In the Line of Fire...Book Review

[UNITED STATES WILDLAND FIREFIGHTERS ASSOCIATION]

A new, unprepared Forest Service takes on a massive, murderous blaze.

By CHARLES PETERSEN

In 1805, the Lewis and Clark expedition was nearly destroyed when it attempted a trek, as winter closed in, through what are now known as the Bitterroot Mountains in northern Idaho. The men were reduced to eating two of their horses and 20 pounds of candles. Midway through the march, William Clark made a bleak entry in his journal: "From this mountain I could observe high rugged mountains in every direction as far as I could see."

Roughly a century later, Clark would have seen fire in every direction. It was the summer of 1910, and another sort of expedition was headed into danger: A band of newly minted rangers from the U.S. Forest Service, then only four years old, were leading thousands of men into a forest so dry that every lightning storm set off hundreds of fires. Their ill-fated battle is at the center of Timothy Egan's "The Big Burn," an account of a disaster that eventually extended across three million acres, incinerated five towns and killed nearly 100 people.

The rangers and a motley army of volunteers barely managed to protect residents from the wildfire, let alone save the forest itself. President Taft ordered 2,500 soldiers into the wilderness just in time for the troops to meet a daunting foe: a strong wind out of the west that whipped the fire into a conflagration roaring though the woods faster than any horse could ride.

Mr. Egan, the author of "The Worst Hard Time" (2005), his well-turned account of the Depression-era families who refused to flee the Dust Bowl, has an evident skill for capturing the drama of natural disasters. "The Big Burn" is at its best when he moves through the hallmarks of catastrophe: the ignored warnings; the hesitation and the help sent too late; the final accounting. The fire, by one ranger's estimate, claimed a billion dollars of timber (in 1910 currency). A smoke cloud could be seen in Denver, 700 miles away.

One survivor of the San Francisco earthquake had the bad luck to be on hand for the big burn as well. "The wildfire was worse," he said at the time. Started when hundreds of spot fires were blown into one massive blaze, the fire wouldn't be contained until reinforcements finally arrived from the Pacific Ocean, in the form of rain clouds. Even today, with modern equipment and airtankers, most experts agree that no number of firefighters could have stopped the blaze once the wind picked up. The rangers' crews—an assortment of town drunks, washed-up old men and out-of-work miners—stood no chance. The rangers themselves, with the Forest Service just formed, lacked the experience to read the signs of the impossibly large fire building up around them. Ed Pulaski, one of the more knowledgeable rangers, had to take refuge with his men in a cave, where several died for lack of oxygen. Pulaski was badly burned and lost much of his vision. A year later he would invent the tool that has since come to symbolize fire-fighting in this country: the "Pulaski," a pick on one side, an ax on the other. Yet the Forest Service, as Mr. Egan tells us in one of the book's more affecting scenes, refused to pay Ed Pulaski's medical bills.

Mr. Egan is less sure-footed when he ventures from storytelling into the realm of politics. His subtitle, "Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America," is not only hyperbolic but misleading. T.R. hardly figures in the narrative. If anything, "The Big Burn" should be commended for shining a light on the real hero of the story, Gifford Pinchot, as important a figure in the protection of wildlands as his better-known contemporaries Roosevelt and John Muir.

The scion of a Pennsylvania family, Pinchot preferred to spend his time tramping through the woods. He founded the Forest Service in 1906 and, with President Roosevelt's help, made the term "conservation" known across the world.

Pinchot is at his most interesting when his views clash with current environmentalism. He hated forest fires, none more than the Big Burn, while most environmentalists today agree that fire helps keep forests healthy. Pinchot was certainly aware of fire's benefits: An article he wrote in 1899, when fire was making its annual foray through the West, was among the first to describe the salutary effects of forest fires. He noted, for instance, that tree seedlings such as those of the giant sequoia in California flourish only on burned ground. Pinchot nonetheless believed in combating forest fires at all costs. He considered the national forests large tree farms, and if fire had once ruled the grasses of the Great Plains, only to be thwarted and supplanted by intensive farming, there was every reason to think the same fire-conquering success might be made in the forests of the West.

Pinchot took other positions that might make today's environmentalists choke on their trail mix. In addition to being an implacable foe of forest fires, he favored logging in California's Yosemite National Park, as well as the damming of one of Yosemite's most beautiful valleys. Mr. Egan seems to suggest that, deep down, Pinchot would have been a Greenpeace-friendly environmentalist—the author speculates that Pinchot adopted his anti-forest-fire policy to drum up public support for the Forest Service. Mr. Egan neglects to mention the most important line in Pinchot's early article on forest fires: "These facts do not imply any desirability in the fires which are now devastating the West." When Pinchot later came to list the top three responsibilities of his rangers, he put the protection against fire first.

It would be churlish to dismiss Mr. Egan's re-creation of a forgotten episode in U.S. history because of a failure to present an old forester in all his complexity. But I found it bracing to return to Pinchot's own writing, the expressions of a man with an interest in protecting the land yet with none of the religious feeling that today's environmentalism so often evokes. For him "conservation" simply meant "the use of the natural resources for the greatest good of the greatest number for the longest time." An inspiring creed in the early 20th century and a challenging one today.

Mr. Petersen, an editor for n+1 magazine, lives in the Blackfoot Valley of Montana.