Multiple small fires fused into giant fires thanks to fierce winds that Pernin describes as hurricane-like. Fire was in the air, and worried residents were not unprepared: “hogsheads of were water were placed at intervals all around the town, ready for any emergency.”īut what came was no ordinary emergency. In the weeks before October 8, the woods around Peshtigo crackled with flames. There were major fires from the Rockies to the Alleghenies. “Ostensibly to raise funds for a new church in Marinette, Father Pernin’s account may have also been an attempt to exorcise the memories of that October night during which he suffered fearfully while behaving heroically,” noted the editors of The Wisconsin History Magazine.Īs the editors wrote on the occasion of the fire’s centennial, no one equaled Pernin’s memoir “in vividness, imagery, or sheer drama.” A century and a half after the fire, it’s still a visceral read, right down to the near-hanging of a man caught robbing corpses after the fire.Īccording to Pernin, 1871 was “distinguished by its unusual dryness.” Drought plagued much of the country all summer and autumn. The Burning of Peshtigo via Wikimedia Commons ![]() Both of his churches burnt to the ground. Born in France about 1822 as Jean-Pierre Pernin, Father Pernin was the Catholic priest in the parishes of Peshtigo and nearby Marinette. ![]() Not included in Tilton’s book was the account written by John Peter Pernin, published in Montreal in French and English versions in 1874. The volume was sold for the benefit of survivors. In the aftermath, there was only one major publication on the Peshtigo Fire for decades: Green Bay journalist Frank Tilton’s quickly produced Sketch of the Great Fires in Wisconsin at Peshtigo, the Sugar Bush, Menekaune, Williamsonville, and Generally on the Shores of Green Bay: with Thrilling and Truthful Incidents by Eyewitnesses (1871). No one equaled Pernin’s memoir “in vividness, imagery, or sheer drama.” Wisconsin’s governor was actually in Chicago with relief supplies for that fire, so his twenty-four-year-old wife, Francis Bull Fairchild, began the home-state relief missions, even rerouting a boxcar of supplies bound for Chicago. News of the fire didn’t even reach the state capital in Madison until October 10. The Peshtigo Fire, meanwhile swept through a sparsely inhabited frontier far from the amplifying voice of media. (There are reasons to suspect the story is bunk.) Kate O’Leary’s infamous bovine, named variously Daisy, Madeline, or Gwendolyn, is supposed to have started the fire by kicking over a barn lantern. For instance, of the things you almost certainly know about Chicago, Mrs O’Leary’s cow is probably right up there with deep dish pizza. The Peshtigo Fire, named after the Wisconsin town incinerated in the blaze, remains the nation’s deadliest wildfire.īecause it was a major metropolis, the Great Chicago Fire got all the attention that night and many afterwards. Two hundred miles north, a firestorm swept through 2,400 square miles of Wisconsin and Michigan and claimed more than 1,100 lives. The Great Chicago Fire is certainly famous, but it wasn’t the only big fire that night. ![]() On the night of October 8, 1871, more than three square miles of the heart of Chicago burnt down. The icon indicates free access to the linked research on JSTOR.
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