The Big Burn (17 page)

For the most part, the press still sided with Pinchot. They mocked Taft, with his multiple jowls and walrus mustache, his waddle and his summer "yachting costume" of white pants and black jacket. Taft dressed up in silly outfits and planted himself on a deck chair of his yacht, the
Sylph,
in the morning and took long naps in the afternoon. A highlight of his day was a regular massage. As always, he took refuge in food. He also suffered from gout, and like most men in the presidency, seemed to age quickly. Friends noticed the deep lines in his face, the folds of fat, and they urged him to diet or go for daily walks. But exercise, he complained, made him moody; he would rather eat, and say the hell with it.

Always, there was the shadow of Teddy Roosevelt. "When I am addressed as Mr. President," Taft had said to Roosevelt shortly after the election, "I turn to see whether you are at my elbow." But for most of 1910, Teddy could not have been farther from the big man's arm. His trip abroad, now nearing its end, was triumphant,
judging by the speaking invitations, the glowing press from reporters who followed his every move, the letters home about big game hunted or foreign dignitaries consulted. Privately, he referred to Taft as a "flubdub," a "floppy-souled creature," and a "fathead." The sacking of Pinchot had angered him. And as the Ballinger affair dragged on through 1910, Roosevelt came to believe that Taft had betrayed all that he and Pinchot had started — as evidenced by Ballinger's testimony and the near gutting of the Forest Service.

At last, Taft could postpone no more. On August 7, he wired his war secretary, authorizing him to "lend every assistance possible in suppression of forest fires." The government would send troops, a total of 2,500, to the front lines of the burning West—an extraordinary commitment, given that the standing Army of the United States comprised barely 80,000 men. In an era of invention and material expansion, a time that had seen innovations from Marconi's wireless to telephones in every middle-class neighborhood, many a well-stuffed parlor evoking the Edwardian Age of comfort, here was a primitive, timeless battle of man against elemental nature. It was a war and a reminder that this new country sprawling from sea to sea was still trying to settle its surroundings. Blue-shirted soldiers armed with rifle magazines and revolvers would be put at the call of the Forest Service. The rangers were relieved. Weigle said his Coeur d'Alene would now have sufficient manpower to save the town of Wallace.

"I'm mighty pleased to hear of the order of President Taft," Weigle told reporters. "We need the men."

The call came to the 25th Infantry while it was bivouacked at Fort George Wright, in stifling barracks on a hill above the river in Spokane. It fell to the infantrymen to be the front line of the troop commitment, though fire duty was a first for the 25 th. Part of an all-black regiment established after the Civil War, these Buffalo Soldiers—so named by the Indians for their hair—had done much of the government's dirty work while garrisoned in Army ghettos throughout
the West. In Texas, they fought the Comanche and Apache on behalf of white settlers who, in the state's post—Civil War constitution, had banned blacks from full citizenship. In the Dakotas, they were dispatched to clean up lingering problems with the Sioux Nation, whose members had been slaughtered at Wounded Knee. In Idaho, during the labor wars around the turn of the century, the black soldiers were sent to keep guard over militant strikers, on the assumption that white miners would never bond with their black captors. As labor strife spread from Idaho across the West, the 25th Infantry was called on repeatedly to put down civil unrest.

But the soldiers also strung telegraph lines, built roads, and constructed military forts. They were part of the bicycle corps, riding two-wheelers over bad terrain from Fort Missoula to St. Louis as a test. Other black soldiers served as the first park rangers, patrolling Yellowstone and Yosemite well before these reserves had a formal national park service. Using soldiers as rangers was not that much of a stretch: while putting together the Forest Service, Pinchot considered an idea to recruit all of his rangers from West Point. While on duty in California, the Buffalo Soldiers named a grove of giant sequoia trees for Booker T. Washington.

In the summer of 1910, the Negro troops were a curious presence in Spokane, a fast-growing city larded by riches from mining and railroad and timber interests, an hour from the fires by train. The city was undergoing its biggest growth spurt, with terracotta-surfaced bank buildings and stores rising downtown along the falls and mansions designed by renowned architects in the leafy cocoons of South Hill. New money was conspicuous. Blacks, on the other hand, were almost invisible—that is, until the troops arrived. In Spokane, the two battalions at Fort George Wright comprised the majority of blacks in the city. In Idaho, they would stand out even more: the state had only 651 African Americans among its population of 325,000 in 1910.

The call to the fire lines was a chance for the 25th to prove itself again, to its own men, to the rest of the nation, and to Teddy Roosevelt. They were still under probation of sorts, in the eyes of
many. A few years earlier, a handful of soldiers from the infantry had killed a bartender in Brownsville, Texas, after they were refused service in town—a last-straw insult in a place where they complained about being treated like dogs despite wearing the uniform of their country. Books such as
The Negro: A Menace to American Civilization
were popular throughout the nation, not just in the South, and the sexual drive of black males was said to be uncontrollable when they were around young white women. Dark-skinned men were always "pulsating with the desire to sate their passions upon white maidens and wives," as the white supremacist senator from South Carolina, Ben Tillman, said at the time. Tillman was proud of taking away the vote from black men. "We have scratched our head to figure out how we can eliminate the last one of them," he said. "We stuffed ballot boxes. We shot them. We are not ashamed."

When questioned about the Brownsville violence, the soldiers closed ranks, refusing to name names within their division. Reaction was swift and strong, going all the way up the chain of command to President Roosevelt. Some of the same soldiers stationed in Brownsville had served under Roosevelt during the charge up San Juan Hill. He never forgot their valor, as he reminded the black miners who gave him the scale at that dinner in Butte. But he felt the soldiers were far out of line in Brownsville.

After several investigations, 167 men were dishonorably discharged from the ranks of the storied Buffalo Soldiers. Those who stayed with the 25 th carried a load of resentment heavier than anything on their backs; all of them had been punished for the actions of a few. They were railroaded, they felt, betrayed by Roosevelt to appease southern whites. What happened in Brownsville was the largest summary dismissal in the history of the U.S. Army.

Going to Idaho and Montana to protect some isolated mountain towns was seen as a way to win back their honor. The soldiers who had served as makeshift park rangers were now back in the role of patrolling the land, this time enlisted to protect Roosevelt's greatest domestic policy experiment. They were dispatched to Wallace,
to Missoula, to the Flathead Valley near Glacier Park, moving as always under the motto that had carried them for half a century:
Onward.
When they arrived, it soon became clear that the soldiers of the 25 th Infantry shared at least one thing with the members of the Forest Service: none of them knew a thing about fighting a big wildfire.

For President Taft, his time away from Washington was supposed to be a tonic for his problems, but the fires kept intruding, even after he dispatched the troops. Newspaper cartoons showed a grotesquely obese figure in a yachting costume, ear cupped to the distant, burning West. The cursed Pinchot was never out of the news. "I have had a hard time of it," Taft wrote Roosevelt in one of his self-pitying moods. "I do know that thus far I have succeeded far less than have others." He had taken office with one of the bigger majorities in the history of the presidency— 321 electoral votes to 162 —and yet he felt that the country was not with him. When the press described him as "foggy" and "bewildered," he couldn't just slough it off. When
Collier's,
which broke the Ballinger story and stoked it for nearly a year, asked for an interview, Taft's response was intemperate. "Condemn them all to hell and eternal damnation!" he said. And the wealthy, who were relieved to have Taft in office after taking seven years of abuse from Roosevelt, had quickly grown tired of him. The railroad magnate James J. Hill, an informal Taft adviser, called him "a platter of mush."

Taft found a few moments of ceremonial relief, throwing out a pitch on opening day of baseball, the first president to do so. But he never mastered the public face, the bully pulpit, as Roosevelt had urged him to do. His political skills were abysmal. He couldn't bluff an opponent, nor could he scare one. Worse, for a politician, he could not remember names. Not yet halfway into his term, Taft sensed he was a failure. "There is no use trying to be William Howard Taft with Roosevelt's ways," he wrote his brother. The White House, he realized, was the "loneliest place in the world." Roosevelt would only make it lonelier.

M
ORE THAN
5,000
MILES
from the fires of the northern Rockies, a mother in the village of Rivara Canavese opened a letter from her son in the faraway American West. Domenico Bruno had left Italy with his friend Giacomo Viettone to find work in the United States. Every few months, the boys sent money back to their families, enough to allow them to keep some measure of dignity.

Tucked away in the foothills of the Italian Alps, Rivara was nearly empty of its young men in 1910, like many places in Italy at the turn of the century. Though it was only thirty miles from the bustle and prosperity of Torino, the village had the feel of gloom and yesterday on it. Through the ages, under a succession of rulers dating to feudal times, Rivara had existed primarily to supply ore for European cities. People were poor, with little education, isolated from the outside world. The fortress walls of the Alps blocked weather systems from the west and north, making Rivara a balmy respite year-round. But with the mines nearly spent, wages fell to bare subsistence, and those who did have jobs worked six days a week. "We get old quickly," one miner said.

Word spread, through anecdotal stories and pamphlets circulated by employment agencies in the United States, that a man with a strong back and good work ethic could make a year's pay in
just a few months' time in America. Passage to the United States, in steerage, could be bought for $12, and it took little more than a week to cross the Atlantic. The copper mines of Arizona, the silver and lead havens of the Rocky Mountains — it was Italy, with gold on the streets! But these places were so remote, distant from the American cities that Italians had heard about. Where was Montana? Where was Arizona Territory? And what were the Bitterroot Mountains?

Domenico Bruno had left his home, like many in the village, with the intention of making just enough money to help his family and build his own nest egg. After that, he would return to Rivara, if not a rich man, then at least with enough of a stake to buy a farm in the Canavese Valley, with its good grass and alluvial soil, replenished by snowmelt from the mountains. His father was a farm laborer, an aging peasant no longer able to work, who lived off his small garden and help from friends. The family's other son, Pietro, had been drafted by the military and sent to Tripoli. It was up to Domenico to save the family. He said goodbye in 1907, a year when 285,000 Italians went to America.

Never before had so many people fled Italy for the United States. In that year, one in four immigrants came from Italy, a country that could barely feed its citizens as it tried to move, a latecomer, into the industrial age. By 1910, the high-water mark of emigration, Italy had given up more than two million of its people in less than a decade. Most of them were from the south, from Naples, with its corruption and crowded tenements, from Sicily and Apulia and other parts of the heel of Italy's boot—places where the soil was as tired and broken as the people, hopeless lands with dark suspicions. The north was considered more European, more prosperous, closer in identity and outlook to France, Germany, or Switzerland. One of the exceptions was the mountain valley northwest of Torino, the home of Domenico and Giacomo.

Most immigrants landed in Boston, New York, or Philadelphia, the docks thick with Sicilian dialect, which Domenico and his
friends could barely understand. The cities were filthy and dangerous, and "many Italians were dazed by the complexity of existence" in these urban centers, the immigration commission reported. Everyone heard the story of the twelve-year-old Italian girl, Camella Teoli, who was working in a factory where cotton was twisted into thread when the machine tore off a big part of her scalp.

Domenico and Giacomo hopped aboard a train, finding work in Rock Springs, Wyoming, a foul-aired boomtown six thousand feet above sea level. Rock Springs was treeless, raked by cold winds, populated by Finns, Chinese, Austrians, and Italians, each with their own ghetto. The Italian miners lived in a cluster of shacks near the railroad tracks north of town. The business of Rock Springs was coal, with mines dating to the first transcontinental railroad in the nineteenth century. Domenico missed the green hills of home, the chestnut trees and balmy weather. But he was making money. In that first year in America, he sent his family $70, a fortune in the ragged village of Rivara Canavese. His friend Giacomo did just as well: after eighteen months of work, he mailed $150 back to his mother, who was blind in one eye and had five children at home with her.

The Rivara immigrants heard about a place in Arizona Territory with better pay, six hundred miles to the southwest. Copper mining was said to be cleaner than digging coal. On a hunch, they headed for Morenci, where the Phelps Dodge Company ran the town with ironfisted consistency. The company favored Mexican and Italian laborers, who were cheaper and thought to be more docile than the Irish. What passed for law and constitutional protections in Morenci were thugs hired by Phelps Dodge. They maintained a three-tier wage system: one for trouble-free whites, one for Mexicans, one for Italians. Such attitudes were typical in a decade when nine million immigrants came to the United States, and one-third of the population was either foreign-born or a child of someone born abroad. The Italian surge in particular angered those who felt the nation was no longer recognizable, had lost its sense
of identity. And they hated all these strange languages spoken in shops, schools, and churches. The Immigration Restriction League, founded by Boston blue bloods with family ties to the old Tories of England, campaigned to keep "undesirable classes" from entering the country. They meant Italians, Greeks, Jews, and people from eastern Europe.