The Big Burn
eBook - ePub

The Big Burn

Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America

  1. 352 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

The Big Burn

Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America

Book details
Table of contents
Citations

About This Book

National Book Award–winner Timothy Egan turns his historian's eye to the largest-ever forest fire in America and offers an epic, cautionary tale for our time.

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 to fight the fires, but no living person had seen anything like those flames, and neither the rangers nor anyone else knew how to subdue them. Egan recreates the struggles of the overmatched rangers against the implacable fire with unstoppable dramatic force, and the larger story of outsized president Teddy Roosevelt and his chief forester, Gifford Pinchot, that follows is equally resonant. Pioneering the notion of conservation, Roosevelt and Pinchot did nothing less than create the idea of public land as our national treasure, owned by every citizen. Even as TR's national forests were smoldering they were saved: The heroism shown by his rangers turned public opinion permanently in favor of the forests, though it changed the mission of the forest service in ways we can still witness today.

This e-book includes a sample chapter of SHORT NIGHTS OF THE SHADOW CATCHER.

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Information

Publisher
Mariner Books
Year
2009
ISBN
9780547416861
Topic
History
Subtopic
North American History
Index
History

Table of contents

  1. Title Page
  2. Contents
  3. Copyright
  4. Dedication
  5. Map: The Big Burn
  6. Epigraph
  7. PROLOGUE
  8. In On the Creation
  9. “A Peculiar Intimacy”
  10. Roost of the Robber Barons
  11. The Great Crusade
  12. Deadwood Days
  13. Showdown
  14. What They Lost
  15. Summer of Smoke
  16. Men, Men, Men!
  17. Spaghetti Westerners
  18. Firestorm’s Eve
  19. Blowup
  20. Photos
  21. The Lost Day
  22. The Lost Night
  23. Towns Afire
  24. To Save a Town
  25. The Missing
  26. The Living and the Dead
  27. What They Saved
  28. Fallout
  29. One for the Boys
  30. Ashes
  31. Notes on Sources
  32. Acknowledgments
  33. Index
  34. Sample Chapter from SHORT NIGHTS OF THE SHADOW CATCHER
  35. Buy the Book
  36. About the Author