The Big Burn by Jeanette Ingold
Richie's Picks: The Big Burn
Out there in the distance, the pink spread from sky to ground, became a
pink-and-red-and-bronze mass of color billowing up in the southwest and
running toward him. Sticks appeared to be tumbling through the air before
it. Then Jarrett realized they were too far away to be sticks. My god, he
thought, those are trees. Wildfires were a terrifying experience 100
years ago, and they have become equally terrifying to many Americans in
recent drought years. The Big Burn is based on the true story of one of
the worst wildfires of the century, a conflagration that destroyed 2.5
million acres of public land and killed 90 people. In the hot, dry summer of
1910, hundreds of small fires were burning all over Montana and the
Idaho panhandle, lit by dry thunderstorms, sparks from trains, untended
campfires. On August 20, a blowup began as the many blazes, pushed
by wind, raced up the slopes until they joined to ignite a crown fire that
roared across treetops, creating its own wind in a mighty inferno. This
novel tells the story of three pairs of young people in the fires path:
Ranger Samuel Logan and his 16-year-old brother Jarrett, who yearns to

fight this fiery monster; Lizbeth, who loves the forest, and her aunt Celia,
who wants only to profit from it; and two African American soldiers,
honorable Seth and his shifty sidekick, Abel. The way their lives interlock
with the fire and each other, and the field notes that document the course
of the blaze make up a thrilling novel with much authenticity for the place
and time and for the nature of wildfire itself. (Ages 10 to 14) --Patty
Campbell
Personal Review: The Big Burn by Jeanette Ingold
THE BIG BURN is a fascinating and harrowing historic novel set in the
midst of a forest fire that trashed Northern Idaho and Western Montana in
1910. It was a large forest fire. "How large?" you may ask. Okay--If there
are 640 acres in a square mile and there were nearly three million acres
affected by THE BIG BURN, then we're talking an area nearly 4700 square
miles. Sonoma County, where I live, is one-third that size. If you consider
the San Francisco Bay Area counties of Santa Cruz, Santa Clara, San
Mateo, San Francisco, Marin, AND Sonoma together, then you've got a
sense of the scale of the destruction. For those of you on the East Coast,
we're talking Long Island, plus all of New York's boroughs, and the
counties of Westchester, Rockland, Putnam, Orange, Dutchess, and
Columbia.
"Field Notes: In the summer of 1910, rangers who were used to working in
isolation suddenly found their forests filling with strangers. With new fires
breaking out daily through July and older ones stubbornly resisting control,
the Forest Service's District One had no choice but to hire more and more
men to fight them. By the end of the month, there were almost three
thousand firefighters scattered across the district's several forests...W.B.
Greeley, would later write, 'It was a case of hiring anyone we could get.
We cleaned out Skid Road in Spokane and Butte. A lot of temporaries
were bums and hobos. In a bad fire year, the temporary is the weakest
link in the chain'...They went into the burning forests wearing the clothes
they'd been recruited in, and the ones wearing street shoes or snug wool
suits would regret that. They worked for twenty-five cents an hour with
board, thirty if they provided their own food..."
In THE BIG BURN we do meet a few scoundrels. But the main characters
here are three young people--Jarrett, a local boy who leaves his harsh
dad; Seth, a southern kid in a black regiment who is trying to live up to the
memory of his dead father; and Lizbeth, a young woman originally from
New England, who is falling in love with the land she's found herself
homesteading with her young, widowed aunt. All three cross paths before
finding themselves in the midst of Hell on Earth.
Perhaps the publisher is calling this an "ages 12 and up" to spare younger
children potential nightmares from the vividly drawn scenes of towering
flames bearing down on our heroes. But for any kid whose tastes run to
disaster and survival, mixed into a coming of age story, THE BIG BURN is
a riveting read.

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