The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America

“The West of unlimited promise was in its last days. The tribes had been rounded up and shuttled off to little remnants of their native land. The indigenous bison herd, sixty million or more strong at one time, was down to a few hundred stragglers. The ecosystem of the high plains, which had been compared to Eden by Lewis and Clark, was being torn to pieces. Where birds had once blotted the skies of migratory flyways, it was hard at times to find a single duck on a fall afternoon. But even with the smell of death on it, the land made Roosevelt whole again. He found renewal in wilderness—the geography of hope, as it was called by westerners who followed him.” 

The Gilded Age of industrial revolution shepherds the end of America’s white westward migration. The untouched west is being developed at rapid pace for railroad, timber, and mining interests; indigenous populations, both human and animal, are displaced or nearing extinction.

“‘The American Colossus was fiercely intent on appropriating and exploiting the riches of the richest of all continents—grasping with both hands, reaping where he had not sown, wasting what he thought would last forever,’ Pinchot wrote. ‘The exploiters were pushing further and further into the wilderness. The man who could get his hands on the biggest slice of natural resources was the best citizen. Wealth and virtue were supposed to trot in double harness.’” 

Notions of conservation and environmental stewardship are nonexistent in the Gilded Age. The Sierra Club is beginning to advocate for the preservation of natural lands and the idea that land should be used for any other purpose than extracting wealth is inconceivable.

“After returning to the East, the forest commission recommended that two national parks be created, Mount Rainier and Grand Canyon, and told President Cleveland he should establish a number of forest reserves for other lands they had seen. Muir had envisioned such protection for years, but the idea was heretical to Congress and the biggest landowners of the day, the natural resource syndicates. The disposal of public land was a one-way proposition—to commerce, to settlement, to profit, with only a few exceptions.” 

Yosemite, created by the Lincoln administration in 1864, is the first national park. Several parks followed, including Yellowstone under the Grant administration and Mount Rainier and Grand Canyon under the Cleveland administration. Roosevelt does not pioneer national parks or national forests. His contribution is to vastly expand the number and size of national forests, parks, and wildlife reserves.

“What Teddy and Pinchot had first spoken of on that winter night in Albany of 1899 had blossomed in the White House. Ideas take on their own trajectory, but they die without people to carry them into the corridors of power. Following his words with action, Roosevelt created the nation’s first wildlife refuge, Pelican Island in Florida. His executive power, he discovered, while not on par with that of creation, certainly could do the opposite—keep species from going out of existence. […] Roosevelt used executive decrees to add considerably to the forest reserve system, building in huge initial chunks on what Grover Cleveland had started in the last months of his presidency.” 

The conservation movement has little voice or power prior to Roosevelt assuming office after the assassination of McKinley. Upon entering office, Roosevelt champions the cause of conservation above all else, giving the idea life it did not previously possess. 

“Roosevelt needed no prodding to remind him of his biggest failure to date. ‘Forests and foresters had nothing to do with each other,’ he lamented, echoing Pinchot’s almost daily complaint. Without a corps of rangers, the land went unprotected and the decrees that set it aside were largely meaningless. Outside the reserves, the bulk of the public domain remained open for the taking by the copper kings, timber barons, and railroad magnates who dominated the economy and controlled much of congress. The railroads alone had nine of the eleven stocks listed on the precursor to the Dow Jones average. Their 240,000 miles of roads were destiny in iron, determining what towns would flourish or fail, what ports would grow or languish as backwaters, what products would ship cheaply or face high costs. In the West, the railroad’s subsidiaries and contractors cut indiscriminately in the reserves, converting whole forests into miles of underground wooden ribs for mines and above ground ties for transportation. The titans were accustomed to getting land for free. The Northern Pacific Railroad, now controlled by James J. Hill and J.P. Morgan, had been given more than 40 million acres by the government as an incentive to build a transcontinental route […] [T]he Union Pacific […] was given 11.4 million acres […]Between them, the two railroads were handed a piece of the United States nearly equal in size to all of New England.” 

Roosevelt and Pinchot set aside vast swaths of land for preservation in the national forest system, but they fail to secure the funding required to adequately police the land and protect it from abuse by industry interests. Roosevelt relies on his authority as the nation’s chief executive to circumvent a hostile legislature and set aside land, but Congress has the power of the purse and uses that power to defund his new Forest Service almost entirely.

“John Rockefeller was perhaps the richest American who ever lived […] his stake at just under $200 billion, when adjusted for inflation.” 

The Gilded Age produces wealth and inequality on a larger scale than has been recorded in any other moment of history. Rockefeller, an adversary of Roosevelt, amasses wealth that when adjusted for inflation made him significantly richer than contemporary billionaires Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. 

“His Republican Party stood for public ownership of natural resources, among the pillars of the progressive cause. At a time when the gap between rich and poor was never greater, Roosevelt called for a national inheritance tax on wealthy families. And looking to remedy a situation where 26 percent of all boys aged ten to fifteen spent their days working full shifts away from home, and less than 5 percent of all workers had graduated from high school, Roosevelt asked for wholesale changes in child welfare laws. He said people had a right to a safe food supply, to regulation of prescription drugs. And for the sake of future generations, he called for a broad range of measures to protect land and wildlife.” 

Roosevelt’s progressive reforms reach further than just environmental conservation. He and his fellow Republicans pioneer regulations, increased taxation, and child labor laws to provide a better life for working class Americans. Conservation under Roosevelt functions in tandem with these other ideals to create something of a birthright for Americans: financial security, safe living conditions, and a natural ecosystem for all to share.

“To win that fight, he now took on a greater one—against something as old as the earth itself. Fire was an enemy, a force feared by settlers, loggers, ranchers, and outdoorsmen.” 

Pinchot engages in a gambit: To prove the Forest Service’s worth to congress and secure funding, he claims the service can prevent forest fires. This would make the service valuable to private interests as well as public interests, and ensure the survival of the Forest Service. However, Pinchot knows that forest fires are ecological necessities and that if they were to cease, the results would be damaging to the forest ecosystem.

“What they had in common, among other things, was miserable pay—$900 a year for an assistant ranger, barely half of what a grade school teacher makes in today’s dollars. Rangers had to supply their own horses, their own saddles, their own rifles and hobnailed boots. At the same time, Senators Heyburn and Clark plotted to keep the Forest Service on a diet that would ensure malnutrition, if not starvation, slashing away at the budget and seizing on any excuse to humiliate the service.”

Congressional adversaries of the Forest Service starve the agency dry. Without adequate funding, the rangers cannot adequately police industry interests in the forest, and ensuring low pay acts to dissuade competent potential rangers from taking the job.

“The Little G.P.s were horrified and perplexed by what they found in the people’s land: instead of honest homesteaders they confronted land thieves, instead of Pinchot’s vaunted Little Man Who Would Be King they found whiskey peddlers, instead of enlightened merchants they found six varieties of pimps—all operating in open defiance of the U.S. Forest Service.” 

Pinchot did not prepare the rangers for the realities they would encounter in the national forests. The new rangers expected to find pristine, beauteous forests. Instead, they find crime, debauchery, and a populace with no respect for the land. 

“In his final months as president, Roosevelt tried to ensure that his policies had a permanent place in the country. That meant conservation was to be as lasting an American principle as free speech. Three weeks before leaving office, he requested that the world’s great powers meet in The Hague to do an inventory of the world’s resources. Far ahead of his time, and to the criticism of isolationists in his own party, Roosevelt tried to get the major nations of the world to come together and take stock of the globe they shared.” 

Roosevelt has broader conservationist goals than his own country. He attempts to form an internationally shared conservationist ideal to unite nations. Taft quashes his plans.

“Not long after Roosevelt sailed for Africa, Pinchot headed out west on a trip of his own. He found his rangers full of misery: the budget cutbacks were killing them. No pay raises. No new funds for roads, trails, telephones. No money to hire fire patrols in advance of the perils of the dry season. All these restrictions came after a four-fold expansion in the land the rangers had to oversee, and it was taking its toll.” 

Congressional defunding of the Forest Service creates hardships for the rangers. Roosevelt and Pinchot thought they were clever by adding as much land as possible to the forest reserves before Roosevelt left office, but without congressional funding they only created more land for the already overtaxed rangers to police with no ability to hire more rangers.

“With the opening of the Milwaukee Road in 1909, the iron muscle of modern industry came to the Bitterroots, the trains charging through, all roars and thunder, whistle yelps bouncing off the rock walls of the mountains. In the first summer of the new line, the train also proved to be an iron fire-starter—a serious problem for the undermanned Forest Service.” 

The Milwaukee Road rail line is the epitome of industry colliding with nature. It is the largest and most destructive rail line ever created, and it is built in the middle of one of the largest swaths of natural forest in the United States. It is an ecological disaster

“This was what Pinchot was up against, what the saintly Muir could never understand: the wolves were at the door, working with the president to undo all that Roosevelt had accomplished. They wanted to hand public lands over to the very people Roosevelt and Pinchot had battled for the past decade.” 

The early conservation movement in the United States is comprised of many individuals who engage in varying tactics to push their agenda. Roles are framed by persons’ places in society and individual ideologies towards the natural world. John Muir, a dogmatic and apolitical nature enthusiast, cannot comprehend why Pinchot must act politically and make compromises to achieve desired ends. To Pinchot conservation is a fight, to Muir it is an ordination. 

“It was summer, peak season, and thousands of people were in the mountains for one reason: to squeeze money from the place as quickly as they could push themselves. It was the people’s forest, by God, just as Gifford Pinchot said, and folks intended to get something while the getting was good. […] In barely a hundred years’ time, the United States had gone from a fledgling set of former colonies with 2.9 million people to an ocean-to-ocean country of 91 million. This first decade of the twentieth century exceeded all others for the volume of new people, the nation adding 16 million residents to its forty-six states and two territories by decades end.” 

Much of the exploding United States population settles in the west with dreams of becoming rich off the resource rich forests and mountains. They have no knowledge of life in the untamed wilds—to natives and the foresters, they seem to bumble around making a mess of everything—and their only desire is to make money off the land. Their presence taxes the land and harms the natural ecology.

“A few of the Little G.P.s, some of the Indians, and a handful of old-timers said these woods needed fire-could not flourish without it. Take a look at a stand of lodgepole pine, a veteran of the woods would try to explain: eighty, ninety, one hundred years old, starting to show some wear. It’ll live another thirty years at most, but the trees must have fire to carry on the species. The cones stay on limbs, tight and closed, until the heat of a big fire comes along and opens them up, starting the next cycle of life again.” 

Fire is a necessary component of the forest ecology. Wildfire destroys and kills, but without it the forests would have even more death and destruction. Species depend on the natural fire cycle for survival. Interference is ruinous to the ecosystem.

“Even after three years without raises, after Congress had ratcheted down the budget until it was a pittance, after the newspapers of the copper kings and timber barons had called for the Forest Service to be run out of the woods-after all of that, the rangers reached deep into their own pockets to try to save the land.” 

Because Congress refuses to fund the Forest Service, individual rangers fund the necessary expenses with their savings. The rangers are dedicated to the land. They are treated as adversaries by local industry, residents of the towns, and their own government, but still they sacrifice their own lives and spend their own money to protect the forests as well as the very same people, industries, and government that derides them.

“Their crew was international, the woods thick with a babel of languages from people forced to the edge of the new America because the cities were deemed less hospitable.” 

The search for opportunity has pushed many immigrants from the coastal cities to the West, where they now find themselves working 17-hour days and risking their lives to save the natural resource of a country that has welcomed them with scorn and contempt.

“Instead of readying for retreat or defense, instead of digging fire lines or packing clothes and belongings, instead of watering down roofs or gathering shovels and picks, the people of Taft went to work hoarding and then consuming their entire whisky supply.” 

Showing complete lack of care or value for anything in the West but themselves, the citizens of Taft treat the oncoming fire as an excuse to have one last party before the city burns, likely taking them with it.

“The chain reaction of a wildfire had begun. Heated plant matter released hydrogen and carbon while drawing in oxygen, and the whole of it was on the run, a weather system of its own. Thus, three small blazes in grass met six bigger ones in the lower forest and then merged with a dozen others before joining twenty or thirty more, until the mass was bundled into a single wall of yellow and orange moving upward at fifty miles an hour into the crowded zone of Douglas fir, spruce, and larch, into groves of wizened hardwoods and withered cedars next to dried-up streams, moving faster than a horse could run.”

Because the rangers could not contain the many small fires as they ignited throughout the forest, they were given time to fester and grow. Now, increased winds bring the fires together, creating one large and destructive fire.

“To Avery they came, rushing in from homesteads and ranches and flame-ravaged villages, to Avery for the last train out of the northern Rockies, to Avery which stood untouched after Wallace had burned, after Grand Forks and Taft had been wiped off the map, after millions of trees were uprooted or charred in place, to Avery the town named for a Rockefeller at the height of the family’s reach into the Far West. In all, about a thousand people remained in the path of the Big Burn. And once in Avery, in the stew of smoke and misdirection, they looked for the two faces of the American government, the Forest Service and the Army.” 

In the fire, when their lives depend on it, residents and industry interests who previously derided the Forest Service, who paid for antagonistic newspaper headlines, view rangers as their saviors.

“There was an order, a pattern, to afternoon thunder boomers, even to wildfires, even to freak events. But the speed of this fire was beyond the comprehension of any wrangler, miner, timberman, or ranger who thought he knew how nature worked.”

The world exists in patterns. Nature is not an exception and neither are wildfires. Every fire is logical and can be understood. Once it is understood, it can be solved. Unfortunately for the rangers and others fighting this wildfire, the fire is too immense and moves to quickly to understand in time.

“After surface-dressing Sullivan’s wounds, though, doctors and nurses would no longer treat him. They did not have authorization, they said; there was no contingency money for the injured. When word of this reached Pulaski, he was infuriated. Couldn’t they see the man had nearly died for his country? How was this different from a soldier wounded on the battlefield? Hell, he would pay the man’s doctor bills out of his own pocket, Pulaski said, if it came to that. So once again the rangers felt obligated to cover the cost of what had been placed in their stewardship, the human and the natural world. […] Just as congressmen had shortchanged the rangers of shovels, axes, and trailbuilding funds, charging them for the cost of horses and mules, and, in the case of Lolo National Forest, essentially forcing them to pay firefighters out of their own pockets, they stiffed the rangers again on medical costs. All these men, their fingernails melted off, skin raised and infected, lungs permanently compromised by smoke, joints strained and bones broken, muscles torn and hair lost, were left to fend for themselves.” 

Even after the fire, Congress continues depriving the Forest Service of money. The federal government refuses to pay medical costs of people injured fighting the fire; private interests who own land and buildings protected by the fire fighters also largely refuse. Congress deprives many who worked long hours fighting the fires, who risked their lives, the wages they were promised. The federal government also refuses to pay for burial expenses and gravesite upkeep for those who perished fighting the fires. It is one last reminder to those in the Forest Service that their country does not value their work, even when that work saves lives and property.