The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America

Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009. First Printing. Hardcover. Very good/Good. Chazaud, Jaques (Map). x, [2], 324 pages. map, illustrations, notes on sources, index. Small tear in front DJ, DJ has some sticker residue. Timothy Egan (born November 8, 1954) is an American author and journalist. For The Worst Hard Time, a 2006 book about people who lived through The Great Depression's Dust Bowl, he won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and the Washington State Book Award in History/Biography. In 2001, the New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for a series to which Egan contributed, "How Race is Lived in America". He currently lives in Seattle. He is a weekly op-ed writer for the New York Times. Egan has written seven books including his National Book Award winner The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl. His first, The Good Rain, won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award in 1991. The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America (2009) is about the Great Fire of 1910, which burned about three million acres (12,000 km�) and helped shape the United States Forest Service. The book details some of the political issues facing Theodore Roosevelt. For this work he won a second Washington State Book Award in History/Biography and a second Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award. The Big Burn of 1910 in Montana was the largest-ever forest fire in America, and the tragedy that cemented Theodore Roosevelt's legacy as the president who saved our wild places. The Big Burn of 1910 in Montana was the largest-ever forest fire in America, and the tragedy that cemented Theodore Roosevelt's legacy as the president who saved our wild places. The Great Fire of 1910 (also commonly referred to as the Big Blowup, the Big Burn, or the Devil's Broom fire) was a wildfire that burned about three million acres (1,214,057 ha), approximately the size of Connecticut) in northeast Washington, northern Idaho (the panhandle), and western Montana. The area burned included parts of the Bitterroot, Cabinet, Clearwater, Coeur d'Alene, Flathead, Kaniksu, Kootenai, Lewis and Clark, Lolo, and St. Joe National Forests. The firestorm burned over two days (August 20-21, 1910), and killed 87 people, mostly firefighters. It is believed to be the largest, although not the deadliest, forest fire in U.S. history. The outcome was to highlight firefighters as public heroes while raising public awareness surrounding national nature conservation. The Fire of 1910 cemented and shaped the U.S. Forest Service, which at the time was a newly established department on the verge of cancellation. Before the epic event, there were many debates on how to handle forest fires; whether to let them burn because they were a part of nature and were expensive to fight, or to fight them in order to protect the forests. One of the people who fought the fire, Ferdinand A. Silcox, went on to become the fifth chief of the fire service. Influenced by the devastation of the Big Blowup, Silcox promoted the "10 a.m." policy, the goal of suppressing all fires by 10 a.m. of the day following their report. It was decided that the U.S. Forest Service was to prevent and battle against every wildfire. More recently, this absolutist attitude to wildfires has been criticized for altering the natural disturbance mechanisms that drive forest ecosystem structure.