The Big Burn (8 page)

Koch had never been to the East. Everything was new to him—the people, the dress, the social rituals. He learned to smoke a pipe and mix a martini, habits he would find useful at Koch family dinner parties in Missoula. This inaugural group of American forestry students, about twenty young men in all, was special, and they knew it, stamped from the start for greatness. At Yale's bicentennial in 1901, they dressed in Robin Hood costumes, parading around campus in green tights and hoods for all the old Yalies to see—uniformed brothers of the woods. It was New Haven, Connecticut, but it could have been Sherwood Forest.

Also in the class was Bill Greeley, who had come to Yale by way of Stanford and the University of California. When other students went out for nights of chugging ale and chasing women, Greeley stayed back and studied the cellular structure of poplars and deconstructed Bible verses. The son of a Congregational minister, he found the fullest expressions of creation in the intricacies of the natural world—the church of the outdoors. Like Pinchot, he'd been taught to "see God in nature," as the founding forester put it.

Greeley finished at the top of that first Yale forestry graduating class of 1904, which meant he was an easy pick to be another of Pinchot's knights of the woods. Pinchot told Greeley he was being tapped to be part of the "Great Crusade"; he could shape boundaries of land his great-grandchildren would one day walk through, a legacy that appealed to the responsibilities Greeley felt as part of his Christian faith. Indeed, he soon started calling himself "a forest missionary." He was flattered to join such a select group. Pinchot and his acolyte took a train out west, where they surveyed land in California, terrain to be included in the rapidly expanding national forests. They spent long days on horseback in country without trails. "My admiration for the boss grew with every mile," Greeley wrote. "I got to know Gifford Pinchot as men can know each other only in camp and on the trail."

Returning to Washington, back inside the building on F Street, they reviewed the same ground by map, drawing boundaries. If the land passed muster, it would be included in a new round of forest reserves, by Roosevelt's executive order. Most of Pinchot's early rangers performed a task similar to Greeley's, and they did it at a sprint.

"There was no time to lose, and G.P. was sending his young men to ride the forests and mountains of all parts of the West," Koch recalled. "I doubt if there has ever been such a wonderful job in the world as the early days of forest boundary work. One was given a state map of say California, or Montana or Wyoming, with an area of a few million acres roughly blocked out in green. One proceeded to the nearest point by rail, and then rode all summer, seeing thrilling new wild country every day."

In years past, wars had been fought and rivers of blood shed for far less land than that which was under consideration by the select group of "forest arrangers," as they called themselves. Never before had the fate of so much territory been determined by a small, mostly unarmed group of tree specialists. They were in on the creation, transforming by surveys, mapping, and suggestions areas larger than some eastern states. Thereafter, to all succeeding generations of forest rangers, the arrangers grew in legend. Anything a modern forester did was small by comparison, and how could it not be?

Pinchot was known as the Chief, or G.P. And his charges were called Little G.P.s. They bought into the Chief's vision that working for the Forest Service was the most noble thing a young American could do for his country in the new century. Like the other G.P.s, Bill Greeley worshiped the Chief, this patrician who could "outride and outshoot any ranger on the force." Teddy Roosevelt moved him in the same way. He went to see the president speak one night in 1905. Midway through his speech, Roosevelt put aside his prepared remarks. He went silent for a few seconds as he moved away from the podium. Unleashed, Roosevelt strode across the stage, looking out at his audience. "I am against the man who skins the land!" he bellowed. That was all Greeley needed to hear, and
bully for you, T.R
.

A few years out of college, Greeley was summoned down the hall by Pinchot to look at another of the Chief's maps. This one showed an even bigger part of the Rocky Mountain West than had been presented to Koch — all of Montana, much of Idaho and Washington, and a corner of South Dakota covered with pine. The Forest Service was breaking down its domain into regions. This was a map of the largest, Region One—forty-one million acres, twenty-two national forests in four states. How would Greeley like to be in charge of all of it, based in Missoula with Elers Koch?
All of it?
Yes. He would be regional forester. It was a dream job, of course, though it didn't pay much. Greeley packed for Missoula.

The two Yalies were joined in the Rockies by a third man from
Sherwood Forest, William Weigle. He was also one of the first forestry students to be schooled at Yale, and had completed an office rotation under Pinchot in Washington, D.C. Whereas Greeley was pious, Weigle could tell a joke, a dirty one at that; he was equally at home in a roadhouse saloon and a New Haven classroom. A big redhead with a hound-dog face, Weigle was known for his toughness and his pragmatism. Smart, yes. But people knew not to push him. With these qualities, Weigle was thought to be a perfect fit for the most wide-open, challenging forest in the system, the Coeur d'Alene, headquartered in Wallace, Idaho.

When the Chief offered him the job, Weigle knew Wallace only by reputation. It was a battleground, as most Americans understood, for one of the biggest labor wars in the nation's history: sabotage, bombings, and hijackings of trains led to a massive roundup of miners, who were held in a makeshift jail for months without basic legal rights. The class war around Wallace was the focus of world attention at the turn of the century; who was America to lecture people about democracy when it held hundreds of its own citizens in a pen without habeas corpus? When the ex-governor of Idaho, Frank Steunenberg, was assassinated in 1905, the man who confessed to the killing said he was simply a pawn in a larger conspiracy. A trial in Idaho, with Clarence Darrow on the unions' side and the great silky-voiced orator, and later senator, William Borah on the other, was a spectacular show, ending in triumph by Darrow and the union officials accused of complicity in the governor's assassination. Any federal official, even one from a progressive administration, was suspect.

Things had settled down some since the assassination, Weigle was assured. People in the Coeur d'Alenes were back to moving precious metal out of the ground. And the woods were full of timber thieves, even with the Forest Service as the new sheriff in the land. Weigle took the job. The Yale School of Forestry, its graduating class dispatched across the continent, was in place in the Rockies. Koch had charge of the Lolo, Bitterroot, and Missoula national
forests. Weigle ran the Coeur d'Alene. And overseeing all of it was Greeley.

"It was a wonderful thing to have a government bureau with nothing but young men in it," Koch said.

Though a degree from Yale was not required, Pinchot wanted his foresters to be able to write well, for the numerous reports that their enemies in Congress would be second-guessing. But as someone who had spent many summer days in the high Rockies without trail or road to guide his way, Pinchot also required aspiring forest rangers to pass a rigorous test, lasting two days, that showed they could survive on their own in the woods.

Most of them would be riding solo in a region they called the High Lonesome. They had to know how to navigate by compass and by the stars, how to cut wood and do basic carpentry, how to saddle a horse, how to tie a knot for lassos, how to throw a rope, how to shoot, how to cook. What's more, the food had to be more than gruel. As Pinchot said, one test was to cook a meal, the other was to eat it. Many of them would have to build their own cabins and their own outhouses. The written test would usually weed out illiterates, Pinchot recalled, and the practical test would cull people who could never shake their bookishness. One recruiting poster said, "Invalids need not apply."

As a complement to the Ivy Leaguers, the ideal hire was someone like Frank Herring, a cowboy who had worked with Roosevelt on his ranch in the Dakotas and then served under him in Cuba as one of Teddy's Rough Riders. In his crisp Forest Service uniform, pants tucked into high-top boots, a .44 holstered to his belt, and a silver-studded bridle, Herring made an imposing figure on his bay horse. Tough-nutted western men like Herring were often ill at ease around Bible-quoting college kids like Greeley. What they had in common, among other things, was miserable pay— $900 a year for an assistant ranger, barely half of what a grade school teacher makes in today's dollars. Rangers had to supply their own horses,
their own saddles, their own rifles and hobnailed boots. At the same time, Senators Heyburn and Clark plotted to keep the Forest Service on a diet that would ensure malnutrition, if not starvation, slashing away at the budget and seizing on any excuse to humiliate the service.

At first it hardly mattered. Pinchot and Roosevelt had their way. Morale was high, Pinchot believed, because his boys had a great purpose: they were fighting to level the field for average Americans in the West. "The Forest Service stood up for the honest small man and fought the predatory big man as no government had done before," he wrote. "Big Money was King in the Great Open Spaces, and no mistake. But in the national forests, Big Money was not King."

Pinchot made frequent excursions out west for inspections and to make speeches in places packed with his enemies. On a trip to Idaho, he chose to go directly to Wallace, the lair of his chief antagonist, Senator Heyburn. His visit reinforced his view of Heyburn as a bought politician, owned by "the great lumber syndicates," he reported back to Roosevelt. One state over, in Montana, Pinchot scolded Greeley for letting those syndicates get away with too much timber cutting at giveaway prices. Logging was permitted in national forests—these weren't parks or pockets of pristine wilderness. But it was supposed to be limited, orderly, at a pace that would not deplete the timber supply or threaten the health of a forest. "The chief expected us to be supermen," Greeley wrote.

Out in the field, Pinchot would break away for time on horseback or foot with one of his young knights. Some forest rangers even thought of him as a prophet. "He made us all—rangers and fire guards and Mexican boys building trail—feel like soldiers in a patriotic cause," said Greeley. In the Southwest, a researcher for the Forest Service named a newly discovered tree after the Chief,
Juniperus pinchotii,
a subspecies of the fragrant high-desert juniper. But for all of that devotion, all the inspiring nights spent at the mansion on Rhode Island Avenue, all the weekends when forest recruits were invited to Grey Towers, all the time together in the wilderness, all the evangelical speeches, Pinchot was not a friend—he could not be. In the woods, he would often sleep alone, far removed from camp, which was as off-putting and antisocial to the rangers as it was to John Muir during earlier outings. Why did he go off by himself? One ranger who called him Pinchot, leaving out the Mister, was harshly reprimanded. "He was always the aristocrat, and his affability contained something of patronage," Koch wrote. "One never forgot that he was Gifford Pinchot, the Chief, and no one ever dreamed of taking any liberties with him."

Around Washington, Pinchot was the subject of clingy gossip. He was rich, attractive in a gentlemanly way, powerful, one of Roosevelt's closest confidants. He knew everybody—leading authors, Supreme Court justices, European royalty, bishops, diplomats, and sports heroes. He played tennis with Teddy on a regular basis, and when they weren't on the court, or in a boxing ring, they went for brisk walks through Rock Creek Park. Who else could say he had skinny-dipped with the president in the Potomac? In turn, what Roosevelt liked about Pinchot, he wrote, was his "tireless energy and activity, his fearlessness, his complete disinterestedness, his single-minded devotion to the interests of the plain people, and his extraordinary efficiency."

But ... people talked.
Why wasn't Pinchot married? Good God, the man still lived with his parents! What did he do inside that enormous house on Rhode Island Avenue? Or at Grey Towers? And that distant expression of his: What could he be thinking?
Women certainly found Pinchot handsome and mysterious, a lethal combination. Ethel Barrymore, the actress, one of the first celebrities of the twentieth century, sat next to him once and said he was "dreamy looking." At Yale, he had been voted the best-looking man in his class, and the press in the capital dubbed Pinchot "the most eligible of Washington beaux." Alice Roosevelt, the president's eldest daughter, herself a magnet for romance and spicy speculation, said
Pinchot was "very appealing to the ladies." So why didn't he date? Why did he prefer to be alone? Word had it the man was celibate, a priest of the outdoors following some strange vows of his own making. Was there really no one to share the years with Gifford Pinchot?

Oh, but Pinchot did have someone: the love of his life. Laura Houghteling was a woman of high spirits, blond-haired and alabaster-skinned, a woman to whom he revealed every detail of his heart and mind, a woman who believed, as he did, that they were twined for eternity. The problem was that she was dead. By 1905, Laura Houghteling had been in the grave for eleven years, and yet Pinchot carried on a vigorous spiritual love affair with her—the biggest, best-kept secret of his life, which came out in full, more than a century after her death, only because of the scholarship of a researcher, James G. Bradley.

Pinchot fell in love with Laura at the compound of one of the world's richest men: George Washington Vanderbilt, grandson of Cornelius, heir to a shipping and rail fortune. A shy, soft-spoken wisp of a person, Vanderbilt harbored one great dream: to build the biggest country estate in America. In the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina he found his site, and purchased 125,000 acres just outside Asheville. There, a thousand workers labored five years to construct the Biltmore Estate, a French Renaissance mansion. Biltmore was nearly a thousand feet across; the walls enclosed 65 fireplaces and 250 rooms, many of them filled with masterpieces by Renoir, Whistler, and others. The skinny little heir was a collector of name art and trophy experts. He hired Richard M. Hunt, the nation's foremost architect, to design Biltmore, and Frederick Law Olmsted to mold the landscape. Hunt also did Grey Towers. To oversee the woods, Vanderbilt turned to Pinchot.