As the scientific knowledge of tuberculosis progressed, the prejudice towards people with the disease eased.Â
Starting in the 1840s, health-seekers fanned out across the United States in search for "the cure."Â
By the dawn of the 19th century tuberculosis had killed one in seven of all the people who had ever lived.Â
Watch the opening scene of The Forgotten Plague.
In the summer of 1910, the Forest Service had less than 500 rangers nationwide.
In the early 1900s, President Theodore Roosevelt worried that unless America's forests were protected and regulated, the nation's forests would soon disappear.Â
After the Big Burn, Chief Forester Gifford Pinchot publicizes the selfless actions of the fire fighters who lost their lives in the blaze.Â
Chief Forester Gifford Pinchot saw fighting forest fires as being essential to the new Forest Service's mission.
At the turn of the 20th century, Gifford Pinchot was the nation's preeminent forester.Â
In 1910, a wildfire burned an area the size of Connecticut and killed at least 78 firefighters in just 36 hours.
In the summer of 1910, hundreds of wildfires raged across the Northern Rockies.
Watch Chapter 1 of The Big Burn.
