Smoldering City: Chicagoans and the Great Fire, 1871-1874 / Edition 1

by Karen Sawislak

Overview

The fateful kick of Mrs. O'Leary's cow, the wild flight before the flames, the astonishingly quick rebuilding--these are the well-known stories of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. But as much as Chicago's recovery from disaster was a remarkable civic achievement, the Great Fire is also the story of a city's people divided and at odds. This is the story that Karen Sawislak tells so revealingly in this book.

In a detailed account, drawn on memoirs, private correspondences, and other documents, Sawislak chronicles years of widespread, sometimes bitter, social and political conflict in the fire's wake, from fights over relief soup kitchens to cries against profiteering and marches on city hall by workers burned out of their homes. She shows how through the years of rebuilding the people of Chicago struggled to define civic order--and the role that "good citizens" would play within it. As they rebuilt, she writes, Chicagoans confronted hard questions about charity and social welfare, work and labor relations, morality, and the limits of state power. Their debates in turn exposed the array of values and interests that different class, ethnic, and religious groups brought to these public discussions.

"Sawislak combines the copious detail of a historian with the vivid portrayals of a storyteller in her investigation of the infamous Chicago fire. . . . Highlighted by historical maps, plates and engravings, with an epilogue and notes, Smoldering City presents an extremely thorough and engaging study of this extraordinary disaster."--Publishers Weekly

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226735481
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	12/15/1995
Series:	Historical Studies of Urban America
Edition description:	1
Pages:	403
Sales rank:	686,488
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

Read an Excerpt

Smoldering City

Chicagoans and the Great Fire, 1871-1874

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By Karen Sawislak

University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2003


University of Chicago
All right reserved.

ISBN: 0-226-73548-6

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Chapter One

Intensely dry conditions, a 20-m.p.h. southwest wind, and an unfortunate spark
at approximately 10 o'clock on the night of October 8 all combined to turn
Chicago into what two historians of the Great Fire would describe as "a vast
ocean of flame." The chronically undermanned fire department, already exhausted
by the effort required to subdue the major blaze that had raged on the West Side
only the previous evening, rushed at the first alarm to the soon-to-be infamous
O'Leary barn. But the strong, steady wind fanned the flames, blowing showers of
burning shingles and charcoal sparks northeast toward an industrial district of
lumberyards, wooden warehouses and sheds, and coal heaps-"everything," as one
commentator later noted, "that would make a good fire." When the flames reached
the sixteen acres desolated the night before, the firemen hoped that the blaze
might die for lack of fuel. This newly bare patch did act as a buffer zone,
sparing the West Side from any further damage. But the driving force of the wind
proved unstoppable; easily breaching the natural barrier posed by the south
branch of the Chicago River, the Great Fire began to feed on the equally
flammable structures of the Southwest Side.

Within four hours of its humble genesis, the Great Fire became so large, so hot,
and moved so quickly that firefighters and fire engines could not stand fast
before it. Proceeding north, the fire descended upon Conley's Patch, an Irish
immigrant shantytown typical of this poor neighborhood, with little warning.
Flames, heat, and smoke roared through the flimsy and densely packed structures,
in minutes claiming many of the victims of the disaster. Fire next engulfed the
municipal gasworks; the explosion of a massive holding tank added an enormous
amount of especially volatile fuel to the already raging blaze. Street lights
all across the city flickered and died, plunging the streets into a darkness
broken only by the ever-brighter glow of flames.

By the time the Great Fire reached the central business district, it no longer
needed the south wind or contact with fresh fuel to continue to move north. For
the mile-wide holocaust at this point began to exhibit what firefighters call a
convection effect, the physics and chemistry of a giant conflagration that
produce a concentrated thermal updraft-a phenomenon that allows a massive blaze
to generate its own forward motion. Chicago's fire, in more simple terms, had
now become a firestorm. Thomas Mosher, Jr., the official weatherman of the city,
described how the wind at ground level blew straight toward the center of the
fire from all directions, resulting in "a decided whirling motion in the column
of flame and smoke, which was contrary to the hands of a watch." Smoldering
beams and rafters, blazing asphalt roofs, and clouds of smaller sparks and
cinders were all propelled far into the sky. "The very air," one survivor
recalled, "was full of flame." Carried north by the prevailing winds in the
upper atmosphere, the flaming chunks of debris started new fires wherever they
fell. The tremendous heat, moreover, often resulted in spontaneous combustions
far in advance of any actual flames. In the face of such an intense blaze,
mercantile buildings that had been touted as "fireproof"-the downtown built
mostly of brick and stone that was the pride and joy of city boosters-offered
little more resistance than the wooden rookeries of Conley's Patch. Bricks
withstood the heat, but mortar dissolved, collapsing masonry walls. Throughout
the center of the city, marble crumbled and iron melted.

Those who were awake on the North Side could hear the alarms and look south to
see the red glare. But most residents remained in their beds, trusting that the
barrier posed by the main branch of the Chicago River would protect their
division-until they rudely awakened to the fact that this particular fire would
not stop until there was no more to burn. Around 3:30 a.m., the Great Fire
gained its first purchase on the North Side. Flaming debris borne aloft by
convection currents ignited a blaze that disabled the machinery at the municipal
waterworks, and the main body of fire leaped the river soon after. Since Chicago
had just one pumping station and that facility was now incapacitated,
firefighters could do nothing more: for almost twenty hours the fire marched
north, as writer Frank Luzerne observed, "without enemy to oppose it." In the
North Division, where tens of thousands of German and Scandinavian immigrants
resided, fewer lives were lost than in the poorer districts of the South
Division, but nearly every building was incinerated. Among the structures of any
size, only the mansion of real estate millionaire Mahlon D. Ogden miraculously
remained intact, the beneficiary of a lucky shift in the wind. At the northern
limits of the city, four-and-one-half miles distant from its origins in Mrs.
O'Leary's barn, the Great Fire was finally extinguished near midnight. With only
prairie grass and dried sod left for fuel, the holocaust could consume nothing
more.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Smoldering City
by Karen Sawislak
Copyright © 2003
by University of Chicago.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1: Barriers Burned
2: Relief, Aid, and Order
3: Burdens and Boundaries
4: The Meanings of Cooperation
5: Laws and Order
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

Sawislak combines the copious detail of a historian with the vivid portrayals of a storyteller in her investigation of the infamous Chicago fire. Drawing historical accounts from one of the nation's first media frenzies, she examines the various philosophical debates the city faced after the fire in dealing with homelessness, the care and feeding of much of the population and the problem of rebuilding amidst political chaos and people working at cross purposes. She also explains the events that led up to the inferno. ``Intensely dry conditions, a 20-m.p.h. southwest wind, and an unfortunate spark at approximately 10 o'clock on the night of October 8 all combined to turn Chicago into what two historians of the Great Fire would describe as `a vast ocean of flame.'" The rift between the immigrant working class and the wealthy ``native-born'' Chicagoans made Catherine O'Leary (and her infamous bovine) a perfect scapegoat for anti-Irish, anti-working class invective. Highlighted by historical maps, plates and engravings, with an epilogue and notes, Smoldering City presents an extremely thorough and engaging study of this extraordinary disaster. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly