Copyright USGenNet Inc., 2012, All Rights Reserved U.S. Data Repository Please read U.S. Data Repository Copyright Statement on this page: Transcribed and submitted by Linda Talbott for the US Data Repository http://www.us-data.org/ ========================================================================= U.S. Data Repository NOTICE: These electronic pages may NOT be reproduced in any format for profit or presentation by any other organization. Non-commercial organizations desiring to use this material must obtain the consent of the transcriber prior to use. Individuals desiring to use this material in their own research may do so. ========================================================================= Formatted by U.S. Data Repository Chief Archivist, Linda Talbott All of the above information must remain when copied or downloaded. =========================================================================== Source: "The Great Calamity!" Scenes, Incidents and Lessons of the Great Chicago Fire of the 8th and 9th of October, 1871. Also Some Account of Other Great Conflagrations of Modern Times, and the Burning of Peshtigo, Wisconsin. - Alfred L. Sewell, Chicago, IL - 1871 Page 94 THE BURNING OF PESHTIGO In the beginning of our account of the Chicago Conflagration we made reference to the great fires in the pine woods of Wisconsin and Michi- gan. The loss of life was greater in those fearful fires than in the Chicago disaster. It is estimated that over a thousand human beings perished in the flames that swept like a besom of destruction over thousands of acres of wooded country in the North-West. Involved in this wholesale destruction was the village of Peshtigo, near Green Bay, Wisconsin. This was one of the most appalling disasters on record. It occurred on the same day on which the great Chicago fire commenced. A correspondent of the New York Tribune, writing from Peshtigo (or where it had been) under date of October 20, 1871, thus describes the horrid visitation and its incidents, and the scenes after the destruction of the village: "This letter, to give it a local habitation and a name, is dated where Peshtigo was. In the glory of this Indian Summer afternoon I look out on the ghastliest clearing that every lay before mortal eyes. The sandy streets glisten with a frightful smoothness, and calcined fragments are all that remain of imposing edifices and hundreds of peaceful homes. This ominous clearing is in the center of a blackened, withered forest of oak, pine, and tamarack, with a swift river - the Peshtigo - gliding silently through the center from north-east to south-west. Situated seven miles from the Green Bay, on the Peshtigo River, the town commanded all the lumber trade of the northern penin- sula, and grew rapidly into importance as a frontier mart of Chicago. Built by an enterprising by lately singularly unfortunate Chicago sufferer, William B. Ogden, the town has had but one purpose, to make money for its founder and keep up the lumber interests. But one in- dustry breeds many, and in time a railroad running seven miles to the Bay connected the little city with the great chain of lakes. Great founderies and machine-shops rose on the banks of the river, and a busy mill stood in ceaseless operation in the center of the town. The banks of the Peshtigo teem with a rich and various growth of timber, and a trade of years stood always in prospective to her busy people. The great Northern Pacific Railroad was to be tapped by a road even now building to the place where Peshtigo was, and every hamlet and town in Northern Wisconsin envied and admired the wonderful little city. "The keen eye of trade and speculation was not deceived; population flocked in amain, and fully two thousand people had established permanent homes. The site was well chosen for beauty as well as business; the river at this point runs through a slight bluff, which breaks into a low flat before the stream escapes from the borders of the Page 95 town. The excellent water-power, as well as the lumber interest, had determined the spot, and a mill was one of the first establishments in operation when the walls of the village began to rise. Below the mill the ground on either bank sloped gently into low, pebbly flats, which joined the water's edge a few rods from the center of the town. The business and residence streets were wide and well laid out, the houses prettily built and carefully painted, and little ornamental gardens were frequent. "The river cut the town pretty fairly in twain, the works and shops of the Peshtigo Company covering most of the north-eastern shore, while trade and business for the main part held themselves on the south- western bank. The site was, and is to this day, unmistakably a clearing. A solid wall of pine, oak, and tamarack hedge in the deso- late waste even now. As it stood, the pretty bustling village combined the orderly enterprise of New England and the irrepressible vigor of the typical Western 'city.' Roads cut through the forest communicated with a long line of prospering lumbering hamlets and thriving farms, to the west and south. The surrounding woods were interspersed with innumerable open glades, of crisp brown herbage and dried furze, which had for weeks glowed with the Autumn fires that infest these regions. Little heed was paid them, for the first rain would inevitably quench the flames. But the rain never came, and finally, valiant battle was waged far and near against the slowly increasing fires. In this, as in other towns, the danger was thought well warded off by the general precautions. The fire had raged up to the very outskirts of the town weeks before that fatal Sunday, and the fires set outward to fight the enemy. Every thing flammable had apparently been taken out of harm's way on that memorable Sunday. One careful citizen traversed the western outskirt, and assured his people that no danger could come from that quarter. "The sharp air of early October had sent the people in from the evening church services more promptly than usual, although numbers delayed to speculate on a great noise and ado which set in ominously from the west. The housewives looked tremblingly at the fires and lights within, and the men took a last look at the possibilities without; for many it was truly a last glimpse. The noise grew in volume, and came nearer and nearer, with terrific crackling and detonations. The forest rocked and tossed tumultuously; a dire alarm fell upon the imprisoned village, for the swirling blasts came now from every side. In one awful instant, before expectation could give shape to the horror, a great flame shot up in the western heavens, and in countless fiery tongues struck downward into the village, piercing every object that stood in the town, like a red-hot bolt. A deafening roar, mingled with blasts of electric flame, filled the air and paralyzed every soul in the place. There was no beginning to the work of ruin; the flaming whirlwind swirled in an instant through the town. There is no diversity in general experience; all heard the first inex- plicable roar; some aver that the earth shook, while a credulous few avow that the heavens opened, and the fire rained down from above. Moved by a common instinct, for all knew that the woods that encircled the town were impenetrable, every habitation was deserted to the flames, and the gasping multitude flocked to the river. On the west the mad horde saw the bridge in flames in a score of places, and, turning sharply to the Page 96 left, with one accord, plunged into the water. Three hundred people wedged themselves in between the rolling booms, swayed to and fro by the current, where they roasted in the hot breath of flame that hovered above them and singed the hair on each head momentarily exposed above the water. Here despairing men and women held their children till the cold water came as an ally to the flames, and deprived them of strength. "Meantime the eastern bank was densely crowded by the dying and the dead. Rushing to the river from this direction the swirling blasts met the victims full in the face and mowed a swath through the fleeing throng. Inhalation was annihilation. Scores fell before the first blast. A few were able to crawl to the pebbly flats, but so dreadfully disfigured that death must have been preferable. All could not reach the river; even the groups that fell prone on the grateful damp flats suffered excruciating agony. The fierce blaze, playing in tremendous counter currents above them on the higher ground, was sufficiently strong to set the clothing aflame, and the flying sand, heated as by a furnace, blistered the flesh wherever it fell. All that could break through the stifling simoon had come to the river. In the red glare they could see the sloping bank covered with the bodies of those who fell by the way. Few living on the back streets succeeded in reaching the river, the hot breath of the fire cutting them down as they ran. But here a new danger befell. The cows, terrified by smoke and flame, rushed in a great lowing drove to the river brink. Women and children were trampled by the frightened brutes, and many losing their hold on the friendly logs, were swept under the waters. "This was the situation above the bridge; below, a no less harrowing thing happened. The burning timbers of the mill, built at the edge of the bridge, blew and floated down upon the multitude assembled near the flats, and inflicted the most lamentable sufferings. The men fought this new death bitterly; those who were fortunate enough to have coats, flung them over the heads of wives and children, and dipped water with their hats on the improvised shelter. Scores had every shred of hair burned off in the battle, and many lost their lives in protecting others. The firemen had made an effort to save some of the buildings, and the hose was run from the river to some important edifice. The heat instantly stopped the attempt, but not before the hose, swollen with water, had been burned through in a hundred places. Although the onslaught of fire and wind had been instantaneous, and the destruction almost simultaneous, the fierce, stifling currents of heat careened through the air for hours. These currents were more fatal than the flames of the burning village. Ignorant of the extent of the fire, and the frightful combination of wind and flames, many of the company's workmen, some with wives and children, shut themselves up in the great brick building and perished in the raging heats of the next half hour. Others on the remote streets broke for the clearing beyond the woods, but few ever passed the burning barrier. Within the boundaries of the town and accessible to the multitude, the river accommodation was rather limited, and when the animals had crowded in, the situation was full of despair. The flats were covered with prone figures with packs ablaze and faces pressed rigidly into the cooling, moist earth. The flames played about and above all with an incessant deafening roar. Page 97 "The tornado was but momentary, but was succeeded by maelstroms of fire, smoke, cinders, and red-hot sand. Wherever a building seemed to resist the fire, the roof would be sent whirling in the air, breaking into clouds of flame as it fell. The shower of sparks, cinders, and hot sand fell in continuous and prodigious force, and did quite as much in killing the people as the first terrific sirocco that succeeded the fire. The wretched throng neck-deep in the water, and the still more helpless beings stretched on the heated sands, were pierced and blistered by those burning particles. They seemed like lancets of red- hot steel, penetrating the thickest covering. The evidence now remains to attest the incredible force of the slenderest pencils of darting flame. Hard iron-wood plow-handles still remain, perforated as though by minnie-balls, and for the main part unburned. When the hapless dwellers in the remote streets saw themselves cut off from the river, groups broke in all directions in a wild panic of fright and terror. A few took refuge in a cleared field bordering on the town. Here, flat upon the ground, with faces pressed in the sand, the helpless sufferers lay and roasted. But few survived the dreadful agony. The next day revealed a picture exceeding in horror any battle-field. Mothers with children hugged closely lay in rigid groups, the clothes burned off, and the poor flesh seared to a crisp. One mother, solicitous only for her babe, embalms her unutterable love in the terrible picture left on these woeful sands. With her bare fingers she had scraped out a pass, as the soldiers did before Petersburg, and pressing the little one into this, she put her own body above it as a shield, and when the daylight came, both were dead - the little baby, face unscarred, but the mother burned almost to cinders. "The hardy lumbermen are not wont to exaggerate, and the perfect accord of every story and incident confirm every episode of this tragedy. Faithful to the helpless, a stout woodman carried out on his shoulders one deadly sick of fever. He burrowed for the helpless body a sepulcher, and then began the struggle for his own life. He had lingered too long, and his scarred body was found near the refuge of the man his heroism had preserved. "The tornado played through the desolated streets, and swept the river and the low land adjoining. The timber of the mill floating down among the people, made additional labor and danger, and daylight broke terribly on the saturated survivors before they dared drag their cramped limbs from the icy waters. The mingled crowd of men, women and children, cows and swine, had helf this watery refuge since 10 o'clock of the night before. Of the hundreds of human beings that entered the waters, not all escaped; the frightened cows trampled many under the waters; the blistering heat blinded many who groped hopelessly about in the current, and finally sunk. To this day none can tell how great was the slaughter in the waters. After the burning heat of the night, a numbing chill followed, and the water-soaked group crawled over dead bodies and hot sands to the only blazing building in all the waste about them. Groups of dead bodies were found within a stone's-throw of the water. Families rushing down for a breathing place, had been blown upon by the rushing blast and struck lifeless. The ghastly throng huddled, shrieking and bewailing, about the flaring embers, and the terrible roll of the missing was soon called from end to end of the ashen waste. No vestige of human habitation remained, and the steaming, freezing, wretched group, crazed by their unutterable Page 98 terror and despair, pleaded with each other to restore the lost ones. The hot blasts of the night had blinded them, and they could but vaguely recognize one another in the murky light of the new day. "Long after the flames had died out, when there was no more to feed on, the hot sands rendered moving about an exquisite torture, and long into the dismal midday the survivors were confined to the narrow circuit near the river. As the day wore on, help came in slowly from the northward. Several railroad gangs had escaped annihilation, and one gang, led by an ex-prize fighter named Mulligan, came with prompt- ness and efficiency to the rescue, through miles of burning prairie and blockaded roads. On Sunday night something over two thousand people were assembled within the confines of this industrious, prosperous city; the dreadful morning light came upon a haggard, maniacal multi- tude of less than seven hundred. When the work of rescue began, it was found, that a great number had escaped by the bed of the river and the northern road to the port, and as the day advanced, half-naked stragglers, unkempt and blackened, began to stream into the sparse settlement. As the molten sands cooled off, the woeful work of recog- nition began. Peering into blackened faces, mothers, fathers, brothers, tremblingly sought out missing ones. "Some, in the immeasurable anguish of the moment, had dashed them- selves against the sands, and let out the life with their own hands that the licking flames coveted. Men too distant from the river to hope for rescue or safety, had cut the throats of their choking children, and were found in groups, sometimes unscarred by the flames. "In the streets, full twenty corpses were found with no apparent in- jury or abrasion. Fatuous tradesmen, in the sudden rush of flame, had thrown their valuables into wells for security. Every well in the city was turned into a flaming pit, and the very waters half evaporated by the heat. Survivors attest that women and children, cut off from the rivers, were put into wells and covered with bedding. I have looked into every well in the ash covered clearing, and there is no possibility that a living thing could have endured the flames that boiled and seethed in them. "For hours the unreasoning search was continued by the famished, dying remnants, but to little avail; the dead, when recognizable, lay where they had fallen in the streets; where the houses stood, the ground was whipped clean as a carpet, and all hope of identifying human ashes was idle. The next night the long-prayed-for rain came, grate- fully to the living, and kindly to the fleeting ashes of the dead. The great dread that hovered over the bay cities and towns was allayed, and the threatened danger nearly gone. Before dark help came to the perishing sufferers from the neighboring villages. The wounded were taken by boat to Green Bay, whence some were forwarded to Milwaukee. "From 9 o'clock Sunday night until dusk of Monday, may be taken as the time of the main action of this terrible drama. By Tuesday the sweeping miles of fire had been quenched by Monday night's rain. A slight drizzle still further aided the work of rescue. The ravages of the one night's tornado left unmistakable traces on every hand. Through the solid growth of timber a clean swath of blackened stumps and roots marked the course of the fiery tempests. The roads were cumbered with roasted cattle, and frequently with the carcasses of Page 99 bears and deer, while the ditches and cleared fields were strewed with smaller game and wild birds. Nearing the vicinity sadder relics were found, for those who penetrated eastward through the wall of flame, met equally fierce flames in the clearest places. Remote dwellers on the high-roads, warned of the great danger, with their families safely packed on their great farm wagons, made northward through the high- ways for security; but the flames ingulfed them in the heart of the woods, and the fragments of stout vehicles, burned to the irons, now strew the road hither from Marinette, the last town on the Northern Wisconsin border. The high-road enters Peshtigo from the north, through a break in the encircling belt of woods, where the pretty Epis- copal church stood - the last to burn in the fatal place. Even before this was reached, a putrid hecatomb of dead cattle cumbered the wooded street. Among the pines, scores lay, not burnt, but smothered to death. Through this underbrush thirty bodies of men and children were picked up, more or less injured by the fire. In a great many instances the human remains were distinguished from animals by the teeth alone. One horror-struck relative recognized the relics of his nephew by a pen-knife imbedded in an oblong mound of ashes. What does it avail to narrate circumstantially the inexpressible horrors of these succeeding days? What good to tell of the dead faces staring upward through the calm waters? or the piteous circumstances of a hundred heart-wrenching tragedies during and following that treacherous Sunday blast? No moral underlies the terrible story; all that frightened human nature was capable of came into play that direful night; the slaughter resulted from no sin of omission or commission on the part of man. No unseemly panic aided natural causes in achieving, comparatively, the completest devastation in human annals. On the contrary, superhuman daring and energy were put into active operation to mitigate preternatural horrors. The immensity of visible destruction at Chicago surpasses the completeness of this devastation, but Chicago, with all its woes, has not two-thirds of its citizens to deplore as dead. "With one of the men who passed through that night of destruction, I wandered over the pretty rising plain where Peshtigo spread its thriving stores and handsome houses. Save where the houses were built with cellars, which was very rare, there is no trace of a former habi- tation. Here and there are metallic remnants of sewing-machines and cracked stones. The hardware and drug stores leave almost the only reminders of things that were - a blackened mortar stands indly in a wild confusion of melted glass and lead, with the pestle ready for a new decoction. Two or three men, with troubled faces, were moving about putting up a shed for the Relief Committee. They answered civilly and sadly that they had been in the fire, but saved themselves and nearest kin. They should have starved to death if the outside world had not stepped in, and now hoped to be shortly on their feet again. They despaired of the bright, cheery little town ever being again as it was, but complacently 'reckoned,' if the scared ones didn't drive new comers away by their silly stories, a new people would make a new Peshtigo. If you ever walked over the ground where a camp had been burned, and there are few that served during the war that have not, you found there as much semblance of a substantial city as now marks the spot where Peshtigo's two thousand people carried on the business Page 100 of life a few days ago. On the bank of the river, fish killed by the lusting flame are still to be seen, which, the day after the fire, were soft and white and unwounded. Crossing the frail remnants of the bridge on timbers charred and fragile, my neighbor said, 'It was like Judgment Day as I can imagine. Friend Hansen, with his wife and four children, believe firmly that it was, and while the fire rained down he began to walk composedly up and down his parlor with his family about him, and I have never seen him since.' "The material loss is estimated at $3,000,000, the greater part of which falls on William B. Ogden, who suffered simultaneously greater losses in Chicago. But undaunted by his accumulating misfortunes, that energetic man instantly sent an agent on to rebuild the mills and shops, and gather a new people in the place if possible. There are four hundred dead authentically accounted for there, besides half as many missing who can not be accounted for, and probably never will be. Many of the mill hands and company's employe's were utter strangers in the place, and the majority of them, something like one hundred, trusting to the stout walls of the company's building, perished en masse." ===========================================================================