much public land in his single term in office as did his energetic predecessor in over seven years. Taft deserves the title of trustbuster far more than Roosevelt does. His Justice Department launched over three times as many antitrust suits in his four years as president. In fact, it was Taft’s decision to bring an antitrust suit against U.S. Steel in 1911 that led to the decisive rupture in his relations with Roosevelt. The suit mentioned a deal made by U.S. Steel that Roosevelt had personally approved.

The Rough Rider regarded the Justice Department’s action against U.S. Steel as a personal affront, and he soon resolved to challenge Taft for the Republican presidential nomination. Egan leaves the impression that Roosevelt ran against Taft in 1912 because of differences over conservation. His fixation on the Big Burn and the battle for America’s woodlands leads Egan to distort the political history of the Roosevelt and Taft Administrations. In his version of progressivism, the tail wags the dog.

Fortunately, Egan’s weakness in laying out the political background of his story is balanced by the strength of his account of the formative years of the United States Forest Service. The central figure in his book is Gifford Pinchot, Roosevelt’s chief forester. Pinchot was born to wealth, the family fortune ironically rooted in the lumber industry. Financially secure, Pinchot devoted himself to the study of forestry. He became a leader in a field few understood. He befriended the great naturalist John Muir and became passionately devoted to protecting the American wilderness from reckless commercial exploitation.

The crucial relationship of Pinchot’s life was his friendship with Roosevelt. Both men were avid outdoorsmen; they also shared impatience with the politics of business-as-usual in Washington. Pinchot became a sparring partner and speechwriter for Roosevelt. He was a kindred spirit the president could count on for companionship in either a constitutional or a convivial conversation. Pinchot’s reward was access to power. Roosevelt gave Pinchot an opportunity to act on his ideals, making him the first chief of the Forest Service.

Pinchot threw himself into his work with single-minded devotion. Unlike his mentor, he had not married and started a family. Pinchot was once engaged, but his fiancé died of tuberculosis in 1894. Egan recounts that, for the next two decades, Pinchot was convinced that the spirit of his lost love visited him regularlynot as an ethereal presence but in a form so tangible that he could carry on conversations with her about policy. Egan notes this strange psychic phenomenon in Pinchot’s life but does not otherwise comment on it. In other hands, this might be taken as an indication that Pinchot was mentally unbalanced. For Egan, it seems to be one more measure of his hero’s driven nature. Pinchot was a man determined to make the world conform to his vision of it.

Certainly, this was the case in his management of the Forest Service. He stamped his personality on it so indelibly that his early corps of specially chosen and trained forest rangers called themselves “Little G.P.s.” Pinchot carefully picked his forest rangers. Many were products of the Ivy League, especially a program in forestry at Yale University. Pinchot demanded that his rangers write well; they also had to pass grueling tests in outdoor living, animal care, shooting, and carpentry.

The first generation of forest rangers was expected to patrol huge ranges of woodland, building their own cabins and stations. Pinchot entertained rangers in his Washington home as they trained for their assignments, imbuing them with his own sense of dedication to defending America’s woodlands. Morale was very high in the Forest Service. This was important because, under Roosevelt as well as Taft, forest rangers were poorly paid and had to provide their own, horses, saddles, rifles, and boots.

Pinchot faced entrenched opposition in Congress from powerful politicians who saw the Forest Service as an obstacle to economic development in the West. In an effort to justify his fledgling agency, Pinchot made fire control a priority of the Forest Service. This was a mission that lumber men and conservationists alike could embrace. Rangers soon were stamping out brush fires that seemed to threaten ancient timber.

Pinchot’s maneuver, while politically shrewd, set the stage for the Forest Service’s futile battle in 1910. He, however, would not be there to command his rangers. He engaged in a ferocious dispute with Taft’s secretary of the interior, Richard Ballinger, over the opening of some public land to commercial use. Taft finally fired Pinchot early in 1910. Pinchot immediately joined the peregrinating Roosevelt overseas to tell his mentor his version of events, and the affair strained relations between the former and incumbent presidents.

The summer of 1910 in the mountain woodlands where Montana and Idaho meet was unusually dry. On July 26, an electrical storm started over one thousand fires. Almost a month later, the number had doubled. On August 20, a western wind known as a Palouser blew in and stoked the fires into a rapidly moving inferno. Caught in the advance of this firestorm were forest rangers, Army troops, and hundreds of immigrant laborers hired to fight the fires and protect the wildcat towns in the region that housed miners and lumbermen.

Egan masterfully describes the efforts of the firefighters to survive in the terrifying conditions of the resulting perfect storm of flame. There were many heroes in this desperate struggle for survival. Ed Pulaski, a forest ranger, was widely acknowledged as the greatest of these heroes. He saved most of his force of fifty firefighters by leading them through the blaze to a mineshaft that gave them cover. Pulaski himself suffered severe injuries that stayed with him for the rest of his life. By the time the fire died down, around eighty men had died, and a huge stretch of the Bitterroot Mountains had been burned over.

Roosevelt and Pinchot used the Big Burn as an occasion to criticize the conservation policies of the Taft administration. Roosevelt talked of the fire on the famous swing through the prairie states during which he laid out his “New Nationalism.” Pinchot argued that, had the Forest Service been better supported and funded, it could have prevented the disaster. Given the titanic natural forces at work, this was an absurd claim. Nevertheless, the trauma of the Big Burn shaped the governing ethos of the Forest Service for generations. As veterans of the fire rose in the service, firefighting became an obsession.

Increasingly, the Forest Service cooperated with the logging industry, protecting trees so they could be harvested for commercial purposes. Only recently has the Forest Service acknowledged the ecological folly of preventing all fires, which are nature’s way of renewing forests. Pinchot himself came to acknowledge this. After a successful career in politics, during which he served two terms as governor of Pennsylvania, he revisited the western forests and recognized that fires were not a force that human beings could hope to control. Egan ends his account on a note of grace, pointing out that, whatever the errors of Pinchot and other early leaders of the Forest Service, the forests that they sought to protect still remain for future generations to treasure.