Downed trees littered the Lolo National Forest after teh Big Blowup. Photo © Forest History Society
The story of the fires that seared Idaho and Montana in 1910 never grows stale with the telling. Anyone interested in that extraordinary event—which likely includes followers of the Northern Rockies, the U.S. Forest Service, fire, Gifford Pinchot, public lands, conservation and Teddy Roosevelt—will find The Big Burn well worth the read. Timothy Egan is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a best-selling author with a National Book Award under his belt, and as a graceful columnist and long-time voice of the Pacific Northwest for the New York Times, a writer accustomed to showing how regional concerns can speak to a national audience.
That, in brief, is my review. Anyone who knows anything about the Big Blowup will not need more, and anyone who doesn’t is probably not a reader of Forest Magazine.
What else might be said? Two matters will concern historians. One is the question of sources; the other is interpretation.
The concern with sources mostly comes down to differences between doing journalism and writing history. A journalist can interview participants, visit the setting to absorb its ambience and soak up its telling details, and in doing so, become himself a kind of witness. In writing an account, he can tweak events into scenes and rely on dialogue to help define character. A historian must rely on what actually got recorded. You can’t invent dialogue that wasn’t spoken or contrive scenes (however probable) for which there is no direct evidence, and you can’t get into a character’s mind.
But Egan does. He presents the scenes as real, and his citations are tauntingly elliptical (e.g., “Rangers in Colorado,” from Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent). Some of his information does not exist in the sources he lists—it comes from others, not given. Most readers, however, will dismiss such matters as quibbles that will bother only the dreariest pedant. They will likely appreciate some rhetorical airbrushing. In an age when Photoshop has become a verb, they won’t care if the cracks are smoothed out of old photos or missing scenes are restored. It makes for a better story.
And story, complete with character, plot and conflict, is what journalism does best. The sharper the contrasts, the fiercer the fight, the better the telling. The Big Burn has it all: bully heroes, snarling villains and two grand fights—one political and one physical—that feed upon each other. The political brouhaha is the Gilded Age against the Progressive Era, given a peculiarly western aura here by focusing on conservation and the establishment of the Forest Service by a handful of public champions who face down the big interests with their bottomless money, corrupt lobbyists and bought politicians. The physical conflict is the unequaled firefight that pits a fledgling ranger corps against the Big Blowup.
The Great Fires thus serve two purposes. One is literary: they keep the pot boiling. The other is thematic: the two fights do not merely mirror one another, but are said to be causally linked. The rangers lack the necessary tools to cope because venal politicians (and a lazy, incompetent president) deny them the money and machinery to do the job. The fires, in turn, reveal the moral rot at the heart of the plutocrats and their politicos. While the rangers lose the firefight, they beat the odds and win the war for political reform.
On matters of interpretation, authors deserve lots of slack. Egan clearly intends his view of the past to resonate with the here and now, not least with contemporary quarrels over immigration, the character of a multiethnic society, the environment and the place of government. The problem, however, lies with his use of fire to animate that message.
To begin with, there is little evidence that the Big Burn mattered to the principals of the narrative. Both Roosevelt and Pinchot only referred to it in passing during press conferences when it was, for a few days, national news. When the fires broke out, Pinchot had already removed himself from the arena to the press box. The real firefight for Pinchot was his pitched battle with then-president Taft. He says nothing about what Egan’s subtitle claims is “the fire that saved America” in his autobiography, which climaxes with the events of 1910 and its aftermath.
Nor did the Great Fires thunder over the national scene as one might suppose. They surely helped boost the Forest Service budget and pass the Weeks Act of 1911, which authorized the federal government to purchase land for national forests and to promote fire control by the states. Mostly they affected the agency because they traumatized a succession of chiefs who became more intransigent toward fire. More seriously, Egan avoids the controversy over fire policy that has hounded the Forest Service since its origins. Like a Hollywood melodrama, the good guys are all good, the bad guys all bad, and government must rescue its redneck citizens from their own greed and stupidity. The locals sneer at fire protection and scorn the rangers until they come to rely on those government agents to save their lives.
The actual story with fire is more complex. Naturally, the locals did not want their homesteads and towns to burn down. But neither did they like the government’s paramilitary approach to fire suppression. They wanted to fight fire with fire, specifically, to practice light burning (“the Indian way”) as a means to dampen fires and promote forest health. Light burning was a far more serious threat to the Forest Service than big burns because it questioned the legitimacy of forestry as a source of expertise and sapped the assertion that the agency was a necessary deputy of state-sponsored conservation.
Light burning was political in ways the Big Blowup was not. Its challenge called for an ability to sieve through a variety of practices and decide which worked and which didn’t. That was not Pinchot’s style—nor, in this book, Egan’s. Pinchot had already demonized fire—he had proclaimed it the best public relations angle available to promote forestry. He further polarized the debate by declaring conservation a great crusade and demanding that every citizen must stand either with him or against him. (Sound familiar?) All this makes him look less like the Al Gore of the Progressive Era than its Newt Gingrich. It became impossible to separate good and bad people from good and bad ideas. You were either all one or all the other. So, too, Egan presents the historical choices as either fighting or not fighting fire, which leaves him in the position of blaming those who did not equip the rangers but not those who sent them into the inferno to execute a fatally flawed policy.
The Big Burn is a rousing read, but its misuse of fire is the literary equivalent of the misuse made by early forestry. The outcome is unfortunate, because Egan is a terrific writer who doesn’t need to Photoshop events or shun the complexity of fire’s management. Great literature thrives on just such tensions: when ambiguities get stressed, when good people make poor choices, when flawed people act in noble causes, when all choices are awful, when the need to act overwhelms understanding. The Great Fires boil over with such literary opportunities, which unfortunately get tossed aside like the surplus luggage from panicking townfolk.
In the movie, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, having learned the truth about a pivotal event, the local newspaper editor announces, “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” In The Big Burn a modern western journalist restates that line to read, “This is still the West. When the story becomes fact, print the story.”
Stephen J. Pyne is a professor at Arizona State University and the author of more than twenty books, most recently Voice and Vision: A Guide to Writing History and Other Serious Nonfiction.