In 1910 a massive forest fire spread through two million acres of Idaho and Montana just at the infancy of US Forestry Service.  This book documents this burn as well as the events preceding it and what its ultimate legacy was for America and its national forests.  The book can easily be broken into two parts.  The first half focuses on Teddy Roosevelt and the founder of the Forestry Service during Roosevelt’s administration Gifford Pinchot.  Also mentioned is a background on the settlement of the area where the burn occurred.  The second half can be characterized by descriptions of the burn itself, its toll on human life and the land that was burned as well as its legacy in helping build the Forestry Service into what it is today.

Gifford Pinchot was an interesting character.  He started the Forestry Service and educated what would be his park rangers at Yale.  These rangers would be known at their outposts in the West as “Little GPs” and were not well respected by the settlers but more on that later.  He was a Progressive and good friends with Teddy Roosevelt even to the point that they would wrestle together at Roosevelt’s home. Roosevelt made him the first head of the newly formed Forestry Service.  What really made Pinchot and interesting character though is that he believed in the supernatural.  He lost his wife Laura at a young age, yet he believed Laura was with him at every moment of his life and he talked to her.  In his diary if he spoke to Laura he called it a “good day” but as time went on the spirits faded and  whenever she didn’t appear to him he said it wasn’t a good day.  Pinchot toured the West many times and loved to hike the forests.  He became friends with the great naturalist John Muir while at Yosemite and the Sierras in California.  Muir would become like a mentor to him, but would also lobby for more environmental rights since Pinchot was a government leader.

Another part of the book was about the affected area itself in Wallace, Idaho and surrounding areas.  The book opens with a train coming to evacuate the women and children from Wallace and the mayor saying that men need to stay behind to help fight the fire.  However, there were some men who defied the mayor’s order and cowardly pushed women out of the way to get on that train. This brings us to some of the settlements out here like Taft, Idaho that made Deadwood seem tame by comparison.  They were founded as gambling, liquor,  and prostitution dens.  William Howard Taft, who became president after Roosevelt, was seen as fat, weak-willed and not a respectable leader.  The town of Taft was named after him as a joke.  Amongst and surrounding these towns were the newly formed National Forests which were also seen as a joke.  The rangers or Little GPs were not respected and were constantly battling the politicians and lumber magnates who wanted to clear cut the entire forest.

So all of this sets the backdrop for the big burn of 1910.  A perfect storm of hot, dry August weather and the emergence of these strong, hurricane force winds in the Washington and Idaho area called Palousers (pronounced Palooser) caused one of the biggest forest fires in American history. There was also a complacency amongst the settlers in this area.  A newspaper a year before the burn declared that they would not be susceptible to forest fires.  Even Gifford Pinchot believed man could systematically defeat forest fires and they weren’t much of a threat.

Overall I thought this was a pretty interesting book.  I learned about the history of the forestry service, the debates over logging and clear cutting vs. conservation and keeping the forests public and most of all the effects and after effects of this giant forest fire I had never heard about that occurred 100 years ago which really helped in a large way to create the US Forestry Service as it is today.