It was well within the national interest, at a time when conservation had been hailed as the highest moral cause of the day, to include much of the forested East in the public-land system, Pinchot and his allies argued anew. But after the fire of 1910, the winds shifted dramatically. Even at the height of Roosevelt's popularity, right after his landslide election in 1904, he could not win congressional approval for buying land for the public in the East. In order to protect them, however, the government would have to buy land from private owners and make it part of the reserve system. had included not just western public land, but eastern hardwood forests. The big conservation dream of Teddy and G.P. With the new sentiment in the country, the time was ripe for one of the most significant changes in the law since the reserves were turned over to the Forest Service in 1905. 'I have fought for many years for conservation, and conservation has won.'

'There are but a few moments in a man's life like this,' he said. Pinchot gave perhaps the most energetic expression of the principles he and Roosevelt had enshrined with the Forest Service, and at the end he struck a valedictory note. He urged Americans to seize the moment: expand the Forest Service, enlarge its domain, set more land aside. The fires in the Rocky Mountains, Roosevelt said, should prompt a renewal of the idea of protecting public land with a corps of young foresters.

So what the crowd got from Roosevelt and Pinchot, by contrast, was the most tumultuous of rhapsodies over conservation. Roosevelt and Pinchot had personalized it - boys out west had died for it. The Big Burn had stirred the blood of many Americans, and for them conservation was no longer an abstract debate. He won the National Book Award for his critically acclaimed Dust Bowl chronicle The Worst Hard Time. Forest Service, and rally public opinion behind Theodore Roosevelt's plan to protect national lands.Įgan is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author of five books. The disaster served to strengthen the fledgling U.S.

The Idaho Statesman has since remembered it as 'a conflagration of biblical proportions,' and Egan says the fire was of a singular kind, 'a monster that takes on a life of its own.'īut in The Big Burn - subtitled Teddy Roosevelt and The Fire That Saved America - Egan argues that the fire actually saved the nation's forests, even as its flames charred the trees. Three million acres - an area the size of Connecticut - burned down in Idaho and Montana over the course of a single weekend.

In his new book The Big Burn, author Timothy Egan takes us back to 1910, to the scene of the largest forest fire in American history. Timothy Egan writes the weekly column Outposts for the New York Times.

The Big Burn by Timothy Egan