Ed Pulaski was the kind of man traditional Idahoans admire.

The former prospector, miner and ranch foreman demonstrated craftsman skills as a blacksmith, plumber, carpenter and machine repairman. When in 1908 he took the job of ranger of the Wallace District of the recently created Coeur d’Alene National Forest at 40, about the only thing he shared with his Yale-educated colleagues was a love of the outdoors.

Many Idahoans then as now were skeptical of the federal government. The new Forest Service was the face of that government and the progressive ideas of its founders Gifford Pinchot and President Theodore Roosevelt.

But Pulaski was one of both camps, a man of the community who was protecting the land under the auspices of the federal government. His heroics on August 20, 1910 became the story on which the Forest Service was built.

That day and the next three million acres of Idaho and Montana burned in hurricane-wind driven conflagration of biblical proportions. Town across the Northern Rockies burned and more than 70 people died in one of the defining moments of Idaho history.

Pulaski crafted his place in the story when he left his wife and daughter at the trailhead of Placer Creek that faithful morning to return to his men with supplies and leadership. He told her he might not return but that he had a job to do and more than 50 men who were depending on him.

When he arrived on the ridge the firestorm was growing to its crescendo, threatening to burn he and his men to a crisp. He led them back down the trail, giving up his horse to an older, heavier man, desperately trying to stay ahead of the fire.

When it became clear they were losing the race he led his men into an old mine and ordered them to lie down at gunpoint. They all passed out and Pulaski was burned as he guarded the flaming entry.

The next morning one of the men awoke and went to town to announce they were all dead. But slowly all but six got up alive. Pulaski appeared to be one of the dead.

But he too awoke blinded and barely able to walk. His quick thinking and will had saved his crew.

Later he designed the tool that is carried by wildland firefighters today.

His story has been told many times but never better than by Tim Egan in his new book about the 1910 fires, “The Big Burn.” Egan, whose last book, “The Worst Hard Time, about the 1930s Dust Bowl, won the National Book Award, grew up in Spokane.

The Pulitzer-Prize-winning New York Times reporter and columnist tells story of Pulaski and the rest of the early rangers through the window of the fight between Roosevelt and Idaho Sen. Weldon Heyburn over the establishment of the national forests.

Egan’s book is not as authoritative as historian Stephen Pyne’s book “Year of the Fires.” But Egan is a storyteller and proves it again in “The Big Burn.”

He tells how the black men of the Army 25th Regiment, known as the Buffalo Soldiers, who charged up San Juan Hill with TR during the Spanish American War, found redemption and respect in the fire. And he shows how Pinchot and Roosevelt turned the young Forest Service’s defeat into victory in their own battle for progressive democracy over Heyburn’s special interests.

The story of the 1910 fires, the creation myth of the U.S. Forest Service is an important Idaho story that deserves special notice. With the 100th anniversary only months away the state should celebrate just as it did during the 200th anniversary of the Lewis and Clark voyages.

Idahoans can walk the trail Pulaski did up and down Placer Creek, visit the old railroad tunnels where trains rode out the blazes, follow retreat of crews throughout the St. Joe drainage near Avery. They can see the forest that has grown back and learn what the Forest Service did right and wrong in its management over time.

Egan’s book gives them a guide the same way Stephen Ambrose’s “Undaunted Courage” did for Lewis and Clark.