Big Burn
by Egan, Timothy
Published by : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (Boston) Physical details: x, 324 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates illustrations, map 24 cm ISBN:9780547394602; 0547394608.| Item type | Current location | Call number | Status | Notes | Date due | Barcode |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 900 - 999 | 973.911 Ega (Browse shelf) | Available | State Grant in Aid | 113652 |
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| 973.91092 Mil Ruth Hanna McCormick | 973.91092 Vio Ben Nighthorse Campbell | 973.910924 Eis At ease: stories I tell to friends | 973.911 Ega Big Burn | 973.911092 Goo The bully pulpit : | 973.911092 Hag The Roosevelt family of Sagamore Hill. | 973.911092 Kil Teddy and Booker T. |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 287-305) and index.
Prologue: A fire at the end of the world -- Part I. In on the creation. "A peculiar intimacy" ; Roost of the robber barons ; The Great Crusade ; Deadwood days ; Showdown -- Part II. What they lost. Summer of smoke ; Men, men, men! ; Spaghetti Westerners ; Firestorm's eve ; Blowup ; The lost day ; The lost night ; Towns afire ; To save a town ; The missing ; The living and the dead -- Part III. What they saved. Fallout ; One for the boys ; Ashes.
On the afternoon of August 20, 1910, a battering ram of wind moved through the drought-stricken national forests of Washington, Idaho, and Montana, whipping the hundreds of small blazes burning across the forest floor into a roaring inferno that jumped from treetop to ridge as it raged, destroying towns and timber in the blink of an eye. Forest rangers had assembled nearly ten thousand men -- college boys, day workers, immigrants from mining camps -- to fight the fire. But no living person had seen anything like those flames, and neither the rangers nor anyone else knew how to subdue them. Equally dramatic is the larger story of outsized president Teddy Roosevelt and his chief forester, Gifford Pinchot. Pioneering the notion of conservation, Roosevelt and Pinchot did nothing less than create the idea of public land as our national treasure, owned by and preserved for every citizen. The robber barons fought Roosevelt and Pinchot's rangers, but the Big Burn saved the forests even as it destroyed them: the heroism shown by the rangers turned public opinion permanently in their favor and became the creation myth that drove the Forest Service, with consequences still felt in the way our national lands are protected -- or not -- today.
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