The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America
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How Much Time Did They Have until Wallace Burned to the Ground?An hour or two? Perhaps not even that? Hundreds of firefighters were lost, thought to be dead. The most experienced ranger in the district was racing through another part of the mountains, chased by a crown fire, flames leaping from treetop to treetop, pushed by gusts now approaching eighty miles an hour. Back in town, a teiegraph operator at the Northern Pacific sent a message: "Every hill around town is a mass of flames and the whole place looks like a death trap. Men, women and children are hysterical in streets and leave by every possible conveyance and route." 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
