The Big Burn by Timothy Egan Read Free Book Online Page A

across the lake. Pinchot rowed furiously across the water and went face-to-face with the errant shooter. In Idaho, he also saw up close what fire could do to a forest. Entire mountainsides were left scorched and skeletal by earlier burns around Priest Lake. It spooked him, sickened him, and stayed with him, as if he had seen a dead body for the first time.
    "Of all the foes which attack the woodlands of North America, no other is so terrible as fire," he wrote in a little primer outlining his views of forestry at the time.
    Back in Washington, Pinchot's report was buried. But McKinley was impressed by the young man's energy, and found his family connections useful. He named Pinchot his forester, head of a tiny division with no power. Cleveland's reserves would stand for now, but with no manpower to protect them. They were reserves in name only.
Well, it's a start,
Pinchot told friends. He was given a back office in a brick building with a staff of ten. He had no land to manage, no oversight, no authority. On many days, it was humiliating: the big timber owners "held us in amused toleration or open contempt," he wrote.
    He was invited to speak at garden clubs and universities, a harmless gadfly with some compelling ideas, and
thank you very much, Giff.
So by the time thirty-three-year-old Gifford Pinchot laced up his boxing gloves to face Teddy Roosevelt in the governor's mansion in 1899, he was a forester without a forest.
    As a boxer, Roosevelt was predictable. Not for him would there be lightning-quick footwork and bouncing on his toes. He was a windmill of fists, with occasional uppercuts. The strategy was simple: throw it all at the opponent at once, overwhelming him. "I believe in going hard at everything" was his stated philosophy of life. Pinchot the boxer was classically trained, as with most things in his upbringing. He played it safe, using his height, keeping his distance from the flailing pug of a governor. Teddy landed a couple of glancing blows, nothing serious. Pinchot took his time to size up his man, taking in his moves. When his opening came, he hit Roosevelt hard several times. The governor was stunned, head snapping back. He staggered, swooned, tried to recover. A roundhouse round followed from Pinchot.
Snap! Snap! Boom!
Dazed, Roosevelt fell to the floor. Match to Pinchot.
    Raised to be modest, keeping his thoughts to himself unless asked, the American model of Edwardian class, Pinchot still allowed himself to gloat—in private, of course. Before the year's end, Pinchot was back at the governor's mansion for a rematch—"boxed and wrestled with T.R. before dinner," he wrote, as if recording the day's weather. He and Roosevelt would maintain a brotherly, often tortured relationship for the rest of their lives, the needy and mysterious Pinchot, the ever-confident Bull Moose. It was unequal, as good friendships should not be, master and slave. They climbed rocks, swam icy channels, played tetherball on the roof of Pinchot's house and tennis on the White House grounds, rode horses at full gallop over dirt trails. But Pinchot never forgot his triumph in the governor's mansion. "I had the honor of knocking the future President of the United States off his very solid pins," he wrote.

    Nineteen months later, an anarchist shot President McKinley at the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo, on September 6, 1901. Roosevelt was summoned from the Adirondacks, where he was on a hiking trip not far from where Pinchot had gone for his winter climb. He rushed to Buffalo to be at the side of the bleeding president. T.R. had served a single two-year term as governor, and then ran as the number two man on the Republican presidential ticket in 1900. The party bosses in Albany felt the Siberia of the vice president's office was a way to get rid of Roosevelt.
    For a time, it looked as if the badly wounded McKinley would recover; Roosevelt was told he could rejoin his family back in the woods. He had just started to descend