Free The Big Burn by Timothy Egan

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.

3. The Great Crusade
    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,