The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America
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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. The Washington Post - Bill Gifford Egan always writes insightfully about his native region; here he commands the full sweep of characters, from the president on down to the loneliest mining-town drunk.
Prologue: A Fire at the End of the World 1Part I In on the Creation1 "A Peculiar Intimacy" 172 Roost of the Robber Barons 395 The Great Crusade 534 Deadwood Days 735 Showdown 86Part II What They Lost6 Summer of Smoke 1057 Men, Men, Men! 1168 Spaghetti Westerners 1299 Firestorm's Eve 14110 Blowup 15411 The Lost Day 15812 The Lost Night 17213 Towns Afire 18714 To Save a Town 20115 The Missing 21116 The Living and the Dead 227Part III What They Saved17 Fallout 23918 One for the Boys 24919 Ashes 263Notes on Sources 287Acknowledgments 307Index 309
