Free The Big Burn by Timothy Egan Page A

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.
    Koch had never been to the East. Everything was new to him—the people, the dress, the social rituals. He learned to smoke a pipe and mix a martini, habits he would find useful at Koch family dinner parties in Missoula. This inaugural group of American forestry students, about twenty young men in all, was special, and they knew it, stamped from the start for greatness. At Yale's bicentennial in 1901, they dressed in Robin Hood costumes, parading around campus in green tights and hoods for all the old Yalies to see—uniformed brothers of the woods. It was New Haven, Connecticut, but it could have been Sherwood Forest.
    Also in the class was Bill Greeley, who had come to Yale by way of Stanford and the University of California. When other students went out for nights of chugging ale and chasing women, Greeley stayed back and studied the cellular structure of poplars and deconstructed Bible verses. The son of a Congregational minister, he found the fullest expressions of creation in the intricacies of the natural world—the church of the outdoors. Like Pinchot, he'd been taught to "see God in nature," as the founding forester put it.
    Greeley finished at the top of that first Yale forestry graduating class of 1904, which meant he was an easy pick to be another of Pinchot's knights of the woods. Pinchot told Greeley he was being tapped to be part of the "Great Crusade"; he could shape boundaries of land his great-grandchildren would one day walk through, a legacy that appealed to the responsibilities Greeley felt as part of his Christian faith. Indeed, he soon started calling himself "a forest missionary." He was flattered to join such a select group. Pinchot and his acolyte took a train out west, where they surveyed land in California, terrain to be included in the rapidly expanding national forests. They spent long days on horseback in country without trails. "My admiration for the boss grew with every mile," Greeley wrote. "I got to know Gifford