The Big Burn (7 page)

John Rockefeller was perhaps the richest American who ever lived. Morgan and Weyerhaeuser were not far behind, each with a net worth roughly equal to that of Bill Gates, the Microsoft cofounder, in contemporary dollars. Rockefeller had more than four times the wealth of Gates, his stake at just under $200 billion, when adjusted for inflation. As to Roosevelt's view of these men, he was rarely discreet. He called them "the most dangerous members of the criminal class, the malefactors of great wealth," in his best-known phrase, uttered during a sharp economic downturn. And he was more cutting when he really wanted to be dismissive.

"It tires me to talk to rich men," he said. "You expect a man of millions to be worth hearing, but as a rule, they don't know anything outside their own business." When Standard Oil donated $100,000 to Roosevelt's campaign, the president asked that it be returned. It was somewhat jarring, to say the least, that Roosevelt, from a wealthy New York family, and Pinchot, who had inherited a chateau with twenty-three fireplaces, had turned so vehemently against their class, envisioning the national forests as a way to "help the small man make a living rather than help the big man make a profit," as Pinchot said frequently. But once engaged, they never looked back.

The dinner crowd in Butte was liquored up by the time food was ready to be served, buzzed on "every kind of whiskey," Roosevelt recalled. As he had asked that his guests be a cross-section of Butte, there were more than the usual Irish who dominated the town. Blacks, Chinese, Cornish, Italians, Greeks, Swedes, and Germans — all had a seat, in addition to pinch-faced Senator Clark and
his allies. Mayor Pat Mullins summoned his waiters: "Boys, bring on the feed." Then he ordered that the window blinds be lifted so that people on the street could look inside and see what Butte had corralled. Gifts were presented. One in particular touched Roosevelt: a pair of silver scales from black miners at the table. "This comes in the shape I appreciate—scales of justice held even," Roosevelt said. He went on to discuss the bravery of "colored troops" who had served with him in Cuba. Visibly moved, he turned to the miners and said the scale — this gift — made him want to help blacks get "a square deal." A pact, of sorts, was born at the banquet table: the simple phrase "a square deal" would be at the heart of the Roosevelt social contract.

Clark was not impressed. In a huff, the senator retreated to his manse in Butte—three stories, thirty-four rooms, stuffed with Tiffany glass lamps — fortified in his resolve to thwart Roosevelt at every turn. Since buying his Senate seat, he had rarely been home in the northern Rockies. Clark preferred the forest of chateaux in New York with the other titans now carving up the West. J. P. Morgan had a house at 219 Madison Avenue. The Astors, the Fricks, the Goulds, the Whitneys, the Harrimans, and the Carnegies each had a stone showpiece nearby. Clark started with a home on Fifth Avenue, a few blocks from Morgan. But after visiting the world's fair in Paris, he was determined to build a royalist fantasy in Manhattan. He created a 121-room palace on Park Avenue at Seventy-seventh Street. And so for the duration of his only term as a senator from Montana, Clark's principal residence was a Gotham fortress with thirty-one bathrooms—a different commode for every day of the month.

After the dinner in Butte, there would be no truce, no letup, no middle ground. Roosevelt had to be stopped. Clark used his Senate seat to block every effort at conservation, and he used his newspapers to echo his interests and applaud his opposition to Roosevelt. At the same time, his wealth grew with a plan to start a town in the Mojave Desert built around a pit stop for a railroad he owned—Las
Vegas, Nevada. The town took off, and the railroad was sold to E. H. Harriman, putting Clark within reach of becoming one of the richest Americans ever. Clark was the voice of brute wealth and blunt strength—might over right, the way copper kings did their business in the West. And, as his papers told it, he was heroic to take on this radical young president. His allies, such as Herschel Hogg, a congressman from Colorado, relied on ridicule: these conservationists were "google-eyed, bandy-legged dudes from the East and sad-eyed, absent-minded professors and bugologists," in Hogg's memorable phrase.

So long as there were no trained professionals to watch the woods and grasslands, big money prevailed. Clark could rest easy. The General Land Office existed for one reason: to transfer public property to private hands—in Clark's mind, the perfect government agency. It was staffed by bureaucrats who neither knew nor cared for wild land in the West. As for Pinchot's main request, Clark was consistently defiant: he would never agree to transfer the reserves from the land office to a forest service. As to the larger argument, he sniffed at calls from Roosevelt and Pinchot to leave something behind for the future.

"Those who succeed us," said Clark, "can well take care of themselves."

Everything changed in the next year, with the 1904 election, when Roosevelt at last won his own full term—a victory that would literally be landscape-altering. "It's all colossal," his firebrand daughter, Alice, wrote in her diary. Indeed it was: Roosevelt won by the largest margin of any presidential candidate to date, taking thirty-three of the forty-five states—something he could not keep from broadcasting. "How they are voting for me!" said Teddy as he skipped through the White House on election night. "I have the greatest popular majority and the greatest electoral majority ever given to a candidate for president," he wrote his son Kermit.

The public knew that this energetic leader was no mere keeper
of the dead President McKinley's name. His Republican Party stood for public ownership of natural resources, among the pillars of the progressive cause. At a time when the gap between rich and poor was never greater, Roosevelt called for a national inheritance tax on wealthy families. And looking to remedy a situation where 26 percent of all boys aged ten to fifteen spent their days working full shifts away from home, and less than 5 percent of all workers had graduated from high school, Roosevelt asked for wholesale changes in child welfare laws. He said people had a right to a safe food supply, to regulation of prescription drugs. And for the sake of future generations, he called for a broad range of measures to protect land and wildlife. He was eager to slay any foe. "I felt his clothes might not contain him, he was so ready to go, to attack anything, anywhere," wrote the muckraking journalist Ida Tarbell.

"We are the heirs of the ages," Roosevelt said in his 1905 inaugural address, signaling that he intended to use that inheritance.

In one of the first orders of business after Roosevelt's landslide, Congress agreed to transfer the reserves to Gifford Pinchot's fledgling agency, and gave him a small budget to train rangers who would have stewardship of the forests. The General Land Office, that hidebound bureaucracy, service station for the syndicates, was pushed aside. Outmaneuvering Clark and Heyburn, Roosevelt promised that legitimate homesteaders would be allowed to claim 160 acres of land within national forest boundaries if they could prove that it was right for farming. There was not much arable land for homesteading in the reserves, but this move silenced critics who said the president was sealing off the land from opportunity.

With the transfer, the newly named United States Forest Service was created in 1905, with Pinchot as the first Chief—a job "worth more to me than all the treasures of all the pirates of history," he wrote. His domain was sixty million acres. Having fulfilled his promise to his friend, Roosevelt now gave Pinchot simple marching orders: "It must not be forgotten," he wrote to him, "that the forest reserves belong to all the people." Pinchot felt the same
way; if anything, he was more militant in his belief that the essence of Progressive Era ideals could be manifest on the land, guided by his new agency. Pinchot and Roosevelt also knew that they had only a short time to prove their worth. Congress was skeptical, and the leash was short; legislators could kill the Forest Service simply by defunding it.

"The transfer meant a revolutionary change," Pinchot wrote. "We had the power, as we had the duty, to protect the Reserves for the use of the people, and that meant stepping on the toes of the biggest interests in the West. From that time on, it was fight, fight, fight."

To win that fight, he now took on a greater one — against something as old as the earth itself. Fire was an enemy, a force feared by settlers, loggers, ranchers, and outdoorsmen. "Fire has always been, and seemingly will always remain, the most terrible of elements," said Harry Houdini, perhaps the most popular entertainer of Pinchot's age, who knew a thing or two about tricking an element. The natives had used fire for selective purposes. But the new stewards of this land wanted nothing to do with it. Wolves had been wiped out, erased like the bison herds that once blotted the landscape. The grizzly bear was nearly gone. What remained in the wild to stir primordial fear was wildfire. Organized firefighting was an oxymoron at the time. Pinchot promised to bring a plan of attack.

Pinchot's thinking had evolved from five years earlier. He knew then, though he seldom said so in public, that wildfire was part of nature, even essential. He knew that some species in the West
needed
fire to proliferate—"gaining ground by the action of its enemy," as he said. But he put the science aside and chose to believe the words he used to sell Congress on his big idea.

That was the pact, the price of existence for his rangers. Certainly, he could count on people being terrified. Some still brought up two disasters: the Peshtigo fire of 1871, which killed 1,182 people and burned more than a million acres in Wisconsin, and an 1894 fire in Hinckley, Minnesota, where 413 people perished. Big cities—San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago—were leveled in the hot sweep of a night, and it was the same story in midsize burgs. In the way that people anthropomorphized it, fire was the final menace of the frontier, as if the land itself were sloughing off all attempts at establishing order in the woods. And now, at long last, here was a protector, green-shirted insurance from Gifford Pinchot. So even if he didn't believe it in his heart, perhaps the only way Pinchot could bring his grand vision to life was to promise that his foresters could whip fire.

Pinchot the missionary now professed that wildfire was akin to slavery—a blight on the young country, but something that could be wiped out by man. While nature could never be conquered, it could be tamed, tailored, customized. "I object to the law of the jungle," Pinchot always said, a philosophy that applied to predatory capitalism as well as the unruly extremes of the physical world. He assured Congress that his legion of rangers—men he would select himself, stamp with progressive principles, and train in the finishing school of the wild—could manage fire. And in controlling fire, they could win the confidence of skeptical westerners. One simply had to apply the principles of the newborn study of forestry to the reserves. Of this, Pinchot professed to have no doubt.

The moody, self-lacerating young man was no more. The man who had been greatly influenced by the book given him on his twenty-first birthday,
The Earth as Modified by Human Action
by George P. Marsh, had changed. Here was a titan in his own rank, lord of the outdoors. His deference to the complexity of the world seemed gone. He certainly knew his place: at the top.

"The first duty of the human race is to control the earth it lives upon," he wrote, flexing his muscles as a forester with a forest. But in a short time, a wildfire would make a mockery of Pinchot's certainty.

E
LERS KOCH WAS JUST
a few years out of college when Gifford Pinchot summoned him into his office and asked him if he wanted to scout an area nearly half the size of the Louisiana Purchase. On the Chief's office wall was a map of Montana and Wyoming—a big land pushed to the sky, the Continental Divide running through it, forests of tamarack, pine, fir, and aspen, high rock covered with snow for all but a month or so each year. Koch knew it well. He was a Montana boy, the son of Danish immigrants, raised in the Rockies. He grew up fishing in the Gallatin River and hiking in the Crazy Mountains.

Koch had been laboring for the fresh-minted Forest Service in Washington, D.C., going over land surveys in a small brick building at 930 F Street. Once a month on Friday night, Pinchot would have a dozen or so of the young foresters over to his palatial family home at 1615 Rhode Island Avenue, where he lived with his parents and an Irish maid who had been with him since age eleven. Sometimes President Roosevelt would drop by. They ate baked apples and cream, talking up the big dream in the wood-paneled library. Later, a select few would sneak down to the basement with Pinchot for marksmanship with pistols, the target placed in front of a steel wall; in Pinchot's home shooting range, it was rare for anybody to beat the Chief.

Koch liked his time in the capital. Still, the summers were hazy and steamy and there were no big mountains to climb, no horizons without end. Here was a way to go home, back to Montana. By executive decree, Roosevelt was adding millions of acres to the new forestry system, as fast as the land could be surveyed. At the same time, Pinchot was trying to transform an office with a staff of ten and no forests into the largest public land agency the world had yet known. He set about building his corps, first pruning the deadwood from the old land office—relatives of senators, people who had never seen a forest, "human rubbish," in Pinchot's words—then handpicking his men as if they were knights.

Koch was one of the first to be chosen. He had met Pinchot one summer on Mount Rainier; Koch was a teenage student assistant, and Pinchot spent several nights there as part of his forest commission tour of the West. In the crowd of old cedars around the volcano of Rainier, Koch stood out, in part because he was the only westerner among nearly two dozen Ivy Leaguers. Pinchot saw something in the boy from Bozeman. In turn, Koch was mesmerized by Pinchot. He had never met anyone so charismatic, so full of passion for the outdoors. When the chance came for Koch to do graduate work at Yale, studying at a new forestry school endowed by Pinchot family money, he jumped at it. If possible, Pinchot wanted the Forest Service to be manned by westerners, but first they had to have his imprint on them, and that usually meant the Yale School of Forestry.