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

The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America | Timothy Egan | Probably one of the most thrilling histories of the past decade

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	The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America Timothy Egan Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009 - 336 pages average customer review:based on 74 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

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. Forest rangers had assembled nearly ten thousand men?college boys, day workers, immigrants from mining camps?to fight the fire. But no living person had seen anything like those flames, and neither the rangers nor anyone else knew how to subdue them.
Egan narrates the struggles of the overmatched rangers against the implacable fire with unstoppable dramatic force. Equally dramatic is the larger story he tells of outsized president Teddy Roosevelt and his chief forester, Gifford Pinchot. Pioneering the notion of conservation, Roosevelt and Pinchot did nothing less than create the idea of public land as our national treasure, owned by and preserved for every citizen.

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The Big Burn

It arrived in excellent condition but was slow getting here, taking almost a month to arrive.

Probably one of the most thrilling histories of the past decade

Egan does what few historical writers manage to pull off in the way that he gives the narrative such an intense arc. Fascinating details made all the more so in that I was listening to the audio book as I drove through Wallace, ID on I-90.

Good big picture with a less-satisfactory narrative in the middle

As its title suggests, this book tells the story of the huge wildfire of August 1910 that burned an area the size of Connecticut on the Idaho-Montana border. As the subtitle suggests, Egan frames this as part of a larger story about forestry in the Teddy Roosevelt years.

The result is two distinct books. There are several framing chapters at the start of the book, and another couple at the end, that tell the stories of Theodore Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot, conservationism and the Progressive movement. The first group of chapters is excellent, and highly recommend; the last group does a good job wrapping up the story. Egan oversells the role of the 1910 fires in all this but, hey, it's his book and his story and he gets to do that.

The middle of the book is the story of the wildfire itself. This is an interesting but dramatically-difficult narrative. Egan tells us stories of firefighters and residents, forest rangers and railroads, evacuees and heroes, scattered over a wide area. He has a lot of information about some, especially the central figure of Edward Pulaski. If you survived and told your story, Egan knows more about you. There's less information available about working-class immigrants, homesteaders, and those who died. Some of the characters are vividly portrayed while others never quite come along.

More problematically, Egan's story jumps around from group to group, place to place, with some flashbacks and a little repetition. It's difficult to pull this off and he doesn't quite succeed. The result is that the middle of the book still readable and interesting but less compelling than it might have been.

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I'm not sure how it "saved America" (3.5 stars)

In 1910 a large and intense wildfire burned 3 million acres over two days, destroying five small towns in Montana, Idaho, and Washington and killing about 100 people. Some of the dead were homesteaders and prospectors, but many were employees of the nation's new Forest Service, sometimes derisively known as "Teddy's green rangers" or "little GPs" after President Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, the two men who pioneered the new idea of forest conservation.

The background on the establishment of the Forest Service and the politics behind and against it was interesting, and the account of the fire was vivid and dramatic, although a bit confusing. The heroics of rangers like Ed Pulaski, Joe Halm, and others were inspiring, but the different accounts were difficult to follow and sort out. I was disappointed that it wasn't clear if the Forest Service did any good or how the disaster "saved America." Egan seems to take a conservationist agenda in that the heroes and villains are pretty obvious in his telling, but he fails to coherently summarize what lessons (if any) were learned by the Forest Service in how to manage the land. In fact, while the fire was a public relations boon, making heroes of the rangers who bravely fought it, it appears that the Forest Service later came under the influence of the very forces it was created to oppose - the logging industry - even facilitating equally disastrous clear cutting of the land in later years.

Egan isn't as masterful a history-teller as David McCullough, nor does he have a flair to insightfully analyze and interpret history like Joseph Ellis, and it's a little frustrating to wonder what lessons were learned here. The book is what I like to think of as "light" or "popular" history: interesting and at times exciting, but not especially satisfying. (I listened to the audio version read by Robertson Dean who has a deep and sonorous voice which was very difficult to get used to listening to.)

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