‘All gone but wife, children and energy’
Days after the Great Fire, the first building in Chicago’s devastated business district was up
“The fire can scarcely be said to have been conquered; rather it spent its fury, grew tired and abandoned further devastation.” — Edgar Lee Master, who wrote in “Tale of Chicago”
Mathias Schaffer was a night watchman. On the night of Sunday, Oct. 8, he was, as part of his duties, walking the catwalk in the tower of the Cook County Courthouse and City Hall, 120 feet above the city, scanning the sky and ground.
He saw flames to the southwest and sent the first alarm. He got it wrong, sending that alarm to Box 342, located in the general direction of the fire but a mile beyond it, and the steam fire engines “America” and “Little Giant” were dispatched.
The fire that sparked the Great Chicago Fire was initially discovered by a character named Daniel “Pegleg” Sullivan, who was sitting on the sidewalk on the south side of De Koven Street across from the barn owned by Patrick and Catherine O’Leary.
He would testify in an investigation conducted by the Chicago Board of Police and Fire Commissioners that the time was 20 or 25 minutes past 9 p.m. (He would later become a prime suspect in many theories about who started the fire before he vanished under history’s dust while the O’Leary myth persisted).
All the city’s fire companies were exhausted from fighting fires, especially the blaze the night before. By the time “America” and “Little Giant” arrived at the scene, the fire was out of control, plowing north and east, the wind whipping embers across streets and then across the river. Entire blocks went up in flames as fire units were hampered by streets filling with terrified people and equally panicked horses.
One early magnet for the fleeing crowds was the courthouse-city hall at Randolph and Clark streets, but a few hours after the fire started its roof had begun to smolder. The bell in its tower clanged constantly until 2 a.m. That’s when the towers collapsed along with the roof.
For a short time, the new Tribune building at the southeast corner of Dearborn and
Madison streets seemed safe. But the fire doubled back. As Lloyd Wendt described it in his authoritative 1979 book, “Chicago Tribune: The Rise of a Great American Newspaper,” “There was a tremendous crash as the wall of the McVickers Theater collapsed, falling against the Tribune Building and ripping it open to the flames, and soon it, too, was afire.”
Most of the people fleeing the flames ran west to the farmland or east to the shores of Lake Michigan, burying what valuables they had been able to save in the sand and seeking safety in the lake.
On Monday, as the fire still raged, the city’s mayor, Roswell B. Mason, tried to control the panic-stricken populace, ordering all saloons closed and making a wildly hopeful public statement: “It is believed that the fire has spent its force and all will soon be well.”
But the fire still burned and as has ever happened in the face of calamity, marauding looters and thieves took advantage. As Edgar Lee Masters wrote in “Tale of Chicago,” “Bad men in the spell of whiskey, haggard, collarless, some ragged and filthy, and blackened with smoke, glided through the masses, picking pockets, having turned to wolves in this time of despair. … Women were shrieking as they were knocked down by robbers in order to take small bundles of clothing, or what not.”
The fire burned, building to building, block to block, through the business district and onward to residential districts. It burned and leveled the homes of the rich and the poor, factories and schools, theaters, churches and brothels. Nothing was spared but for a very few lucky structures.
And then it was over, as a gentle rain began to fall early Tuesday. There was nothing left to burn. The fire had reached all the way to the city’s northern border, which was then at Fullerton Avenue. As Masters put it, “The fire can scarcely be said to have been conquered; rather it spent its fury, grew tired and abandoned further devastation.”
“Notable citizens stood about lamenting that Chicago was ruined now, that St. Louis and Cincinnati would get the trade that had been Chicago’s,” wrote Masters.
People shared their stories of loss. Federal troops were ordered to the city. Arsonists crept about the unscorched areas, lighting more fires. And, as Masters put it, “Citizens were crazed with fear and worn down ...”
One of them, however, showed remarkable vitality. A young real estate developer named William D. Kerfoot was the first to erect a building in the devastated business district.
On Washington Street between Clark and Dearborn streets, he and some friends put up a wooden shack. Affixed to it was a crude sign: “ALL GONE BUT WIFE, CHILDREN AND ENERGY.”