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A terror-stricken mob jams the Randolph Sreet Bridge, with the fire literally hot on THE GREAT their heels. Public domain and the Cook County Courthouse -were literally a fayade, a magnif­ CHICAGO FIRE icent front for what was really nothing more than a clapboard DON HOLLWAY TAKES A BURNING cowboy town with 55 miles of wood-paved streets and over 650 LOOK AT THE CONFLAGRATION THAT miles of plank walkways. The DESTROYED, AND GAVE REBIRTH TO, Chicago Tribune, regarding its building at Dearborn and Madi­ AMERICA'S SECOND CITY son as fireproof, warned of the city's "miles of fire traps, pleasing rs. O'Leary's milk cow gets all the blame, but it would to the eye, looking substantial, but only have been cruel irony for the meatpacking capital of all sham and shingle." M the United States to be destroyed by an ornery heifer. In In 1870, Chicago had suffered fact, a calf saved the one supposed witness to the disas­ almost 600 fires, and in the ter's spark from a fiery death. No one is sure how it drought-stricken summer of started, but nobody forgets how it ended: the 1871 Great Chicago Fire. 1871, with only 2V2 inches of rain after July, even more. Up to seven TINDERBOX CITY times a day, the bell in the court­ The wonder is that the boomtown of the Midwest, then less than 40 house tower rang out fire alarms. years old, had not gone up in flames already. Its most elegant build­ On Saturday night, October 7th, a . ings - the Chamber of Commerce, opera houses and theaters, hotels blaze broke out in a lumber mill

8 History Magazine February/Marc;,h 2016 on Canal Street, in a working­ class West Side neighborhood. Though fought by all 29 of the city fire companies, in 16 hours, it put four of them out of action, consumed four square blocks and caused $750,000 in damage. The last of the firemen had only re­ turned to the station the follow­ ing evening when they were <;ailed to another blaze, just blocks from the first, at 137 DeKoven Street, near Jefferson. FLASH POINT In the section of the city then Panicked lodgers toss their belongings from windows as the fire bears down called "The West Division", to the Dearborn St. toward the Tremont Hotel. Public domain west of the South Branch of the Chicago River, Irish immigrants bor's house when he saw flames leaping skyward and ordered an Patrick and Catherine O'Leary coming out of the O'Leary barn. alarm call sent, but to the wrong and their five children had gone In his deposition, signed with an location, a mile from the O'Leary to bed early. Both parents worked, "X", he swore he shouted the barn. When he realized the mis­ Patrick as a laborer and Catherine alarm, ran to the barn and tried to take, his young assistant declined as a milkmaid, enabling them to get the animals out, but got his to send the correct signal, to avoid build an addition on their cottage, peg leg caught in the floor and confusing firefighters. One of the rent out the front and build a only escaped by hanging onto the first firemen on the scene de­ barn out back for their five cows, neck of a bolting calf. By the time scribed it as "a nasty fire, but not a calf and a horse. "I had two tons the O'Learys awoke, their barn a particularly bad one, and with of coal and two tons of hay [in was already engulfed. the help of two more engines, we the barn and adjoining shed]," could have knocked it cold." Catherine would later testify. "I ALARM had everything that I wanted in A mile and a half away, 100 feet FUEL FOR THE FIRE for the winter." up in the courthouse tower· By then, the heat was already so The evening was unseasonably cupola, a watchman saw smoke intense that the few engines on warm, with a hot, dry wind rising from the West Division. He hand could not throw enough gusting in off the prairie. Daniel dismissed it as still-smoldering water to stop the fire. "Turn in a Sullivan, a one-legged wagoneer embers from the Saturday night second alarm!" Chief Fire Marshal who lived across and down fire, which by ill luck was in the Robert A. Williams told his men. DeKoven, later testified he was same line of sight. Within mo­ "This is going to spread!" sitting in front of his own neigh- ments, howeve r, he saw flames The fire quickly leaped Taylor

Old-time fire engines burned coal to cre­ ate steam pressure, and were themselves a source of flying embers as they raced through the streets. Public domain The O'Leary home at 137 DeKoven St., Chicago. The fire broke out in the barn to the left. Public d omain

February/March 2016 History Magazine 9 en 0:: Street and, propelled by the ,_UJ prairie wind, advanced on two en fronts, north up Jefferson and east <( CJ) toward Lake Michigan, through 0 the wooden heart of the West Division. Reporter Joseph Cham­ berlin of the Evening Post de­ scribed the shantytown as "thickly studded with one-story frame dwellings, cow stables, pigsties, corncribs, sheds innumerable, every wretched building within four feet of its neighbor, and everything of wood - not a brick or a stone in the whole area .... Nothing could stop that confla­ gration there. It must sweep on until it reached a broad street, and then, everybody said, it would burn itself out." EVERYTHING IN ITS PATH So far, the fire had fed on the prairie wind out of the south. Now it began to breathe on its own, its hot updraft drawing in fresh air underneath with increas­ ing force. The sucking flames rose hundreds of feet, raining embers blocks away. Firefighters trying to contain the blaze found it break­ ing out behind them and were TOP: The twisted, melted girders of the Van Buren Street Bridge lie in the South Branch of the Chicago River. Burned and fallen bridges blocked boat traffic from forced to flee. By I 0:30PM, the fire escape. Public domain BOTTOM: Hundreds of Chicagoans trapped on the Govern­ was out of control. ment Pier used water from Lake Michigan to keep the flames at bay. Public domain . Across the river in the heart of the city, Chicagoans leaning from the blaze. When the warehouses, Panicked throngs choked the Van their windows and gathering on lumberyards and coal yards along Buren, Madison and Randolph street corners could smell smoke its bank blazed up, cinders lofted Street bridges, seeking escape to the and see the ominous glow in across the water, and at about west - at least, until the bridges the southwest. Visiting New York 11:30PM, fire broke out in the caught fire and dropped into the State Assemblyman Alexander South Side, with nothing between river, trapping riverboats until they, Frear was told, "It must be a damn it and downtown Chicago. too, caught fire. big fire this time; you can't put out a high wind with water." He HEART OF THE CITY FIRESTORM recalled the hot breeze rising, the When the fire advanced between Within hours, some 20 blocks - streets beginning to fill with con­ the river and the lake into 500 buildings - were burning cerned citizens and, not long downtown, the formerly empty at once. The Tribune building afterward, embers drifting down streets filled with terrified citizens. withstood the flames better than like glowing snowflakes. "All I The financial district on LaSalle most, but not forever, "... fire­ could distinctly hear was 'burning Street, the market district on State, proof," as one citizen put it, "until on both sides of the river."' the department stores, grand the date of its destruction." At Not even the South Branch of hotels, theaters and opera houses, about 2:30AM, the courthouse the Chicago River had held back all went up one after another. tower collapsed, the five-ton bell

10 History Magazine February/March 2016 At about three in the mornmg, the water mains lost pressure. Chicago was doomed. The wind, roaring in atthe foot of the fire, whirled upward into a white-hot tornado. Hurricane­ force winds tore the roofs off houses and flung burning furni­ ture hundreds of feet. The city be­ came a huge furnace, hot enough at the core to melt glass and pig iron like candle wax, split granite building blocks, and crumble In this 1872 lithograph, the firestorm destroys Chicago and even sets ships in the river and along the waterfront alight with drifting embers. Public domain limestone and marble to dust. falling to earth with a clang said justice, of accused arsonists hung DAWN OF DESTRUCTION to be heard a mile away, tolling from lampposts and left to burn. Throughout the night, the fire­ the death of a city. Hundreds of people crowded onto storm marched inexorably north. "Nobody endeavored to stay the the Government Pier or waded up At six o'clock Monday morning, flames now. A mob of men and to their necks into Lake Michigan, Mayor Robert B. Morrison sent women, all screaming and shout­ where they could do nothing, telegrams to neighboring cities: ing, ran about wildly," wrote but watch the waterfront be CHICAGO IS IN FLAMES. SEND Frear, remembering "... some of consumed. YOUR WHOLE DEPARTMENT the strangest and saddest scenes it The last chance for the city TO HELP US. Entire fire compa- . has ever been my misfortune to came in the early hours. Tribune nies from as far away as Milwau­ witness. I saw a woman kneeling editor Thomas White remem­ kee and Pittsburgh entrained for in the street with a crucifix held bered, "The city Waterworks, with Chicago, knowing they could not up before her and the skirt of her their four great pumping engines, arrive in time. dress burning while she prayed. were in a straight line with the fire . The sun rising over Lake Michi­ We had barely passed when a and wind ... priceless machinery gan barely showed through the runaway truck dashed her to the covered by a wooden roof." pall of smoke rising from hun- ground .... Then ensued a scene that was beyond description." The fire ate across the State Street bridge, over the Main Stem of the river into the North Side, advancing on a front fifteen blocks or more across. The luxu­ rious mansions of the residential district withstood destruction no better than shantytown shacks. As the fire drove rich and poor alike before it, civility and civilization broke down. Surging crowds of people, horses, and wagons filled with last worldly possessions fled before the wall of flame. Thieves and looters smashed their way into deserted storefronts and homes to grab what they could, fight over their loot in the streets and ultimately leave it, lest it drag One of the first priorities for banks and businesses after the fire was to dig through them down before the fire. Stories the rubble, recover their safes and learn if they really were fireproof. Some of Gen. would later circulate of vigilante Phil Sheridan's troops guard the strongbox at right. Public domain

February/March 2016 History Magazine ll Cl

LEFT: Amid the desolation, an enterprising businessman takes advantage of a hungry public by rolling his lunch wagon into town. The street was more crowded than it looks; the ghostly figures on the walks are pedestrians rendered semi-visible by the time-lapse effect of slow 1870s photographic exposure. Public domain RIGHT: One of the first businesses to spring up in the ruins was a thriving trade in surviving household goods and "fire relics": bits of glass and iron melted into fantastic shapes by the fire, highly sought as souvenirs by both visitors and natives. Public domain

dreds of square blocks of obliter­ anyone else to halt the fire, for at contained. By then, 17,500 build­ ated city, a path of destruction about 11 PM, a miracle occurred. ings and nearly 75 miles of street eventually a mile across. Publisher Out of the darkness and smoke, were gone. Almost 100,000 people Alfred Sewell would remember it which had so far precipitated were homeless. About 120 bodies as "a horrible scene .... Heaps of nothing but embers and cinders, were collected in a makeshift ruins, and here and there, a stand­ fell rain. From a drizzle, it grew, morgue in a former stable; a ing wall, as far as the eye could and by 3AM Tuesday, it had grown like number were never found, reach, and far beyond, fO'f a into a steady downfall, putting lost in the lake or rivers or utterly stretch of four miles ... one vast an end to both the drought and cremated, their ashes scattered to scene of desolation." the fire. the winds. The living immediately North of the river, there was went to work rebuilding their nothing to stop the Great Chicago PHOENIX OF city and their lives . Gen. Philip Fire from burning all the way THE MIDWEST Sheridan brought in army troops to Lake Superior, and all day Isolated spots would continue to to quell looting and assist in re­ Monday, it did just that. Those burn for days, but with fire crews construction. Food and supplies who could, escaped to the west. arriving hourly, the holocaust was arrived by train from across the That evening, those who couldn't '- some 30,000 refugees with nowhere else to go- crowded into 230-acre lakeside Lincoln Park, trapped with their backs to the water. GRAVEYARD Until recently, part of Lincoln Park had been a city cemetery. As the great fire closed in on the packed refugees, it appeared about to become a graveyard again; once its trees and dry grass and wooden grave markers took light, everyone in it would be dead. It's said that a Methodist con­ The Chicago Water Tower (left) and Chicago Avenue Pumping Station rise above gregation knelt together to pray. the destruction near Pine St., near North Michigan Ave. The water tower still stands Perhaps they did • more tha_n as a city landmark. Public d omain

12 History Magazine February/March 2016 co untry. Tent cities and shanty­ location of the infamous barn. towns sprang up on the ruins, but The fact that Pegleg Sullivan was FURTHER READING only temporarily. By the end of first on the scene has led many The Great Chicago Fire, the year, downtown Chicago was historians to implicate him in the edited by David Lowe. a city of 8,000 new buildings, with fire, however accidentally. An in­ Great Disasters: Dramatic True 500 of stone and fireproof brick. vestigation by the Board of Police Stories of Nature's Awesome Like a phoenix, the city arose and Fire Commissioners never Powers. Pleasantville, NY: Reader's Digest Association, 1989. from its own ashes. determined the exact cause of the ISBN 089577321X fire, possibly being more con­ BLAME Lowe, David, and Mabel Mcilvaine. cerned with repairing the reputa­ The Great Chicago Fire: In The fire had not yet burned tion of the fire department itself. Eyewitness Accounts and 70 out when the Evening Journal In 1997, the Chicago City Council Contemporary Photographs ran a limited editi

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February/March 2016 History Magazine 13