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. =========================================================================== 'Seething Hell' in Peshtigo An Old Woodsman's Story of the Great Wisconsin Forest Fire Which Took Seven Times as Many Lives as the Chicago Conflagration. With the spring season for forest fires just around the corner, American Forests magazine tells again the story of the most tragic forest fire in the nation's history - that which occurred in 1871, at Peshtigo, Wis., and took 1,500 lives. This is the story, written by Stewart H. Holbrook, as he heard it from an old woodsman. John Cameron was an ancient man who had known more than 50 years in the timber. Old John had seen a good deal in his time. But the remarkable thing about John Cameron was the fact that he had lived through the most terrible forest fire this country has ever known. John could tell of fires in Maine and fires in Idaho, but I liked best to sit on a deacon seat in the bunkhouse and hear of what went on in Wisconsin in 1871. I have never forgotten the story. It was in Peshtigo, Wis., on an October morning that John Cameron sniffed the air and looked out across the log pond to the far shore of the river. He said briefly that he had never seen "nothing like it." His eyes were streaked with red, and so were the eyes of every man, woman and child in the village. There was smoke in the air, just as there had been every day for three months past. It came from the slashing fires of crews who were building the North Western rail- road. Even the sun was red eyed. This morning it had risen late of the Wisconsin timber and it was so deep a red that a man could look at it fair in the face without squinting. No, sir, the grizzled man said again to two lads working on the pond, he certainly had never seen nothing like it. "If we get to snow-fly without no bad trouble," he said, "it will be a wonder." The two lads agreed that things were pretty dry, but they didn't know they had heard a prophet speaking. They continued to pole logs to the mill, where the drone of the saw told of boards being made for the rising young city of Chicago, down at the other end of the lake. This day when the sun shone so dimly over the north Wisconsin woods was Oct. 8, 1871. The village of Peshtigo lay baked and sultry in an autumn heat such as no man, red or white, could recall. The air was deathly still. A man who never could forget that day said long afterward that not a crow, not a bird of any kind was heard to call. By noon the sun disappeared entirely, and a strange yellow half- light, ghastly in its effect on the appearance of men and things, and which came from no visible source, lighted the sawdust streets and plank sidewalks and made the water of the Peshtigo river look bilious. It made elder folk somehow uneasy. Nothing happened, however. The 6 o'clock whistle brought the men to their shacks and the boarding house, and supper was as usual ex- cept that considerable black and white ashes drifted through the screenless windows and got into the food. When the night closed down over the village in the clearing, they could see a sullen red over the treetops to the southwest. The smoke got thicker. John Cameron remarked again that he had never seen such a summer and fall, no time. At a little past 9 o'clock he sat on the steps of the company boarding house and thought he heard a new noise in the night, a low moaning, soft, deep and far off, that soon changed to a steady roar. He had heard big winds in his time, and big cataracts, too, but nothing like this noise that was welling up, back in the timber. As he peered into the night that seemed to be growing lighter every moment, the old scaler saw a whirling slab of fire come hurtling out of nowhere and drop into the sawdust street. He brushed his streaming eyes, but this slab of fire was no illusion. It was followed by another and another. The scaler yelled a long incoherent cry, and more fire rained down. In a flash, it seemed, the splintered pine sidewalks of Peshtigo were blazing. Startled men and women crowded onto doorsteps. The top of a house leaped with sudden flames. There came a crashing and deep booming from the surrounding forest, while underneath all was the steady ominous roar that was greater than the sound of a hurricane. Now a deer, wild eyed and shaking, flitted out of the timber and stood stock still in the midst of town dogs who whimpered and sniffed but made no move to attack the wild creature. Down the street trotted a legion of housecats, stopping to look at what was behind them. City folk are given to thinking that things happen leisurely in the back country, where life all but stands still. City folk should have stood in the smoldering main street of Peshtigo that night. In less than five minutes all hell rode into town on the back of a wind. It was a seething, searing hell, and the hurricane it was riding traveled as fast as light itself. It swept in so suddenly that no man could say for certain what happened in the next few moments. What is assuredly and horribly known is that two score folks, their senses blown away in that first blast of flame, rushed into the big boarding house, and there they were burned, every last one of them. Others fled to the river, where many drowned but a few lived it out. And those who lived it out told afterward of things that couldn't be forgotten. They saw horses and cattle, yes, and men and women, stagger a moment over the smoking sawdust streets, then go down and burn like so many flares of pitch-pine. Forty years afterward, an ancient man's voice choked as he told of crouching in the almost boiling water of the Peshtigo river and of watching pretty Helga Rockstad as she ran down a blazing sidewalk, her blond hair streaming, and of seeing the long blond hair leap into flame that stopped Helga in her tracks. That's what the heat of 2,000,000,000 burning pine trees could do. The heat struck worst at Peshtigo, but it also struck elsewhere in Wisconsin that night. Religious settlers at Brussels saw the same strange yellow light that Peshtigo knew, and they shouted that Judgment Day had come at last. So it had for many of them. Sixty-eight men fled from Williamson's sawmill, but three others crawled into a large tank of water, kept as a protection against fire, and there they were boiled to death. Seventy-five were burned to death at Little Sturgeon, close to 700 in Peshtigo, and weeks later the death list mounted to 1,500. It always maddened John Cameron that the Peshtigo fire was largely unknown to the great public. It would seem odd, too, if you didn't remember the date. On that same Oct. 8, at about 9:30 in the evening, flames licked at a stable in Chicago's De Koven st., and half an hour later most of the city that lived south of the river was trying to get across the choked bridges and away from the flames. Only 200 died in the Chicago fire. But it went down in history, even into the movies, while Peshtigo's holocaust, in which 1,500 gave their lives, remains pretty much unknown to this day. Telegraph wires soon took the news of Chicago's troubles around the world. Clothes, provisions and cash rolled in on every train for weeks on end, and Queen Victoria and Tennyson and Browning and Darwin sent books to found a new library. Telegraph wires into Wisconsin had been burned before the fire struck Peshtigo. It was five weeks before the United States came to know what had gone on up there near the head of the lake, and then only in little dabs at a time. When the news finally seeped out of the charred wilderness, relief was prompt and generous. But there was no sudden impact of horror on the public. Chicago had taken all the headlines. That's why the worst forest fire on record is so little known today. =========================================================================== SOURCE: The Milwaukee Journal, April 23, 1939 "Seething Hell in Peshtigo" by Stewart H. Holbrook