The devastating fire started on October 8, 1871. Though there were several ludicrous theories about how the fire started—including a cow kicking over a lantern and a theory about flaming meteorites caused by a passing comet—the probable cause of the fire was simply high winds fanning a small fire during a year’s long drought that had turned the entire Midwest into a tinderbox that was just waiting for the smallest spark to ignite.
Whatever the cause, the flames spread and the fire quickly became uncontrollable, forcing people to flee. While firefighters tried valiantly to extinguish the blaze, their task was complicated by lack of communications, by lack of professional training and by a shortage of equipment for those fighting the fire. Even when firefighters raced to help other, distant neighbor firemen, they found their hoses would not connect to the hydrants or even to other hoses.
The unusually dry year, the high winds, the almost total lack of preparedness by civil authorities to be unable to fight all but the smallest of fires. This fire, however it started, was the largest and most deadly fire in American history. The really surprising aspect of the fire was that almost no one even noticed that it happened. The New York Times didn’t even report the fire for three days, and even then, it was such a small story that few people even paid attention.
Oh! You thought I was talking about that fire in Chicago? That’s an understandable, innocent mistake, since both fires started on the same day—October 8, 1871–but I was referring to the big fire, the Peshtigo Fire, in northeastern Wisconsin…The fire you’ve probably never heard of.
In the 1870’s, upper Wisconsin was still being settled and most of the new farmers pouring into the virgin forests were poor immigrants. The fastest way to clear the land was to fell the trees, burn them, then plow the ashes back under the soil. This slash and burn agriculture was probably the source of the flames, but no one will ever be sure.
Yes, some excitable people have actually theorized that both this fire and the one that torched Chicago were caused by meteorites. We can probably ignore this theory since not only is there no evidence that such a thing happened in the Midwest in 1871, but there is not one case of meteorites ever starting a fire in history.
The other reason that it took so long for news of the inferno to reach the rest of the country was that there were very few survivors. Due to the drought, there were so many fires across the Northern United States that residents had grown used to smelling smoke, waiting until they actually saw flames before responding. The fire traveled twice as fast as the speediest locomotive and when the fire arrived at small towns and villages, it was if the little communities had been hit by nuclear blast.
The fire destroyed 1.2 million acres and 17 communities, killing somewhere between 1500 and 2500 people.
The exact number of dead will never be known. While the state carefully prepared a list of the known casualties, along with the names of those missing, no one believes that the list is complete. On a fairly regular basis, new mass graves have been discovered, containing unknown victims. The hardest hit community was Peshtigo, where a mass grave contained over 350 bodies. The primary reason that the deceased could not be identified was that there was no one left alive who could connect names with the corpses. The town of Peshtigo was completely destroyed in an hour, with the loss of 800 souls.
It wasn't until days (or even weeks) later, when survivors and witnesses were able to reach larger cities and telegraph offices, that news of the Peshtigo Fire began to spread more widely. The scale of the disaster and the high death toll gradually became known, but the Peshtigo fire never became a news sensation like the “Great” Chicago Fire, that had claimed 300 lives and destroyed 2100 acres.
The Chicago fire was far smaller and caused many fewer casualties than the Peshtigo fire, but it had made the news first, with graphic stories from the numerous survivors who gave detailed interviews. Since it was an urban fire, there were lots of photos of whole streets with destroyed buildings. By comparison, photos of burned trees—regardless of the number—just didn’t seem important. By the time some of the horrific stories of the human losses made their way out of the Wisconsin forest, people were already bored with fires or they simply thought the new stories were about part of the Chicago Fire. Some news sources didn’t even bother reporting the story.
Far worse, by the time the needs of the victims of the Peshtigo Fire were tallied, all of the charitable relief had gone to Chicago. This was long before disaster relief was government-financed, so when the charitable organizations sought contributions from donors a second time, the results fell far short of need. According to the Dictionary of Wisconsin History, there were an additional 1500 severely injured and 3000 made homeless.
The Great Chicago Fire received widespread media attention and became a symbol of urban destruction, leading to significant changes in urban planning and firefighting practices. The Peshtigo Fire, despite being even deadlier, received less national and international attention at the time. It is ironic that the fire that was larger and had a higher death toll—and remains the deadliest wildfire in US history—was less publicized and its victims were less provided for.
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