3 – Peshtigo Fire, October 1871
The Great Chicago Fire was one of the defining moments in the history of the Midwest, but in truth, it wasn’t even the most devastating fire that took place that day. October 10, 1871 has gone down in infamy as the day that the Great Lakes burned, where flames consumed Wisconsin and Michigan as well as Illinois. The largest of them all, the Peshtigo Fire, has been largely forgotten but is in fact the deadliest fire in US history and, indeed, the deadliest ever recorded wildfire.
The town of Peshtigo, Wisconsin, is just 250 miles up the shore of Lake Michigan from Chicago but in 1871, was a world away from the bustling city. The some 2,000 folks who called Peshtigo home were predominantly farmers, and would regularly set wildfires in order to clear the vast swathes of forest that surrounded their town in order to create new pastoral land. This was usually a relatively safe task, as fires would burn themselves out, but the atmospheric conditions were to make this routine job deadly.
The summer of 1871 had been long, hot and dry. Months worth of logging and deforestation had left the land littered with sawdust and wood, debris from the extensive railway construction that was linking the Midwest with the Pacific Ocean. As October rolled around, a colder weather front came in from the west and met the small fires, quickly turning them into huge, out of control infernos. When they linked up, a firestorm began.
Firestorms are rare natural phenomenons, but when they are in full flow they are lethal. The heat of the flames changes the atmospheric conditions, sucking in oxygen from the surrounding area, resulting in localised gale force winds. A thermal column is created, as the rising heat attached to the strong wind becomes a tornado. In Peshtigo, the firestorm was so strong that it jumped the river, causing many residents to take shelter in the waters. The Peshtigo Fire was uncontrollable and devastated the whole community, killing an estimated 75% of the whole town’s population and reducing all but one building to cinder.
It was far from the only fire that struck the Midwest on that fateful day in 1871. Across Lake Michigan, the coastal towns of Holland and Manistee in Michigan were also reduced to ashes, with the same combination of dry weather, extensive logging and freak winds coming together to wreak havoc. Further east, at the southern end of Lake Huron, Port Huron was also destroyed. Over the border, Windsor, Ontario also suffered.
Rumours were rife about the causes of the fires. Within just a few years, many posited a theory that a comet had struck the region and caused the devastation, or at least, that the methane that had been left by Comet Biela, which certainly was in circulation at the time of the fires, had added to the fuel for the flames. More likely is the deadly combination of dry wood, caused by logging and a drought, plus irregular and unusually strong winds that came as the winter weather fronts arrived.