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

The town of Taft, emblematic of the “wild west,” is derisively named by its inhabitants after the future president William H. Taft and described as “the wickedest city in America” (73). The town is inside a national forest reserve under Ranger Koch’s jurisdiction. Pinchot had not visited Taft or described its open lawlessness to Koch before assigning him there. Koch arrives to find the town full of prostitutes, gambling, and hopeless drunks. Koch and his team of both permanent and seasonal rangers work in the forests: stringing telephone wire, building trails, rescuing hunters and hikers, felling dead trees. They travel deep in the forest on multi-day excursions subsisting on nothing but tea, sugar, raisins, and hard tack.

Weigle is stationed “just over the ridge in Idaho” (75), in the Coeur d’Alene. His territory contains three depraved towns, the worst of which being Grand Forks, “where muddy streets thick with filth and feces were lined with burned-out stumps […] Saloons were held together by rough-cut planks, with canvas-walled cribs out back […] for quick paid sex” (75). Broken-down wagons remain in streets until they are burned or picked for scrap. The Little G.P.s expected to find honest homesteaders in the public lands, but instead they find land thieves, whiskey peddlers, and pimps “operating in open defiance of the U.