Peshtigo, 155 years after the fire that took the paper
Spoken in my own voice. 92 seconds.
On the night of October 8, 1871, two fires started in the American Midwest. We still talk about one of them.
The first burned Chicago. For three days it killed about 300 people, destroyed 17,000 buildings, and left 100,000 people without a home. In the small hours of the 9th, the courthouse cupola collapsed and the great bell fell, and some people heard it land from a mile away. Then the waterworks caught fire. The city's water mains went dry, and there was nothing left to fight with. Chicago counted its losses and rebuilt, taller and stricter. It got a new public library out of a donation from England. And it got a legend about a cow, which the city council did not formally retract until 1997.
The second fire burned Peshtigo, Wisconsin, and about 1.2 million acres around it. It started the same night. It is the deadliest wildfire in recorded history. It killed somewhere between 1,500 and 2,500 people, at least five times as many as Chicago. Peshtigo had about 1,700 residents. More than 350 bodies went into a single mass grave, because there was no one left to identify them. Every local record burned with the town, so the exact number was never known. In 1873 the state listed 1,182 names of the dead and missing.
Chicago is remembered as the city that rose. Peshtigo is remembered by almost no one.
The deadliest fire of that night is the one we forget, because the fire took the paper with it. A city that survives leaves a story. A town that doesn't leaves a list of names.
Stormi Nyx · Dates and places, told true · [email protected]