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The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt And The Fire That Saved America (2009)

by Timothy Egan(Favorite Author)

4.02 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

0618968415 (ISBN13: 9780618968411)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

review 1: This was a very quick and captivating read which I chose because my mom wanted to read it. (I don't think she's started it yet.) It took me a minute to get into it, but I enjoyed the novelistic approach and the multiple narratives. The many men who suffered or died during the fire were a great cross section of America at that time: Italian laborers supporting their families back home, sons/grandsons of wealthy families, immigrants from England trying their luck, and men escaping the urbanization of the East and its attendant devastation of natural resources. Although Teddy Roosevelt is in the title, he is not directly involved with the fire, and is not even president when it occurs. He weaves in and out, while main characters of the story are Gifford Pinchot, Chief of... more the US Forest Service and later Pennsylvania governor whose professional life is somewhat bookended by the presidents Roosevelt. The secondary lead is Ed Pulaski, one of the most heroic forest rangers of the Big Burn, who never recovered physically from the fire, partly due to the indifference of the US government afterwards, and partly due to his unwillingness to beg for assistance. The book captures the sweep of history from the end of the US' period of settling the west to the Progressive Era, and jumping ahead to the New Deal and the founding of the Civilian Conservation Corps. Highly recommended for history buffs.
review 2: This a tautly-worded story of an important, and dreadful, moment in American history. A drought year, a series of lightning storms, a large number of fires across eastern Washington, western Montana, and northern Idaho. Then came a sudden strong wind that would merge these fires into a single, 3-million-acre inferno: the Big Burn.Timothy Egan puts this into its context in history: conservation had gotten its first boost during Teddy Roosevelt's administration, now over in 1910. The new Forest Service was still in its infancy. The story tells of bigger-than-life personalities: Roosevelt; Gifford Pinchot, the agency's founder; John Muir. Egan also tells of first rangers in that region, equally-vivid personalities like Ed Pulaski, Elers Koch, Roscoe Haines, Joe Halm. He tells of the rangers confronting the wild-and-wooly mining and railroad towns in Idaho, and the rich men who owned them. Indeed, the raucous saloon-Sodom towns are among the liveliest parts of the story, and a real challenge to the rangers who had to protect the newly-reserved forests from barroom roughnecks and roughneck barons.No accident that the Forest Service met with contempt and ill-funding as a result, leaving the rangers overextended and unready to stop the firestorm. The firefighters who fought, died, survived, also get their story, like Pinkie Adair and the fire workers she cooked for, and faced terrifying hazards with. Some of the firefighter dead only now have names and a past, thanks to Egan's research.It's a familiar story to anyone who knows the modern Forest Service, and Pinchot and Pulaski - the latter the inventor of the Pulaski fire tool. They are legendary in the agency's telling, and rightly so, since this terrible event would transform the agency to become what it is now, particularly Pinchot's fierce publicity campaign after the Big Burn. But Egan does not neglect the downside of the story, notably the agency's adoption of the "10 a.m. rule," the policy that a district ranger had to contain any fire by the next morning or face official sanction. It would be a policy, understandable after the trauma of the Big Burn, that would leave the West with overgrown, fire-prone forests by the end of the 20th Century.Indeed, the aftermath of the Big Burn is perhaps Egan's most thoughtful summing up. Not only did it give a new birth to the conservation movement and the Forest Service, but re-energized Teddy Roosevelt's political career and affected U.S. history well through the century. And Egan's prose is terse, fast-paced, vivid in the telling and intelligent in the interpretation and the context.Highest recommendation. less

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