October 8, 1871: What (or Who) Caused the Great Chicago Fire?

[Valin]

Smithsonianmag.com

Late one night, when we were all in bed,
Mrs. O’Leary lit a lantern in the shed.
Her cow kicked it over, then winked her eye and said,
“There’ll be a hot time in the old town tonight!”
— Chicago folksong


An unflattering depiction of Catherine O’Leary inside her infamous barn. From “The Great Chicago Fire and the Myth of Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow.”

There is no known photograph of Catherine O’Leary, and who could blame her for shunning the cameras? After those two catastrophic days in October 1871, when more than 2,000 acres of Chicago burned, reporters continually appeared on Mrs. O’Leary’s doorstep, calling her “shiftless and worthless” and a “drunken old hag with dirty hands.” Her husband sicced dogs at their ankles and hurled bricks at their heads. P.T. Barnum came knocking to ask her to tour with his circus; she reportedly chased him away with a broomstick. Her dubious role in one of the greatest disasters in American history brought her fame she never wanted and couldn’t deflect. When she died 24 years later of acute pneumonia, neighbors insisted the true cause was a broken heart.

Mrs. O’Leary claimed to be asleep on the night of Sunday, October 8, when flames first sparked in the barn next to the family cottage on DeKoven Street. The blaze traveled in northeast, tearing through shanties and sheds and leaping across Taylor Street, the heat so fierce that fireman Charles Anderson could hold his hose to the flames only when shielded by a door. His hat curdled on his head. All spare engines were called to the growing conflagration, prompting one fire marshal to ask another: “Where has this fire gone to?” The answer was swift and apt: “She has gone to hell and gone.” Residents noticed that a freakish wind whipped the flames into great walls of fire more than 100 feet high, a meteorological phenomenon called “convection whirls”—masses of overheated air rising from the flames and began spinning violently upon contact with cooler surrounding air. “The wind, blowing like a hurricane, howling like myriads of evil spirits,” one witness later wrote, “drove the flames before it with a force and fierceness which could never be described or imagined.”


Chicago In Ruins

(Snip)

Before the Great Chicago Fire, no one took notice of Patrick and Catherine O’Leary, two Irish immigrants who lived with their five children on the city’s West Side. Patrick was a laborer and Catherine sold milk from door to door, keeping her five cows in the barn. Even before the fire died out on the city’s northern edges, the Chicago Evening Journal implicated her, reporting that it began “on the corner of DeKoven and Twelfth Streets, at about 9 o’clock on Sunday evening, being caused by a cow kicking over a lamp in a stable in which a woman was milking”—a scenario that originated with children in the neighborhood. Similar articles followed, many perpetuating ethnic stereotypes and underscoring nativist fears about the city’s growing immigrant population. The Chicago Times, for one, depicted the 44-year-old Catherine as “an old Irish woman” who was “bent almost double with the weight of many years of toil, trouble and privation” and concluded that she deliberately set fire to her barn out of bitterness: “The old hag swore she would be revenged on a city that would deny her a bit of wood or a pound of bacon.”

(Snip)

 

[nickydog]

So actually they don't know who started the fire. Huh.