Hi, I'm the History Guy.
I have a degree in history, I love history, if you love history too this is the channel
for you.
You might have heard of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, a fire so terrible that it burned
3.3 square miles from the center of the city of Chicago, cost an estimated 222 million
dollars in property damage, left a hundred thousand people homeless and killed three
hundred.
All caused, according to a legend that's actually never been proven, by Mrs. O'Leary's cow.
You might even think that the Great Chicago Fire was the worst, deadliest fire in American
history, and you might be surprised to find out that the Great Chicago Fire wasn't even
the worst deadliest fire in the American Midwest..on that day.
The news of the Great Chicago Fire overshadowed the news of another fire in a little town
in Wisconsin called Peshtigo, just 250 miles away, that occurred on the exact same day,
October 8th 1871.
And so today we are going to remember the victims of the great Peshtigo Fire, the deadliest
fire in the United States history.
Settlement in the area began in the 1830s with the first sawmill built in the town in
1836.
Originally the town was called Clarksville, but in 1858, it was renamed Peshtigo for the
nearby Peshtigo River, a tributary of Green Bay.
The great wealth of the area is in lumber, the area was heavily forested with white pine
and white pine is great for lumber.
White pines can grow 120 to 170 feet tall, they are six or more feet around, they are
very straight, they don't have branches for the first three quarters of the tree, the
wood wind cut is unpopped and one white pine can produce enough lumber to build a good
sized house and when cut white pine floats easily.
Which is where the Peshtigo river comes in because the lumberjack could just haul the
trees to the river and float them downriver to the lumber mills in the city of Peshtigo.
The town had a rich benefactor, William Butler Ogden, Ogden had made a fortune in railroads,
and had been the very first mayor of the city of Chicago, and he recognized the value of
the trees around Peshtigo and decided to invest there, creating the Peshtigo Company.
He built a lumber mill and he also built the Ogden Woodwear Company a factory that built
every sort of wooden implement from axe handles to clothespins, it was the largest Factory
of its kind in the country.
In 1871 Peshtigo was a booming town, it had all the things that you would have in a lumber
boomtown, from schools to brothels, from churches to banks, it had a population of 1700, a good-sized
metropolis for its day.
Fire was always a risk in a lumber town but in the great northern forest it was usually
quite wet, and so forest fires would burn themselves out quickly, but this was not a
normal year, the forests of Wisconsin and Upper Peninsula of Michigan had faced a great
drought in 1871.
Winters there would usually produce four or five feet of snow but the winter of 1870-71
had produced hardly any.
The normal spring rain showers had been brief and there hadn't been a good soaking rain
storm since mid-July with the exception of just one shower in September, on October 8th,
Peshtigo had not seen rain for 11 weeks.
The forest floor was covered with the tender dry needles dropped by stressed trees, and
there was a lot of brush from the lumber work and from clearing land for the railroads.
No one knows what started the fire, but fire was commonly used to clear land for farming,
or to clear brush for logging, or to cook or to stay warm.
Fires were used everywhere and fires were commonly left unattended.
On October 8, the cold front was coming down from Canada, it ran into a warm front that
came up from the southern United States, the difference in temperatures was as much as
40 degrees, and the two crashing together, created hurricane-force winds.
The town of Peshtigo was built almost entirely out of wood, including the bridge that connected
the two parts of the town that were on either side of the Peshtigo River.
The fire moved so fast that there was no time to escape, pushed by hundred miles per hour
winds, it created something called a firestorm, a fire so hot that it creates its own wing
system.
Described as nature's nuclear bomb, it could burn as hot as 2,000 degrees.
Something called a Convection Column rose up and created what was described as a fire
tornado.
People rushed to the bridge, hoping that the fire would stop at the Peshtigo River, but
it jumped the river and burnt both sides of the town, and then it burned the bridge covered
with people.
Many tried to escape by jumping into the frigid waters of the Peshtigo River, but the fire
was burning so hot that you had to be underwater or you be burned and so many of those drowned,
others died of hypothermia in the 40-degree water.
Only a few who made it to the river and some who made it to a lower laying marshy area
on the south end of town survived and in the morning they found some 1,100 bodies, many
more presumed to be dead.
Estimates of death in the fire range as high as 2,500, but it's impossible to tell because
the records in towns like Peshtigo and Brussels, and a dozen other small towns that were destroyed
in the fire, were all destroyed and so no one really knows how many died, many times
the number that died in the fire in Chicago.
Many of the bodies were burned beyond recognition, sometimes the only way you could tell that
it was human remains was because there was the melted remnants of a belt buckle or a
wedding ring, some people were presumably burnt to ash and simply blew away.
Still others were overcome by poisonous gas, or suffocated by the heat of the fire, and
the bodies were found apparently untouched by fire.
350 were buried in a mass grave, unidentifiable.
Some simply because every person on earth who could identify them also perished in the
fire.
Every building in the town of Peshtigo was gone.
The fire burned some 1.2 million acres before it burned itself out.
The survivors did get help from nearby communities and the state of Wisconsin, but since Peshtigo
was some two days from the nearest telegraph, the news only slowly eked out and was overshadowed
by the news of the Great Chicago Fire, a fire with far fewer casualties, but more witnesses.
The town of Peshtigo still survives, it was rebuilt at about 3,800 residents as of the
2000 census, there is a museum there just off of US Highway 41 that remembers the victims
of the fire and keeps some artifacts.
The mass grave of the 350 unidentified victims of the fire is adjacent to the museum.
It's hard to define some great lesson from the Peshtigo Fire except maybe, people whom
history forgot, deserve to be remembered.
Certainly we've gotten better at fighting fires and preventing fires and disaster relief,
but disasters still occur and people still die.
The people of Peshtigo, who at the time we're living on the edge of civilization, knew that
that offered some risk.
And maybe that risk seems small to people who would take on the dangerous job of cutting
and milling lumber, jobs so dangerous that people died every day but it's not like they
were fools, it's not like they were even unprepared.
It's just that all the conditions for a disaster came terribly together that day and maybe
that's the great lesson, that you can't take anything in this life for granted, that the
world can change in one terrible instant.
I'm The History Guy, I hope you enjoyed this edition of my channel, 5 minutes of history,
short snippets of forgotten history five to ten minutes.
If you did enjoy it then go ahead and click that like button that's on your left.
If you have any questions or comments feel free to write them in the comment section,
I would be happy to respond and if you'd like five minutes more of forgotten history then
click the subscribe button on your right.
I hope you enjoyed this edition of my channel 5 minutes of history, short snippets of forgotten
history five to ten minutes.
If you did enjoy then go ahead and click that like button that's on your left.
If you have any questions or comments feel free to write them in the comment section,
I would be happy to respond, and if you'd like five minutes more forgot the history
click the subscribe button on your right