5

Showdown

ON ONE OF THE LAST days of Teddy Roosevelt’s time in the White House, the president called in his handpicked successor to talk about plans to run the nation in the second decade of the American century. Despite his girth, William H. Taft was always the smaller man when in Roosevelt’s presence, or so he felt. Roosevelt was the human volcano; Taft was a putting green. Roosevelt sucked the air out of a room; Taft tried to be invisible. Roosevelt barked; Taft had a low monotone, punctuated by a random and annoying chuckle. Roosevelt burned two thousand calories before noon and drank his coffee with seven lumps of sugar; Taft was the picture of sloth: multiple chins, a zest for five-course meals and long baths. Sleeping Beauty was the nickname his wife, Nellie, gave him, and oh, how he loved to nap. But on the question of how and where to lead the country, they did not differ, the president believed.

Taft had spent the past three years observing Roosevelt’s likes and dislikes, his private quirks and public persona. He took it all in carefully and then projected it back to him, hitting the right notes as Roosevelt probed him on his political beliefs. As such, he seemed to be the perfect successor. Roosevelt was full of energy, at the peak of his power and popularity, but he felt duty-bound to keep the promise he had made to serve only two terms. More than any guiding philosophy, Will Taft simply was driven by the desire to please the man he considered his closest friend. And so when Roosevelt asked him to the White House in late 1908, after a campaign in which Taft won with the full backing and expert advice of the still-young Roosevelt, the incoming president again said all the right things. Taft had won in a landslide, crushing the perennial Democratic populist William Jennings Bryan. For this meeting in the old cabinet room upstairs Roosevelt invited Pinchot along. The three men talked late into the night.

Roosevelt was convinced that conservation and the rest of the progressive agenda would have a central place in the Taft administration. No need for the big man to be bold; just keep the ship going forward, even keel. Fighting the trusts, holding firm to the idea that natural resources belonged to the public, setting aside unique pieces of land for future generations, trying to do something about nine-year-old girls working twelve-hour days in cotton mills down south—on all of these issues Taft would be solid. But Pinchot thought otherwise. He considered Taft superficial, somewhat silly, and malleable. He didn’t trust him. Taft, in his view, “had successfully followed and chuckled his way through life.”

The country was bursting at the seams, people buying automobiles and feathering the insides of gabled houses, on a roll with the downturn of 1907 behind them. In Pinchot’s eyes, Taft had been carried into office by the tail wind of T.R.’s popularity. Pinchot thought of quitting. How could he work for a man he didn’t respect? But Roosevelt talked him out of it, inviting him to come to the White House to hear out Taft in the cabinet room. Their work was not finished, the president reminded the forester; stay on for the good of all the Little G.P.s if nothing else.

That night in the White House, Taft made a promise. “Then and there Taft pledged himself to T.R., and incidentally to me, to stand by and carry on the conservation fight,” wrote Pinchot. “It was no perfunctory promise . . . He bound himself, as completely as one man can to another, to stand by and go forward with the T.R. conservation policy.”

In his final months as president, Roosevelt tried to ensure that his policies had a permanent place in the country. That meant conservation was to be as lasting an American principle as free speech. Three weeks before leaving office, he requested that the world’s great powers meet in The Hague to do an inventory of the world’s resources. Far ahead of his time, and to the criticism of isolationists in his own party, Roosevelt tried to get the major nations of the world to come together and take stock of the globe they shared.

In barely five years’ time, many of these same powers would be at war, in a drawn-out conflict of nationalistic frenzy with repercussions for the rest of the century. But for now Roosevelt wanted only to get other nations to see their rivers, their forests, their farm fields, their oil and coal, their wildlife as valuable assets that would not last if they failed to become good stewards. There was a limit to what the world could bear. His idea was not a complicated notion, he said—“all of this is simply good common sense.” At home, Roosevelt’s legacy was intact: he had added about 230 million acres to national forests, parks, wildlife refuges, and other lands managed for future generations—an endowment 50 percent bigger than all of Texas. In one of his last acts as president, Roosevelt presented a report on what conservation had meant for America—and what it could mean for the world. People living in 1909 were obligated to the future, he wrote.

“It is high time to realize that our responsibility to the coming millions is like that of parents to their children, and that in wasting our resources we are wronging our children.”

In the final hours of his presidency, Roosevelt gathered his closest confidants for a self-congratulatory lunch, excluding Taft. He spoke of their achievements, how they had altered the American landscape, changed its politics, its view of itself in the world. Not all of their goals had been achieved, but the United States was a nation transformed—for the better, he believed. As a parting present, Teddy’s friends gave him a bronze lion; it brought him close to tears.

 

Early on, there were clear signs that Congress would have its way with Taft, simply because he so loathed conflict. With Roosevelt out of the way, the spark-eyed, cigar-chomping Speaker of the House, Uncle Joe Cannon, was back in full form, a force that Taft tried first to avoid and then to please. Senator Heyburn was ginning up complaints from powerful constituents in the West, preparing to cripple the Forest Service with a thousand little blows. His bully pulpit gone, Roosevelt left for Africa on a long-planned safari. “To the lions!” his enemies toasted. Like a fresh college graduate who has waited years to hit the road, T.R. lighted out for adventure in distant parts of the big continent, with plans to make his way up through Egypt, the Mediterranean, and much of Europe. He was free. Pinchot hated to see him go. Two days before he left the White House, Roosevelt penned a farewell to G.P.

“I am a better man for having known you,” he wrote, “and I can’t think of a man whose loss would be a more real misfortune to the Nation than yours would be. For seven-and-a-half years we have worked together, and now and then played together . . .”

Not long after Roosevelt sailed for Africa, Pinchot headed out west on a trip of his own. He found his rangers full of misery: the budget cutbacks were killing them. No pay raises. No new funds for roads, trails, telephones. No money to hire fire patrols in advance of the perils of the dry season. All these restrictions came after a fourfold expansion in the land the rangers had to oversee, and it was taking its toll. With room, board, laundry, tools, the costs of maintaining their own four-footed transports—it was a lot to cover on a ranger’s salary of barely $1,000 a year, the foresters complained. Yale graduates, five years into service, were not making as much money as a first lieutenant in the Army, whose pay was 50 percent higher. Pinchot promised to take the fight to Congress. He would stay on to keep his creation intact, to remind the rangers of their sense of purpose, keepers of this great experiment. But when he returned to the capital after a month, it was as if the life had been vacuumed from the city.

“Washington was a dead town,” Pinchot wrote. Without Teddy Roosevelt, the city was lifeless, apathetic. In the White House, where pets, games, and kids once filled the halls, where a rooster crowed in a bedroom, where a pony rode in the elevator, where the crack and snap of energy and excitement, of youth and purpose, filled every cubic foot, there was now nothing but the silent passing of time, Pinchot felt—which in itself was backward motion. The forester tried to give Taft counsel, but they clashed, opposites in every way. In the new Washington there was no more incongruous sight than the skeletal Pinchot, with all his nervous energy, and the spherical Taft.

Just before Inauguration Day, March 4, 1909, Roosevelt had offered Taft one last bit of advice: stay off the back of a horse, at least in public. He feared for beast and man, he said. And in fact, a horse had already collapsed under the weight of the man. Taft had shed some fat during the campaign, getting down to 280 pounds. But he started to gain it back almost as soon as the election returns were counted. Pictures of the new president shot from behind—“Aft Taft,” they were called—made him look ridiculous, as he was.

Beyond the surface ridicule were much deeper concerns. The energy of the Progressive Era, the sense of taking on giants and bringing them down, of gleefully tripping up the “malefactors of great wealth,” of changing the way America looked at its future, its land, the world around it—all had disappeared. Soon the nation would have another loss, with the death of Mark Twain. “It’s a losing race,” the writer said before he slipped away in 1910. “No ship can outsail death.”

Pinchot fell into a deep funk. He grew moody and somber despite his outward vigor and cheer. He did not think Taft was evil or open to petty corruption. Nor did he think the new president was stupid. “Weak rather than wicked” was his view, though he kept such musings to himself. Pinchot’s closest ally in town was the secretary of the interior, James Garfield, son of the assassinated twentieth president and a Roosevelt holdover like Pinchot. Garfield had been along on many of the rigorous walks in Rock Creek Park and swims in the icy Potomac, when the grand ideas of conservation were hatched. He also shared Roosevelt’s and Pinchot’s disdain for the gilded rulers of American industry who maneuvered around G.P. during his years working for Teddy. In one of Taft’s first acts as president—and a surprise, at least to Pinchot—he let Garfield go, and replaced him with Richard Ballinger, a former Seattle mayor and lawyer with ties to some of the biggest land barons in the West. Ballinger believed that the conservation crusade had gone too far, a view secretly shared by Taft. Pinchot was stunned.

“A stocky, square-headed little man who believed in turning all public resources as freely and rapidly as possible over to private ownership,” Pinchot said of the new secretary of the interior. And regarding Ballinger, Pinchot did not keep his comments to himself.

Compounding Pinchot’s woes, he had more trouble summoning Laura, his dead lover. Oh, she was there when he faced his nemesis in Congress, fighting for the Forest Service against the blunt scorn of the swollen-faced Senator Heyburn. “I felt my Lady’s help,” he wrote after numerous appearances in the hot seat. But during the first year of Taft’s presidency, Laura started to fade. She had been his refuge, confidante, and spiritual wife. But the apparition had grown dimmer, its appearances less frequent, with each passing year; by 1909, the flesh-and-blood Laura had been gone for fifteen years. No more did Pinchot write of “bright days” in which Laura was clear as a chatty seat-mate at dinner. Now it was mostly “cloudy days” or worse. “A blind day,” Pinchot wrote, night-after-day. About this time, Pinchot may have started to think of seeing other women. His friend in the psychic world, the London editor W. T. Steadman, advised Pinchot that he owed it to Laura to let her know if he ever gave his heart to someone else. “You should at least be able to get in direct touch with her mind to know her wishes,” he wrote Pinchot. The forester’s long spiritual affair with the lovely, deceased woman of his youth was nearing an end, it appeared, just as the man who gave life to his biggest ideas had left the country.

On top of everything else, Pinchot now had a troubled relationship with his mentor, John Muir, the man who had done even more than Roosevelt to get Americans to rethink their ideas on the land. Muir seemed dismissive of Pinchot’s gloomy year. They drifted apart, and then began to feud at a distance. Muir thought Pinchot had become drunk with power and his status in the Roosevelt administration. “P. is ambitious,” Muir wrote, “and never hesitates to sacrifice anything or anybody in his way.”

Pinchot wanted the land to work for the people. His was a practical conservation, forged from the daily struggle with his adversaries—the art of the possible. Muir saw the land as sacrosanct, best when left alone, without human shaping. He seldom dirtied his hands in the muck of politics. “I care to live only to entice people to look at nature’s loveliness,” Muir said, floating above the conflict. It was a debate, mostly abstract, that they could have on civil terms. It turned personal after business interests in San Francisco pressed to dam the waters of the Tuolumne River in Muir’s temple of Yosemite National Park. Muir believed it was an abomination, a high crime against nature, to back up the river in the Hetch Hetchy Valley so that San Francisco could outgrow its water shortages. In 1905, Muir had taken his case directly to another hiking friend—Roosevelt, who seemed sympathetic. But then the earthquake of 1906 gave fresh urgency to the case for helping San Francisco, with many people left homeless on the hills of a burned-out city. Pinchot favored the dam, which would provide a humanitarian lift, he believed. And from there the argument simmered off and on for years between two of the founding voices of conservation, the fate of Hetch Hetchy undetermined for the rest of the Roosevelt presidency and into the new president’s term.

Taft was emboldened by Pinchot’s woes, but he knew he could not fire him without causing a storm among Roosevelt loyalists. Despite his promise to Roosevelt that night in the White House, Taft believed the conservation movement had gone too far too fast, and that too much land had been put in the public’s hands. Roosevelt and Pinchot were radicals, he said in confidence to his brother; they were crusaders. They had steered the Republican Party into territory where Taft was clearly uncomfortable. In private, he dismissed Pinchot as “Sir Galahad” and agreed with the forester’s many enemies who derided him as “a millionaire with a mission.” Of course, Taft had competed with him for the affections of Roosevelt; both the new president and the Chief adored T.R. But Taft thought Pinchot’s ardor was over the top—“sort of a fetish worship,” he said. He mocked Pinchot in a letter to his brother in 1909: “G.P. is out there again defying the lightning and the storm and championing the cause of the oppressed and downtrodden, and harassing the wealthy and the greedy and the dishonest.”

 

Out west, the Little G.P.s felt overwhelmed. Prosecutions for fraudulent homesteads were few and time-consuming. It would take a single ranger months to make a case against someone who tried to claim part of the national forest as his own. On fire patrol, the rangers were even more short-handed, and volunteers to help with the watch were scarce. A killing could be made in these public lands, but not by befriending the Forest Service. With the opening of the Milwaukee Road in 1909, the iron muscle of modern industry came to the Bitterroots, the trains charging through, all roars and thunder, whistle yelps bouncing off the rock walls of the mountains. In the first summer of the new line, the train also proved to be an iron fire-starter—a serious problem for the undermanned Forest Service. From his headquarters in Wallace, Bill Weigle sent a man to do nothing but follow the tracks all day on a velocipede, putting out small fires. He could not keep up. Suddenly, as if an immigration starting gun had gone off, people poured into Montana, Idaho, and Washington—a growth spurt like no other in the history of the Northwest. Nancy Warren, the Chicago transplant in Idaho, had been rhapsodic over the beauty of the area. Now she saw a different side. “The possibilities of profit soon mounted to millions in terms of money and board feet. Everyone was elated at the sight of so much raw material for monetary advancement,” she wrote. “The timber companies were planning a monstrous cut.”

At the least, Weigle, Greeley, Pulaski, Koch, and other rangers expected a bit more support from their government. During a meeting in Missoula, the foresters spent all day commiserating about low pay and constant harassment from Heyburn and his monied clients in the woods. “It’s a well-known fact that on several occasions Senator Heyburn has solicited complaints from residents of the Coeur d’Alene against the Forest Service,” one ranger wrote in a letter to Greeley. Heyburn was working several angles to crush the national forests. He had drawn up a bill, not yet announced, that would take millions of acres out of public land and give them to private interests—a complete reversal of the Roosevelt agenda. The best forest rangers were tempted to leave. “The spirit of the young men in the service is kept alive only by the ideals of leaders in forestry and the optimism from youth,” wrote one forest supervisor. “But there must be a living wage.”

They would get no help from Congress. Pinchot pleaded with the president to take on the enemies of the Forest Service. In desperation, Pinchot again paid some ranger expenses with money from his own pocket. But even a man as rich as Pinchot could not fund the service on his own. And Taft, wincing at conflict as someone blinking in the dawn sunlight, did not want to go after Heyburn or the Speaker of the House. “He is an amiable man,” said one senator, referring to the new president, “completely surrounded by men who know what they want.”

Less than a year into Taft’s presidency, a scandal engulfed Pinchot’s nemesis, Ballinger; it would split the Republican Party. The interior secretary, whose duty was to oversee an empire of public land on behalf of the American people, had once backed a syndicate as it tried to take control of coal in a part of Alaska that was later added to the Chugach National Forest. When a federal official complained that the coal deal was a fraud, like one of the homesteading schemes of the timber industry, Ballinger fired the whistleblower rather than move against the syndicate. The fired official went public, creating a furor—page-one stories for nearly a year. Pinchot called Ballinger a crook and urged the president to get rid of him. Taft advised the forester to lie low, and promised that he would look into the matter and listen to all sides. Privately, he fumed, and seemed flummoxed. He backed Ballinger, and he did not know what to do with Pinchot, the most public link to Roosevelt. “He is a good deal of a radical and a good deal of a crank,” Taft said of Pinchot in a letter to his brother. “Still, I’m glad to have him in my administration.”

Beyond the Alaska coal deal, Ballinger was now showing his true colors—as a traitor to the progressives, Pinchot believed. “You chaps who are in favor of this conservation program are all wrong,” Ballinger said in a speech. “You are hindering the development of the West. In my opinion, the proper course is to divide it up among the big corporations and let the people who know how to make money out of it get the benefits of the circulation of money.” This was what Pinchot was up against, what the saintly Muir could never understand: the wolves were at the door, working with the president to undo all that Roosevelt had accomplished. They wanted to hand public lands over to the very people Roosevelt and Pinchot had battled for the past decade.

Defying Taft, Pinchot took his case to the public. But first he touched home and tried to rally his base. In the summer of 1909, he met as usual with a large group of students from the School of Forestry at Yale, encamped at the Pinchot family estate of Grey Towers. They spent their nights in tents, but often were invited to cross the moat surrounding the castle and share dinner with the Chief inside the forty-two-room chateau. After dinner, it was songs around the piano or speeches in front of a huge bonfire outside. Pinchot told the young foresters that his fight was their fight—a battle for the land itself, and the future. Posing with the students, Pinchot looked grim, gaunt, grey, and out of place with a bow tie on a hot summer’s eve. He tried to summon Laura from the mists, but the spirit was absent.

Then he went west for a series of incendiary speeches, vowing not to quit and urging Americans to stand on behalf of their birthright. Nothing brightened his mood like a battle, and he fed off the energy of westerners who shared his views. In Spokane, Pinchot and Ballinger found themselves in the same room before a large gathering of farmers dependent on government irrigation. The audience members sat on their hands for Ballinger but gave Pinchot a five-minute standing ovation. These people were his “Little Men,” and they loved him—or so he felt.

“The great oppressive trusts exist because of subservient lawmakers,” he told the farmers in Spokane. It was a direct slap at Ballinger, seated a few feet away, and at Heyburn. “I stand for the Roosevelt policies because they set the common good of all of us above the private gain of some of us,” he said. The speech landed him, again, on front pages of newspapers across the nation. It was conflict! Defiance! The feud was on! Furious, Taft called the forester to the woodshed at a meeting in Salt Lake City. Their face-off was tense, precisely the kind of confrontation that Taft could not stomach. Pinchot gave little ground, telling the president he had “no confidence” in the interior secretary. And, he vowed, he would not resign. Now Pinchot was truly on his own. He knew he was insubordinate, and was surprised Taft did not fire him on the spot.

“As President, he should never have approved my aggressive and defiant statement,” Pinchot wrote later. “And as a man he was in honor and in duty bound to stick to his word, given to T.R. in my presence.” But Taft did not have the nerve to fire him. Fresh stories were breaking every day on the Ballinger affair, and it would look bad to ax the face of Roosevelt’s conservation policies at the very time when Taft was being accused of caving in to the trusts. “Are the Guggenheims in Charge of the Department of Interior?” was a Collier’s headline.

The scandal threatened to make Taft a one-term president. There was a stirring among progressive Republicans, called Insurgents, of turning against Taft—very early in his term for a party mutiny. Pinchot appeared to have the public, or at least the press, on his side. Taft was portrayed as a bulbous buffoon, easily manipulated. There were snide remarks about the huge new bathtub he had installed in the White House; it was said he got stuck in the old one. Consuming meals of roast turkey and lobster, ham, cakes and pudding, a hefty steak for breakfast every morning, and salted almonds at all times, he ballooned beyond the 330-pound mark, and his shirt buttons strained on his vest when he sat down. He fell asleep in the middle of a meeting with Cannon, snoring loudly, to the Speaker’s annoyance.

What Pinchot had going for him, in addition to sympathetic press coverage, were his Little G.P.s—“probably the best-trained body of men and women in the government today,” as the New York Times noted in a story about his legacy in the heat of the controversy. “Wherever you find a Forest Service man or woman, you find a devoted believer in Gifford Pinchot. He is the Little Father of his people and they know it and will show it by the most faithful and loyal service that Uncle Sam gets from any of his employees.” But the Times warned Pinchot to be careful, and to back off, or he would soon find himself out of power.

“Mr. Gifford Pinchot, the savior of the country’s forests, is wrong,” the paper concluded. “Unless he rights himself speedily, he may cease to become a member of Mr. Taft’s administration, despite his great services to the Nation.”

Exhausted after more speeches similar to his exhortation in Spokane, Pinchot took refuge on a little island off the coast of southern California. At the height of the biggest battle of his public life, he decided to disappear for a few days, perhaps to summon Laura, to be alone with nature and in pursuit of a big fish. He missed T.R. and wished that he were in Africa with him. “We have fallen back down the hill you led us up,” he wrote to Roosevelt, who was then in Khartoum. “There is general belief that the special interests are once more substantially in full control of both Congress and the Administration.”

On a day infused with the winter sun of California, Pinchot took a fishing rod and a small skiff to the sea. He trolled most of the morning, ate a packed lunch, and continued through the afternoon. A few hours before the sun set, his line snapped taut, the reel disengaged, and Pinchot was jolted to one side of the skiff. Fish on! The swells of the Pacific rolled in, rocking his small craft. He fought and reeled, tugging and giving back much of the line to the fish. Near dusk, his arms ached and his back was stiff but the fish was nowhere near to being landed. At one point, his line went briefly slack, and the surface water broke with a loud splash. He saw then that he had hooked a man-size marlin. It leapt well above the surface, a stirring encounter. “High out of the water sprang this splendid creature,” Pinchot wrote, “his big eye staring as he rose, till the impression of beauty and lithe power was enough to make a man’s heart sing with him. It was a moment to be remembered for a lifetime.” Forester and fish fought for two and a half hours. Near the end, Pinchot was eight miles from land, and it was dark. At last he brought the fish close enough to spear and haul it into the boat. The marlin weighed 168 pounds.

 

Back in Washington for the new year, Pinchot geared up for congressional hearings on the Ballinger affair. The story dominated the news and preoccupied the Taft administration. Pinchot was rested and ready for battle; he not only felt renewed, he felt more than ever that the country was with him. Taft could not bear the thought of another year with a chief forester in unbridled defiance. And then Pinchot pushed him to the edge. He arranged for a letter to be read in Congress that was openly critical of the president, saying his boss had misinterpreted the facts in the Ballinger imbroglio. The next day’s headlines—“Forester’s Letter Creates Sensation” was typical—foretold the logical outcome. On January 7, 1910, just as Pinchot was leaving the family home on Rhode Island Avenue to go to a dinner party, he was approached by a messenger with an envelope, a long, formal letter from the president. Pinchot, dressed in evening clothes, silk hat in hand, hastily read it. He turned to his mother.

“I’m fired.”

“Hurrah!” she replied, clearly relieved.

In his letter, Taft wrote, “By your own conduct you have betrayed your usefulness as a helpful subordinate of the government.”

For Pinchot’s enemies, the firing was received like news of a large inheritance from a rich uncle. Syndicates that fought for free grazing on millions of acres of public land were holding a national meeting in Denver at the time. They had battled Pinchot for nearly a decade. In the forests of Colorado and Arizona, they ran rangers out of the woods, hiring killers in some cases to threaten their lives. When that didn’t work, they tried to bribe the Little G.P.s, reasoning that it was still cheaper to pay off a ranger than pay a grazing fee. The convention was interrupted with a bulletin, read from the podium: Pinchot is gone! Great cheering and whistling broke out, lasting several minutes.

It took a few weeks for the news to reach Roosevelt in Africa. “We have just heard by runner that you have been removed,” he wrote to Pinchot. “I cannot believe it. I do not know any man in public life who has rendered quite the service you have rendered; and it seems to me absolutely impossible that there can be any truth in this statement. But of course it makes me very uneasy.” With time to reflect, Roosevelt was more than uneasy. He was angry. Pinchot, he said in his letter, was a fighter who stood for good causes. Taft was jelly. “You were the leader among all the men in public office—and the aggressive, hard-hitting leader—of all the forces struggling for conservation,” he said in his letter to Pinchot. He had started to think of Taft as a “puzzlewit,” as he put it later, and wondered if he had made a terrible mistake in choosing him. Yes, Pinchot, his friend since they boxed together in Albany, the man with whom he built the conservation dream from scratch, had all but asked to be fired. And no doubt Pinchot could be too zealous, too eager for a fight, too full of his own self-righteousness. A pain! But for Roosevelt, the forester always had a special place: Gifford Pinchot, he told a friend, was the true keeper of his conscience.

When Pinchot arrived at Forest Service headquarters the day after his firing, some rangers were weeping. Others expected him to bivouac inside this fortress of foresters, forcing Taft to remove him at the barrel end of a gun. Pinchot acted the gentleman. First he met with top associates and urged them to stay on and fight for the life of the Forest Service. “You are engaged in a piece of work that lies at the foundation of the new patriotism of conservation and equal opportunity,” he told them. “You are creating a point of view that will in the end control this and all other nations.” Next he spoke to a larger group, rank-and-file forest rangers, black and white, janitors and executive assistants, about three hundred people in all, a very boisterous, defiant crowd. When Pinchot started to talk, the ovation was so loud and sustained that passersby outside thought an entire government agency was in revolt. “Don’t let the spirit of the service decline one-half inch,” Pinchot said. “Stay in the service. Stick to the work.”

 

In the northern Rockies, the late winter of 1910 was one for the records. Storm after storm rolled out of the Gulf of Alaska, over the mountain hurdles in the western Pacific Northwest, and into the Bitterroots. Furious blizzards dumped snow over the whole range, from the lowest valleys to the highest peaks, sometimes a foot a day. The towns of Wallace and Grand Forks, Taft and Avery, continued their honky-tonk ways, their squeals muffled by heavy snow. Ten feet of it covered the valley where Wallace was built.

In late February, the weather warmed, and rain and higher temperatures made the snow heavy and prone to movement. A tug of gravity, a shrug and a roar, brought the snow down. The avalanche was loud enough that it shattered windows in a school hundreds of feet away. The slide rolled over a big rooming house, killing a family and several boarders. The Forest Service was called to the rescue. The rangers came and dug out the house buried by snow. To the west, in the Cascades, trains were smothered and swept away in another slide, killing dozens of people. But in early spring came a dramatic change, as if a switch had been turned off. Bluebird days were the rule.

Where was the spring rain? The snow melted early, all of it. Creeks withered and stilled, the forest leathered and baked. Pine needles and twigs on the floor cracked underfoot, dry as sun-crisped bread chips. The shiny cars of the Milwaukee Road screamed through the heart of the Bitterroots on the way to Puget Sound for loads of silk, making another generation of Rockefellers rich on a gamble that looked as if it was going to pay off big. Whenever the forest supervisors, Koch in Missoula and Weigle in Wallace, heard whistles in the woods they thought of showers of sparks trailing the trains and landing in a very dry public forest.

They had other concerns, of course. With the founder ousted, the Forest Service was in extreme peril. “We used to call you our Greek god,” a Forest Service colleague wrote to Pinchot. “None of us had any idea how much of Jove’s thunder there really was in you, but I assure you that you have made us proud of you time and again. We have grown to like your thunder and its loudness, too, because that has always told us the lightning has struck something!” The Little G.P.s felt orphaned and glum without the Chief. “I feel as if attending a funeral,” one regional forester wrote of an upcoming meeting. “I hope somebody in Congress can be brought to see the other side of the shield.” Another forester wrote a memo summarizing “the complete demoralization of the service” and a “widespread state of unrest.” Senator Heyburn and others were closing in for the kill, backed by newspaper owners who had long hated the Forest Service and Roosevelt’s idea of land preservation. “It is criminal folly to preserve the forests merely to placate Gifford Pinchot,” one newspaper, a mouthpiece for the corrupt Senator Clark, had editorialized on the front page. The national forests “are an expensive and useless burden to the public,” another paper wrote that summer, adding that ”this Pinchot troop of foresters now infesting the West should be called in, paid off, and abolished. If they are not a nuisance, they are of no practical use.”

And then smoke started to fill the woods. There had been no rain since early spring, a drought worse than any in nearly a generation’s time. Typically, mornings were windless. In the afternoons, parts of the sky darkened with the formation of thunderheads, followed by lightning strikes and claps of thunder echoing through the canyons—dry storms, all sound and fury from the sky, but no water. It did not take much for these electric forks to light the forests. Greeley, the northern Rockies supervisor, soon had his hands full dispatching men to put out numerous spot blazes, as they were called. This became all part of a day’s work—a dozen men with shovels dashing after an acre or two on fire, trying to corral the blaze before dark. By midsummer, lightning-sparked fires were breaking out every day: a pile of brush here, a hillside of pine there, a meadow of heat-withered grass smoking through a week. It was a nuisance and wearing, but the rangers took to it stoically. If this was the cost of keeping the Great Crusade alive, so be it. But they were afraid, many of them, for the first time since joining the service. A single question dominated talk: What if it all blows up?