Timothy Egan takes the story of this massive wildfire as an opportunity to reveal a side to President Teddy Roosevelt that goes beyond his "walk softly, big stick" stuff. He dives into Teddy's close relationship to Gifford Pinchot and their combined efforts to combat corporations and to preserve pristine parts of the American wilderness for posterity. Egan paints a fairly rose colored biography of America's 26th president. He glosses over TR's deep insecurities, his overwhelming urge to overcompensate for his privileged upbringing, his life-long compulsion to prove to the world that he was not the dandy delicate young man he was labeled when he first sought public office. None of this is mentioned in "The Big Burn." Egan is more than happy to place Teddy in the exact lighting the president always craved. Nevertheless, the book has an easy narrative to it and Egan uses this lighting to illuminate parts of American history that you knew little about.
In February of 1897, Democratic President Cleveland, at the end of his final administration (the only president to serve two non-consecutive terms in office) used a little known executive power to set aside 21 million acres of forest reserves scattered over three different states. Most of the open land in the US at the turn of the 20th Century was owned by corporations. Railroad magnates, logging conglomerates, and mining trusts wrote all the laws in the wild places of North America and President Cleveland wanted to push back against that status quo. His replacement in the executive office, Republican President McKinley suspended Cleveland's orders and allowed logging and mining to continue in those forests unabated.
McKinley asked the only forestry expert in the country to scout the area for him. Gifford Pinchot, the millionaire aristocrat, was given a title but no authority to be the president's forester. He was close friends with Mckinley's pugnacious young Vice President, and fellow Yale graduate, Teddy Roosevelt. In September of 1901, an assassin shot President Mckinley. Eight days later the president died and TR was sworn in at the age of forty two, making him the youngest president in American history. Roosevelt was determined to move the Republican party away from their embrace of big business and toward becoming "a fairly radical progressive party." He made the thirty six year old Pinchot a special adviser to the president. The two of them shared a love of the outdoors and they were determined to protect the wild places of the nation, to keep them out of the hands of industry and firmly in the possession of The People.
Both Roosevelt and Pinchot were rare men for the times they lived in. When they viewed the natural wonders of the country around them, they didn't see mere material wealth waiting to be transformed into financial profit, simple resources to plunder. They saw beauty and wonder and they were motivated to preserve that for future generations. Whatever their faults, this was their greatest strength, that they thought of Americans as fellow citizens, even Americans who were not yet born.
On page 42, Egan notes that "In an era of free-for-all capitalism, it was revolutionary to insist, as he (Roosevelt) did that the "rights of the public to the national resources outweigh private rights.'" So was the new president's idea that, "We should not turn into shingles a tree which was old when the first Egyptian conquerors penetrated to the valley of the Euphrates." Your first impression in your journey to understanding Teddy Roosevelt was not overwhelmingly positive ("The Imperial Cruise"). Quotes like those above assure you that there is more to this man than a few unconstitutional disastrous foreign policy debacles.
Those in the West did not share this view of the nation's resources. They saw it all as a philosophical, ridiculous ideal being forced on them by East Coast Ivy League elitists. Ironically, Teddy Roosevelt's desperation to appear more manly drove him to explore the wild places of the world and his love for those places inspired him to preserve them, an act which was not seen as particularly "manly" by the men who worked in the wilderness at the time. It is entirely possible that fate conspired to use Roosevelt's weaknesses for a greater purpose. His insecure need to overcompensate, his bombast, his stubbornness were all put to use protecting some of the most unique and extraordinary places in America.
In 1905, newly elected Roosevelt (who won with largest margin of victory in American history to that point) created the US Forestry Service and made Gifford Pinchot the chief. President Roosevelt's own party, which was in control of Congress, worked against him and fought his every effort at conservation, at declaring millions of acres of forests off-limits for corporate exploitation. But together, TR and Pinchot were almost unstoppable, each spurring the other to more audacious goals, to more sweeping efforts. After Congress passed a law giving the president one week before rescinding his power to unilaterally set aside lands for federal protection, the two men lead a team of foresters who scrambled and snatched up in those seven days over 16 million acres for the national forest system. (The fact that Congress attached this recension of Executive Power to a bill funding the federal government, forcing the president to decide between his political priorities and keeping the government operational, just proves that the more things change the more they stay the same.) Teddy and Pinchot set aside lands they both had personally visited and enjoyed. Pinchot reminded you of a nuclear accelerant when he was around TR. Yes, Roosevelt was always a firecracker, but Pinchot's presence, like tritium in a hydrogen bomb, always ramped up the president's explosive power to levels he could never have reached alone.
As heady as these adventures in conservation were for the president and his lifelong friend, and as frustrating as it was for the corporations which had those lands in their sights, everyone had forgotten one thing, the forests were ripe for fire. The fledgling Forestry Service believed they could control fires in nature. They had grown arrogant by repeatedly wet seasons and centuries without any fires. What they didn't realize was that for millenia, Native Americans had regularly burned the forests and grasslands of North America. The Indians knew that regular, controlled burns kept the lands healthy and prevented the buildup of dead dry plant life that could fuel a catastrophic burn. But the natives were mostly eradicated by the dawn of the 20th Century and the white men who had taken their place knew nothing of this burning practice, or if they did know they discounted it as a savage and ignorant practice. In 1910, a year after Roosevelt left office, the woods he set aside for preservation and almost 100 men paid the price for that arrogance.
The summer of 1910 proved to be dry and hot in the mountian ranges of northern Idaho and western Montana. Summer storms brought the danger of lightning without providing the much needed rain. Several smaller fires had broken out in the area, and the forest rangers had culled together every able bodied man they could to fight them. The night before the Big Burn, there were 10,000 people in 3 different states on duty to combat fires in almost 2 dozen forests. Early on Saturday, August 20th a freak wind storm, called a Palauser, rolled into the mountains from the west. This fresh injection of air raced to give the 3,000 small fires burning thoughout the northern Rockies exactly what they needed to merge into one massive firestorm. The inferno quickly became so powerful that it created its own weather system. Hurricane force winds up to 80 miles per hour soon pushed the fire line faster than anyone or anything could move out of its path. Trees one hundred feet tall were turned in an instant into torches, spouting flames thousands of feet into the Rocky Mountain sky. A conflagration like this skipped not only over rivers, it leaped across massive lakes, sending flaming embers ten miles ahead of its advance. The trees in the storm's path that weren't uprooted by the unprecedented winds, simply exploded in the unprecedented heat. It must have been like looking into the gates of Hades. Fighting this beast was hopeless. The forest had lain untouched by fire for too long. It was determined to burn.
"The Big Burn" tells the story of the dozens of people who tried to survive the firestorm, some of them even fighting to save a few of the small towns dotting the flaming mountainsides. Everyone sought shelter wherever they could. Some were roasted alive running in a desperate attempt to outpace the flames. Trees that had stood for hundreds of years collapsed under the assault, crushing the unfortunate firefighters underneath them. Some people found refuge in miners' caves or on top of stony, un-burnable slag heaps. In a story set in an era where only white masculine men exemplified the ultimate "manly" goal for Americans, it is notable that two of the towns in the firestorm's path were saved from destruction by black men from the US Army's 25th Division (the storied Buffalo Soldiers). Not only that, but it was a group of concerned women who proved to be the only people who had the courage to search for lost firemen by climbing into the smoldering ash heap that was all that was left of the mountains around Avery, Idaho after the fires had moved on.
Almost 100 people were killed in the firestorm that day, most of them immigrants who had been hired to fight the flames. Many more were wounded and disfigured for life. It was the greatest loss of firefighters in one event in American history, until September 11th of 2001. These were men who had been lured by the promise of riches in America. Immigrants who had been exploited and discriminated against by the very Americans who had posted a Statue of Liberty at the mouth of their greatest port. Egan notes that the Italian immigrants of the era had a saying. "I came to America because I heard the streets were paved with gold. When I got here, I found out three things. First, the streets weren't paved with gold. Second, they weren't paved at all. Third, I was expected to pave them."
The Big Burn may not have lived up to the hyperbole of the book's subtitle. It may not have been "The Fire That Saved America," but it was certainly an important event in the process of shaping the nation. It's story may have been upstaged by two world wars or overshadowed by terrorist attacks, but it is an important story for what it reveals about the soul of the nation. We are a nation comprised of people who rose above the expectations of bigots, who dreamed of better days, who fought to save the beauty found in the wild places of this land, who sacrificed themselves in the hopes that future generations would live better and more fulfilled lives.
The sacrifice of those dead firemen made the forest service almost holy in the eyes of the American people. The outrage over their deaths ripped the Republican party apart. TR ran for another term against President Taft, the very man Teddy had chosen as his successor. Roosevelt pulled most Republicans into his new Bull Moose party in the election. President Taft carried only two states (the fewest of any incumbent in American history) allowing Woodrow Wilson to run away with the election.
The destruction you saw in Yellowstone when you were a kid was nothing compared to the fire of 1910. The Big Burn torched 3 million acres of forests. But that fire taught us how to allow some fires to burn themselves out so that the current 35 million acres of American wilderness land will never get to the point where they could be destroyed like they were in the Big Burn. They will be allowed to stay untouched and they will be allowed to stay healthy. They will stay wild, a testament to the vision of a young president and a monument to the sacrifice of 78 young firefighters.
On to the next book!
No comments:
Post a Comment