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The Big Burn By Timothy Egan

The Big Burn

Teddy Roosevelt & the Fire that Saved America

by Timothy Egan

Mem. Ed. $17.99

Pub. Ed. $26.00

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The Big Burn

On the afternoon of August 20, 1910, a battering ram of wind known as a Palouser whipped hundreds of small blazes that had been burning in the drought-stricken national forests of Washington, Idaho and Montana into a roaring inferno that destroyed towns and timber in an eye blink. Now In The Big Burn, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Timothy Egan, who brought the Depression-era Dust Bowl of the American high plains to vivid life in The Worst Hard Time, tells the story of the Great Fire of 1910, the largest-ever forest fire in America. More than just an account of a natural disaster, The Big Burn is the story of how President Teddy Roosevelt and his chief forester Gifford Pinchot pioneered the notion of conservation in America, creating the idea of public land as our national treasure, owned by and preserved for every citizen. Their vision led to the creation of the United States Forest Service in 1905, shifting oversight of public land from patronage bureaucrats to professional foresters, keeping the forest from the control of men they regarded as robber barons and plunderers of the public domain. But at the time of the Big Burn, the Forest Service was just five years old, and its enemies hoped that the fire would prove the mortal blow to the fledgling agency, killing the crusade of conservation and clearing away an obstacle to further big-business control of the land. What followed was the first organized, large-scale battle against a forest fire in the United States. Forest rangers had already assembled nearly 10,000 men—including college boys, day-workers and immigrants from mining camps—to fight the many smaller separate fires, and Egan tells the stories of these men and their brave but futile struggle against the newly stoked inferno, including U.S. Forest Service Ranger Ed Pulaski, who famously led his firefighting crew to safety in a mining tunnel. The Great Fire raged through the Bitterroot Mountains, from central Idaho, east into Montana, west into Washington and north into British Columbia, taking at least 85 lives, burning five towns and more than three million acres in just two days. But while the heroism shown by the rangers actually turned public opinion in favor of the forests, leading to a doubling of the Forest Service budget, Egan notes that in an ironic twist, the timber barons themselves would soon come to support the Forest Service as the fire-fighting agency that protected the trees they would eventually begin cutting down. Combining solid history with a vivid account of the blaze seen through the eyes of those who lived through it, The Big Burn is an epic story of heroism with a cautionary message that’s as relevant today as it was a century ago.

Hardcover: 352 pages

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Pub. Co. ( October 19, 2009 )

Item #: 86-4247

ISBN: 9780618968411

Product Dimensions: 6.0 x 9.0 x 0.79 inches

Product Weight: 16.0 ounces

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