The Big Burn (35 page)

In the end, Pulaski did not get a dime from the government for the ravages fire inflicted on his body. The reasoning seemed to be that since he went directly back to work after leaving the hospital, he was not disabled, and therefore was ineligible for compensation for lost work time. But of course the reason Pulaski had returned to his job, despite his serious medical troubles, was that he needed the paycheck just to stay alive. His only remaining recourse, as the regional forester had suggested, was to tell his story to the Carnegie Hero Fund in the hope that it would find him worthy of some small change from the fortune of a man who once embodied Gilded Age wealth. He had to beg from the rich.

But Pulaski would not grovel, as he showed when he scolded his neighbors for being careless with their public forests at that Chamber of Commerce luncheon. It was undignified, he felt, to try to win a hero's reward for what he had done. So Ranger Haines did it for him, collecting stories from the people who had been in the mine tunnel. When he solicited Pulaski for his own account, the wounded ranger refused to comply. Haines had to trick him; he told Pulaski he needed the narrative for Forest Service files, nothing else. Nobody would see his account. Pulaski sent along the most basic of details: the story of returning to the fire with the packers after leaving his family to certain doom, the rounding up of panicky firefighters, the retreat downhill, the offer of his horse to the obese former Texas Ranger, the dash into the tunnel, and the threat to shoot anyone who tried to leave the mineshaft.

"I hope you will regard this letter as confidential and send it back or destroy it when it serves its purpose," he wrote to Haines. Instead, the supervisor sent it on to the Carnegie commission.

When not doing paperwork, Pulaski tended to graves, alone, at great pain and some financial cost. It was an abomination that the dead were treated no better than the living, he thought. At the least, a memorial should be erected to those who lost their lives—eighty-five people, according to the Forest Service's official report, completed in 1911. The dead were scattered throughout the Bitterroots;
some remained where they had fallen, the bodies never retrieved, left to the elements under a few feet of fire-blackened earth. Others, in Wallace, were put in graves marked by wooden slabs. Pulaski pulled weeds and mowed the lawn around these tombstones, all the while reminding his supervisors that the dead were owed a proper memorial. He did this on his own time, using his own money, though he worried that the government might frown on such a thing.

"I would probably get called for mixing in," he wrote. "But I think the only way for me is to clear the weeds and grass off each year as I have on my own time."

He found refuge in his blacksmith shop, sometimes working late into the night, experimenting with a tool to help firefighters. He crafted an ax and a hoe-type blade on a single handle. One side could be used to cut wood, the other to dig and scrape a fire line. It was an ingenious idea, one of those inventions that look obvious in retrospect, and it was instantly duplicated across North America. Pulaski tried to patent the tool, as yet another way to get money for eye surgery, but when faced with a blizzard of forms, he said the hell with it.

The Carnegie commission returned the application to Ranger Haines—sorry, but no hero's reward for Ed Pulaski. "While Mr. Pulaski's act is commendable, from the facts you gave it does not appear that he did anything more than was necessary to save his own life, and for this reason his case, I regret to say, does not come within the scope of the Fund."

Haines was livid. Pulaski could have stayed in Wallace when the woods blew up, saved his own ass. He could have fled downhill, back to town with the other firefighters. He could have retreated with the frightened packers, who escaped as soon as they dropped their loads. There was "conclusive evidence to show beyond all doubt that Edward Pulaski did risk his own life voluntarily to save the lives of fellow human beings," Haines wrote. He fired up a fresh round of queries, trying to compile overwhelming
evidence to win the Carnegie money for Pulaski. Among the crew members who wrote on his behalf, Fred Libby said, "I know that he could have saved himself on more than one occasion but would not forsake his men." The ex—Texas Ranger, "Dad" Stockton, credited Pulaski with saving his life, without doubt. Haines went back to Pulaski with questions, this time letting him in on the scope of his mission. Pulaski could not believe it—who were
these people
to challenge his honor?

"Do you think I would have stayed there when I knew my home and family was in more or less danger, if I did not realize that there were men being killed and that I might help them by staying at the same time staking my own life to help them?" The words were as stinging as any Pulaski ever put to paper in his years in the Forest Service. And he gave a hint, at last, at the depth of his bitterness. "I did think that U. Sam might have taken notice of me and sent me a leather medal. To show me that men put to the test are not forgotten."

Alas, there would be no medal, leather or bronze, and no money from the Carnegie Hero Fund, and no patent for the Pulaski tool.

By 1911, Gifford Pinchot was exhausted. The scraps of a year when he and Roosevelt were in the news nearly every day had clearly drained him. Sleep was uneasy. His stomach bothered him. His skin was splotchy; his brushy mustache was starting to grey. He stooped a bit. He looked gaunt, hollow-eyed, and had lost the glow of youth that had made him one of the most eligible single men in the capital. He still summoned his long-lost lover, though she was much harder to bring to life. And of course she was forever twenty-eight years old, an immortal beauty in the full blush of her life, while Pinchot was slipping well into middle age. Seeking restoration of body and soul, he checked himself into the Kellogg sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan, an institution founded by the breakfast cereal magnate and known for its naturopathic remedies. Pinchot was a celebrity there, and gave frequent talks to other clients. But he was lonely for Laura.

"Not a clear day," he wrote after his first night in the sanitarium.

"Not a clear day," the next day.

"Not a clear day," again, through his two-week stay in Battle Creek.

It continued like this for months, with only the occasional dream encounter, which he found unsatisfying. One note showed a hint of optimism that he could have further mystic encounters with Laura: "Not a clear day, but not blind."

Fully rested, Pinchot immediately sought to get the wings of Teddy Roosevelt aloft once more, building on the political triumphs that came in the wake of the Big Burn. Any day without a full schedule, as before, prompted much guilt and self-loathing. "Shamefully stayed in the house all day, loafing and catching up..."

Even with Heyburn gone, he had his enemies. A mob stormed the docks in Cordova, Alaska, and burned an effigy of Pinchot—cheering with gusto as the image of the founding forester fell into Prince William Sound. They were mad that coal in some national forests in Alaska was off-limits to mining. That protection was one of Roosevelt's final acts as president, three years earlier, but the mob blamed Pinchot because he was the easier target. Another man, Pinchot's old friend and camping mate John Muir, was the other face of this movement, in addition to Roosevelt. Muir, in failing health, had not spoken to Pinchot in some time, a breach dating to their opposing views on damming the river in the Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite. But in a gesture that showed Muir was not blinded by this dispute to what Pinchot had done for the larger cause, three hundred of his Sierra Club followers ventured into a grove of coastal redwoods just north of San Francisco and selected what they considered the most perfect of the big trees in Muir Woods. There they placed a plaque on a rock with this inscription:

THIS TREE IS DEDICATED TO
GIFFORD PINCHOT
FRIEND OF THE FOREST
CONSERVER OF THE COMMON-WEALTH

As Pinchot focused his energy on the second coming of Roosevelt, he initially faced stiff opposition in his own party. Many Republican insurgents had planned to back Robert La Follette, the Wisconsin governor who had taken strong early stands against the sitting president. He was a friend of both Roosevelt and Pinchot and was a driving force behind some of the major progressive initiatives. But then La Follette gave a rambling, shockingly incoherent speech in New York before a group of donors, power players, and writers. It was two hours of gibberish, which an aide attributed to fatigue and alcohol. Afterward, the consensus was that this man could not be president.

All eyes turned to Teddy. And so in early 1912, he ended a two-year tease, declaring: "My hat is in the ring. The fight is on, and I am stripped to the buff." It sounded as if he were ready for another wrestling match with Pinchot. Using the key points of his New Nationalism speech as a platform, Roosevelt won all but one primary and one caucus—still not enough, by the undemocratic rules of the day, to become the nominee, but it demonstrated that his vote-drawing power had not diminished. He swept New England, the West Coast, and states in between.

At the convention in Chicago, Roosevelt should have carried the Republican banner. But Taft's men controlled the national committee, and the fix was in. "Those elements were mostly rich men," William Allen White wrote, "well placed, well housed, well fed, well clad, who hitherto for a generation had been able to control American politics." And they still controlled the party of Lincoln. Roosevelt thought his popularity alone would prevail. When he arrived in Chicago, he was mobbed in the streets as his car made its way along Michigan Avenue. In a speech before supporters, Roosevelt said he stood for the underdog, though as White noted, "It was a middle-class revolt."

The lightning that split the Republican Party came during five days in June. In the face of certain defeat in the fall, and despite Roosevelt's preeminence in the primaries and his superior popularity, Republican power brokers declared that the beleaguered and unpopular sitting president would be the nominee.

A riot seemed at hand. More than a thousand police officers rushed to control the convention. But rather than storm the stage, Roosevelt's forces walked out and marched over to a nearby auditorium, Orchestra Hall. There, they broke away from the Republican Party and declared a new group, the Progressive Party, with Teddy Roosevelt at the head of the ticket.

Roosevelt gave a speech that "tore the roof off," the press reported. And when asked how he felt, he responded, "I feel as strong as a bull moose!" Thereafter his Progressive Party was more commonly known by that favorite T.R. term. Pinchot wrote the party platform, which he described as "a contract with the people." It was also a contract with Roosevelt's will, which faced an extreme test when Teddy was shot in the chest while campaigning in Milwaukee. Blood dripping through his suit, he continued with the speech for ninety minutes before leaving to see a doctor. The bullet had missed his vital organs.

On Election Day, the country chose a liberal majority, but split its votes between three left-center candidates: a Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, who was president of Princeton University; the fiery Roosevelt, on the Progressive ticket; and the perennial socialist, Eugene Debs. Taft was routed, winning only two states, Utah and Vermont, the worst showing ever by an incumbent president. Roosevelt, with 27 percent of the vote, set a mark for third-party candidates that would not be surpassed through century's end. Debs peeled off 6 percent. Wilson won with 42 percent.

The Bull Moose Party faded away almost as quickly as it came to life, built as it was on Roosevelt's personality. But many of those self-described Progressives never went back to the Republican Party, a break that shaped the GOP for the next hundred years.

Taft returned home to Ohio, to practice law, to eat in peace, to putter around the golf course every now and then. In 1921, he was named to the Supreme Court, the job he had always wanted. At the
same time, his weight fell to 259 pounds—down a hundred pounds from the peak of his presidency. Of the four years when he occupied the White House as the nation's most powerful man, he wrote: "I don't remember that I ever was President."

Teddy Roosevelt went off to South America to explore an uncharted waterway, the River of Doubt, in the center of the Amazon rain forest. The trip nearly killed him, an epic of illness, food shortages, disease, and danger on a river that swallowed boats and men. "I had to go," Roosevelt said. "It was my last chance to be a boy." He came home ill and underweight.

He retreated to Oyster Bay to be with his big family. His public career was over, though he was only in his mid-fifties. "I am having a horrid, unimportant time," he wrote to a friend, eight years out of office. He found solace in the profession that had sustained him before he entered politics—writing. His sight was nearly gone in one eye, after taking too many punches during White House boxing matches, but he was as prolific as ever, producing as much in a few years' time as some professionals do in a career. At the start of American involvement in the Great War, Roosevelt tried one last time to enter the arena—"to warm both hands before the fire of life," as he put it—requesting permission to lead an infantry division in France. He was turned down. Two years later, on January 6, 1919, this most vigorous of presidents died a relatively young man, at the age of sixty, from an embolism.

Pinchot took the loss hard. No man would ever inspire him so much, and no man's friendship would have greater value. With Roosevelt, every day was an adventure, part of a journey toward something finer, Pinchot felt — "life at its warmest, and fullest and freest, at its utmost in vigor, at its sanest in purpose." Without Roosevelt, the world was smaller, the causes less animating. In Roosevelt's autobiography, Pinchot was mentioned often, which gave the ever-needy forester the love in print that he required in regular doses from his old boxing mate and political partner. Pinchot would remind people that Roosevelt had once said it was G.P. himself who was the "true keeper of his conscience." And for the rest of his life, Pinchot took particular comfort in an additional compliment, this a single line about him from Roosevelt's autobiography: