The Big Burn by Timothy Egan

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."
    He reserved a special wrath for Pinchot, regularly calling him before committees to explain the Forest Service and its budget. He questioned him as aggressively as a prosecutor would go after a man on trial for murder. When it came out that Pinchot was working without a salary and distributing to his clerks the money that should have gone to him as Chief, Heyburn tried to get the appropriation withdrawn. The very idea of forestry was a joke—it had no bearing in science, the senator believed. "Forestry," Heyburn said at one hearing, "has been fostered as a policy to uphold the leisurely, lazy dignity of a monarch," a reference to a man he called Czar Pinchot. To this remark, several senators hissed.
    "Geese!" Heyburn shot back. "Geese! Hiss! Don't try that with me. I'm too old to be scared by that process."
    After years of back-and-forth clashes with little to show for it, Heyburn and his allies finally came up with a way—they thought—that would stop Roosevelt. In 1907, an amendment was tacked onto a spending bill, a bit of dynamite in a small package. The add-on took away the president's authority to create new national forests in a huge part of the West without congressional approval. Every tree in the public domain in that area would be subject to the whim of key members of Congress like Heyburn. At the same time, Heyburn took to the Senate floor for a marathon attack, questioning whether the Forest Service had a right to exist, implying that it was a treasonous agency, unsanctioned by the Constitution.
    Roosevelt felt cornered. Not so with Pinchot. To the forester, the Senate amendment was no defeat; it was an opportunity—but only if they acted quickly. The president had a week to sign the bill, and it had to be signed because it kept the government in operation. Pinchot had an idea. Why not use the seven-day window to put as much land into the national forest system as possible? Just go full bore and do in a week's time what they might normally do over the course of four years.
    Roosevelt loved it. He asked the Forest Service to bring him
maps—and hurry!—a carpet of cartography, every square mile in the area Heyburn was trying to take away. A messenger ran into agency headquarters with a two-word command from the Chief: "Get busy!" For a week, a huddle of Little G.P.s worked nonstop to outline valleys and rivers, mountain ranges and high meadows, ridge after ridge of forestland that might qualify. The floor of an entire room in the White House was covered with maps; Roosevelt, on his knees with Pinchot, went over individual sections, recalling hikes and hunting trips on land where he had mended a broken soul.
    "Oh, this is bully!" said the president, in full nostril-snorting charge on the floor. "Have you put in the North Fork of the Flathead? Up there once I saw the biggest herd of black-tailed deer."
    At the end of the week, Roosevelt issued executive proclamations covering sixteen million acres of land in half a dozen states, bringing them into the fold of the national forest system. And then he signed the bill that prevented him or any other president from doing such a thing again.
    "The joke was on them," said Pinchot.
    Heyburn and his allies seethed. "The opponents of the Forest Service turned handsprings in their wrath," Roosevelt wrote,