The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America [B1308]

2010 PB in nice clean condition. Timothy Egan turns his historian's eye to the largest-ever forest fire in America and offers an epic, cautionary tale for our time.

On the afternoon of August 20, 1910, a battering ram of wind moved through the drought-stricken national forests of Washington, Idaho, and Montana, whipping the hundreds of small blazes burning across the forest floor into a roaring inferno that jumped from treetop to ridge as it raged, destroying towns and timber in the blink of an eye. Forest rangers had assembled nearly ten thousand men to fight the fires, but no living person had seen anything like those flames, and neither the rangers nor anyone else knew how to subdue them. Egan recreates the struggles of the overmatched rangers against the implacable fire with unstoppable dramatic force, and the larger story of outsized president Teddy Roosevelt and his chief forester, Gifford Pinchot, that follows is equally resonant. Pioneering the notion of conservation, Roosevelt and Pinchot did nothing less than create the idea of public land as our national treasure, owned by every citizen. Even as TR's national forests were smoldering they were saved: The heroism shown by his rangers turned public opinion permanently in favor of the forests, though it changed the mission of the forest service in ways we can still witness today.

From recent Amazon/GoodReads reviews: "This was fascinating. I had heard of the 1910 fire from one of my classes but never knew about it in depth. I really liked the way the author framed the fire in parallel with the development of the US Forest Service and the conservation movement at large. It made me realize how much we take having national parks and forests for granted and how little I knew about the battle it took to get those lands set aside for recreation."; "Really good book focusing on the infant Forest Service and the huge wildfire in 1910 that burned over 3 million acres over the course of 2 days. Well written and researched with harrowing details, examples of courage and cowardice and the fallout of political opposition pitting big money against conservation."; "I really appreciate the way Egan goes about telling this story. He explains the mixed bag of politics that led up to the fire as well as the consequences (good and bad) after the fire in an ultimately hopeful way.From the life of Roosevelt and Pinchot to the nail-biting stories of Ed Pulaski, Joe Halm, and so many others, this book kept my interest from cover to cover."