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

On a snowy day in February 1899, Gifford Pinchot arrives at future president Teddy Roosevelt’s executive mansion in Albany and finds him helping his children escape down a rope out the window in a make-believe game. Pinchot is the national forester for the McKinley administration. The grandson of a timber baron who amassed a fortune skinning Pennsylvania of its trees, Pinchot grew up with immense wealth and privilege—he was raised in a castle in Pennsylvania. Pinchot views his life as a corrective for his grandfather’s actions. He is in love with the land and strives to protect it. After studying forestry at Yale and l’Ecole Nationale Forestiere in France, he travels west in the United States where he experiences “pure bliss: baptism in the land” (29). He shares this love of nature with Roosevelt.

Roosevelt is born sickly, frail, asthmatic, and nearsighted. He defies doctors who tell him his life depends on remaining indoors and vows, “I will make my body” (20). Roosevelt becomes an avid outdoorsman: mountain climbing, snowshoeing, canoeing, horseback riding, shooting, and roping. He also develops an appreciation of nature and studies zoology, but pivots to politics when he learns most zoology work occurs indoors. Egan explains, “He wanted to crash and thump and charge and breathe in all the dimensions beyond the walls” (22). After losing his wife and mother in the same day, Roosevelt travels west to the Badlands, where he builds a cabin. When he returns to New York, he re-enters politics, marries, has five children, and writes nine books in 10 years. During the Spanish-American War, he enlists as a Colonel and “with his sun-hardened troop of ranchers, broncobusters, drifters, and hunters—the Rough Riders, 1st Volunteer Cavalry Regiment—became the best-known man in America” (24). He is elected governor of New York in 1898, named Vice President in 1901, and succeeds McKinley after his death as President of the United States, serving from 1901 to 1909.

Pinchot and Roosevelt know each other through sportsman’s clubs, but on this evening, Pinchot is in Roosevelt’s Governor’s mansion while on a trip to climb Mount Marcy and survey the forests of the Adirondacks. After tea, Roosevelt challenges Pinchot to wrestling, then boxing. Roosevelt had, at the state’s expense, a wrestling mat installed in the governor’s mansion. Pinchot accepts. Roosevelt wins the wrestling match, but the taller and more calculated Pinchot bests Roosevelt in boxing. Pinchot and Roosevelt are kindred spirits who believe that the natural beauty of the United States is its greatest asset. Roosevelt and Pinchot work together on many conservation efforts between Roosevelt’s governorship and his presidency, partnering with the legendary naturalist John Muir and establishing national forest reserves. When Roosevelt becomes president, he declares publicly that little will change, but to Pinchot he privately expresses a desire “to steer the Republican Party away from big business and toward becoming ‘a fairly radical progressive party’” (37).

Roosevelt creates the first national wildlife refuge in 1903—Pelican Island in Florida. Egan writes, “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” (43). He continues to use executive decrees to add lands to the national forest reserve system. Congress refuses to allocate funds, so he is unable to hire enough forest rangers to adequately police the land and prevent timber, mining, and railroad syndicates from plundering the public land.

Senator William A. Clark is “the richest and the most hated” man in Montana (39). He corners the copper market when the commodity is in its highest demand and “purchase[s] cops and courts, newspaper editors and ministers, grand juries—any source of opposition or fair play” (39). At this time, senators are chosen by state legislators, so Clark essentially buys his senate seat and remains unaccountable to the people. Mark Twain describes Senator Clark as “the most disgusting creature that the republic has produced” (39). Senator Clark and his ally, Senator Heyburn of Montana, despise Roosevelt’s conservation policies. They deride Roosevelt as an outsider with no place in the American West and use Clark’s newspaper holdings to portray Roosevelt’s forest rangers as “sissies and interlopers” (41). During an era of “ free-for-all capitalism,” Roosevelt’s insistence that the public’s right to the country’s national resources outweighs the private sector’s is revolutionary (42).

On May 27, 1903, Clark finds himself sitting with Roosevelt at a dinner party in Butte, Montana. The party’s attendees are “a cross-section of Butte”: “Irish […], Blacks, Chinese, Cornish, Italians, Greeks, Swedes, and Germans” (47). Roosevelt is touched by a present given to him by a group of black miners at the table: a pair of silver scales. He states, “This comes in the shape I appreciate—scales of justice held even” and tells the miners the gift makes him want to help the miners get “a square deal” (48). This idea is central to his administration’s policy. Senator Clark retreats from the dinner in a huff, resolving to thwart Roosevelt’s ambitions. Egan explains: “After the dinner in Butte, there would be no truce, no letup, no middle ground. Roosevelt had to be stopped. Clark used his Senate seat to block every effort at conservation, and he used his newspapers to echo his interests and applaud his opposition to Roosevelt” (48).

Clark is successful for some time. With no forest rangers to protect the reserves, big money interests do as they please. The General Land Office exists to transfer public lands to private ownership. This changes in 1904, when Roosevelt wins his first full term as president by a record-breaking margin.

With this mandate, Roosevelt transforms the Republican party into a progressive party which champions public ownership of natural resources, a national inheritance tax, child welfare laws, and increased regulation of food and prescription drugs. Congress transfers the forest reserves to the Pinchot-led United States Forest Service and allocates a small budget to train rangers to steward the forests. Roosevelt and Pinchot know that to maintain funding, they must prove the agency’s worth to a skeptical Congress. Egan explains, “legislators could kill the Forest Service simply by defunding it” (51). Their mantra becomes “fight, fight, fight” (51). To win, they set out to prove the forest service can be valuable to both private and public interests by taming the threat of fire. However, wildfires are a part of nature. Pinchot and Roosevelt know fire is necessary to the forest ecosystem and preventing it is antithetical to the conservation effort, but “he put the science aside and chose to believe the words he used to sell Congress on his big idea” (51). Pinchot promises Congress his foresters can control fire.

Elers Koch is one of the first rangers in Pinchot’s United States Forest Service. Raised in the Rocky Mountains, he met Pinchot as a teenager on Mount Rainer. Impressed, Pinchot invited him to attend his new forestry program at Yale. Egan explains, “If possible, Pinchot wanted the Forest Service to be manned by westerners, but first they had to have his imprint on them, and that usually meant the Yale School of Forestry” (54). Bill Greely, a minister’s son who referred to himself as “a forest missionary,” was also in this inaugural class of the Yale School of Forestry. Pinchot brings Koch and Greely west to scout an area in Montana and Wyoming “half the size of the Louisiana Purchase” (53). They survey land to include as new additions to the rapidly expanding forest reserve system.

The rangers call Pinchot “G.P.” and refer to themselves as “Little G.P.s.” They believe “working for the Forest Service was the most noble thing a young American could do for his country” (56). Encouraged by Roosevelt’s rallying cries, the rangers sacrifice safe and lucrative careers to devote themselves to the land. Greely is put in charge of a large region with Koch and William Weigle serving as forest rangers under him. Weigle, who is tough and pragmatic, is assigned to the most challenging forest—the Coeur d’Alene in Wallace, Idaho. Wallace had previously been a battleground in labor wars, which made locals suspect of any federal official. The rangers are paid miserably; an assistant ranger made $900 dollars a year and had to purchase their own supplies, including horses and saddles. Low pay is the result of the machinations of Senators Clark and Heyburn, who intentionally underfund the agency.

Logging is permitted in the forests, but rangers are expected to limit it, maintain order, and ensure it is conducted “at a pace that would not deplete the timber supply or threaten the health of a forest” (59). Understaffed and underfunded, rangers cannot reign in misuse of the land.

In Washington, Pinchot is the most trusted member of Roosevelt’s inner circle. They spend their days alternating between exhilarating activity and hatching ideas for America’s future. During a horseback ride in 1907, Pinchot coins the idea of conservation as a theme to “bring together all the things the Roosevelt administration was trying to do in the natural world” (66). Pinchot writes in his memoir: “The earth, I repeat, belongs of right to all its people, and not to a minority, insignificant in numbers but tremendous in wealth and power” (66). Roosevelt begins using the word conservation in speeches and congressional proposals. Egan elaborates, “Whether Pinchot and Roosevelt actually invented conservation is debatable […] But Pinchot and Teddy were the first to advance conservation for […] an executive branch agenda” (67). They expand national forests, parks, wildlife refuges, and other protected lands. They prosecute timber thieves and cons, even convicting a sitting senator of their own party.

Roosevelt and Pinchot draw Congress’s ire. Representative Joseph Gurney Cannon of Illinois coins the rallying cry, “Not one cent for scenery!” (68) In 1907, Congress devises a plan to foil the Forest Service. They insert an amendment to a spending bill that removes the president’s authority to create new national forests without congressional approval. Roosevelt and Pinchot use the seven day window with which they have to sign the bill to add as much land to the national forest system as possible. Roosevelt adds 16 million acres of land to the national forest system, then signs the bill. Heyburn eliminates as much funding as possible for the Forest Service, but Roosevelt had already tripled the national forest system to 180 million acres, and the public had become aware of the benefits of conservation. In Idaho, Montana, Colorado, the Dakotas, Wyoming, Washington, Oregon, California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Alaska, hundreds of Little G.P.s steward the land, fight fires, and work “to show homesteaders, grubstakers, immigrants, and others that the Forest Service worked on their behalf” (72).