When fire came over the mountain

THE BIG BURN By Timothy Egan Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26, 352 pages. Not since David McCullough's 1968 "The Johnstown Flood" grabbed readers and hurled them down the narrow Conemaugh Valley to certain doom can I remember a natural-disaster yarn that yanks one by the back of the neck face to face with horror the way Timothy Egan's "The Big Burn" brings the great Western fire of 1910 over the mountain to destroy the town of Wallace, Idaho. Before it burned itself out, the inferno consumed 3 million acres in just two days, and blazes elsewhere in the panhandle of Idaho, western Montana and eastern Oregon had burned up an area larger than the state of Connecticut. More than 10,000 men had been dispatched to the various conflagrations from as far away as California and Arizona, but most were too late to do more than rescue the handful of fledgling U.S. Forest Service rangers who had never had a chance to snuff out the early fires before they became an incinerating tsunami that evaporated everything in its path. Mr. Egan, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist (one of his five previous books, "The Worst Hard Times," won a National Book Award) is at the top of his game with this tale. It is both the story of the worst fire ever to sweep modern America at that time and a deft political tale of how we got the public land policy and conservation movement we have today - and how vulnerable that policy is to the pressures of human greed...read more