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Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
October 2009
On Sale: October 19, 2009
336 pages
ISBN: 0618968415
EAN: 9780618968411
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
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 that jumped from treetop to ridge as it raged,
destroying towns and timber in the blink of an eye. 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 robber barons fought
Roosevelt and Pinchot’s rangers, but the Big Burn saved the
forests even as it destroyed them: the heroism shown by the
rangers turned public opinion permanently in their favor
and became the creation myth that drove the Forest Service,
with consequences still felt in the way our national lands
are protected — or not — today.
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