The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America »

A national enterprise reporter for New York Times, Timothy Egan possesses a keen talent for capturing the qualities of the places and events he writes about that has garnered him several awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for journalism.

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. 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 Washington Post - Bill Gifford

Egan always writes insightfully about his native region; here he commands the full sweep of characters, from the president on down to the loneliest mining-town drunk.

Prologue: A Fire at the End of the World 1

Part I In on the Creation

1 "A Peculiar Intimacy" 17

2 Roost of the Robber Barons 39

5 The Great Crusade 53

4 Deadwood Days 73

5 Showdown 86

Part II What They Lost

6 Summer of Smoke 105

7 Men, Men, Men! 116

8 Spaghetti Westerners 129

9 Firestorm's Eve 141

10 Blowup 154

11 The Lost Day 158

12 The Lost Night 172

13 Towns Afire 187

14 To Save a Town 201

15 The Missing 211

16 The Living and the Dead 227

Part III What They Saved

17 Fallout 239

18 One for the Boys 249

19 Ashes 263

Notes on Sources 287

Acknowledgments 307

Index 309