Can You Survive The 1910 Big Burn

In the northwestern United States, the summer of 1910 was the driest anyone had seen in a long time. The weather was extremely hot and windy. Crops everywhere were drying up. Then in August the region faced one of the biggest forest fires in U.S. history. Will you lead the fight to battle the fires and save your hometown? Can you save others and escape before the town is consumed by flames? Will you flee with your mother to find safety on a train? With dozens of possible choices, YOU will have to decide how to survive one of history's biggest and deadliest forest fires.

A good case could be made for predicting a calamitous forest fire that would ravage the relatively unscathed, lush timber stands of the Northwest. Some people shrugged and lamented that one could never predict much of the future. But regardless of what people thought, 1910 was to be the year of what some termed the "big blowup" of the "big burn," or the "time when the mountains roared." A series of 1,736 fires ravaged three million acres and killed eighty-five people. With abnormally low amounts of precipitation and soaring high temperatures, disaster threatened imminently, and the undermanned, underequipped national forest service did not help the situation.

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.

The Land Speaks explores the intersection of two vibrant fields, oral history and environmental studies. Ranging across farm and forest, city and wilderness, river and desert, this collection of fourteen oral histories gives voice to nature and the stories it has to tell. These essays consider topics as diverse as environmental activism, wilderness management, public health, urban exploring, and smoke jumping. They raise questions about the roles of water, neglected urban spaces, land ownership concepts, protectionist activism, and climate change. Covering almost every region of the United States and part of the Caribbean, Lee and Newfont and their diverse collection of contributors address the particular contributions oral history can make toward understanding issues of public land and the environment. In the face of global warming and events like the Flint water crisis, environmental challenges are undoubtedly among the most pressing issues of our time. These essays suggest that oral history can serve both documentary and problem-solving functions as we grapple with these challenges.

"1910 was America's millennial year of fire. That summer, American nature and American society collided with tectonic force as western wildfires scorched millions of acres, darkened skies in New England, and deposited soot on the ice of Greenland. Farms, mining camps, and rail towns cracked and burned. A survivor said that the towering flames raged with the sound of a thousand trains rushing over a thousand steel trestles. As one ranger put it, the mountains roared." "Stephen Pyne explains how wildland fires happen and how they are fought, how forests are created then re-created in cycles of burning, and what happens to a landscape when roads, railways, mining camps, logging, and national parks appear. The action distills into a two-day crisis, the Big Blowup of August 20-21, when the fires tripled in size, and focuses in particular on the heroics of Ranger Ed Pulaski, who held his panicked crew at gunpoint in a mine tunnel while the firestorm raged outside." "Pyne brings that year to life through the experiences and words of the rangers, soldiers, politicians, bureaucrats, scientists, and civilians who faced the fires, fought the flames, and were forever scarred by them. It was the first and greatest test of the five-year-old Forest Service. Yet even as seventy-eight fire-fighters perished, a national debate raged about policy, and especially about the relative merits of firefighting versus fire lighting."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved