The Big Burn Read online

  The Big Burn

  Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America

  Timothy Egan

  * * *

  HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT

  BOSTON • NEW YORK • 2009

  * * *

  Copyright © 2009 by Timothy Egan

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this

  book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing

  Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Egan, Timothy.

  The big burn : Teddy Roosevelt and the fire that saved America /

  Timothy Egan.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-618-96841-1

  1. Roosevelt, Theodore, 1858–1919. 2. Presidents—United States—Biography. 3. Conservationists—United States—Biography. 4. Pinchot, Gifford, 1865–1946. 5. Forest conservation—United States—History. 6. Nature conservation—United States—History. 7. National parks and reserves—United States—History. 8. United States. National Park Service—History. 9. Forest fires—Montana—History. 10. Forest fires—Idaho—History. I. Title.

  E757.E325 2009

  975.911— dc22 2009021881

  Book design by Melissa Lotfy

  Map by Jaques Chazaud

  Printed in the United States of America

  DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  The text of this book is printed on 45# Domtar Earthchoice, which is

  certified by the Forest Stewardship Council. FSC certification ensures

  the environmentally responsible, socially acceptable, and economically

  viable use of well-managed forests.

  * * *

  To Sam Howe Verhovek

  Friend, editor, writer, and adopted son of

  the Pacific Northwest, no bow-tied bum-kisser he

  * * *

  Contents

  Prologue: A Fire at the End of the World [>]

  PART I

  IN ON THE CREATION

  1. "A Peculiar Intimacy" [>]

  2. Roost of the Robber Barons [>]

  3. The Great Crusade [>]

  4. Deadwood Days [>]

  5. Showdown [>]

  PART II

  WHAT THEY LOST

  6. Summer of Smoke [>]

  7. Men, Men, Men! [>]

  8. Spaghetti Westerners [>]

  9. Firestorm's Eve [>]

  10. Blowup [>]

  11. The Lost Day [>]

  12. The Lost Night [>]

  13. Towns Afire [>]

  14. To Save a Town [>]

  15. The Missing [>]

  16. The Living and the Dead [>]

  PART III

  WHAT THEY SAVED

  17. Fallout [>]

  18. One for the Boys [>]

  19. Ashes [>]

  Notes on Sources [>]

  Acknowledgments [>]

  Index [>]

  * * *

  If now the dead of this fire should awaken and I should be stopped beside a cross, I would no longer be nervous if asked the first and last question of life, How did it happen?

  —NORMAN MACLEAN, Young Men and Fire

  * * *

  Prologue

  A Fire at the End of the World

  HERE NOW CAME the fire down from the Bitterroot Mountains and showered embers and forest shrapnel onto the town that was supposed to be protected by all those men with faraway accents and empty stomachs. For days, people had watched it from their gabled houses, from front porches and ash-covered streets, and there was some safety in the distance, some fascination even— see there, way up on the ridgeline, just candles flickering in the trees. But now it was on them, an element transformed from Out There to Here, and just as suddenly on their front lawns, in their hair, snuffing out the life of a drunk on a hotel mattress, torching a veranda. The sky had been dark for some time on this Saturday in August 1910, the town covered in a warm fog so opaque that the lights were turned on at three o'clock in the afternoon. People took stock of what to take, what to leave behind. A woman buried her sewing machine out back in a shallow grave. A pressman dug a hole for his trunk of family possessions, but before he could finish, the fire caught him on the face, the arms, the neck.

  How much time did they have until Wallace burned to the ground? An hour or two? Perhaps not even that? When the town had been consumed by flame twenty years earlier, it fell in a deep exhale—painted clapboards, plank sidewalks, varnished storefronts. Whoooommmppffffff! Then they did what all western boomers did after a combustible punch: got up from the floor and rebuilt, with brick, stone, and steel, shaking a fist again at nature. And since there was so much treasure being stripped from the veins of these mountains on the high divide between Montana and Idaho, they rebuilt in a style befitting their status as the source of many a bauble in the late Gilded Age. Italian marble sinks went into barber shops. Cornices were crafted of cast iron. Terracotta trim decorated bank windows. The saloons, the bordellos, the rooming houses, the men's clubs, the hotels—fireproof, it said on their stationery. Most impressive of all was the new train depot of the Northern Pacific Railroad. Designed in the Chateau style, the depot's buff-colored bricks formed a Roman arch over the main window. Three stories, counting the magnificent turret, and shingled in green. The depot was an apt hub for a region that promised to produce more silver, lead, and white pine than any other on the planet.

  "It seemed like a toy city," a novice forest ranger said after he had crested the mountains by train and caught his first sight of Wallace, Idaho, "clean and spotless, and very much up to date, with fine homes and fine people."

  In the early evening, the young mayor, Walter Hanson, checked with his fire chief, and he summoned his assistant, and they said, yes, it was time— sound the alarm! That was it; everyone knew they had to make a dash for the getaway trains. Women and children only, the mayor said, with a Victorian gentleman's reflex common even in the Far West. He deputized an instant force of local men to back him up. Troops were available as well, the "negro soldiers" of the 25th Infantry, I Company, who had just pitched a hurried camp on the Wallace baseball field after withdrawing from the aggressive front line of the fire. Over the years, they had chased Indians in the Dakotas, put down insurrections in the Philippines, and helped to establish civil order during western labor wars, but never in the history of the 25th Infantry had these Buffalo Soldiers been asked to tame a mountain range on fire. In a state with fewer than seven hundred blacks, the troops were greeted with curiosity and skepticism by polite citizens, scorn and open hostility by others. On Saturday, after they pulled back from the flames up high and regrouped on the baseball field, the retreat fed the scolds who said a black battalion could never save a town, much less fight a wildfire nearly as large as the state of Connecticut.

  Even as the bell rang, the special trains were being fitted, with not enough space for half the town of 3,500 people. Rail workers stripped away cargo and some seats to make room for the exodus. The men could not leave, the mayor insisted; they must stay behind and fight. The elderly, the infirm, and little boys, of course, even those who looked like men, could go. Everyone else was told to get a garden hose and go up on their roofs, or jump aboard one of the horse-drawn fire carriages, or grab a shovel and get on a bicycle. Or pray. The mayor was asked about the jail— do we let the prisoners burn? Needing the manpower, he ordered the cells opened and the inmates sent to Bank Street, right in front of the courthouse, to form a human fire line. Only two would remain handcuffed, a murderer and a bank robber.

  The evacuation was not orderly, not at all as
the mayor had imagined days earlier when he first drew up plans with the United States Forest Service to save Wallace. People dashed through the streets, stumbling, bumping into each other, shouting rumors, crying, unsure exactly where to go. Some carried babies under wet towels. Some insisted on carting away large objects. It felt as if the town was under artillery fire, the mile-high walls of the Bitterroots shooting flaming branches onto the squat of houses in the narrow valley below. Between flareups and blowups, the hot wind delivered a continuous stream of sparks and detritus.

  Earlier in the day, ashes had fallen like soft snow through the haze. At the edge of town, where visibility was better, people looked up and saw thunderheads of smoke, flat-bottomed and ragged-topped, reaching far into the sky. Then the wind had calmed to a whisper for the better part of an hour, a truce of sorts, and it seemed that the town might be spared. But at 5 P.M., leaves on trees rustled and flags unfurled in slow flaps as winds picked up to twenty miles an hour. By 6 P.M., telephone lines and utility wires whistled with another kick in velocity. And before the hour passed, big evergreens groaned at the waist and twigs snapped off—the air galloping to gale force, forty-five to sixty miles an hour, a wildfire's best stimulant. So by nightfall, when the evacuation began, the blows were approaching hurricane force, extended gusts of seventy-four miles an hour or more. Everyone knew about Palousers, the warm winds from the southwest; they could pack a punch, though they were rare in the Bitterroots. But a Palouser hissing flames at high speed — this was a peek beyond the gates of Hell.

  In the pandemonium, to be heard on the streets required a shout. Strong men knocked down women, ignoring the mayor's order and betting that the newly constituted fire militia — their neighbors — would never shoot them for fleeing. "I have been in panics," said Carl Getz, visiting from Seattle, "but the one at Wallace was the worst I have ever seen."

  John Boyd, father of a town fire captain, was worried about his bird, the parrot that kept him company in his old age. He covered the cage with a sheet, but the bird squawked something terrible when menaced by the smoke and wind. Forget it, his son told him. Get out! Don't take the bird. The orders stipulated that no pets would be evacuated, and no baggage allowed beyond what a person could carry and fit in her lap. It was the only way to ensure enough room to get all the women and children out of town. Boyd left his house and started for the exit trains, aided by his son, who was quickly called away to his fire duties. But Boyd couldn't stop thinking about his parrot, and when his son was out of sight, the old man doubled back toward his house.

  Just after 9 P.M., an ember the size of a horse's thigh fell from the sky and landed next to buckets of press grease and rags that had been soaked in solvent at the Wallace Times. The wooden rear side of the newspaper building went up in a flash; inside, reporters, editors, and pressmen fled with barely enough time to find the exits. From there, flames jumped to a mill, a rooming house, two hotels, and the depot of the Oregon Railway & Navigation Company, the town's second line, designated for the main evacuation service. The roof of the four-story Sunset Brewery collapsed in flames. Beer spilled out the side of the building and ran down the streets. The defense line had been drawn a few blocks west, where a buttress of solid stone buildings stood. But soon came a pop, pop, pop of glass as some windows of the courthouse broke in the heat or cracked as the wood trim curled, the fire now challenging the boundary of resistance. From the streets, it looked as if all of Wallace was burning, the storm setting off near-constant explosions of its own—gas tanks, oil vats, and other containers of liquid combustibles blowing up.

  The mass of exiles clustered along the tracks, unsure where to meet the train, waiting, stomping feet, shuffling, surrounded on all sides by what looked like an amphitheater of flame. The mayor tried to assure the crowd: the train was coming— don't panic! The plan was to make a run west for Spokane, 103 miles away. People were drenched in sweat; all their worldly possessions—that is, the clothes on their backs — picked up ash from above. Wrapped in a swirl of hot air and gas, some fainted or buckled over from dehydration. When the train whistle screeched the crowd moved closer to the tracks, more pushing, more jostling, more screaming. The mayor hurried to address the mob, leading a handful of troops and his fire chief, Fred Kelly. Their job, he had told the troops, was simply to keep people from turning on each other, to maintain order. Again he issued the command: no able-bodied man was allowed on the train, no baggage but what you could hold in your lap. The train whistle blared constantly in the dark, but it was almost drowned out as tanks continued to blow up, scattering flammables to other parts of town.

  The train came into view, moving very slowly, an eternity to those in the exodus scrum. It lumbered to a stop, engines still fired, wheezing smoke and steam. Doors opened, and with a heave people poured into the cars, all seats and standing room filled as if by water gushing into a ship's cargo hold. A woman separated from her child cried out, "My baby! My baby!" One man yanked a woman from her seat and took it as his own. He was pulled from the train and kicked to the ground by those who were overseeing the evacuation. Within minutes, all space was taken, even on the flatbeds, and yet men of strong build in fine clothes spurned the mayor's orders and bullied their way onto the train.

  "Men fought with women for precedence, well-dressed men eager to get into the coaches and save themselves," the Idaho Press reported in its eyewitness dispatch. The men were cowards, the railroad's freight agent said. "The women were the heroines." To the mayor's dismay, among the weak men were prominent citizens who had talked earlier of holding the line, of fighting for the town and setting an example for the children, for the community. In truth, they came to this mountain town to get rich, and damned if they were going to die trying to save the place. The mayor consulted with his fire chief about ejecting all the men by force. Before he could issue an order, a soldier removed a well-known roustabout from the train, "a fat gambler," as the papers called him; he was forced off at the end of a fixed bayonet. Still, men dodged, slipped, and pressed to get on; they were in life-flight, bloated with adrenaline.

  "Let the bastards go," Chief Kelly said to Mayor Hanson.

  Missing from the rescue train was John Boyd. He had ignored his son's pleading, returning to the house to rescue his parrot. He found the bird in a frenzy. Boyd took the cage outside, then paused and set it on the ground. Perhaps the house could be saved. He turned on the garden hose and sprayed the outside walls, the roof, the porch—just enough water for good measure, and surely his son would thank him for thinking like a fireman and not like a coward in abject confusion. Then he picked up the bird cage and hustled for the rail tracks. His gait was unsteady. Snagged by smoke and heat, he gasped and trembled. He had trouble getting a deep breath in the heated air that smothered the town, and it hurt his chest to cough. He sat and rested on the street, taking slow, deliberate breaths, mumbling promises to his parrot. Now when he stood it was difficult to take more than a step or two. After walking a few hesitant paces, he fell to the ground, his grip tight on the birdcage no more. John Boyd and his parrot died on the streets of Wallace, of smoke inhalation.

  Also missing from the train was Emma Pulaski. Her husband was a ranger with the Forest Service who had spent the month of August trying to knock down small blazes in the mountains. He had nearly three hundred men under his command at one point, working a few miles from Wallace. If anyone could keep the fire from jumping into town, it was thought to be Ed Pulaski, one of the few rangers in the fledgling Forest Service who knew the region—its trails, creekbeds, and ridgelines. He knew the winds, the mining holes, the path of afternoon thunderstorms. He knew how to calm a horse when lightning struck, and could craft a tool from a plank of rough cedar, and could pitch a lean-to in less time than it took other rangers to finish a sentence. Chronically short of supplies while commanding a brigade of confused men, Pulaski had fought a rear-guard, defensive action, trying to hold flames in check by digging lines that would deprive the fire of fresh fuel. The strateg
y was simply to keep the fire a safe distance from Wallace, the biggest town in the valley. On Friday, the day before the evacuation, Pulaski had returned to Wallace for food, blankets, shovels—anything to restock his bedraggled crew. He stopped by his house to see Emma and their ten-year-old daughter, Elsie. He had a bad feeling about the next twenty-four hours, he told them.

  "Wallace will surely burn," Pulaski said to his wife. "Be prepared to save yourselves." His was a voice of doom, not a hint of optimism. Wallace had never looked so vulnerable: all this fuel, in this narrow slot of humanity, at the base of a dense forest that had not seen noticeable rain for months. Pulaski and Emma discussed the town evacuation plan first, then another idea of staying behind and hunkering down near the mine tailings by the river, a berm of graveled waste. He was not long into his visit when another ranger rushed up to the house—a fresh fire, much bigger than anything to date, was moving close to town. Pulaski had to go back into the mountains and tend to his firefighters; his orders were to corral this thing before it advanced any farther down the valley. Emma and Elsie went with him to the trailhead, an eight-mile ride from town.

  At road's end, Pulaski faced his wife and daughter. In his fashion, he was blunt, devoid of sentiment, telling them this might be the final goodbye. He turned and started up the steep, faint trail, a corkscrew that had been hacked along a creek by miners. Emma and Elsie rode back to town through a thicket of smoke and blowing embers, Emma's eyes red from the sting of the air.

  When Emma and Elsie reached home, the front yard was littered with burning bark and the porch was covered in ash. They spent a sleepless night. The next day, Saturday, as the winds picked up in the early evening, the house shook so violently Emma thought it might be pushed off its foundation. Those who did not head for the train streamed out of town, their furniture, pots, pans, blankets, and linens piled onto horse-drawn jalopies. Emma still thought she could ride it out. She put her child to bed at 8:30 P.M., closed the doors and windows. In the dark of Saturday night, a neighbor banged on the door.