more arizona license plates during the summer than any other state probably. i love tucson in part because it is a classic in typical western city, vibrant, forward-looking, fast-growing, new and surrounded entirely by both envy and public so, you know, a few days ago i was up in the national forest and in the national park and i'm going to make a case this afternoon that you owe some of this huge bit of public land that surrounds your town, that surrounds most western towns to this fire that happened 100 years ago this year. now, i'm attracted to these collisions of human beings and nature. i'm attracted to the sort of natural drama that's inherent whenever we human beings think that we can overcome nature. my last book was on the dust bowl called "the worst hard time" and i was attracted to that because no one had ever seen anything like this before.

no one had seen the earth turned inside out and no one had seen a time when you literally had mountains of earth 5,000 feet high, 100 miles wide moving toward people and blotting out the sun and i like the sort of drama of that and i like there were some people left, many wonderful people and so i could look into their eyes and say tell me what it was like 75 years ago to live through this horrible disaster. well, with this fire i didn't have anyone alive because it happened 100 years ago and i had to go back and look at the figures both big and small who gave us this drama. and early on the fire was so fascinating to me. i thought i was going to write a book just about the pure sort of atmospherics of a fire that we never had in our history. let me give you a rough outline of this thing 3 million acres was how much land was burned an area of the size of connecticut.

3 million acres in 36 hours. less than a weekend, 33 million acres burned to the ground. temperatures in excess of 2,000 degrees. 5 towns burned to the ground, four of them leave the map. they're never replaced at all. amazingly, only 100 people die. i say amazing. let me get back to this. you'll hear why this is the fire that saves america. it's the first time the united states ever decided to fight a fire.m// we assembled an army of firefighters. mostly immigrants, more irish, poor italian, black soldiers from the buffalo soldiers. all these people assembled under a services. and this is where it's important for you who live here. everything that came out of that fire is with us still. what we did. the lessons that were learned and the lessons probably shouldn't have been taken away is with us still. the western landscape is not

only our public land which is so important to us as westerners but how we treat the land. the fact that we tried to fight every fire for a long time and now we have all this built-up fuel in some of the fires you had in arizona are a direct result of the lessons taken away from the big burn. but before i get into the fire i have to tell you about two of the figures at the basis of this. teddy roosevelt and gifford pin shell i'm one of those people like so many americans who sort of knew about roosevelt as this figure on mount rushmore. this bull moose person who said oh -- invented the term bully pulpit. it came from him and then i started to read him and read his autobiography and his letters and the many biographies on him. i absolutely fell for the guy. we have never had a president who was such a renaissance man. he wrote 15 books before his 40th birthday. he wanted to be a zooologist.

he would write sometimes 10,000 words before noon in letters, in personal letters. he burned 4,000 calories in a day. he just was always active. now, i read recently that -- this is last week that president obama is now reading roosevelt's biography. interestingly at a time when some republicans are trying to disown this most famous republican by the way, roosevelt, teddy was a republican president. your senator john mccain, of course, has always listed teddy roosevelt as his favorites. he goes out of fashion. and now he's this progressive whom some people on the right side of the spectrum are trying to disown. other years, you know, the left sees him as this, you know, warmonger, although he was also the first president to win the nobel peace prize, which he did for negotiating a settlement between the japanese and the russians. now, let me tell you a little bit about roosevelt. most of you -- some of you will know this already.

and this is important to our national forests and the fire. he was a sickly child. a product of wealth. his father was very wealthy. he grew up in manhattan. the only president born and raised in new york city. you can still see the place where he grew up. and very sickly. and the doctors told him, you know, don't go outside. don't exercise. don't -- you probably won't live to see your 21st birthday if you spend any time in the outdoors. and roosevelt said, i just won't live with that. he willed himself to strength. this is what he said in his autobiography. i willed my way not to be afraid of the dark as a little boy. i willed my way not to be afraid of riding a horse at a fast pace. i willed my way into not letting the bully push me down. i willed my way to strength. he got himself from a sickly little kid.uí& he lifted weights and so by the time he goes off to harvard, he's a fairly robust young man.

he has willed his way out of this sickness. and he thinks he wants to be a zoologist and he studies all this time in the -- the sort of clustered claustrophobia of a laboratory looking at insects and he wants to be outside. he's hyperkinetic. he wants to be roaming in the woods and he wants to be outside at all times. he can't stands the laboratory. and he changes his profession. he decides he's going to be a politician. so he graduates, goes to columbia and thinks he's going to be a lawyer and goes there without getting his law degree and he's a republican because then he thought the republicans were the only clean party in albany. he said most of the legislators in all of albany were corrupt but republicans were only two-thirds corrupt. [laughter] >> so he becomes a republican 'cause they're the least corrupt. they're not tammany hall. and at age 23 he's elected. and at age 25 he's the republican minority leader.

and then something very dramatic and life shaping happens that affects all of us. you'll see the connection if you stay with me, by the way. he's in love and married to this gorgeous wonderful woman alice hathaway whom he says is so radiant and pure and beautiful. i just want to worship her and they have their first child. they are living in central park. and the day his beautiful radiant wife whom he's in love with and he's 25 years old gives birth to their first child alice, she dies in the act of childbirth and roosevelt is grief-stricken. he can't talk. but then he goes upstairs to the second story of this home he's living on west 57th where his mother, his widowed mother because his father died while he was at school. she dies on the same way. he loses his wife and mother on the same day valentine's day,

1884, valentine's day, and he says -- he's a prolific diaryist. no one is more of a writer than theodore roosevelt. no president has approached his output. and if any of you do research you know what it's a thrilled to come on an original page you get goose bumps at least i do.ó(i i'm reading this biography and i see valentine's day and he writes a big shaky x on february 14th. and he writes a single line. he says, the light has gone out of my life. so he gives up politics. he resigns from the legislature. he hands his child over to a sister to raise little alice and he goes out west to the dakota territory and becomes a cowboy. now, this is a harvard grad with glasses and people make fun of him. they call him four eyes. he punches a guy in a bar and he was proud of it. he goes out to the territory and

he sets up this little cabin about a third of the size of where i'm standing. about from here to the wall. it's like 200 square feet. i've seen the cabin. and he puts a little -- hangs a little bear's rug next to the fireplace and he has a rocking chair and it's filled with books. and by day working 16-hour days he's running cattle and at night he sits in his rocking chair in front of a fireplace and he reads. he reads and reads and reads and he writes and writes.nk and over the course of almost two years the west restores him. the west makes him whole again. it gets rid of his grief. and he says later, i owe more to the west than any man -- any american ever could. so this is important to understand what he does later. now, let's fast forward. he becomes governor of new york. and he's a reformist. and the traditional party leaders want to get rid of him because he's a reformist so they

sort of manipulate to get him on the presidential ticket thinking, you know, he'll be gone forever once he's vice president. no one will ever hear about him. it wasn't in the age of the activist vice president as we have now so roosevelt become mckinley's vice president. who's elected president in 1900. you know what happens. less than a year's time an anarkist shoots mckinley in buffalo in september of 19 01. roosevelt is hiking at the time. secret service comes up to get him. they haul him down the mountain. it takes them three days to get to buffalo and it looks like mckinley is going to make it and he goes back up to continue hiking to climb mount marcy and five days later the secret service, this time he doesn't make it. he comes back down over three days and he makes it back to buffalo. eight days after mckinley is shot theodore roosevelt is sworn in as our youngest president. age 42.w7= now, you'll say there's been a younger elected president that's true, kennedy.

he's our youngest president. so he's a republican. he's president. now, he writes in his diary, i want to change the republican party into a fairly radical, progressive party. this is what he says. he doesn't announce this in a press conference. he doesn't tell the public this. but he says this to himself and he wants to do this and part of him is going after the trust. there's a concentration of wealth. we've never had such a great concentration of wealth and divisions between rich and poor until just a few years ago, in fact, which absolutely paralleled these times. it's also the peak of immigration. they've just opened the doors to italians which they've kept out for a long time and southern immigrants and they'll figure in this fire as well. republican party, in order to govern as a populist, roosevelt needs another person named gifford pin cho. pinchot.

he's the son of great wealth. his father made money clear-cutting trees in the state of opinions. -- pennsylvania. he wants to study forestry at yale. there's no school of forestry so he goes to france and he hates it. it's this fussy mildewed aircraft stock si. the trees grow in all these evenly rows and all professor wants to talk about is the great stories of the american west. that's where it's at. that's eden's creation. if you want to study forestry goes to america. and pinchot leaves and he comes home and he goes west as sort of a lot of young men goes west and he falls in love with it. he goes in and out of yosemite. he describes dashing in and out of the waterfalls in yosemite like a baptism and he's giddy with joy and this is a gloomy man. wrote in his diary, i made an

ass of myself. i hate myself. he comes to arizona territory. he goes up to flagstaff and he hikes in the san francisco mountains. he's ecstatic. he camps along the rim of the grand canyon. later with his mentor, john muir. and a spider comes down and he wants to kill it and he says no it's as much to live as we do. and he says if you do this, i will get you forests. i will create national forests. there was such a thing called a national forester then but there was no from uses. you had no public forest and pinchot complained he was a forester without a forest. so in the course of the next seven years, roosevelt serves the rest of mckinley's term and he serves his second full term when he's elected by a landslide.

and only after he's elected by a landslide when the public knows what he's up to he's starting to create national forests by executive order does he feel he has a mandate to do the most audacious thing in conservation that any president has ever done. over the course of his presidency, he sets aside an area almost as large as france. and that is our birthright as americans. that's the public land legacy. it's national from us, it's national parks. it's blm land. it's national monuments, which you have all over here in the southwest. all of this is public domain land that roosevelt and pinchot helped to give us as all americans and it's not an easy fight either. i mean, they are facing -- remember, this is the end of the guilded age so you have these guilded age plutocrats, the rockefeller family and they're pushing railroads through the west. in the course of building this giant railroad through the bitterroot mountains where the fire takes place.

you've got a senator from montana named clark who later goes on to found las vegas who wants to be the richest person in america. and he buys his senate seat in montana for $10,000 a vote. remember, senators then were not elected by popular vote. they were chosen by legislators so he hands out these envelopes monogrammed with his initials. he said, i never bought a man who's not for sale. mark twain calls him the most disgusting creature the public has ever produced and his one goal in the united states senate is to stop teddy roosevelt and gifford pinchot from creating an more public land. now, they're not taking private land. i want to emphasize this and giving it to the public. they're taking what's left over from the big public domain. the louisiana purchase. land that has not been set aside for cities, for homesteading or indian reservations.

it's public domain land and they're giving it a purpose, okay? they're putting boundaries around it. now, it's really interesting in washington, d.c. this is one of the reasons why i fell for these two guys. pinchot is this good-looking kind of strange 6'3" gangly -- i say he looks like a sleepy hollow character though he's fabulously wealthy and he's unmarried. they say he's the most eligible bachelor in the capital. well, it turns out he's married to a ghost. his love of his life had died just as theodore roosevelt's love had died. and pinchot -- this is a time of seances. summons the spirit of his beloved and gets sealed into eternity -- he shows up at his mother's house one day and he had been wearing black in mourning for two years. and he's got a skip in his step and he's not wearing his black and his mother says what's up. he said i'm married. and she says to whom? and he tells her and she says

she's been dead. she appears me at dinner and we discuss books. i had her over at the white house. so somebody was interviewing me when i started this book tour last year. and they said, you know, gifford pinchot was psychotic. [laughter] >> i said what do you mean by that? well, he had these delusions. i never thought of him more of a jamiey stewart character in "harvey." he's got a big white rabbit. so while he's the advisor. he's not the from user. he's the chief domestic aid of the president of the united states who's at this point is the most popular american in the world. his chief aide is a guy who's in love with a ghost. and they come up with this conservation idea, pinchot says, while on their many adventures in rock creek park. they would go to rock creek park near the capitol and they would ride the park on their horses or they would do this brisk pace and roosevelt would often say if you couldn't keep up with him you weren't going to be in his

cabinet or they would skinny dip and they describe this one time where pinchot and roosevelt are naked in the potomac and the secret service is holding the clothes and they are trying to get the french ambassador and he's got his gloves on and roosevelt says why do you wear the gloves and the french ambassador said there might be ladies present. [laughter] >> i was trying to how to compare gifford pinchot skinny dip with the president and i thought rahm emanuel and he was in a shower and he approached a congressman said vote for healthcare so it isn't that farfetched. they set aside these national forests and these public lands and they do it against the objections of this gilded age crowd. roosevelt leaves office in 1909, in march of 1909. he goes off to africa for a year.

and one of his most fierce rivals, jp morgan who hated theodore roosevelt said after roosevelt left for africa, i trust some lion will do its duty. [laughter] >> and that's the way they felt about him. now, he leaves the forest service behind. and the forest service is not s-really not very popular not just with the republican congress. but but the people who live in the west. they don't understand why you have these rangers from yale. they're mostly from yale who come out and they're in the service of what they call the great crusade. that's what they called, you know, the conservation cause. and the forest service is all of 4 1/2 years old in 1909. your average ranger is earning $900 a year. i did the adjusted for inflation money. it's less than an elementary school teacher makes now and your average ranger has to patrol 300,000 acres. that's their beat. and this public land has just been sort of set aside and created.

and the people who live out there are just ignoring them. they're setting up these brawling, deadwood-like towns so there's a town called taft in montana on the montana-idaho border named for -- you'll hear me mention later the president who followed him later. and they say it has a higher murder rate than new york city. and four men for every prostitute, for every prostitute in town. this is -- these rangers are appalled. two rangers -- there's a famous story the rangers like to tell. they show up outside of taft. and they see a brothel is rising on this public land, on the people's land on this national forest and they go back to their little place and they telegraph to missoula two undesirable prostitutes setting business on government land. what should we do? and the chief ranger cables

back, get two desirable ones. [laughter] >> i was reading on my tour and a woman approached me. she had that telegram. it was her grandfather who sent back get two desirable ones. [laughter] >> the rangers love this story because that's what they were up against. a ranger in montana is shot and killed. and no one is charged. the person who killed him said, well, i thought he was a deer. so this is how their thought. they're not well thought of. they're harassed in the woods. gold mining goes on. logging goes on. town-building goes on. prostitution goes on. and certainly salooning goes on. there's these saloons rising here and there because there's all of these people loose in the woods. it's wide open. it's deadwood. this is the situation. and roosevelt is gone. pinchot has been fired by taft. now, taft -- one word about him, he was our largest president. he follows roosevelt. and it's unfortunate.

he said i felt -- i was always looking over my shoulder when somebody would say mr. president, you're not talking to me are you? taft was 350 pounds of insecurity. and he said later that he hated being president. he later became a supreme court justice and he said, i don't remember that i ever was president. so he's conflict-averse unlike roosevelt he doesn't like to get in the face of these gilded age powers. he doesn't want to confront fellow members of congress which roosevelt loved to do. he invented the bully pulpit remember. so he's letting people have their way with the national forests. he's actually giving public land back to private industry. and the gilded age powers are getting control again. now, all of this sets the stage for the fire in august of 1910. theodore roosevelt comes back after a year -- almost a year away. and it's a hot summer. very hot summer. and these rangers are just

feeling bedraggled. congress is systematically defunding them. so it looks like five years into their life the united states forest service is going to die. which right now u.s. forest service and u.s. park rangers are consistently rated in polls as the two government agencies that people like. that they really respect. they respect what these folks do. and they're just a few months from being entirely defunded, okay? and it's a long, hot, dry summer. and i tried to explain this when i was reading back east but people didn't understand it. we have dry lightning storms. they have them here but they don't get them in the east and clouds will clash and move and there will be a great collision of systems but there won't be any rain. and you have lightning starting little fires up in the tinder dry forests of idaho and montana. this is the eastern side. it's pretty dry.

there's a little bit of spruce. also you've got this biggest new transcontinental railroad that the rockefeller money has built. going right through the heart of the bitterroot mountains and the sparks are causing all these fires so the forest rangers to have come after the trains on their little bikes and try to put out all these little fires. so on august 20th, 1910, there are all these little fires burning all over the course of the northern rockies. and then this massive, almost unseen wind that's called a paluser that comes out of northeastern washington state. it starts slow but soon it's 70 miles per hour. now, 70 miles an hour is a hurricane-force win. -- wind. i know because we did a documentary on the dust bowl and we tried to recreate some winds

and like a stupid idiot i stood in front of the wind tunnel we're going to crank it up to 50. when it got up to 60 you could not stand. it threw me on my back and i was like a tumble weed. 70 miles an hour winds carrying fire. carrying branches the size of a horse's thigh. and the thing just blew up. anyone who's ever fought fire and i'm sure we have people here who fought fire knows the biggest fear you have is a blowup. and that's what happened here. this thing just blew up. and it becomes its own weather system. it's a beast in search of oxygen. so what it did was men would run into caves and died in these caves because it sucked all the oxygen. pulled all the oxygen out of them. people who did lives went into streams and had a little tube of oxygen hoping the fire would skip over them but others who

went into streams had these giant trees fall down on them. you'll see in the book there's some pictures of this thing after it came through. the only thing i can compare it to is mount st. helens whom i covered in 1980. millions and millions of trees were just thrown down. century-old trees that had held to the ground forever were just flat flattened by the full force of this thing. so that's why with these 70 miles an hour winds it could burn 3 million acres in a day and a half. now, let's talk for a moment about the firefighters themselves and why this became the fire that saved america. you have 10,000 people who are assembled to fight this fire. remember, all august it's been spot fires everywhere and they're worried. this is the age when towns are burning to the ground. seattle, san francisco, denver. chicago earlier. there are towns built of wood and they burn to the ground. people are petrified of wildfires in the american west. they've gotten rid of wolves and

bison and moved indians to the edge but the one thing they live in fear of the wildfire. they cable president taft who is vacationing in his quote yachting costume. that's the term they used him off the coast of massachusetts and they beg him to bring troops and they bring in these black troops. they're supposed to do the dirty work. they are sent down to solve a labor unrest. none of them fought a fire and they are sent to fight the fire. immigrants, it's the first time we opened the door to italian immigration. during this time we're letting in almost 2 million italians. and in the book i follow two boys out of this little town. and i went to the little town in italy and saw the memorial to these boys who gave it up to the american west and theodore roosevelt's dream. their kicking around.

they'd come to arizona territories to work in the copper mines. they hated it. you spent most of the money in the company towns. and when it came up to fight the fire 25 cents an hour and off they went. and a lot of italians died in this fire. irish, italian, black soldiers. but press is there. and they're covering this. it's a very big deal. it's a huge event. front page news on the "new york times" and papers in europe. it becomes a huge deal. and though the rangers said later we lost the fire -- we lost the battle, i mean, 3 million acres, five towns burned to the ground it has the effect with roosevelt's help of making heroes and martyrs out of a young forest service. here are these young men. remember, roosevelt has come back and now at this very time of the fire he's touring. he's in denver. he comes to san francisco.

he goes to the major cities of the west. and he gives these tub-thumping, you know, classic t.r. speeches with his steamed glasses and he pounds the bully pulpit that he's invented and says, these men didn't die in vain. they died for public land. they died for the cause of the united states forest service. so he does what all good politicians do. he makes it a founding story. so to this day this is almost like the creation myth of the united states forest service. they were born in fire. they were born in the big fire. so public opinion changes dramatically. and when the congress goes back in september, all these editorials have been written saying we should not defund -- not defund foresters and double their budget and they double their budget and they pass a law for the first time -- roosevelt could never get this passed but

they pass a law creating national forests in the east. so i tell my fellow citizens who live in pennsylvania and virginia and massachusetts that you owe your national forests such as they are. to the big burn because the weeks law was created after the fire and you would not arguably have national forest in the east because of that. now, one other thing happens after this, this is why it's still with us. they saved the forest service because it makes heroes of these young men. they're seen in the same way as war or a battle can rows public sentiment for warriors who give their lives for something. that's what it did. they take a lesson out of this which is the forest service which is founded as this sort of conservation thing, as this great crusade becomes the fire service. and thereafter, their mission -- it's not written into the mission book but it becomes their mission is to put out fire. and as such they're embraced by

westerners because -- and they're embraced by the timber industry which is great. they'll put all the fires and we can go in and cut trees that they've saved. it was a great deal for the industry. so it became not only have taxpayers build the roads for them they can go in and get the trees that the young forest service has saved for them. so the mission changes rather dramatically. and at one point they start something called the 10:00 rule which is if you see a fire happen on your watch as a ranger, that fire better be put out by 10:00 the next day. and a young norman mclean who wrote "young men in fire" every ranger thereafter had 1910 on the brain. so almost the next century, we suppress fire. and it's a good thing and a bad thing. it's a good thing in that, you know, it saves towns. it saves areas that otherwise, you know, would have burned to the ground but it's a bad thing in that as you know living here in arizona, you really can't hold the fire cycle back that far. fire is part of nature.

there's many trees that will not rejuvenate and will not reproduce without fire. it's cleansing. it gets rid of the underbrush so by not fighting fire -- excuse me, by putting out fire from 100 years and suppressing fire we have all this fuel built up so many of the fires we had in the last 10 years and the ones that are predicted to happen in the next 10 years are the direct result from policy that came from the big burn. so i find it so fascinating that the fire has these -- the ripples of legacy, these different legacies that we keep living with. roosevelt died as a relatively young man. age 59, i believe. he went off to the amazon to explore a river that was then largely unexplored, the river of doubt.

a terrific book was written about it. he was in his 50s. he nearly died and he said at the time, why are you going off to this malarial unexplored thing so full of peril. he said i have to go. it's my last chance to be a boy. and to me that just says who theodore roosevelt was. even though he was our most literate president and even though he was our -- he spoke three languages all these things i said before, at his heart avenues boy. he loved to play. you know, he just loved to be active and he dice relatively young. gifford pinchot born in 1865 at the end of the civil war. lives to 1946 the end of world war ii. not only pounds the united states forest service. goes on to become two-term governor of pennsylvania in the 1930s, 1940s but is an advisor to roosevelt's cousin the democrat, franklin roosevelt. and you've all heard of the ccc,

civilian conservation corps. that was gifford pinchot's idea and franklin roosevelt got that from pinchot. he had tried it when he was governor of pennsylvania. and so roosevelt credits him -- in fact, roosevelt franklin, the democrat said i learned about -- everything i knew about conservation from reading and listening to gifford pinchot. so pinchot who thought -- pinchot thought he could run for president as a republican and never did. but he lives with the ghost wife for 20 years. 20 years he does not date. he does not see anyone. and then shortly after his mother dies, pinchot starts to date. starts to see a woman, a suffragette like him, very intellectually active and matters and gifford pinchot iii lives in seattle along with the teddy roosevelt, the great daughter. that would be a great dinner

party. one more thing, and i told you what the legacy of the forest service. i haven't mentioned john muir yet. and those of you who saw the ken burns series on national parks knows how prominent this scottish naturalist one of seven children moved to wisconsin was. history, i think, wrongly frames john muir against gifford pinchot. pinchot was always cast as the utilitarian. well, let me -- i like to set the record straight. i spoke to ken burns about this so we had a friendly argument/discussion about this as well. it's the difference between having to govern and being able to say anything you want. and we see this every day in public life. pinchot is the advisor to the president. he's trying to get through this audacious -- and it really is audacious public lands experiment. you can imagine what would happen if mckinley had not been shot and roosevelt had not been president. we arguably would not have nash forests.

-- national forests. we would not have some of the national parks. we would have some of them yosemite, grand canyon started as a national monument. it's extraordinary to think of an accident of history how one thing turns so many other things. but pinchot's mentor's for the 20 years he was living with that ghost was none other than john muir. pinchot met him in the outdoors once and he said, it's amazing. don't you take anything when you hike and muir said i just take a pen and a notebook and some water and i forage. and he was very well-known. and he would come to gramercy park and for 20 years he's pinchot's mentor and he talks to him about -- pinchot says, you know, everyone thinks i'm strange because i like to go off by myself when i'm in the woods.

it was very strange and muir wrote in one of his diaries when they were at crater lake. all slept in camp except for pinchot who would wander off. we know now this was only broken a few years ago. we know pinchot was wandering off because he was communing with his long lost dead lover. for 20 years they're very close but muir is sitting out here in california. you know, he marries a wealthy woman and pinchot has to govern. that's the difference. they are simpatico in one thing. one thing causes the schism which is the damning in yosemite national park. remember, san francisco got its water supply from the water that comes through yosemite national park. and after the earthquake of 1906, they said they could not rebuild without getting their water from yosemite. from damning of the valley. and pinchot was a humanitarian. and that's the way he thought of himself. he said this city needs to

rebuild it and he was in favor of the dam. to muir that was a high crime. that was the destroying the temple. and that's what they broke over. after 20 years. but this is the important point. it wasn't gifford pinchot. it wasn't theodore roosevelt. who okayed the building of the dam in the sacred national park. it was woodrow wilson. it happened after their watch. so it's wrongly framed as gifford pinchot this utilitarian versus the saintly john muir, you know, stroking his beard while propounding on all manner of things. i think it's just a -- i mean, they were all sort of part of this burgeoning idea of conservation which is a largely american idea. i mean, ken burns described his series as america's best idea which is what they said about national parks but conservation pinchot himself said he invented. again, the wonderful thing about this fire it was the creation -- it was the thing that solidified those ideas. so again, i'm always

fascinated -- i'm fascinated by public policy but often it's so rare to have an iconic event like a blow-up fire that solidifies public policy one way or the other, too. and also i've been getting these wonderful letters from forest rangers who -- they love reading about the founding of the forest rangers because the early rangers were called the arrangers because they would literally draw the boundaries. and there's a scene in my book where congress has hadló roosevelt creating these national forests so they pass a law saying you can't do it anymore. but in order -- pinchot and roosevelt decide that they're going to do one more executive order and then sign the bill outlawing them from ever creating any new national forests. so they have six days to do this and they have these rangers bring the maps to the white house and roosevelt is sitting on the floor -- on the rug of the white house going over these maps of the west saying oh, good god. you got to put the flat head valley and i was up there and

saw an enormous herd of elk and the middle ford of the snake river. so they have the power of creation. that's why they called them the arrangers and they would send these rangers out and they would say, you know, before they were shot and chased they said there was no better job. i called this section of my book in on creation. because you're just -- you're looking at this virgin wilderness and this is your terrain and you're deciding how this thing is going to go. it's really fascinating to see these -- all of these things come together both the public policy version and the founding of american conservation and then this amazing fire. now, some people will say, there was a bigger fire. there have been fires that have killed more people in wisconsin. some of the bigger city fires but there was never a fire -- there was never a fire like that and nothing of this size and ferocity, nothing that has

burned all the acres in a day half. the heart of it is called the silver valley in idaho which is a necklace of little towns that used to be full of labor unrest at the turn of the century. it's actually where national guard troops were sent in when they had all this labor unrest. you see the third growth forest has come back by he went to some of these towns that burnt to the ground and there's nothing. there is nothing. you can't even see the footings of things that were there. i went into the mine shaft where ed polaski, that there was one undeniable hero of the big burn. and his name was polaski. and he was a blue collar guy. he wasn't somebody from yale. he was a divorced 40-something who was a master of all trades. he kicked around the woods. he worked in mines. he worked in timber. he tanned leather. he'd done a little bit of everything. and when the united states forest service hired him, they never had a better man because he knew how to do a little bit of everything in the outdoors. he knew how to read the sky.

he knew how to look at the wind. and he saved the lives of 50 men in this fire. took them into a mine shaft forced them at gunpoint to lie down in this shallow water in this mine shaft and not move until the storm passed them over. even they threatened to move and threatened mutiny. three of them passed out. two horses died with them in the shaft. polaski himself passed out. and everyone said efforts the hero. everyone recognized he was a hero. he died a bitter man. he burned one eye and one lung was severely compromised and he also invented this tool called the polaski. has anyone ever heard of the polaski? good. i'm happy to see that. anyone who fought a fire will tell you it's a polaski. it's the most commonly tool in wildfire footing. it has an ax hoe on one end -- excuse me, an ax end on one end and a hoe on the other. you use it to dig fire lines and cut trees.

polaski invented this great tool. there's about 3 million of them in use in keeping the bitterness of the last part of his life he never got the patent for that either. i'm happy to say he's being honored on his 100th anniversary and they'll have a big commemoration on him and finally there's a national historic site in idaho at the tunnel where polaski saved 50-some people on the night of the big burn. so i'll be happy to take some questions and thank you very much. [applause] >> well, while you're coming to the podium to ask your questions, i have one. what could you say to us arizonians we're facing budget crisis and many and many of our state parks are being closed. how do you help inspire people

to get the public and political will to shift that? >> i think you need a giant wildfire. [laughter] >> with heroes working for the arizona state parks. and i'm only being half facetious because they were defunding the forest service. i saw, of course, in arizona there's a big furor over closing the rest stops. and those are important places. i think so many people look at public policy and these budget battles and these battles between democrats and republicans as these sort of, you know, abstract meaningless things that are always with us. and they have meaning. and that's one of the things that was so great about roosevelt was he had the ability as great leaders have to humanize, per sonfy, dramatize and make narrative out of them.

so -- i mean, i think, unfortunately, usually when you have a situation like this, what gavelizes public sentiment is something all of. people see what it's like in the absence of having child protective services so they rush to the cause of children who are not being protected. i don't want to say go out and do something awful certainly but that's what galvanizes it and people see so much of public policy that it's abstract. and that's -- it's interesting you bring that up because it's really analogous to this thing. forest service was this close from being erased basically. >> could you talk about some of the women in your book? >> uh-huh. i'll take your question first since you you're up here. >> it's more of a comment. this past summer we discovered a national park or park in western north dakota.

roosevelt had two ranches in north dakota. and later on he made them national parks. and they were the most beautiful parks i think i've ever seen. and i've seen a lot of national parks. but the ground was red and green. and it was just absolutely gorgeous. >> was that the badlands national park or the theodore roosevelt national park. >> yes. >> i failed to mention this. roosevelt, when he ran for president as an independent, the bull moose candidate in 1912, by the way to this day no third-party candidate has ever got as many votes as he did. he got 27% of the vote. that is in the 20th century and beyond. but while he was a candidate in the bull moose year of 1912 he was giving a speech and somebody shot him. and right in the chest. and he continued to give the speech for another 20 minutes. that bloody shirt -- when i was

visiting the park you just mentioned, i saw it on display there. i don't know if you saw it. i was amazed on that. there's teddy roosevelt's bloody shirt. i mean, again, modern politicians just don't compare. [laughter] [applause] >> oh, it's just a scratch. don't worry about this. what's that blood squirting out. go ahead. >> i love in the area where this fire went through. i live between sandpoint idaho and we own 40 acres near the lake. and the fire went through there. and all that's left are cedar just standing dead charred cedar have fallen down now but, of course, they're well preserved and a lot of them have survived. i guess, my question is, in your research and talking with people, there will be another

fire like this because the forest service has always put out the fires and that forest is ripe for another one. has anyone been talking about that? and what action should be taken to stop it 'cause a lot more people are there than in 1910. >> that's a great question. and thank you. nice to see someone from that area here, too. i grew up -- i'm from seattle but i grew up in eastern washington and we would always camp in idaho and montana. and i too remember seeing these charred giant shells of these old cedars. and it's amazing now that i'm an adult and i get tours with these forest rangers and i say what's that. it's the skeletons of the 1910 fire. now her question is a great one because one of the things that's going on in the west and canada as well in alberta canada is this beetle infestation. there's a debate whether it's climate change because of a few

temperature rises allow these beetles to live in the winter. but i will tell you a debate what caused it. what we know it's huge. and they're eating up these -- you can go to montana. you can go to idaho, arizona, anywhere and look out and see these huge swaths of rusted trees that are dying because of this beetle infestation. it's enormous. and every forester is worried about it because you have standing dead dry timber. and the next fires in the next 10 years are going to be catastrophic, they say, you know, i'm just telling you what the foresters say. i'm not a forester. because of this beetle infestation. so if you get the right combination of winds, drought, and everything else you could have a big burn and then some. because you have -- i mean, again, next time you fly north to glacier park or canada, look down. i fly all over the west 30,000 miles a year. look down and see these huge swaths of dying standing timber. and so that's a great question.

and, you know, any ranger who's work in the woods will tell you they're really afraid of that. they're really afraid of that. yes, sir. >> you spoke of how they had authorized and then bring in people to fight the fire. some of them all the way from arizona. that obviously must have taken some time and arrangements. how did that all relate to the 36-hour timeline of the big burn? >> yeah. it's a good question. this is in the buildup as these little fires -- see, all summer they had these little lightning fires. none of them were more than 100 acres or 200 acres but they had them 3,000 at one point so they were afraid that the thing would eventually just get out and start to affect the cities and get into the farmed areas and some of the populated areas. they spent a month assembling the army. they spent all of august -- this largely immigrant army led by the young forest service and then the blowup happened that weekend. so it was a -- when the blowup happened there were 3,000 individual fires. they merged into one. so that's what happened. they just -- 3,000 became 1. and you asked a question about women.

there's a woman -- i tend to fall in love with these ghosts like gifford pinchot. there was a woman named pinky adair and i read her oral history. she was a homesteader in this area. now, the government didn't want to be too pushy on this. they set up these national forests but they said if you could prove -- if you could prove that there was arable land there we would grant you a homestead in the national forest and there's people trying to set up homesteads within the national forests and prove them up. most of them were fraudulent schemes for timber companies. they would go in, claim 160 acres and then sell it to a warehouse. so there were timber thieves and pinky adair was up there. and she was the daughter of a doctor who had a pistol strapped to her right leg and lived in this little cabin and tough as nails and in the middle of

august when these other fires are burning before the blowup, some forest servicer knocking on her daughter, ma'am, can you cook and she said i can and she said can you cook for 300 and she became the cook for the fire camps. they were convicts they had just let out of jail in missoula. they were so desperate for men they literally opened up all the jails in wallace idaho and missoula and let anyone but the murderers out to go in the woods to fight the fires so pinky adair is cooking, you know, massive pots of potatoes and onions for convicts and one gets aggressive to her and she says hold that can up over there on a stomp and she takes a gun out and shoots it does that tell you what kind of shoddy am. -- shot i am? when the blowup happens all the convicts run under this stream and bury themselves in the water hoping they'll live. and some of them die again because trees fall down.

pinky goes into the stream with them and says, i won't die here. i won't die here and gets up and starts walking out and they said you're crazy. she walks 20-some miles down to the valley and her father doesn't see her for three days and she shows up in this little town where she's from three days later she had -- they used to wear these nailed boots. they were logger shoes that had like little nails on the bottom. and as her father describes hearing the clack on the worn shoes on the wooden boardwalk and it was pinky adair three days out of the woods. she lives to be in her upper nineties. i think 99. she's the last survivor -- last sort of major event person to live through the fire. and sort of has the last word on it. 'cause when they interviewed her it's 1977, i think, and she ends up pinky has the last word on it. and this is what's fascinating i don't want to spoil too many things in my book, and it must have been horrible and she said

i never had a more adventurous or daring time in my life and i loved it. [laughter] >> so memory coats things like that. >> i like your book very much and one of the things that's so interesting about it is showing the diversity of the firefighters. a diversity of the army that's assembled and you make several references and i must confess i've got about 50 pages left to go which i'll finish for sure after today but there was one -- there were a couple of references to the native americans. to the indians that are in the area, nes pierce. it wasn't a focus on your book but you left some things out. can you fill us in on some of the things that didn't get in the book that relates to this experience. >> this is what a parallel to the dust bowl book. they had never seen the land turn -- and they didn't understand what happened. the natives said they ripped up all the grass and plowed it and then when the winds come as they always do they took this stuff

to the sky. and there's -- i quote a book in -- i quote a native american in my dust bowl book saying wrong side up and that was the story of the dust bowl. wrong side up. this is a land that shouldn't have been farmed for intensive agriculture and it just took to the sky and the stuff hit the fan. they had no institutional memory. there's no one to turn to. they moved all the comanche who were known as the lords of the prairie who had 300 years at least of living there. they moved them down to these terrible little reservations in southern arizona so there was no one what was it like when it happened before? did it happen before. there's no institutional memory. they were all of 20 years old when the worst hard time happened. similarly in the fire, the native people and the spokanes and the flat heads and the nez pierce had lived in the country in western montana because they were at the margins now too.

so they were not consulted. it's interesting because you know if i had, you know, a tree in my backyard was suddenly infested with somebody and i had go to my neighbor who lived in the neighborhood for 50 years, how do you treat this? you would have someone who knew what it was like. these were all brand-new towns. so the indians were really -- now polaski, i mentioned ed polaski he was very close with the natives. there were a lot of indians who still fished for these giant companies on the st. joe river. it's a big mouthed trout and there were other parts of idaho and they lived in these little summer camps. they would still go and fish. and he was very close to the natives there. but it was a really bad point for them. taft, one of the things he did was open up by lottery the indian reservation which had been promised to this tribe. i should mention also one of my favorite authors and fellow

seattleans is sherman alexi. he said forest service we were there for 3,000 years, you know. anyway, thanks for your question. i think i'll have to close it out. i appreciate it, folks. [applause] >> timothy÷ egan is the author f the worst hard time, the untold story of those who survived the great american dust bowl, which was awarded the 2006 national book award for nonfiction. he shared the 2001 pulitzer prize for a series he cowrote about race in america for the "new york times." this program took place during the 2010 tucson festival of books. for more information, visit tucsonfestivalofbooks.org. >> mr. speaker, on this historic day the house of representatives opens its proceedings for the first time to televised coverage.

>> 31 years ago america's cable companies created c-span as a public service. today, we've expanded your access to politics and public affairs, nonfiction books and american history through multiple platforms, television, radio, and online and cable television's latest gift, an extensive free video archive. c-span's video library. >> b.r. meyers atlantic monthly contributing editor takes an in depth look at north korean society and the domestic propaganda to which its citizens are exposed. the world affairs council of northern california host the hour-long event. >> it's kind of a miracle that i'm here because i was in washington, d.c., a couple days ago and my publisher said why don't you try to outrun the storm by heading north to new york. [laughter] >> and i thought i don't think so. so i drove south instead and i went to richmond and got the plane out of there.

you know, i love in puson which is a harbor town on the south coast of south korea. okay, what can you hear about north korea that you haven't heard a thousand times before. only the most important thing which is what do the north koreans think and how do they see themselves and the world around them. let's imagine the house next door to where you live has been empty for some time and finally somebody has come to move into it and you look out your window and you see them unloading assault weapons, you know -- i don't know grenade launchers, bazookas, you name it. now, this is america so it's probably all perfectly legal. [laughter] >> but as you lie awake at night having put your house on the market, you're probably asking yourself certain things. and i don't think you're asking yourself what kind of