Mainstreet Radio's Stephanie Hemphill reports on The Peshtigo Fire, which wiped out the booming mill town of Peshtigo Wisconsin, just north of Green Bay. About two thousand people died.
Everyone's heard of the Chicago Fire, back in the 1800s. According to folklore, it was started by Mrs. O'Leary's cow. It incinerated the city in a single night. That fire killed three hundred people. The Peshtigo Fire happened on the same night and was much worse. School children in Wisconsin learn about the Peshtigo Fire, but most people don't know anything about it… until now. Two books on the subject have come out. Each takes a different approach to the story.
Peter Leschak is the author of “Ghosts of the Fireground,” a reflection on the Peshtigo Fire and his own experiences of firefighting.
Denise Gess is the co-author with William Lutz of “Firestorm at Peshtigo,” a detailed history of the disaster.
Transcripts
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STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: Peshtigo in 1871 was a small town on the Peshtigo River that flows into Green Bay. It was just like other mill towns across Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Lumberjacks cut the trees and left the branches in huge tangles in the woods. Mill workers sawed the logs and made great piles of slabs and sawdust. Settlers burned the stumps to clear land for farming. And the men clearing a route for the new railroad burned whatever was in their way. 1871 was a very dry year.
PETER LESCHAK: There were fires burning all summer and into the fall.
STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: Peter Leschak is the author of Ghosts of the Fireground, a reflection on the Peshtigo fire and his own experiences of firefighting.
PETER LESCHAK: Slash-and-burn agriculture, land clearing, the railroad guys clearing line, and nobody put out fires in those days.
STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: The air was so filled with smoke during the week before the fire that harbormasters on Lake Michigan blew their foghorns constantly to keep ships from crashing into shore. But still, people saw fire as a good thing.
DENISE GESS: The farmers were used to it.
STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: Denise Gess is a co-author of Firestorm at Peshtigo, a detailed history of the disaster.
DENISE GESS: Even the immigrants who came from Belgium and Norway, Sweden, everywhere, Germany, they knew this is how you clear land fire. They saw fire as an ally.
STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: People were used to fires even when they got out of control. But Peter Leschak says no one was prepared for what happened at Peshtigo that day.
PETER LESCHAK: The big trees they were cutting were red pine and white pine. And when that stuff gets to be red slash, as it's called when it dries out, it's incredibly volatile. And then it all came together on October 8, when a huge cyclonic low system, cold front, came sweeping in from the Western part of the country.
STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: The difference in temperature on each side of the cold front was probably 40 degrees. That set up furious winds that fanned prairie fires all over the region. Fires were burning all over from Chicago, north to Michigan, and as far west as Minnesota.
PETER LESCHAK: And basically at one point or another, several small fires joined into one huge fire. It becomes more or less stationary over Peshtigo. And why there? I'm not sure. Perhaps, with all the buildings, I mean, any building is just another fuel arrangement. So you had a very tightly arranged fuel in the town itself.
STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: The blaze has developed into a firestorm. The heat generated by the burning trees and buildings caused a column of hot air to rise over the town. Cold air rushing in to take its place fanned the flames. That caused more hot air to rise.
The town was at the center of a tornado of flame. The fire was coming from all directions at once. And the winds were roaring at 100 miles an hour.
Some people in Peshtigo managed to struggle to the river. A Catholic priest arrived at the river and found people standing at the banks. He pushed one of them into the water, and the rest followed. They stood in the river for hours. Some of them survived.
PETER LESCHAK: And of course, it is very clear, because all of the smoke and gases have been sucked up, they're gone. They are witnessing something that very few people have ever witnessed and lived to tell the tale, which is they're at the center of this hurricane of flame, and it's incredible. And small wonder, their hair was bursting into flame if they didn't keep ducking their heads into the water. And to have survived that is just amazing, just amazing.
STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: Most people weren't so lucky. Karl Lamp and his wife were German immigrants who were trying to build a farm. Denise Gess says when she was researching her book, she came to think of this couple as representing the fortitude of immigrant settlers and the heartbreak they faced.
DENISE GESS: I mean, this man saved up all of his money to have his 40 acres, finally gets them cleared. And here they are. She's working at the Peshtigo woodenware factory. And he's out there clearing stumps. She was pregnant with their fourth child when the fire struck. And he managed to get them all out of the house and onto a wagon and thought that they could run from it.
But you can't run from a fire that's moving that quickly. And the wagon wheel fell off. And he saw that the family was still safe. The horse went up in flames. And he turned around for a second and turned back. And there was his whole family in flames.
PETER LESCHAK: The ambient air temperature is probably 500, 600, 700 degrees, which means that they weren't going to live very long anyway. If your clothes are bursting into flame, you are also doing extreme damage to your respiratory tract. But I think there was probably a lot of intense pain that went on. And I think that's why, for example, there's the account of the one man who slit the throats of all of his children to spare them this death by fire.
STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: The fire went out when it had burned up everything in Peshtigo. The survivors rebuilt the town. But it wasn't a booming mill town anymore. The trees were gone.
But that wasn't the end of the monstrous fires. As the lumber camps and railroads and settlers moved west, the fires moved with them. In Minnesota, there were several major fires. In 1894, the Hinckley fire killed more than 400 people. And in 1918, the Cloquet fire killed more than 500 people.
PETER LESCHAK: It didn't really end until they basically got all the timber. They weren't going to stop the practices that were making them rich. It wasn't worth it to them to treat the slash, to log in a way that would not create such fuel. And essentially, that era ended when all the big timber was gone.
STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: The Peshtigo fire was horrific. But many years later, scientists tried to recreate it. Denise Gess says during World War II, the US military studied the Peshtigo fire to learn how to make firestorms. And then they made them, by dropping tons and tons of bombs on Dresden and Tokyo. More people died in those cities than died in Hiroshima.
DENISE GESS: The Peshtigo fire was a model for the firestorms of Dresden and Tokyo. They actually did make a demo first for themselves, a little scale model of wood and buildings and how you would drop bombs until it created a firestorm, something that devastating and that hot.
STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: Denise Gess is co-author of Firestorm at Peshtigo. Peter Leschak is author of Ghosts of the Fireground. I'm Stephanie Hemphill, Minnesota Public Radio.