forest reserves belong to all the people." Pinchot felt the same way; if anything, he was more militant in his belief that the essence of Progressive Era ideals could be manifest on the land, guided by his new agency. Pinchot and Roosevelt also knew that they had only a short time to prove their worth. Congress was skeptical, and the leash was short; legislators could kill the Forest Service simply by defunding it.

"The transfer meant a revolutionary change," Pinchot wrote. "We had the power, as we had the duty, to protect the Reserves for the use of the people, and that meant stepping on the toes of the biggest interests in the West. From that time on, it was fight, fight, fight."

To win that fight, he now tookthe nation's sixth transcontinental route, using a right of way that preceded the forest designation and gave the railway power to move through the reserves. The line hired thousands of men to dynamite holes in the granite, to sluice away gravel, to cut timber for ties and trestles, some of them running three hundred feet above the forest floor. No railroad had ever spent as much, $75,000 per mile, to lace ties across the Rockies. The toughest section—entirely roadless, with steep peaks, enormous snowdrifts and blizzards in winter, raging floods in spring, swarms of mosquitoes and yellow-jackets in summer—was in the high mountains shared by Idaho and Montana. To cross that stretch of merely twenty-two miles, workers would need to build twenty-one bridges and sixteen tunnels. But flush