The Big Burn (34 page)

"Conservation is a great moral issue!"

In its dispatch from Osawatomie, the Associated Press wrote that the crowd's enthusiasm made it hard for Roosevelt to get through the speech. Standing near the makeshift stage, Pinchot was mesmerized—after a lonely year, here were the forester's words brought to rousing life by Teddy, every sentence a cannon blast at the enemy. "I've never seen a crowd that affected me as much as that one did," Pinchot wrote. Roosevelt's friend the writer William Allen White also witnessed the spectacle in Kansas; it took several decades for him to fully understand its ramifications. "It is hard to bring back today the sense of excitement, almost of tumult, that was in the air over this land in the summer and autumn of 1910," White wrote. "It was revolutionary."

Roosevelt had not yet declared his intention to challenge Taft for the Republican presidential nomination. But Taft, plowing through a round of golf at his summer retreat, was said to be so angry upon hearing Roosevelt's words that he threw his club twenty-five yards—one of his better shots. Later, he told his brother the speech made it clear that he and his mentor no longer shared the same political beliefs. And in a rare show of defiance, Taft vowed not to be rolled by a fresh Teddy juggernaut. "I will not step out of the way of Mr. Roosevelt when he is advocating such wild ideas," Taft wrote his brother.

Two weeks later, building on the momentum of the New Nationalism speech, Pinchot and Roosevelt spoke at the second National Conservation Congress, in St. Paul, attended by governors, leading politicians, and members of Taft's inner circle. The president himself made an appearance. Taft's remarks were tepid, greeted by blank stares. "Whatever conservation may mean," he said, "there is one thing it should never mean, and that is the mere tying up of resources." In Taft's mind, the nation should pursue a sober, business-minded version of protecting the natural world. "The time has come for a halt in general rhapsodies over conservation," he said. Politically tone-deaf as always, Taft could not read the mood of the crowd or sense that the country had changed. The Big Burn had stirred the blood of many Americans, and for them conservation was no longer an abstract debate. Roosevelt and Pinchot had personalized it—boys out west had died for it.

So what the crowd got from Roosevelt and Pinchot, by contrast, was the most tumultuous of rhapsodies over conservation. The fires in the Rocky Mountains, Roosevelt said, should prompt a renewal of the idea of protecting public land with a corps of young foresters. He urged Americans to seize the moment: expand the Forest Service, enlarge its domain, set more land aside. Pinchot gave perhaps the most energetic expression of the principles he and Roosevelt had enshrined with the Forest Service, and at the end he struck a valedictory note. "There are but a few moments in a man's life like
this," he said. "I have fought for many years for conservation, and conservation has won."

In November, in the off-year elections, Taft's Republican Party was wiped out at the polls. The Democrats took control of Congress, pleasing Pinchot; he felt that Taft deserved to be repudiated, even if it meant the party that had been Pinchot's home since he came of age was trounced. "An overwhelming rebuke to the reactionaries," Pinchot said. Taft was adrift as never before. "Roosevelt was my closest friend," he said, describing the "agony of my spirit." But no sitting president could let such abuse stand and still be respected as a man, or a leader. Taft had to return fire. Pushed by his aides, Taft criticized Roosevelt in public, something he had never done. But the words no sooner left the mouth of the big man, now pushing 360 pounds, than he felt a stab of guilt over betraying the person who had essentially made him president. After his broadside against Roosevelt, Taft retreated to his sleeping quarters in the White House, threw himself on the bed, and wept.

Not long after the election, Senator Heyburn took one more stab at the Forest Service. Despite the public's renewed sympathy with the agency, he plowed ahead, proposing that much of the land that had been burned in the fires of August be taken out of the national forest system and given to private owners. He did not precisely state that nearly three million acres would no longer be in public ownership, but his bill set up a system by which burned-over land would be removed from the reserves—effectively doing what he had long intended. In this latest campaign, at least, he was supported by one of his hometown newspapers, which added a suggestion that had been a favorite remedy of Heyburn's: to clear-cut healthy standing forests as a drastic form of fire prevention. "It would really be better to cut down all the trees than to incur the imminent risk of such vast destruction and mortality as has accompanied these fires," the
Idaho Press
editorialized. "For it is better to devastate forests than to devastate settlements."

Pinchot sprang into action yet again, giving a flurry of interviews, lobbying senators, prompting thousands of telegrams protesting the plan. Here was Heyburn, he said, "who for years has tried in every way he could to injure or destroy the national forests" with a proposal to take millions of acres away from the public. It was a robber barons' renaissance. Pinchot had long advocated "a little rioting" to move public opinion along; now he was back in his element. "It was effective, and great fun," he wrote in his diary. "Like old times."

Heyburn's bill was defeated. And now Pinchot went from defense to offense. With the new sentiment in the country, the time was ripe for one of the most significant changes in the law since the reserves were turned over to the Forest Service in 1905. The big conservation dream of Teddy and G.P. had included not just western public land, but eastern hardwood forests. In order to protect them, however, the government would have to buy land from private owners and make it part of the reserve system. Even at the height of Roosevelt's popularity, right after his landslide election in 1904, he could not win congressional approval for buying land for the public in the East. But after the fire of 1910, the winds shifted dramatically. It was well within the national interest, at a time when conservation had been hailed as the highest moral cause of the day, to include much of the forested East in the public-land system, Pinchot and his allies argued anew. This time, after years of rejection, a bill doing exactly that passed the new Congress and was signed into law by a dispirited and overwhelmed Taft.

Over time, more than twenty million acres in the East were acquired and made part of the national forest system—woods along the spine of the Appalachians, leafy hollows in the Smoky Mountains, crowds of trees with brilliant fall colors in New England, rocky pockets of wooded wilderness in southern Ohio. All of this eventually became public land, thanks to passage of the Weeks Act in early 1911. The Big Burn, taking with it nearly a hundred men, had made the difference. "Opposition in the Senate to federal purchase of eastern forests had gone up in the smoke of a 1910 holocaust in Idaho," wrote the historian Harold K. Steen. The fire, as it turned out, had remade the American landscape in a much larger way than Pinchot himself could have imagined.

Barely ten months after the fire, Congress doubled the money in the Forest Service budget for roads and trails, giving the rangers what they had begged for in previous years. The convincing story Pinchot had told of ragged young foresters fighting a sea of flame carried the day once more for a majority in the new Congress. The coming-of-age myth was in place and had become part of popular culture. Zane Grey made a forest ranger the hero of his next book,
The Young Forester,
the story of a well-educated Pinchot progressive who saves the day from timber thieves and flame in territorial Arizona.

The budget win for Pinchot followed another victory: the resignation of his nemesis in the Taft administration, Interior Secretary Ballinger. "Feeling cheerful," Pinchot wrote after the embattled secretary stepped down. There remained only Senator Heyburn, who continued his tirades against the Forest Service and its founder. But in the midst of a late-night speech to a near-empty Senate chamber—a filibuster against an investigation of corrupt campaign practices—Heyburn collapsed.

He had ruptured a blood vessel, which formed a clot in his brain. Felled by a stroke, blind in one eye, half his face sagging, Heyburn was never able to regain his form. He died a few months later, in the fall of 1912. He was sixty years old, "a stalwart who was widely known for his unyielding bitterness," his obituary in the
New York Times
said. The most positive thing his colleagues in the Senate could muster in a sheaf of written memories was that he was "an intense partisan." With his death, at long last, the United States Forest Service was safe.

T
HE BITTERROOT MOUNTAINS
were slow to heal. Deep, lasting scars could be seen throughout the three states where the Big Burn hit hardest—fire-branded tattoos on the land to match those on the skin that the first rangers would carry to their graves. The Forest Service tried different things, planting saplings from a Rocky Mountain nursery, shipping nearly two tons of seeds from walnuts, red oaks, and hickories in the East to see if these hardwoods would take root in the northern Rockies. But though the rangers put thousands of starts into the ground, the blaze-cleared earth was so bare—in places stripped of its already thin soil to bedrock—that heavy rains washed much of the new life downhill. The trees that had remained standing were so weakened that they fell prey to insect infestations. Broad swaths of rust-colored firs, the needles lifeless after the sap was drained by beetles or boiled by the fire, ran through the forest. It sickened many of the rangers. They knew well enough that a forest after a fire is not a cemetery, set with stones—just a change of worlds. Still, it was hard to see any tomorrow in the ashen landscape.

"A feeling of great sorrow," Ranger Will Morris recalled of how he felt during his first good look at the land in September. "The canyons and hillsides were covered with a twisted mass of broken, blackened trees, in some places five feet deep."

The standing, staggered trees died slowly, unlike some of the towns that had been wiped off the map in a few hours or less. Other towns, in valleys where people tried to stitch their lives back together, seemed vulnerable now to forces just beyond their front doors. People would never again look at the woods in the same way.

After spending weeks in the hospital with little improvement to show for it, Ed Pulaski came home a different man. His energy was gone, Emma could tell. He was angry, nagged by an ulcerating bitterness; it was a struggle to button up his frustration. Despite multiple, slow-healing burns, blindness in one eye, and badly damaged lungs, Pulaski returned to work. He had to: he was not entitled to sick pay, under Forest Service rules at the time, and the family had no other source of income. He was a sad sight around Wallace, the tall ranger with the unsteady gait who seemed to avoid eye contact.

The town, unlike others ravaged by the fire, was coming back with a flourish. The lure of good money for silver and other treasures from the mines was a draw for new capital and fresh energy. Wallace was rebuilding in iron and stone, a phoenix, while Pulaski was going in the other direction. To see him was to be reminded of two days in August when the land blew up, the walking, wounded face of the Forest Service. And to some—the men who had shoved women from the exit trains, or turned the other way when Weigle begged for help to rescue Pulaski from the mine—he was a reminder of their cowardice. Of course, he was a hero in the Coeur d'Alenes, as he was throughout the country. Everyone said so: Ranger Pulaski, such courage! But that meant little; in truth Pulaski was a broken man, best kept at a distance.

For two years following the burn, Pulaski's days were filled with painful indoor work: answering queries from the government about those who had gone into the tunnel with him. Prodded by Pinchot and higher-ups in the Forest Service, Congress was shamed into passing a measure that would compensate people who were unable to work because of injuries suffered in the line of duty. But it was a
cumbrous process for the Forest Service, and forced Pulaski to relive that one horrific night over and over again. One firefighter, John Brandon, requested money for the horse he lost in the mine on August 20 —he valued the beast at $40. The government refused to pay more than $30, and asked Pulaski for verification.

"I was blind at the time and could not have attended to such things if I wanted to," Pulaski wrote back, clearly annoyed. Another man claimed that smoke from inside the tunnel had left him so ill he could no longer look for work—his lungs were permanently compromised, and his burns had not healed. The government had doubts about his case, asking Pulaski for more details almost two years after the fire. "Please write everything you know concerning Mr. Christensen's case," they demanded of Pulaski.

Dutifully, he inhabited that hot, gas-filled earthen space dozens of times for dozens of cases, always signing off as "The Assistant Ranger."

Humiliated and sick, with little money for his own medical care, Pulaski asked his supervisors for help with his case. They shared his outrage. Roscoe Haines, the ranger who had braved the still-flaming forests in the St. Joe country to find Joe Halm, took up Pulaski's cause as a claims supervisor for the region. He wrote up and down the chain of command, a vertical nag. Surely the government could not treat the hero of the Big Burn this way. Word came back from Washington via a regional forester who wrote to Haines:

"I regret exceedingly that it will not be possible to allow this claim of Mr. Pulaski, since he is certainly deserving of remuneration for the permanent injuries affecting his eyesight. The only method by which further compensation could be secured for Mr. Pulaski would be by special legislation through Congress. The only other suggestion which occurs to me at this time would be for Mr. Pulaski or some of his friends to place his case and the story of his saving 40 of the men at the mine tunnel before the Carnegie Commission for the allotting of medals and awards to persons of bravery."