52 pages • 1 hour read
The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America
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Part 2, Chapters 6-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “What They Lost”
Chapter 6 Summary: “Summer of Smoke”
Every morning in July 1910 Pulaski assembles a civilian firefighting crew, finds a blaze, then digs perimeters to contain it. Pulaski is a local, the most knowledgeable of the land, and the best firefighter. He does not have formal forestry training like other rangers, but he has an unparalleled practical knowledge of the woods. He shares the other rangers’ love of the pristine land “as it once was—empty, wild, unpredictable” (106). Pulaski traveled west as a teenager, through untouched country and land still free to indigenous, but “[n]ow the conveniences of early-twentieth-century America had found the isolation of Pulaski’s home” (106). Automobiles litter the streets, telephone lines clutter the sky, rivers are polluted with mine tailings, tree stumps, barrels, rusted cans, clothing scraps, and other garbage. Locals, homesteaders, and other migrants to the West consider the blunt and non-diplomatic Pulaski a local. Most of Pulaski’s life is behind him—a series of stops and starts, failures, and dead-end endeavors—he is past the age of caring what others think of him.
Dry storms occur on summer afternoons. Warm air escapes upward from valleys and heated slopes, and the sky quickly transforms from clear to ominously dark. As the hot air rises, it cools and forms thunderheads inside the clouds, where positive and negative charges collide to produce lightning. Between the storms and the trains barreling through the wilderness sparking fires, Pulaski is containing forest fires 14 hours a day. Few townspeople volunteer to assist. They migrated west to make money and have no more interest in the land pecuniary. Underfunded, understaffed, and facing the most actively dangerous fire season in recent history, the rangers struggle to keep-up containing blazes. Rangers soon get word that blazes are being set intentionally to clear land, get title, and “ensure that a patch of woods not remain for long as part of Roosevelt’s reserves” (109). Even once contained and reduced, small fires smolder and are reignited several days later by the wind. The crews must circle back and again subdue these fires over and over again throughout the summer.
Native Americans who once populated this land lived with the fire as a necessary part of nature. They sometimes intentionally ignited fires to clear land. In 1910 Taft opened their 600,000-acre reservation for settlement. The tribe was promised the land via 1887 treaty. It is now populated by migrants who know nothing of the forest and seek nothing more than to plunder it for riches. Egan explains, “To the Forest Service, the latest homesteaders from the Indian lottery only added to their headaches—more sourdoughs who didn’t know jack about the woods stumbling around the forests, carving out their piece” (112). The indigenous, some old-timers, and a few Little G.P.s recognize that the woods need fire and cannot flourish without it, but it is the rangers’ duty to prevent fires.
On July 26, 1910, the night sky explodes. Hundreds of fires are reported the next day just in the Coeur d’Alene, with many more burning in the 21 other national forests. Glacier National Park, the Cabinets, Priest Lake, the Kanisku National Forest, the Pend Oreille, the Kootenai, the Lolo, the Lochsa, and the River of No Return are all on fire. It is now a disaster the rangers have neither the men nor the resources to address.
Chapter 7 Summary: “Men, Men, Men!”
Koch is desperate for firefighters. He goes to the saloons and prostitution houses of Taft to beg for help, willing to take anyone. Almost 1,000 fires rage in the northern Rockies. Firefighters use backfiring—fighting fire with fire—to contain fires. Egan explains, “a trail is cut across a part of the fire, between it and the direction toward which the wind is blowing […] then fires are started at short distances from each other on the windward side of the trail” (117). The blazes meet, but cannot progress past each other because the already burned forest on either side of the blaze cannot reignite. Since being assigned to their forests, the Little G.P.s had come to know the land intimately and to love it. It is now their home, their families’ home, and protecting it is their top priority.
Trying to recruit people, “Koch found that people would rather chip away at a silver vein for twelve hours a day than go into the woods and stomp smoke” (119). For many, fear inhibits their desire to join. Many demand payment upfront, but the forest service has no money, is buying supplies on credit, and can only offer the promise of payment later. Koch and several other rangers deplete their savings to pay men themselves, with hope that the government will reimburse them. Desperate, the rangers release criminals from jails to aid in firefighting.
By August 10, the number of fires more than doubles. Among the new arrivals to help is a ragged, nearly 60-year-old Irishman, Patrick Grogan, and his equally ragged dog. Grogan fled Ireland’s Great Famine and supports his family in Butte. He is of little use fighting fires, but he can cook, and a cook is always valuable. Another electrical storm increases the amount of fires. The rangers have approximately one fighter for each fire blazing. Koch laments, “For every fire we put out […] a new one is reported” (123). They fight fires daily, all day, and are worn out.
President Taft is in the middle of his five-week summer vacation in Beverly, Massachusetts. He is continually interrupted by news of the fires. States request Taft assign federal troops to fight the fires. Many criticize Taft, calling him “The Great Postponer” and mocking his weight and timidity; he lives in the shadow of Roosevelt. In Africa, Roosevelt receives periodic reports. Egan says, “Roosevelt came to believe that Taft had betrayed all that he and Pinchot had started” (125). On August 7, Taft authorizes the military to allocate troops to fight the fires. They send 2,500 Buffalo Soldiers—the 25th Regiment, an all-black elite regiment. When the soldiers arrive, they have at least one thing in common with members of the Forest Service: “none of them knew a thing about fighting a big wildfire” (128).
Chapter 8 Summary: “Spaghetti Westerners”
Domenico Bruno and Giacomo Viettone are immigrants to the United States from the Italian village of Rivara Canavese, a small poor village in the Alps. The friends left Italy together in 1907 at a time when one in four immigrants were Italian. Both send money monthly to their families. After crossing the Atlantic, they work in Arizona’s copper mines, the silver and lead mines in the Rockies, and in Wyoming. Their intention is to make enough money to help their families, build a nest egg, then return home to buy farms in the Canavese Valley. Anti-Italian sentiment is rampant. They are unemployable in certain places because they are Italian. Other employers “maintain a three-tier wage system: one for trouble-free whites, one for Mexicans, one for Italians” (131). In the first decade of the 20th century, one-third of the United States’ “population was either foreign-born or a child of someone born abroad” (131). Many complain the country is no longer recognizable, and a nationalist sentiment emerges. Boston “blue bloods” form The Immigration Restriction League to restrict immigration for Italians, Greeks, Jews, and Eastern Europeans. In Arizona, Bruno and Viettone earn a lot of money, but working conditions are unbearable. When they hear the government is looking for young men to fight forest fires in the Rocky Mountains, they head north.
Roosevelt’s African expedition is over and Pinchot travels to meet him in the Italian Riviera. Roosevelt had vowed to refrain from publicly commenting on Taft’s presidency, but the gutting of the Forest Service and Taft’s departure from other policies has Roosevelt considering breaking his silence. After meeting with Pinchot, Roosevelt tells reporters he will be returning to the United States for a major speech on conservation. Egan explains: “The implication, of course, was that Taft had failed the country in what Roosevelt had started; it was up to Teddy to revive it” (136).
Bruno and Viettone arrive in Wallace in early August. The town is in a haze of smoke. Their role in their new country is “to save the centerpiece of the dream of” Pinchot and Roosevelt (137). Ranger Weigle hires both men to work on the frontline fighting fires while Pinchot and Roosevelt work to reinvigorate the conservation movement through speeches and writing.
Chapters 6-8 Analysis
In an era of extreme anti-immigrant sentiment, anti-discrimination laws do not exist, and many immigrants cannot obtain good work due to their ethnicity. It is mostly immigrants who work the front lines fighting fire. As the number of fires increases, the understaffed forest service welcomes them. These chapters highlight several of these immigrants, like Giacomo Viettone and Domenico Bruno, men who eventually joined the ranks of embattled firefighters to help save an America that ironically sought at the same time to displace them.
Most others in the forests are only there to extract value from the land before it is decimated, and will not risk their lives to prevent it from burning. The immigrants in their newly adopted country risk their lives to save its forests. Moreover, when Taft finally budges and sends support in the form of troops, he sends black soldiers to the frontlines to fight the fires, thus putting the lives of black Americans at risk because others refused to help. This section also touches on the land grabs of American Indian settlement land, land promised to Native Americans by treaty yet parceled off by greedy government and homesteaders. Chapters 6-8 reveal a constant theme of greed coupled with racism, a theme that underscores the early capitalist beliefs of both the well-to-do and those who simply refused to acknowledge the rights of immigrants. America has long thrived off of the hard work of those it has historically stolen, stolen from, and scorned.
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By Timothy Egan
