The Big Burn (33 page)

Months passed before news arrived in the foothills of the Italian Alps that Rivara Canavese had lost two of its native sons to a big American wildfire. Domenico Bruno was twenty-four. Giacomo Viettone was twenty-seven. At first no one was able to identify them, burned in that heap of other bodies in the half-built cellar at the homestead of Joe Beauchamp. Simple deduction, a reconstruction of the eyewitness accounts, and time books found at the site eventually determined the names. Their families were owed back pay from the U.S. government. Each man had labored nearly three weeks, days of twelve to sixteen hours. Cables passed between the American consulate in Italy and the mayor of Rivara Canavese. The families were interviewed. "I was formerly a farm laborer," Domenico's father said. "And on account of our age, neither I nor my wife have been able to earn a living by labor for some years. I was wholly dependent upon him for support." The other Italian came from a family of seven children—all girls but for Giacomo. The father was old, broken by physical labor, unable to work; the mother was blind. They pleaded with the American investigators for compensation, a little sum for the loss of their boy.

During a lengthy inquiry, the American consul, Albert Michelson, found that the two immigrants had been supporting their families for at least five years, sending money home from the mines in Wyoming and Arizona, regular income. "The letters of the two deceased men demonstrate a willingness and desire to keep their parents from want," Michelson wrote his superiors in Washington. "That is admirable and convincing."

Yet nothing came from the United States. The families checked regularly with the mayor, who checked with the consul, who checked with his government, and all of them were given half
promises and uncertainty, but no money. "The family is in great want," Michelson wrote after one of the visits from the mayor of Rivara. By now Michelson was angry, sharing some of the indignation that forest ranger families felt in the northern Rockies. These grieving parents were "peasants," he wrote in one cable, living hand to mouth, and the least his government could do was to give them some small compensation for what the boys had done on behalf of the United States. "In ten years of service, there has not been a case more deserving," Michelson wrote. At last, two years after the fire, Domenico Bruno's parents were paid $200 for the loss of their son's life. There is no record of the Viettone settlement.

Families of the Americans who died were not treated much better. A few days after the seventeen-year-old boy Val Nicholson fell in the Bullion Mine, his father hiked up through the smoking debris and retrieved the boy's body. Young Val was dragged down to Wallace and buried. The grief overwhelmed his father, though — two weeks later, he died of a heart attack. That left the widow Nicholson, a mother with young children underfoot, and no money. She pleaded with the Forest Service for compensation after losing the two men in her life, but the government turned her down. There was nothing in reserve, no funds for the fallen American warriors in the Bitterroots. She then asked for something simpler: a stone slab for her son's grave. Government officials said they would look into it.

A
S THE SUSTAINING
cause of his life and the men who shepherded that cause were engulfed in flame, nobody in the public arena was angrier than Gifford Pinchot. He had joined Roosevelt on the road, getting daily fire updates during the last week of August. For him, the dispatches were like hearing, blow by blow, of his hometown burning to the ground. He knew the Bitterroots better than most of the transient firefighters. By horseback or on foot, with rod and rifle, with surveyors' tools and primitive maps, he had been all over the land that had just collapsed. The news reports left him hollow, furious, and stunned. He and Roosevelt had all but written off fire, and now this: at least a hundred dead, the fate of some rangers still unknown, the destruction of an area big enough to hold their most outsized ambitions. His knights had never faced such a test. And yet, in the crucible of a wildfire of unseen magnitude, in the face of great loss, they performed as true heroes, he felt.

Anger and indignation in his voice, Pinchot went on the attack before the rains had yet put out the fire, seizing this calamity as a rallying cry in the same way that a band of Texans used the disastrous defeat of the Alamo. He blamed enemies of the Forest Service for leaving the agency so vulnerable. He had preached that forests must be preserved, in part to prevent a coming timber
"famine." And by the early estimates of the rangers, the fire had burned enough wood to provide timber for the whole nation for fifteen years — an inexcusable waste, in Pinchot's telling. It could all be laid at the feet of people who had gone after the Forest Service since its infancy and were taking advantage of Taft's feeble presidency to kill it. On August 26, papers around the country carried on their front pages an Associated Press dispatch that had originated in the
New York Times.

PINCHOT PLACES BLAME FOR FIRES

The immediate causes of the fire were drought, lightning, and locomotives — and of course a wind for the ages, that Palouser. But the Big Burn did not have to happen as it did. The fire was not inevitable, not a pure force of nature. It was "the ironbound reactionaries," led by Senator Heyburn of Idaho, who had left the people's forests without adequate stewardship, Pinchot said. They had blood on their hands. "The men in Congress like Heyburn," Pinchot said, "who have made light of the efforts of the Forest Service to prepare itself to prevent such a calamity as this, have in effect been fighting on the side of the fires against the general welfare. If even a small fraction of the loss from the present fires had been expended in additional patrol and preventive equipment some or perhaps all of the loss could have been avoided."

Pinchot's conclusion was a reach, to say the least. If ten times the manpower had been on the fire lines, if the entire nation's standing Army of roughly eighty thousand men had been in place in the forest, it's doubtful they could have done anything when the northern Rockies blew up in the face of those winds, with the woods so dry. But even if Pinchot knew it was absurd to claim that "some or perhaps all of the loss could have been avoided," he had another motive for going on the attack. Schooled in heroic mythology and his years with Roosevelt, Pinchot knew that public policy revolutions needed more than outrage — they needed a master narrative. With the Big Burn, Pinchot sketched the blueprint of a coming-of-age
myth for an agency just five years old. If the Forest Service had lost the battle, it would now try to win the war behind the ousted Chief, using the martyrdom of his wounded Little G.P.s as a call to arms.

"The Forest Service has done wonders with its handful of men," he said. "Many of them have given their lives to protect the homes of settlers and the forests on which the prosperity of the Western people depend. To my mind their conduct is beyond all praise." Give them tools, money for trails and telephones, and funds to build lookouts, and the Big Burn would never happen again.

"Forest fires are preventable," he said. "It is a good thing for us to remember at this time that nearly all or quite all of the loss, suffering and death the fires have caused was wholly unnecessary."

Pinchot spread the word through extensive interviews. "For the want of a nail," he told the popular
Everybody's Magazine,
"the shoe was cast, the rider thrown, the battle lost. For the want of a trail, the finest white pine forests in the United States were laid waste and scores of lives lost. It is all loss, dead loss, due to the pique, the bias, the bullheadedness of a knot of men who have sulked and planted their hulks in the way of appropriation and protection of these national forests." Three other national magazines,
Collier's, Harper's,
and
American Forestry,
also took up the theme, lashing out at Congress. "This national calamity is blamable to the petulance and vindictiveness of certain men,"
Everybody's
declared.

Roosevelt, whose every utterance was being recorded as he toured a country curious about whether he might take on President Taft, reinforced Pinchot's cause. He saw in these green-uniformed men out west something of what he had seen in the Rough Riders who stormed into a hail of bullets with him in Cuba. Few remembered the cause of that war, already an asterisk barely ten years after it ended. What they remembered were those brave souls who charged up San Juan Hill. In similar fashion, Roosevelt saw courage, selflessness, and strength in battle in the men who faced movable mountains of fire in August 1910. Teddy sent a telegram to Greeley, lavish in praise for the Forest Service, which was forwarded to every employee of the agency. What the rangers had done was enough to "make an American proud of having such a body of public servants," Roosevelt said. They had acted with valor and competence, he added, despite being undermined by Congress.

Senator Heyburn was taken aback. "Pinchot's charge is ridiculous," he said. "I won't need two-hundred words to answer it." He groused about efforts to portray the Forest Service as heroic, and then decided, after double volleys from G.P. and Roosevelt, to make a claim of greater absurdity. He blamed the rangers for the fire.

It was not that they didn't know what they were doing, or lacked funds, tools, men, or support services. The problem, Heyburn believed, was the very existence of the Forest Service as a force of preservation—enabling nature to run wild, as it were. This fire would never have happened had the Forest Service not tried to hold back the controlling forces of civilization, he said. The great national forests of the West needed loggers, miners, city builders, farmers, and ranchers to cut them down, thus preempting any big fire, because the fuel would be gone. In setting aside these vast public reserves, Heyburn implied, Roosevelt had all but torched the trees himself.

He pronounced Teddy's national forests a monumental failure. Of course, Heyburn had long opposed the very idea of public forests, just as he had worked against child labor laws and direct election of U.S. senators. But see here, this conservation idea, in practice, was a disaster! Here, in the biggest wildfire in American history, was proof of a point he had long argued, he claimed. The rangers themselves, from Greeley to Pulaski, all these Little G.P.s with their leather-bound book of rules of the woods, handed down from the great Pinchot himself—they were a menace, an impediment, interested only in collecting their paychecks.

"The exclusion of responsible settlers and the substitution of irresponsible persons as rangers account in a large measure for the fires," Heyburn said. "The presence of thousands of men in the forest whose principal industry is to establish the necessity for their employment will always constitute a menace to the forest." And
then Heyburn went one step further. The fires, he said, were God's will—an angry God, enraged by the Forest Service. In letting so much land burn, God was doing what the Forest Service would not let industry do, clearing the land of its tangle of wildness to prepare for cities, industry, farms, and settlers. Heyburn won few converts, with the West still smoking, with men still nursing wounds in hospitals, with stories appearing daily of heroic and selfless acts by the young rangers.

Paired again on the road, Roosevelt and Pinchot grew stronger in daily battle with the enemies of conservation, coasting on a full tank of outrage after the fire, a righteous wind at their backs. The highlight of their tour was an address in Osawatomie, Kansas, ten days after the Big Burn. Pinchot wrote the speech, once again finding the words that fit the oratorical style of the man he worshiped. It had been eleven years since they boxed and wrestled together on a winter night in the governor's mansion in Albany, eleven years since they shared a dream of persuading Americans to see their land as something worthy of holding on to for the ages, eleven years since they dared to think that the Gilded Age's powers who controlled natural resources at the cusp of the twentieth century could be brought to heel. Over that span, they had set aside more than 230 million acres, freed the Republican Party from the grip of a handful of big trusts, and created an agency that embodied the spirit of progressive government—young men in the service of country, some of whom were dying in hospitals in a part of the northern Rockies stripped of its forest cover.

A massive crowd stretched to the horizon on the prairie. Roosevelt climbed atop a table placed in the midst of the audience, barely high enough for most people to see him. He launched into a declaration of "new nationalism," a creed that stressed people power over corporations, and conservation over hands-off capitalism. If there was ever any doubt that Roosevelt stood with the burgeoning insurgents in his party, he removed it on August 31. First he went after Taft, essentially labeling him a man who broke his
pact with the voters, though he never named him. Then he called for "a graduated income tax on big fortunes," and an inheritance tax as well. He stood up for his Square Deal, urged passage of child labor laws to curb abuse of young children working in mines and factories, and said there should be government protection for workers knocked out of the job market because of physical disabilities. He urged further prosecution of the trusts, and regulation of banks, insurance companies, and railroads. As for the big swath of land left over from America's western expansion—it was your land, he said.

"I believe that the natural resources must be used for the benefit of all the people, and not monopolized for the benefit of a few," he said. Here, in the midst of an hourlong speech, Roosevelt's voice rose, and he punctured the air with his fingers. Of "all the questions which can come before this nation," he thundered, "there is none which compares in importance with the central task of leaving this land even a better land for our descendants than it is for us." Such a notion, he said, was still counterintuitive to many Americans—"another case in which I am accused of taking a revolutionary attitude." But he saw this cause as something vital to the United States' remaining a land of equals.