The Great Fire: Chapters 5–7

It can be reasonably assumed that she was surrounded by a frightening cacophony of sounds — wood igniting and burning wildly, the glass of windows exploding, stairways and ceilings collapsing.

I was wet and scorched and bedraggled. My clothes were burnt full of holes on my arms and shoulders and back.

Men who wrote about the Great Fire generally portrayed women as passive and helpless, waiting for their husbands, brothers, or some other man to save them. This seemed to go doubly for women who were wealthier. But if we look beyond the condescending references, a remarkable picture of strong and very active women emerges.

At this point, her aged father balked at leaving the house, insisting that the fire would change direction before it got to them.

The Great Fire would have burned until it ran out of city, then continued its hungry march across the prairie. Nothing the firemen or citizens of Chicago did seemed to stop the fire’s insatiable quest for fuel.

Sadly, no one had considered the hazards that might result from stagnant water in the pipes. It seems that “the pipes had become foul from the deposits of the muddy stream from the river. The consequence was much sickness for about two weeks, especially among children.”

As the days crept by, more and more people shook off their despondency and began to rebuild their homes and businesses.

Some large permanent brick edifices have already been reared on the scene of the ruins, and many others are in the process of erection.

Something deeper, more pernicious was at work here: a wide division between the wealthy and the poor that was made worse by fear.

The fire had obliterated the heart of the city, its very center of business and culture, then had gone on to wipe out the residences of its wealthiest and most powerful citizens.

The next day, up in the more affluent North Division, Jonas Hutchinson was numbed by the spectacle he beheld: "As far as the fire reached, the city is thronged with desperadoes who are plundering and trying to set new fires....Several were shot and others hung to lampposts last night....The like of this sight since Sodom and Gomorrah has never met human vision.”

In Chicago, city officials did nothing to soften the idea that the fire was caused by the city’s poor. To do so would have forced people to look elsewhere for a culprit — a search that would have invited questions about the city’s blatant lack of emergency planning.

Without cash, they were unable to hire carpenters and masons to rebuild their homes. The city made no arrangements to help less fortunate citizens procure loans necessary for the actual work.

The poor are driven by inexorable necessity into ‘the poor quarters’ of the city, where they pull each other further down from all chance and hope.

These tensions and animosities would brew and simmer for many decades, and eventually they would result in urban unrest on a grand scale in the twentieth century.