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AMERICAN EXPERIENCE Presents the Big Burn

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AMERICAN EXPERIENCE Presents the Big Burn AMERICAN EXPERIENCE Presents The Big Burn Premieres Tuesday, February 3, 2015 9:00-10:00 p.m. ET on PBS Inspired by Timothy Egan’s best-selling book, The Big Burn is the dramatic story of the massive wildfire that swept across the Northern Rockies in the summer of 1910. The fire devoured more than three million acres in thirty-six hours, confronting the fledgling U.S. Forest Service with a catastrophe that would define the agency and the nation’s fire policy for much of the twentieth century. As America tries to manage its fire-prone landscapes in the twenty-first century, The Big Burn provides a cautionary tale of heroism and sacrifice, arrogance and greed, hubris and, ultimately, humility, in the face of nature’s frightening power. Written and directed by Stephen Ives, The Big Burn premieres on AMERICAN EXPERIENCE on Tuesday, February 3, 2015, 9:00-10:00 p.m. ET on PBS (check local listings). In the spring of 1905, the first group of fresh-faced graduates of Yale’s Forestry School began to arrive in the bawdy frontier towns of the West. These first employees of the Forest Service were given the monumental task of managing the newly created national forests in the Northern Rockies. They served under the founder of the Forest Service, Gifford Pinchot, an eccentric patrician with an almost missionary zeal for conserving America’s public lands. A close friend of fellow conservationist Teddy Roosevelt, the two men passionately believed that unless they acted quickly, the forces of unbridled capitalism would devour their beloved American wilderness once and for all. One of Pinchot’s first hires was young William Greeley, who was given the task of overseeing twenty-nine million acres, covering most of Montana, Idaho, and parts of South Dakota; each of the 160 rangers under Greeley would be responsible for almost three hundred square miles of national forest. But Greeley and his men were not popular with the hard-drinking, hard-living settlers accustomed to living without the intrusion of the federal government. As tensions rose, both sides would be silenced by one uncontrollable foe—nature itself. The previous two years had been dry, but nothing could have prepared the fledgling Forest Service for the severity of the drought that befell the Northern Rockies in 1910. Fires broke out continually and were fought by the rookie rangers as best they could. As author Timothy Egan says, “Firefighting was a very primitive science. They were learning as they went along.” Pinchot saw fighting forest fires as essential to the agency’s mission—and the key to his agency’s survival in the face of pending budget cuts. Pinchot made his case: “The question of forest fires, like the question of slavery, may be shelved for a time, at enormous cost in the end, but sooner or later, it must be faced.” Back on the smoldering mountains, the young Ivy League rangers were joined by Ed Pulaski, an older western frontiersman, jack-of-all-trades, and man of the people; when Pulaski spoke, the locals listened. His skill and calm would prove invaluable on the evening of July 26, 1910, when a violent lightning storm lit up the sky, igniting more than one thousand fires across twenty-two national forests. Back East, Roosevelt’s successor, William Howard Taft, fired Pinchot just as Greeley desperately needed additional men on the ground to fight the ever-increasing number of fires. He quickly hired every able- bodied man available, even emptying the jails and sending convicted murderers to the front lines. Finally, the federal government relented; Taft sent two thousand troops to the Rockies, including seven companies from the African American Buffalo Soldiers. By the second week of August, the number of fires had doubled, and on the evening of August 20th, hurricane force winds of seventy miles per hour fanned the flames of the fires into one gigantic blaze, igniting the horror of what would come to be known as the Big Burn. When it was finally over, more than three million acres of forest had been burned and a billion dollars’ worth of timber had been lost. Soot from the fires darkened skies as far away as Boston and a layer of ash blanketed the ice of Greenland. But it was the human toll that stunned the nation—many were injured, scores had lost their homes, and more than seventy-eight firefighters perished in the flames. No sooner had the smoke cleared than the debate over the lessons of the Big Burn began. Although no longer its leader, Pinchot passionately defended the Forest Service’s actions and trumpeted the heroism of the men who lost their lives. Congress finally relented, doubling the Forest Service’s budget and expanding the territories under its control. One hundred years later, the legacy of the Big Burn can be measured in the growth of the U.S. Forest Service and in fire suppression policies that demanded that every fire be fought; a policy most now think is misguided. “By putting out every fire for a hundred years, they allowed this huge build up of standing fuel,” says author Timothy Egan. “You’ve created, indirectly, what are now some of the most catastrophic fires today.” The Big Burn will be available on DVD on September 30, 2014, as well as for online viewing at pbs.org. * * * About the Participants (in alphabetical order) Timothy Egan is the author of The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America and a columnist for The New York Times. Michael Kodas is the associate director of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder, an award-winning photojournalist and reporter, and author. John Maclean has written four books on wildfires. He helped publish his late father Norman Maclean’s last work, Young Men and Fire. Char Miller is an environmental and urban historian, and has written numerous biographies on Gifford Pinchot. He is a professor at Trinity University and a senior fellow at the Pinchot Institute for Conservation. Steve Pyne is the author of Year of the Fires: The Story of the Great Fires of 1910, amongst many other books on fire and fire management. He is a professor of human dimensions of biology and a senior sustainability scholar at Arizona State University. Al Runte is an environmental historian and has written National Parks: The American Experience. He also served as a senior advisor on Ken Burns’ The National Parks: America’s Best Idea. Charles E. Williams is Chief Docent for the Buffalo Soldiers National Museum. About the Filmmakers Written and Directed By Stephen Ives Produced By Amanda Pollak Edited By Omry Maoz Narrated By Oliver Platt Associate Producer Nina Krstic Original Music By Peter Rundquist Director of Photography Andrew Young An Insignia Films production for AMERICAN EXPERIENCE. Stephen Ives (Writer/Director) In his twenty years of work in public television, Stephen Ives has established himself as one of the nation’s leading independent documentary directors. His landmark series The West was one of the most-watched PBS programs of all time. In 1987, Ives began a decade-long collaboration with filmmaker Ken Burns as a co- producer of a history of the United States Congress and as a consulting producer on the groundbreaking series The Civil War and Baseball. After the premiere of The West, Ives turned his attention towards contemporary films, producing a profile of the Cornerstone Theater Company which aired on HBO in the fall of 1999, and Amato: A Love Affair with Opera, which aired on PBS in 2001 and earned Ives a nomination from the Directors Guild of America for Outstanding Directorial Achievement. His profile of 1930s thoroughbred Seabiscuit, which aired on AMERICAN EXPERIENCE in 2003, won a Primetime Emmy award, and his PBS series Reporting America at War, about American war correspondents, was described by Los Angeles Times as “television that matters…a visual document of power and clarity.” His other films for AMERICAN EXPERIENCE include Lindbergh, Las Vegas, New Orleans, Kit Carson, Roads to Memphis, Panama Canal, Custer’s Last Stand, Grand Coulee Dam, and 1964. Mark Samels (Executive Producer) was named executive producer of American Experience, PBS’ flagship history series, in 2003. Under Samels’ leadership, the series has been honored with nearly every industry award, including the Peabody, Primetime Emmys, the duPont-Columbia Journalism Award, Writers Guild Awards, Oscar nominations, and Sundance Film Festival Audience and Grand Jury Awards. Prior to joining WGBH, Samels worked as an independent documentary filmmaker, an executive producer for several U.S. public television stations, and as a producer for the first co-production between Japanese and American television. A native of Wisconsin, he is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. About AMERICAN EXPERIENCE Television’s most-watched history series, AMERICAN EXPERIENCE celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2013. The series has been hailed as “peerless” (The Wall Street Journal), “the most consistently enriching program on television” (Chicago Tribune), and “a beacon of intelligence and purpose” (Houston Chronicle). On air and online, the series brings to life the incredible characters and epic stories that have shaped America’s past and present. Acclaimed by viewers and critics alike, AMERICAN EXPERIENCE documentaries have been honored with every major broadcast award, including thirty Emmy Awards, four duPont- Columbia Awards, and sixteen George Foster Peabody Awards, one most recently for the series represented by Freedom Riders, Triangle Fire, and Stonewall Uprising. Exclusive corporate funding for AMERICAN EXPERIENCE provided by Liberty Mutual Insurance. Major funding provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Additional funding for The Big Burn provided by The Kendeda Fund, and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Public Television Viewers.
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