabins—the biggest house in the valley—and hired servants from among the Japanese who had also moved there. When the manse was finished and fitted out with antiques, Spike disappeared for several months. He returned with the socialite daughter of a California judge—his bride, Mrs. Spike Kelley. She arrived on the St. Joe with eighteen trunks.