Year of the Fires: The Story of the Great Fires of 1910 - Softcover

Pyne, Stephen J

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0878425446 ISBN 13: 9780878425440

Publisher: Mountain Press, 2008

Synopsis

In the summer of 1910, wildfires scorched millions of acres in the West, darkened skies in New England, and deposited soot on the ice of Greenland. The flames ravaged pristine wilderness along with farms, towns, and mining camps, culminating in the deaths of seventy-eight firefighters in the Big Blowup along the Montana-Idaho border. The blazes also illuminated a national debate raging about fire policy. Year of the Fires is the fascinating story of that catastrophic year and its pivotal role in establishing how we deal with forest fire in this country. Everything from the tools firefighters carry to strategies of land management was shaped by the fires of 1910.
Stephen Pyne, acclaimed by the Journal of American History as America’s foremost historian of fire, not only explains how the fires occurred, how they were fought, and who fought them, but puts the event in the context of America’s changing attitudes about forests and fires. In 1910 steam-powered trains were spewing sparks across the West while homesteaders were burning their way into the woods to create farms and settlements. Teddy Roosevelt had just doubled the size of the forest reserves, and the idea that timber is finite was just entering American consciousness. The Forest Service, only five years old, was struggling to solidify its role. And even as the country’s first foresters were facing the question of how to protect the new public lands, the West exploded in fire. Pyne brings that astonishing year to life in a riveting narrative of the fires, the people, and the decisions that continue to affect American life.

About this title

About the Author:

Stephen Pyne is a professor in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University, an internationally recognized fire historian, and a past member of the North Rim Longshots, a Grand Canyon firefighting crew. Among his other fire books are Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire, World Fire: The Culture of Fire on Earth, and Smokechasing.

From Publishers Weekly:

Following last summer's wildfires and debate over "controlled burning," Pyne, author of the five-volume Cycle of Fire and the much-acclaimed How the Canyon Became Grand, has become one of the most widely consulted experts on American fire policy. While this book's focus is on fires that raged 91 years ago in Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana, it addresses such perennial questions as whether there can be a "good" forest fire and the place of fire in healthy forest ecology. Fighting the 1910 Great Fires ignited variously by lightning, abandoned campfires and "candle-sized flames sparked by railroads" cost many lives and injured hundreds. An continuing program of human-controlled "light burning" might have been better, but infighting in scientific forestry circles (compounded by political and bureaucratic sniping) silenced this minority position. Teddy Roosevelt was "bully" on conservation and his five-year-old Forest Service was devoutly antifire. Fire wasn't seen as a natural part of the forest's life cycle it was the enemy and it had to be stopped, no matter how many lives it cost. Pyne builds his case with a dense, month-by-month chronology. At his best with a hard-luck or disaster story, he overwrites his polemic sections shamelessly, occasionally lapsing into awkward similes (firefighters crowded into a cave like "oats in a feedbag"). Maps make the fire's geography easier to follow, while the photo inset gives a period flavor to the tale. (May 7)Forecast: A sharp dust jacket and an author tour in the West, combined with Pyne's eminence in his field, will draw attention to this book, but his generally lifeless prose won't spark major sales.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Mountain Press
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0878425446
• ISBN 13: 9780878425440
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352