The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (Oxford History of the United States)

by Richard White

The Chicago Fire started in Catherine and Patrick O’Leary’s barn on the southwest side of Chicago. Like New York, Chicago was very much an animal city, and the cow that supposedly kicked over the lantern was not an unusual resident. The fire spread to working-class bungalows, built from the cheap lumber of the Wisconsin and Michigan pine forests. Chicago and other cities were, as historian Stephen Pyne has pointed out, “wildland fuels … rearranged in form.”32 Gale-force winds whipped the flames and drove them northeast toward the industrial district, where vast piles of lumber shipped in from the forests to the north, coal heaps, and wooden warehouses provided, as one commentator noted, “everything that would make a good fire.” The fire breached the south branch of the Chicago River. It had become so hot that firefighters could not stand before it. It hit the shanties in Conley’s Patch with full force before people could flee, and a disproportionate number of the fire’s approximately three hundred victims perished there and in similar districts. It enveloped the municipal gasworks, creating a spectacular explosion and knocking out the city’s streetlights. By the time the fire reached the central business district, it had become a firestorm, generating its own wind and weather.