In "The Big Burn," writer Timothy Egan tells two stories. One is up close and personal: a forest fire that hit the northern Rockies on Aug. 20-21, 1910, charring more than 4,600 square miles and killing 85 people in eastern Washington, Idaho and western Montana. To this day, people out there call it the Big Burn.

Egan's second story takes a wider perspective. Under the subtitle "Teddy Roosevelt & the Fire that Saved America," Egan describes how the heroism of the firefighters roused the nation and saved one of Roosevelt's pet agencies, the U.S. Forest Service, from slow death at the hands of timber, mining and rail barons. If the fire didn't quite save America, it saved Roosevelt's vision of an America with protected forests and a conservationist mind-set.

Roosevelt was already an ex-president when the Big Burn hit. But the failure of his hand-picked successor, William Howard Taft, to stand behind the Forest Service vexed Roosevelt and helped prod him into a losing third-party race in 1912.

Still, if Roosevelt lost the race, he managed to focus national attention on the Forest Service and its heroic reaction to the Big Burn. Roosevelt and his forest chief, Gifford Pinchot, left behind a green legacy of national forests.

Trouble is, Egan writes, the Forest Service drew the wrong lessons from its Big Burn legend. For decades afterward, the author writes, the agency gave overriding priority to stopping forest fires, all to ensure a supply of wood for the big timber companies, which were allowed to hack away whole mountainsides.

Now, cheaper Canadian timber — plus environmental awareness, plus federal regulations — have restored much of the dream of Roosevelt and Pinchot.

But no political movement can pack the excitement of Egan's ground-level account of the fire itself. Unlike today's hackneyed and clichéd wire-service accounts of wilderness fires, "The Big Burn" grabs readers with its strong verbs and vivid images:

"In pops and cracks and snaps and gulps, in gasps and whistles, the fire metastasized — more clamorous with every fresh intake, charging ahead. Any leftover little fire that might have smoldered and smoked in a last gasp was given new life by the wind, yanked from the ground, pitched into the river of flame …"

Three years ago, Egan won a National Book Award for "The Worst Hard Time," about the Dust Bowl '30s. "The Big Burn" should keep him in the spotlight.

In fact, as far as I can tell, this latest book comes up short in only one regard:

Nowhere does it mention Smokey the Bear.



Harry Levins of Manchester retired in 2007 as senior writer of the Post-Dispatch.