The Big Burn (16 page)

To many, it sounded counterintuitive. Start a fire to kill a fire? What did these soft-handed Yalies know about a burn running up a steep slope in Montana? What they knew, of course, was informed by Pinchot's belief that man could control fire. After all, the agency had "proved" that it could control wildfire, as Roosevelt had written in that early assessment, with satisfaction. Such an assertion did not seem out of place in a year when headlines proclaimed, "Cure for Cancer Is Found" and "Experts Declare Bald Heads Show Brains." A car had driven at sixty miles an hour in 1910, for more than twenty miles nonstop, and the government would soon double its fleet of airplanes—from two to four.

They had been lucky, the rangers now realized, that the first years of the Forest Service were largely free of big fires. This had allowed them time to fall in love with the land, to get acquainted with its storms and quiet periods, its seasonal quirks, to realize the enormity of what Pinchot and Roosevelt had entrusted to them. Most rangers had never been on a war footing, never looked up at columns of dark smoke and felt their throats tighten, never been asked to organize from scratch hundreds of men to march into a wall of flame-hissing trees. Supervisor Koch, the youngest of the Little G.P.s in charge of his own forests, felt protective about his five million or so acres, even proprietary. He understood—as Pinchot had preached on many nights at the family mansion, as Roosevelt
had sermonized in his epistles on the outdoor life—that Americans needed wilderness to be fully alive. Needed it this year, as people poured into cities back east already saturated with humanity's opportunity refugees.

Overseeing three national forests was everything Koch wanted. After returning home to Montana, he had met a dark-haired woman from the old country, a Dane named Gerda Heiberg-Jurgensen, on a postgraduate visit. A friend of Scandinavian monarchs and other elites, she left a life of European sophistication to become a forester's wife in the Montana wilds. Koch considered her a full partner: she joined him on horseback, riding the High Lonesome, cleaning fish, sleeping many nights on hard ground. The first summer of her life with Koch, in fact, was spent in a Forest Service teepee, nine feet by nine feet, on the floor of the forest. With a broad floppy hat, knickers, and knee-high boots, she moved through the pathless expanse of the Lolo like a native.

They made a home in Missoula near a field of bunchgrass for Koch to graze his three horses. Any Anglo with an open mind could see why the Salishan natives had cherished this broad valley where Missoula was built, where three mighty rivers converged under mountains of thick forests, a temperate climate most of the year. The streets were mud in the spring and dust in the summer, but indoors, the Koch home was stocked with artwork and quilted pillows from Copenhagen, with a library heavy on poetry and history books. Koch was a Rudyard Kipling fan; he memorized long verse passages and recited them to pass the days in the Rockies. He also liked Robert Browning, and one of his favorites was:

Oh, the wild joys of living! the leaping from rock up to rock,
The strong rending of boughs from the fir tree, the cool silver shock
Of the plunge in a pool's living water...

Koch was eager to apply all that he learned at Yale and the school of Gifford Pinchot to the land beneath the big sky. But early on, he found he had more pressing concerns: his Lolo National Forest was a frontier. The shortage of tools to fight fires had become the subject of can-you-top-this tales. When Koch complained about his lack of shovels and picks in the Lolo, Weigle countered that he had but two crosscut saws to keep fires from burning the town of Avery. Koch certainly had the bawdiest of towns, for Taft at one time had nearly 500 prostitutes among its 2,500 people, in the estimate of a journalist, and 30 saloons. By contrast, there was just a single drugstore and one grocery outlet. The hospital was portable, subject to the railroad's need to keep men patched up and vertical. One of the current patients was a man with a bullet lodged in his tongue. He'd been in a gunfight at a card table and had killed the player across from him, but not before the deceased got off a single shot through the chin. Koch had tried to keep his distance from the town, a festering sinkhole in the middle of his national forest.

One of his first hires was Frank Haun, a seasoned woodsman, tough as bark, with intimate knowledge of the outdoors, but with a bit less caution than the college-trained Koch. Patrolling the woods one day, Koch and Haun stumbled upon a huge cache of liquor — cases of bourbon, Scotch, champagne, and rye, enough to supply a small town. Haun wanted to have a closer look, but Koch held him back.

"We better move on," Koch said. The decision probably saved their lives, for Koch heard later that a lookout, his rifle trained on the forest rangers, had kept guard over the cache with orders to shoot anyone who came near it.

Recruiting in the string of towns downslope from Taft, 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. The money from the Forest Service was not bad, especially for someone out of work. In 1910, the average American wage earner took home $13 for a sixty-hour week. Koch was authorized to pay 25 cents an hour, so that same sixty-hour week, which most people worked, could bring $15. He had Greeley's promise that the government would back its
word with cash, eventually. What kept men from signing up was fear of the unknown. They knew about danger in the mines. They knew about felling trees or laying railroad ties or blasting tunnels in the rock with explosives. But fire — that was a mystery predator in this part of the world.

In Missoula, scraping the bottom of the barrel, Koch grabbed anybody who disembarked from the train. At least half of the newcomers were drunk on arrival, he reported, and had no firm plans. But if a man stood upright in the morning light and had a blanket to call his own, Koch would put him in service to Gifford Pinchot's agency.

"Got a bed?" he asked one greenhorn.

"Yep."

"Bring it."

He noticed during his first days with these novice crews that they lacked basic outdoor common sense. "Punks, stew bums and pool hall boys," Koch called them. When they shivered at night, ignorant of ways to keep warm, Koch would make a huge bonfire to comfort his crews. Their talk late into the evening was mostly of the various jails they had known, and rumors of riches still to be found here or there. Many demanded payment up front. But Koch's Lolo forest was tapped out, same as Weigle's Coeur d'Alene.

The Forest Service was buying supplies on credit — food, mules, and axes. Koch did have a little savings of his own, just under $500, money he and Gerda had put away to raise a family. He'd promised her that life in a tent was temporary, and followed up on that when they moved into the fine house in Missoula. They wanted children, educated, with means enough to visit Gerda's relatives in Europe. But the heavier the smoke that settled on Missoula, the more Koch was nudged toward a hard decision. Should he use his own money to pay for fire crews? As one of the original "forest arrangers," Koch had a love of the Lolo that was deep and complicated — like his feelings for Gerda. He'd selected much of this land under Pinchot's guidance, and in that sense he had a bit of immortality, provided he could get through this season of flame.

Up on the front lines, his rangers were crying for help, working in ambient heat well above 100 degrees, trying to beat back flames but losing everything they'd gained whenever the winds picked up in the afternoon. To the east, as smoke settled in Helena and Great Falls around the front range of the Rockies, some rangers complained that they had stopped receiving their regular paychecks. Congress, a year earlier, had given the Forest Service authority to pay firefighters after the fact—basically, hiring on credit in a national emergency. But in practice, funds did not flow from Washington to the burning woods. "I was told there was no money to pay my salary," said one ranger, Albert Cole.

In the first week of August, Koch went down to his bank in Missoula and withdrew his personal savings. Gerda would understand: it was an emergency. He turned to his rangers, Haun, the skilled outdoorsman, and a twenty-two-year-old rookie, Ferdinand A. "Gus" Silcox, the dew of Yale still on him, filled with the gospel of Gifford Pinchot. Koch asked the older ranger and the kid to follow his example. Haun complained some: he was getting on in years and didn't have much to spare. He had a bit of a gut, unusual among the sinewy rangers. Koch poked him, kidded him about his extra load.
C'mon!
Gus Silcox pleaded poverty; he was just out of school, with the smallest of savings accounts. But both men gave in. Even after three years without raises, after Congress had ratcheted down the budget until it was a pittance, after the newspapers of the copper kings and timber barons had called for the Forest Service to be run out of the woods—after all of that, the rangers reached deep into their own pockets to try to save the land.

"Men, men, men! Is the frenzied cry of forest officials,"
The Missoulian
reported on the third of August. "The available supply is now almost exhausted, or so it seems."

Finally, all the rangers had left were the jails. Early on, the Forest Service had considered prison labor, but delayed the move, hoping to build its fire lines from other sources. The service also floated a plan to have state legislatures pass emergency laws that required people to assist the rangers when a fire was imminent—essentially
a draft, like forced military conscription. But it never got off the ground. The first week of August, Koch and Greeley arranged to get sixty prisoners released from jail in Missoula. That move, a very public release of criminals, started a chain of gossip, feeding a story that the firefighters rounded up by the Forest Service were the scum of the earth—criminals, bums, and foreigners—and should be shunned. Missoula added extra police officers, fearing the newcomers would raise hell in town.

By August 10, what had been one thousand fires was more than double that amount. The rangers sent another round of requests to the hiring halls of the West—to Bozeman and Butte, Denver and Rapid City, Albuquerque and Phoenix, Portland and Seattle. From Butte, several hundred miles to the east, came a trainload of broken miners who had been out of work for months. They were middle-aged, many of them, with bad habits, grumpy and prone to cutting corners. Koch and Weigle took them.

Among those who arrived from Butte was an Irishman, Patrick Grogan, a few months short of his sixtieth birthday. He was a sight when he stepped off the train—jowly, with a bindle of ragged clothes, and his dog. A dog! How could a man like this fight a fire? Grogan said he had done a little bit of everything in Butte: labored in the copper mines, put down railroad track, worked in restaurants. Butte was the most Irish city in America at the time, with more than one in four inhabitants tracing their ancestry to the island across the Atlantic. Many were famine Irish, the sons and daughters of those who had first left County Cork, Limerick, and Galway when a million people starved to death and another million fled their homeland. The stories—of hollow-bellied children with teeth stained green from eating grass, of old men shivering with tin cups outside castle doors, of British authorities turning away food aid from the harbor at Dublin—were ingrained in the Irish who settled in Butte. In the United States, they had been called flannelmouths and compared to apes and savages. How could a wildfire deter them? Grogan needed the money to help his large family back in Butte, more

than a dozen children and grandchildren. He and his dog were not in the best of shape, not exactly ready to charge up a steep slope with ax in hand. But he could cook. Cook?
Surely, lad.
That was it, then. A cook in a fire camp was invaluable. Anyone who could feed two hundred people at a sitting, with little more than sacks of potatoes, onions, and sourdough for pancakes, was worth putting on the Forest Service payroll. Grogan was hired on August 6.

That same day, another electrical storm rumbled through the forests. It made the rangers shudder. August was the driest month since 1894. Every clap, every boom brought the potential for something horrible on a grand scale. And by morning, sure enough, the total number of fires had reached 2,500. Even after emptying the saloons, trains, jails, and hiring halls of men, Koch felt that he was not making progress. The Forest Service had less than one man for each fire burning in the northern Rockies. Koch was exasperated: one man per fire!

"For every fire we put out," he told the newspaper in Missoula, "a new one is reported. The rangers have been fighting fires steadily now for 10 days and they are about worn out."

At the summer house he rented in Beverly, Massachusetts, President Taft was immersed in his annual five-week vacation, one that was continually interrupted by the fire alarms out west. Telegrams from the Forest Service, from governors and congressmen, from big timber owners, had grown more pressing with each day of August. Five states had requested federal troops to fight wildfires. They implored him to do something quickly to intercede. Taft's agriculture secretary, James Wilson, who oversaw the Forest Service and had a strained relationship with Pinchot, had just returned from Montana. He feared that the collapse of entire western forests and many towns would happen on his watch. "I was confronted with the problem of either putting out the fires or being directly responsible for what would have been one of the worst disasters in the history of the country," Wilson wrote later.

Taft was in the second year of a troubled presidency, and had become ever more sensitive to the caustic criticism of him. The Great Postponer, he was called, one of the less cruel nicknames. Pinchot considered him a traitor to the progressive cause, and said so in public now that he was "freed for the larger fight," as he had told his mother when Taft fired him in January. Indeed, Pinchot was giddy in his liberation, full of fight. Taft had become "the accomplice and the refuge of land-grabbers, water-power grabbers, grabbers of timber and oil — all of the swarm of big and little thieves," Pinchot wrote. Much of the year had been dominated by congressional hearings on Pinchot's charges against embattled Interior Secretary Ballinger, which had grown to a larger rift. During testimony, Ballinger said he had felt duty-bound to thwart some of the Roosevelt-Pinchot agenda, saying he had acted to stop "certain overzealous persons from converting the public domain into a national preserve." This confirmed everything Pinchot had suspected of the interior secretary, and he took up the cause on behalf of his beloved Forest Service and against the anticonservation forces with gusto.