Includes bibliographical references (p. 309-312) and index.

"1910 was America's millennial year of fire. That summer, American nature and American society collided with tectonic force as western wildfires scorched millions of acres, darkened skies in New England, and deposited soot on the ice of Greenland. Farms, mining camps, and rail towns cracked and burned. A survivor said that the towering flames raged with the sound of a thousand trains rushing over a thousand steel trestles. As one ranger put it, the mountains roared." "Stephen Pyne explains how wildland fires happen and how they are fought, how forests are created then re-created in cycles of burning, and what happens to a landscape when roads, railways, mining camps, logging, and national parks appear. The action distills into a two-day crisis, the Big Blowup of August 20-21, when the fires tripled in size, and focuses in particular on the heroics of Ranger Ed Pulaski, who held his panicked crew at gunpoint in a mine tunnel while the firestorm raged outside." "Pyne brings that year to life through the experiences and words of the rangers, soldiers, politicians, bureaucrats, scientists, and civilians who faced the fires, fought the flames, and were forever scarred by them. It was the first and greatest test of the five-year-old Forest Service. Yet even as seventy-eight fire-fighters perished, a national debate raged about policy, and especially about the relative merits of firefighting versus fire lighting."--BOOK JACKET.