Anne Bartlett

Benjamin Franklin famously mused that the turkey might be a good symbol for the United States; we opted for the eagle instead. But a compelling case could be made for the beaver. In a sense, we owe the European settlement of the North American continent to that intrepid engineer of the animal world.

Or, viewed from another angle, we owe it to the beaver hat. Spurred by the hat’s rise in popularity, beaver fur traders and trappers forged ever westward from the Atlantic seaboard, always the vanguard of European penetration. The trade had to keep moving because it wiped out the beaver population of each successive region.

Eric Jay Dolin, who explored the history of whaling in Leviathan, brings together all the exhilarating and tragic aspects of that trade through the 19th century in Fur, Fortune, and Empire. While he concentrates on the beaver, he includes strong chapters on the similarly intense quests for sea otter and buffalo. The dramatic heart of the book is its chapter on the founding of Astoria, John Jacob Astor’s trading post in what is now Oregon. Astor was the Bill Gates of his day, a dominant force in his industry. But everything went tragically wrong with his Astoria dream.

The pattern of the fur trade was often grim. The animals were hunted to near-extinction; Native American tribes that initially prospered by providing furs were severely damaged by the alcohol sold to them by contemptuous traders. Still, we might not have had an American Revolution if traders hadn’t fueled anger at the British ban on western settlement. They were the pioneers of the China Trade and the Oregon and Santa Fe trails. And the litany of American cities that started as fur trading posts is astonishing—New York, Pittsburgh, Detroit and St. Louis are just a few. Dolin pulls together all those strands, positive and negative, for an absorbing and comprehensive ride through the trade’s history.

We live in a traveling culture heavily defined by McDonald’s, Marriott, Holiday Inn, Starbucks and the like—successfully branded, distinctive national hospitality chains. For that, we can thank (or blame) a workaholic cockney immigrant named Fred Harvey.

Yes, Fred Harvey, not Howard Johnson. Johnson had his own genius, but Harvey was his forebear. Starting in 1876, Harvey created a chain of restaurants, hotels and stores at Santa Fe Railroad stations from Chicago to California that were not only ubiquitous, but really good. At a time when the gunslingers were still shooting it out at the O.K. Corral, Harvey brought high standards, interesting recipes, white tablecloths and well-trained “Harvey Girl” waitresses to what was then the back of beyond.

In Appetite for America, Harvey’s story is both a comprehensive cultural history and a fascinating family saga. Author Stephen Fried takes us from Harvey’s arrival in the U.S. in 1853 to his descendents’ sale of the by-then declining company to a conglomerate in 1968. He even includes an appendix of Harvey House recipes (of which “Bull Frogs Sauté Provencal” is perhaps the most intriguing).

Plagued with terrible health in his later years, Fred Harvey was lucky in his heir. His son, Ford Harvey, not only greatly expanded the empire, he had a lasting impact on the U.S. as an impresario for Southwestern tourism, the development of the Native American curio industry and the invention of the Santa Fe design style. (If you own turquoise earrings from Taos, you’re in Ford’s debt.) But, as is so often true, everything fell apart in the third generation; the talented heirs weren’t much interested in the business, and the untalented ones left to mind the store didn’t have the imagination to face up to interstates and airports.

Happily, not all was lost. Several of the high-end hotels developed under Ford Harvey still exist, like the always-booked El Tovar at the Grand Canyon. And for more proof of Harvey’s legacy, be sure to track down MGM’s The Harvey Girls, starring Judy Garland, and join in the chorus of “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe.”

Anne Bartlett is a journalist in Washington, D.C.

The recent “Station Fire” in California’s Angeles National Forest, the worst in Los Angeles County history, burned more than 160,000 acres and killed two firefighters. In comparison, the 1910 Northern Rockies forest fire remembered in The Big Burn covered nearly 3.2 million acres in Washington, Idaho and Montana. At least 85 people were killed, most of them members of ill-trained firefighting crews.

That blowout, the biggest wildfire in American history, devastated the economy of a booming timber and mining region. It traumatized the survivors—and as New York Times columnist Timothy Egan shows in The Big Burn, it set the course for U.S. forest conservation for the next hundred years, for good and ill.

The national forests that burned were brand new, the product of President Theodore Roosevelt’s conservation crusade. Spurred on by fellow aristocrat Gifford Pinchot, the founding head of the National Forest Service, Roosevelt had worked at breakneck pace to protect millions of acres from logging, railroad and mine companies. But when Roosevelt left office, the land barons’ allies in his own party starved the Forest Service of resources, and forced out Pinchot.

The scope of the disaster and the heroism of so many forest rangers turned public opinion in favor of conservation at a crucial moment. National forests were subsequently created throughout the country, and the Forest Service became a thriving agency.

For his National Book Award-winning account of the Dust Bowl, The Worst Hard Time, Egan was able to interview survivors. For The Big Burn, he had to comb through Forest Service reports, memoirs and old newspapers. But he’s equally effective here in telling the story through individuals—the homesteaders, the fire crews of immigrants and drifters, the idealistic Ivy League grads who followed Pinchot’s siren call to the Forest Service.

Egan is a gorgeous writer. His chapters on the “blowup,” when thousands fled burning towns and desperate fire crews burrowed in mine shafts or submerged in streams to escape the inferno, should become a classic account of an American Pompeii.

Anne Bartlett is a journalist in Washington, D.C.