The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America

“Here now came the fire down from the Bitteroot Mountains and showered embers and forest shrapnel onto the town that was supposed to be protected by all those men with faraway accents and empty stomachs. For days, people had watched it from their gabled houses, from front porches and ash-covered streets, and there was some safety in the distance, some fascination even—see there, way up on the ridgeline, just candles flickering in the trees. But now it was on them, an element transformed from Out There to Here, and just as suddenly on their front lawns, in their hair, snuffing out the life of a drunk on a hotel mattress, torching a veranda.” 

To a generation of people who had never witnessed the might of a wildfire, who migrated west solely by desire to extract riches from the land then leave it decimated, who have no reverence or respect for nature, the fire is no reason for concern until it is upon them burning their buildings and the train tracks on which they hope to escape. Until they see the destruction, smell the burning, and feel the heat, they do not comprehend its destructive power.

“The West of unlimited promise was in its last days. The tribes had been rounded up and shuttled off to little remnants of their native land. The indigenous bison herd, sixty million or more strong at one time, was down to a few hundred stragglers. The ecosystem of the high plains, which had been compared to Eden by Lewis and Clark, was being torn to pieces. Where birds had once blotted the skies of migratory flyways, it was hard at times to find a single duck on a fall afternoon. But even with the smell of death on it, the land made Roosevelt whole again. He found renewal in wilderness—the geography of hope, as it was called by westerners who followed him.” 

The Gilded Age of industrial revolution shepherds the end of America’s white westward migration. The untouched west is being developed at rapid pace for railroad, timber, and mining interests; indigenous populations, both human and animal, are displaced or nearing extinction.

“‘The American Colossus was fiercely intent on appropriating and exploiting the riches of the richest of all continents—grasping with both hands, reaping where he had not sown, wasting what he thought would last forever,’ Pinchot wrote. ‘The exploiters were pushing further and further into the wilderness. The man who could get his hands on the biggest slice of natural resources was the best citizen. Wealth and virtue were supposed to trot in double harness.’” 

Notions of conservation and environmental stewardship are nonexistent in the Gilded Age. The Sierra Club is beginning to advocate for the preservation of natural lands and the idea that land should be used for any other purpose than extracting wealth is inconceivable.