Author Timothy Egan shares a bit of NW history with the world in 'The Big Burn'

Timothy Egan was in author-tour mode last week, touching down in St. Louis for his new book, "The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America." His mission, in his words: take "an obscure forest fire in the Pacific Northwest, and try to make the rest of the country care about it."

Egan, one of Seattle's most admired writers, is a Spokane native, former reporter for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and The New York Times, and now blogger/columnist for The New York Times (read his blog, "Outposts," online). Along the way, he's written a series of critically praised books, winning the 2006 National Book Award for the "The Worst Hard Time," a narrative history of the Dust Bowl. In his more Western-focused books "The Good Rain," "Lasso the Wind" and now "The Big Burn," he's captured a national audience with stories of the West, its history and its dilemmas.

Egan will loop back through Seattle this week and discuss "The Big Burn" Tuesday with me at the Barnes & Noble in Seattle's University Village. We talked over the phone about the fire, and the outsized characters that people his book.

As a kid camping in Montana and Idaho, and as a reporter on the forest-fire beat, Egan heard stories about the 1910 wildfire that destroyed 3 million acres of forest in Montana, Idaho and Washington. "It has a mythic quality to it," he says. "It shaped the agency [the U.S. Forest Service] and led to a century of changes."

"The Big Burn" is a story of big battles: between Teddy Roosevelt and the Gilded Age businessmen who wanted to claim the forests for their own; between Congress and Gifford Pinchot, the country's chief forester; between a phalanx of desperate firefighters and the monster wildfire.

The fire has been covered in other books, notably historian Stephen Pyne's "Year of the Fires: The Story of the Great Fires of 1910." But for sheer drama, Egan's narrative of the fire is hard to beat. There are villains — cowardly men who jumped the last train out of Wallace, Idaho, claiming spots meant for women and children. And heroes, notably Ed Pulaski (inventor of the firefighting tool that bears his name), who fought the fire and saved the lives of most of his firefighters.

Egan says he fell hard for both Roosevelt and Pinchot, who successfully used the fire to argue for more protected forests. Pinchot, he claims, has been somewhat "lost to history." The wealthy, refined heir to a timber fortune became an ardent conservationist. This educated man believed that the spirit of his deceased fiancée stayed with him after her death — he communed with her ghost for years.

"The Big Burn" is the first in a two-book contract; Egan says only that the next one will be about the American West. He'll be carrying on the grand Egan tradition; writing the West, and making the rest of the country care about it.

Mary Ann Gwinn: 206-464-2357 or mgwinn@seattletimes.com. Mary Ann Gwinn appears on Classical KING-FM's Arts Channel at www.king.org/pages/4216533.php