That. If you have a question, you will see below our speakers here the ask a question button. Simply type in that question, youre not disturbing anybody else, theyre not seeing what youre typing at the moment, and youll have that question in the queue when we get to the q a portion of the evening. Another interesting part is you can look and see what other people have asked. If you like the question they asked, you tap a little like thing, and that sends it up higher on the queue. To if a lot of people are interested in a question and theyve clicked on it, thatll be the question weve noticed first to ask professor smith at the end of the evening when we get to the q a portion. Finally, buy the book here, you click on that, and even after this event is over, theres a button that takes you right to our web site where you can purchase a down of chicagos great fire. A copy. Big box Stores Like Amazon and target and walmart are all doing really well right now during the pandemic. The places that are really struggle are small indie bookstores, so were really grateful to you to keep us going and keep us able to bring this great programming. Its especially important now when a lot of us are feeling kind of confined and stuck, we can at least explore all sorts of regions and places and facts with our minds. So thank you all so much for being here. One more thing, if you run into trouble with your screen at all, if, for example, the video freezes or the sound gets a little wonky, what weve found is just hit your refresh button on your browser. I was a viewer and not a participant last night in our crowd cast, and i was going to all i had to do was hit that are e fresh button, and my video that had frozen came right back up. Fred had a question, do we have signed copies of the book . We do not currently, but we will work with professor smith to get some signed bookplates for him. All right, with that, im going to turn things over to our very own jon grand, hes our nonfiction guru, all the book sellers go to him. So im going to take off the screen and give it over to our guests. Thank you, jon and carl, both for being with us this evening. Thank you. Thanks, robert. Well, good evening, and welcome to our discussion of chicagos great fire. Our author is well known on american urban history and particularly chicago history. Hes professor of english and american studies and por of history professor of history emeritus at northwestern university. It may come as a surprise to many of you that until now there hasnt been a truly definitive history of the chicago fire. Why is that . Well, i think were about to find out. So please join me in welcoming dr. Carl smith. Welcome, carl. Hi. Glad to be here. Well, lets just of jump into this. Its worth noting that the chicago fire started on this very day, october 8, 1871, 149 years ago. Sometime between 89 p. M. , so keep an eye on the horizon if it turns red if historys repeating itself. But i thought wed begin by exonerating daisy e and looking at where and how the fire really started. Well, mrs. Oleary was blamed again and again, but she was common rated even as early as exonerated as early as december or i should say at least cleared within two months after the fire by the official inquiry e by the fire marshal. And daisy is just a name somebody after the fact assigned a Norman Rockwell painting, mrs. Oleary milking daisy. Daisy was one of four cows. We hope definitively and finally they were absolutely exonerated by the Chicago City Council in 1997. But legends die hard and what also gets forgotten in all this was those cows and the horse, not the calf, were the first victims of the fire. It started, in all likelihood, in the barn or very close tout around 9 00 that night. But there were dozens of fires just like it. Things happen like this for whatever set of reasons, a spark somewhere, anything. But this was, was unique and kind of a perfect storm of circumstances that allowed it to get out of hand so quickly and burn the city down. The magnitude of this thing, it seemed that chicago was almost waiting for a fire of this scale. And as you point out, there was a confluence of things which made this, as you say, the perfect storm. Talk to us a little bit about that, what had happened and why sure. Sure. There were some sort of ambient things and then what made this one particularly dangerous were the come by nation of things. First of all and the biggest one was that the night before about a mile to the north was another by any comparison major fire very near where Union Station is now. Four full city blocks were burned out. And that kept going well into sunday morning. The fire started on a saturday night. The earlier fire was called the saturday night fire. And by the time it was over, much of the Fire Department equipment was damaged, about a thursday of the men were third of the men were incapacitated and exhausted. They had fought for Something Like 15 hours. And then six or seven hours after they were finally done, this fire began. The second thing is that there was a fatal kind of delay in the fire alarms. Chicago had a state of the art Fire Department in the sense that it was all steamdriven equipment and a telegraph alarm system. But it, for reasons that have never been explained, there was about a half an hour delay from the time the first alarm was turned in. And the department was aware of the fire mostly by sight at that point. Another thing then that there was a strong wind from the southwest, so the fire started west of the downtown, south and west of downtown, so anything was below it and it went to the north side, and basically the whole downtown9 and the whole north side that bore the greatest brunt of this fire. And so by the time the Fire Department got there, it was already out of control. And the final thing is the Fire Department was just much too small. I should say not the final thing, it was overincapacitated. The other thing is that chicago was built almost entirely out of wood. In some ways it was as if you laid a fire. Because not only were all these buildings made out of wood, but even the better ones made out of brick and stone had wood signs all over them and wood decoration all over this many. And on top of all that, as i said, the Fire Department was undermanned and underequiped and things just got off the hand very, very quickly. And once it got going, it was unstoppable. And then i should say, i keep saying the final thing. And then around three in the morning, fire started around nine, the roof of the pumping station this is still the same one thats this on Michigan Avenue and chicago avenue fell in, and no more water was to be had. But even if there had been, i doubt the fire could have been stopped at that point. Yeah. You know, you note in the book that initially the Fire Department was sent in the wrong direction. Yes. Well, a couple of things. When someone in the coupe la of the courthouse which is what was city hall was called this those days spotted the fire, there was a cupola and a watchmans walk, he told the telegraph operate or or downstairs where to look, where the fire was, and he missed literally by a mile. He had the right direction but not the right distance. Yeah. And this might have been thrown off in part by the saturday night fire and embers still blowing from that. You mentioned that at the time the Fire Department was considered state of the art, people had a great deal of confidence in the ability of the Fire Department to manage a fire. In fact, they had yeah, not quite. I mean, the city newspapers, many of them like the tribune and the Fire Department itself said were very good, but we need much more equipment with, we need more pumps, we need more pressure, all these other things. Yeah. Yeah, thats right. I misspoke. What i was trying to get at was even had they been the finest Fire Department imaginable, this fire spread so quickly and with such great and with temperatures that are almost unbelievable. Absolutely. 700 degrees fahrenheit. Again, this half hour head start really meant by the time they got to it, it was out of control. Expect wind from the southwest and the wind from the southwest threw hot air, pushed hot air, thrust up burning pieces of chicago and then threw them further north and east. So the fires not all fire, but multiple fires joining and gathering as it landed in a particularly juicy spot, started again, and thats why the tour could leap the chicago the fire could leap the Chicago River not once, but twice, and did it with tremendous ease. There were some places that were 2 miles away that were getting embers landing on them. Yeah. Yeah, you mentioned people would try to hose down their buildings while there was still pressure, and even that wasnt enough to stop no. But the wind, it would just disperse it it into a spray, and it was just helpless. It was an infer now, it wasnt a fire. In the midst of this, you tell an amazing number of stories that, you know, range from almost the comedic to truly [inaudible] various human recording of the way that people were trying to cope with it, people were trying to salvage things and what they tried to salvage. I wonder if youd just take a few minutes and recount a few of those stories because thats what makes this thing come alive. Well, first of all, thank you very much. I tried to write it, obviously, as the narrative that it is. The fire is mainly a human story. A city of 330,000 people, it made 90,000 of them overnight homeless. And i read about 200 personal accounts of what, of peoples experiences. Finish and as you say, a tremendous range of wealthy and poor people, people of all ages, immigrants and workers and so on. The main thing is at first they thought it was they were used to all these fires. It would be over there and it would stop. And then slowly it dawned on them that its not going to stop, and then theres this panic. They grabbed their children, they grabbed their parents, they grabbed the canary, theyd graham grab whatever and sometimes crazy stuff. And they tried to save things also. But by doing things which seemed almost impossible except in account after account, things like a stove or a piano and people carrying a length of hose or things that had great sentimental value like the painting of a dead child or Something Like that. But also, again strangely darkly comic things. One man started to bury all his stuff, he got overheated, so he took off all his clothes, and he buries them too. Or someone seeing someone come out of his own house with the owners clothing on or taking or stealing things. Saying, well, what the hell, you know . Better you take it than it gets burned up or Something Like that. Or a man leaving his house and as hes leaving knowing that hes leaving it for the last time and its going to be burned up, locking the door. This deeply human stuff. But its mostly people trying to figure out, you know, what really matters to them. Also when people saw the downtown burning. They lived outside of it, but a lot of people would go downtown to get business stuff, important papers. One of them was robert todd lincoln, the son of abraham lincoln, who was a young lawyer just starting out his career in chicago at that time. And basically threw a bunch of things onto a table cloth and then carried it out like, stuff out in a sack. Yeah. You know, people think, gee, what a strange sight, and and yet as you and i were talking a little bit with earlier, you know, if you look at some of the pictures of refugees even modern day, you see them, you know, in hand carts with mattresses piled on top and a couple of kids perched yeah. And the mattresses are significant. That may have been for a lot of people who had no, very little money, very little property except what was in their house and no insurance, the mattress was probably the most valuable thing they owned. The other thing thats so, so stark in this, and it starts with the cover of the book, of course, is the photographs of the damage. And they reminded me at least of the photographs that were taken after the fall of richmond, for example, in the civil war and more recently of bear runs at the end of berlin at the end of world war ii. You wonder how does this ever get put back together. Indeed. Well, as i write in the book, a number of the same illustrators and photographers had photographed the civil war. George barnard had followed sherman on his march through georgia, and he took pictures of charleston and atlanta, and then he took pictures of chicago. Illustrated for harpers weekly are. They had previously not very long ago covered the civil war. Now, how it came back, remarkable story there is how quickly it came back and how robustly it came back. And the reason for that is chicago is if such a terrible thing had to happen, it couldnt have happened at a better time. This was when chicago was on a major upswing. Chicago was built by a lot of local effort, people who had come there from all over the country and the world. But it was largely funded with outside money from the new york banks, east coast banks and european banks and so on who saw in this place a place to invest. This great inland nexus where the railroad, all the Railroad Tracks came together. You couldnt take a train through chicago, you had to switch there if you wanted to go on. And it was a great place to which the Raw Materials of the Great American bounty of the midwest and the further west, the Rocky Mountain west came east, and all the manufactured goods came west, and people in every which direction. And the same forces that built chicago in the first place then rebuilt it quickly right after because the main, its main asset was its location. And much of the infrastructure the telegraph, the railroad were not harmed. You mentioned that. And also the stockyards were largely unhurt. Stockyards were 4 miles from downtown, completely out of the way of the fire. And the Grain Elevators as well. So you had at least some income, some capital and employment that was able to continue. Well, indeed. And some of the employment is in the rebuilding too. Of course. Yes. We cannot, though overestimate how hard a time this was and how stunning this was and how appalling an i experience for the people who went through it. And there was this period of great difficulty between exhilaration and despair. But it did get going, and it didnt really end and only paused with the Great Depression at the end of 1873, the panic of 1873. But by then the downtown that had been rebuilt was twice as big as the one the fire had consumed, and people just never stopped coming to chicago because it was the place to go. And by the time of 1890, there was a million people, three times the size it was at the time of the fire only less than 20 years later earlier. You write that you call the fire a titanic and worldaltering catastrophe beyond the grasp of imagination. And the number of dead, the number of people homeless, the number of buildings lost, numbers are difficult to accept even today. Yeah. The dead is what [inaudible] right. Thats partly because people could see it coming and could escape. The numbers are almost miraculously low, maybe the middle hundreds. It covers a lot of single people in chicago that may have disappeared with no trace in some way. One of the great coincidences although because of the dry summer its not such a coincidence is that the very same night the lumber town in wisconsin near green bay went up. And that to this day is the single largest loss of fire in a single fire. It just surprised these people, and about 1500 people were horribly burned to death in the firestorm that happened that evening. The chicago fire in terms of 122 miles of sidewalks, 3 square miles of [inaudible] 18,000 buildings, you know, unbelievable numbers. Yeah. The wisconsin fire obviously gets second fiddle to the chicago fire in many ways. People know more about the chicago fire than they do, but it was a horrific, horrific disaster. It also speaks to what chicago was at the time of the fire yeah. It was this nexus, this place that the telegraph was and the trains all came through. It was, i talk about probably the first viral, instantaneous news event. So that if you picked up the newspaper in new york on monday morning while chicago was still burning because the fire started around 9 00 monday and didnt end until after midnight sunday night it began and didnt end until after midnight on monday morning tuesday morning, people in new york at 8 or 9 00 in the morning open the newspaper and see chicago is burning. And knew more about what was happening in the city than the people who were there who were running from the fire or burned out or certainly had no newspapers to resort to. You mentioned that the failure of the cook back in 1873, which thats a major depression, and then theres a second smaller fire in 1874. The fire of 1874 is by, again, most other standards a major fire just south of where the other one had been in the area that we would call the south loop now area. And what that speaks to among other things is how slow chicago was to make many changes improving Fire Prevention and that chicago only made those changes because right around the time of that fire and certainly right after this, the National FireInsurance Association said were just not going to write any more insurance to you people until you get a better Fire Department, better water supply and that sort of thing. The other thing that you talk about is as a rebuilding process goes forward, its often hinder ored as much as helped by politics. Well, politics or socioeconomics would be an elegant way to say is it. Chicago was a very divided place socially. About 20 of the population, which was almost all white protestant people from basically e the northeast, owned virtually all the wealth. While the overwhelming percentage of the population was either immigrants or children of immigrants. At the time of the tour, almost 50 of the fire, almost 50 of chicagoans were born in another country, most of them in germany or ireland. And about 75, 80 had at least one foreignborn parent. And these