The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America

  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.

  The game preserve, as Vanderbilt called it, was modeled after the kind of feudal European grounds that Pinchot found repulsive. When he arrived in 1891, he was appalled at the stark contrast between one-room cabins tucked in the Appalachian hollows and this fortress of limestone—"a devastating commentary on the injustice of concentrated wealth," Pinchot said. The locals were shoeless, toothless, and highly suspicious of Vanderbilt. Nevertheless, Pinchot eagerly took to his task of running the Biltmore Forest, trying to apply some of the ideas he had learned at Yale and l'École Nationale Forestière. And it was at Biltmore that his romance with Laura Houghteling blossomed.

  Pinchot was riding his horse through the woods one day when he crossed paths with Laura. They had met on earlier occasions; both were from socially prominent, wealthy families, though they had never before gotten to know each other. She was a stunning woman by all accounts — luminously pretty, smart, assertive, a lover of poetry, and deeply spiritual. Her home was in Chicago, but she spent summers in North Carolina because the mountain air was said to be good for her tuberculosis, growing worse with each month. Both twenty-eight years old, Laura and Giff rode and read together, had picnics in the woods, and spent long afternoons talking about his insecurities and his dreams, her ambitions and her troubles. The illness was always there, which only brought Pinchot closer to her. Friends noticed that he seemed less gloomy, less full of that youthful dread he had carried around for so long. He was in love as he had never been before. They were soon engaged. But it was a doomed affair. By 1894, Laura's illness became grave. "Laura had a bad night," he wrote in late January. On the first day of February came "a good report from Laura." A week later, February 7, she was dead.

  Pinchot dressed in black, head to toe, for the next two years. The loss of Laura forever changed him. But it was not the end of the love affair, not by any means. One relationship was gone; another started up without her body. "Her passing," Pinchot tried to explain to his parents, "was nothing more than a temporary separation." Barely a month after Laura died, an apparition—variously described as a light, or later, as the full woman — revealed itself to Pinchot. He recorded it as a medieval mystic would write about a miracle.

  "My Lady is very near," he wrote on March 18, 1894.

  "My Lady has told me beautiful things," a month later.

  Laura was in the ground, buried, but Pinchot talked as if she were in the room with him, in church, in the woods, on the train, at dinner. He spoke with her — not just to her — walked with her, showed her things, all in spirit, of course, though you would never know it from his diaries. Two months after Laura's death, Pinchot was back at Biltmore — "to church, where I sat with Miss Houghteling." At Grey Towers, "my lady was nearer than ever this afternoon." The ghost joined him on a train in Europe, at night before he dozed off, sometimes at meals. He read books to her, ran his ideas and speeches by her, craved her approval, checked opinions and policies with her.

  New Year's Day, 1895: "My Dearest spoke to me, saying she wants to be with me as much as I want to be with her."

  Two years after Laura's death, Pinchot stopped wearing black. His mood improved. He was buoyant, a skip in his step. In love! And newly married — to Laura. She appeared often in that spring, in glowing light, Pinchot feeling the mystical hand of Laura and God at the same time. They were as one, which perhaps was a way for Pinchot to fit this paranormal experience into his traditional Protestant upbringing. The union was now sealed. "In God's sight, my Lady and I are husband and wife."

  This did not sit well with the other woman in Pinchot's life, the very much alive Mary Pinchot, his aristocratic mother. Her son, the oldest of three children, was her favorite. Mamee once told a reporter that it was "the paramount blessing of my life that I am Gifford Pinchot's mother." He had a special calling, she always told him, "a higher and noble mission to fulfill." T
his mystical "wife" was too much. "It is not right in this world to live in the past or with the dead," she said to Gifford with a mother's directness and no small amount of jealousy.

  But the pull was too strong; regarding Laura, Pinchot could not please his mother. A full eight years after Laura's death, there she was, bright as ever. "Thank God for the light," he wrote in 1902. Even as one of President Roosevelt's top advisers, Pinchot continued to converse regularly with the spirit. He also haunted the house where she had lived in her final days, an Italian-style manse at the corner of Connecticut Avenue and R Street. That was always "our house." At times, he was frustrated when he tried to summon her and the spirit would not appear. Those days he called "dark" or "cloudy." Later, he simply blamed himself, saying he was "blind" or "can't see." Typically, his diary entries reflected a schedule packed with the most powerful people in the United States, and then, almost as an afterthought, he would write a cryptic line: "Not a clear day." Other days, she all but sipped soup next to him—"bright days," he labeled them.

  When he needed help, Pinchot consulted psychics and attended secret'séances. Some of the associates at these sittings, exploring the mystical edge as was popular at the time, warned Pinchot to be careful; a man with his high profile should not be known as someone who communed with the dead. He must be discreet, visiting only the best mediums. "If I were in your position, I should, while avoiding promiscuous'séances, try mediums of good character," an editor friend from London advised him.

  Laura remained his ghost lover for nearly two decades. She was nearby when Pinchot faced his enemies in Congress, and with him in the Rocky Mountains during nights when he slept alone. Clearly, these solo excursions were attempts to commune with her. To look at another woman was to risk a slight of his lady, and so he never courted anyone else for twenty years. In order to be at his best for Laura—frozen at twenty-eight while Pinchot aged—he felt he had to stay in top spiritual shape. A regular churchgoer, he kept up a routine that matched his athletic pursuits—a sort of aerobics of the soul. And when he lapsed, he tortured himself. "I keep falling behind the advances I have to make," he noted. "My soul doesn't grow." The spirit joined him at Grey Towers and at Rhode Island Avenue and possibly even in the White House.

  ***

  A more full-bodied companion was the president. Ideas that would shape American life for a century were hatched in Rock Creek Park, which Teddy and G.P. treated like a big backyard. New advisers were taken to the Crack, a fissure in a rock wall on the west bank of the creek, and shown how to climb. "If you made it, you belonged," Pinchot wrote, only half in jest. Well before the triathlon era, these excursions often involved a fast walk, a quick climb, and a swim. Out for a stroll once in late November, Roosevelt and Pinchot found themselves ankle-deep in mud at dusk. Roosevelt pointed to an inlet of open water. He removed his hat, put his valuables atop his head, and put the hat back on. Then he waded through the muck to open water and swam to the other side, in darkness. Pinchot trailed him. Back home, his mother helped him with his wet clothes.

  "Drenched!" she said. "You've been out with the president."

  On another trip, they found themselves at a dead end, facing the Potomac. Pinchot and Roosevelt stripped and dove in. Their companion, the French ambassador, hesitated on the bank before taking off his clothes, leaving him naked but for his gloves.

  "Why do you wear gloves?" Roosevelt asked the ambassador as he swam toward them.

  "We might meet ladies."

  More often they went by horseback, striding over trails that braided the park. "Met President and rode with him" was a Pinchot diary entry on a winter day early in Roosevelt's first term. "Fine gallop." Often, Pinchot packed his .38 pistol, acting as an extra guardian for his friend. Roosevelt occasionally referred to Pinchot as one of his "faithful bodyguards."

  A perfect day for Pinchot was one with at least three activities with Roosevelt. One July day at Roosevelt's Long Island home, Sagamore Hill, in Oyster Bay, Pinchot wrote a speech with Roosevelt on western issues in the morning, lunched with him and several cabinet secretaries at midday, played a lengthy set of doubles tennis (Pinchot and T.R. beating their opponents, of course) in the afternoon, followed by woodchopping before dinner, and then, just at sunset, an evening sail. Men less fleet-footed fell by the wayside, no matter their power. Pinchot remembered a walk where a top aide had to drop out "because he was too stout to stand the pace."

  For all of that, their friendship was not one of equals. Somewhat jealous of others in Roosevelt's inner circle, Pinchot craved his respect and time. A Roosevelt ventriloquist on many issues, Pinchot would write pitch-perfect speeches that the president delivered with little change in the words. "T.R. told me he favored my material for his speeches more exactly than that of anyone else," Pinchot wrote, glowing like a schoolboy who had just charmed his mentor. But they also had that "peculiar intimacy," as Roosevelt had called it, which Pinchot cherished. "Long talk with T.R. in P.M. & fine intimate talk of men and things."

  It was during a solo horseback ride on a February day in 1907 that Pinchot said he was struck by an idea that would bring together all the things the Roosevelt administration was trying to do in the natural world. Forests, wildlife, clean water, and man's role in the midst of it, trying to shape the land through irrigation and fire suppression in the arid West. Pinchot wondered, "What was the basic link between them?" It was on the back of his horse, mulling these thoughts, that Pinchot says he invented the idea of conservation as an overarching theme.

  "Suddenly the idea flashed through my head that there was a unity in this complication," he wrote in his memoir. "To me it was a good deal like coming out of a dark tunnel. I had been seeing one spot of light ahead. Here, all of a sudden, was a whole landscape." It was a philosophy of the land, grounded in Pinchot's study of forestry, but more sweeping, with a moral, spiritual, and political dimension. "The earth, I repeat, belongs of right to all its people, and not to a minority, insignificant in numbers but tremendous in wealth and power." He took his idea to Roosevelt. "And T.R., as I expected, understood, accepted and adopted it without the smallest hesitation. It was directly in line with everything he had been thinking and doing. It became the heart of his administration."

  Indeed, Roosevelt soon took to using the word "conservation" in his speeches and his proposals to Congress. Whether Pinchot and Roosevelt actually invented conservation is debatable. It takes many currents of thought, some from distant places, to form a river, and one of those most surely came from Pinchot's mentor, John Muir. In 1901, the naturalist published a powerfully argued book, Our National Parks, a popular cry for true preservation. A dog-eared copy found a prominent home in Roosevelt's library. But Pinchot and Teddy were the first to advance conservation for what it was: an executive branch agenda brought to the country with the full force of the bully pulpit.

  Using conservation as a rallying cry, Roosevelt took ever more vigorously to the task of expanding the national forests and national parks, and creating more wildlife refuges and other protected lands. And with the public behind him, he was emboldened. On a trip to the Grand Canyon, he declared, "Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it. The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it. Keep it for your children, your children's children, and for all who come after you." Along with Mount Rainier, the canyon was given the initial protection that would eventually lead to national park status. These designations infuriated the syndicates, for they had significant mining and timber claims on both places.

  At the same time, to show he was serious about public land belonging to the public, Roosevelt vigorously prosecuted timber thieves and cons, helped in no small part by investigative work from Pinchot's rangers in the field. He even put a senator—a fellow Republican, John H. Mitchell of Oregon—in prison for his role in a land scheme. Mitchell had been found guilty of taking bribes from timber companies in return for helping to process phony land claims. During his first year behind bars, he died—from complications of a
tooth extraction.

  Congress balked. Not only had the president done the unthinkable—putting Senator Mitchell, a twenty-two-year veteran of Washington's power corridors, away to rot in prison—but he also was moving far too quickly with this conservation business. A national monument here, ten million acres of new national forest there, and in between, wildlife refuges, plans to force western stockmen to pay for grazing, and timber companies to pay for logging in the national forests. The most powerful voice in the House, Joseph Gurney "Uncle Joe" Cannon of Illinois, joined with Heyburn and Clark in the Senate to stop Roosevelt.

  "Not one cent for scenery!" declared Cannon, perhaps the most potent Speaker of the House in the history of Congress, a man whose government service dated to an appointment from Abraham Lincoln. Cannon had a Mennonite beard and small eyes; he was no friend of Roosevelt's despite their shared party affiliation. Nor was he owned by the trusts. He was prickly, moralistic, and did not like to be crossed. In his mind, Teddy Roosevelt was a radical.

  In the Senate, the pushback was just as strong from fellow Republicans, led by Heyburn. With a triple set of jowls and a permanent scowl, the senator from Idaho was easily mocked by cartoonists and editorial writers. One profile said he was the most humorless, least liked person in the Senate. With a world view formed by his strict Quaker upbringing and the jungle capitalism of the West, where he had used his law office in Wallace to enrich mining syndicates, Heyburn had stood in the way of nearly all Roosevelt's progressive initiatives. He opposed the eight-hour workday, saying people should toil from sunup to sundown and to hell with the clock. He opposed direct election of senators; that would have kept Heyburn and Clark from office, were they to face the people. He opposed child welfare laws, saying it was the employer's right to hire anyone of any age. His reach and pettiness extended to young constituents in Idaho, rejecting a student who had won a debate prize named for Heyburn because "he does not seem to have learned enough to become a Republican," as Heyburn wrote in a scolding letter. When Congress took up the innocuous task of creating a national commission on fine arts, Heyburn blocked it, saying he despised "the artist's temperament."