The Great Chicago Fire

By Dover Publications

Definitive treatment of 1871 fire — one of the greatest disasters in American history — includes eyewitness accounts and before-and-after illustrations. 70 photographs and engravings.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Release date: Jul 12, 2012
• ISBN: 9780486157023

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HARTE

Joseph Edgar Chamberlin

[At the time of the fire, Chamberlin was a reporter of twenty on the old Chicago Evening Post, afterward consolidated with the Evening Mail. His account was first published in Chicago and the Great Conflagration. issued soon after the fire by Elias Colbert and Everett Chamberlin.]

I was at the scene in a few minutes. The fire had already advanced a distance of about a single square through the frame buildings that covered the ground thickly north of De Koven Street and east of Jefferson Street—if those miserable alleys shall be dignified by being denominated streets [Plate 2]. That neighborhood had always been a terra incognita to respectable Chicagoans, and during a residence of three years in the city I had never visited it. The land was thickly studded with one-story frame dwellings, cow stables, pigsties, corncribs, sheds innumerable; every wretched building within four feet of its neighbor, and everything of wood—not a brick or a stone in the whole area.

The fire was under full headway in this combustible mass before the engines arrived, and what could be done? Streams were thrown into the flame, and evaporated almost as soon as they struck it [Plate 3]. A single fire engine in the blazing forests of Wisconsin would have been as effective as were these machines in a forest of shanties thrice as combustible as the pine woods of the North. But still the firemen kept at work fighting the flames—stupidly and listlessly, for they had worked hard all of Saturday night and most of Sunday, and had been enervated by the whisky which is always copiously poured on such occasions. I stepped in among some sheds south of Ewing Street; a fence by my side began to blaze; I beat a hasty retreat, and in five minutes the place where I had stood was all ablaze. Nothing could stop that conflagration there. It must sweep on until it reached a broad street, and then, everybody said, it would burn itself