Firestorm at Peshtigo: A Town, Its People, and the Deadliest Fire in American History

Not many people know about the fire in Peshtigo, although most know about the Great Chicago Fire, which happened at the same time. Really a fascinating read, especially if you're into Chicago history.

A fascinating bit of history as this is the fire that traveled down to Chicago (forget what you heard about the cow). Due to the fire 300-400 people died in Chicago, but over 1,200 died around Peshtigo. However, the book was difficult to read as it wasn't put together very well.

Four generations on its hard to reconstruct what happened that fall in eastern Wisconsin just north of Green Bay; this is a pretty good effort. Its the personal accounts and remarks that make it a gripping horror story. Though it has three maps, and a list of principal players, there are many

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others mentioned and not all of them are identified by the places they lived or worked, so it was still confusing. Ms. Gess organized the narrative in chronological order. She started with August, and I think the tension would have built better in late September, if the fire date of October 8, 1871, had been shared with the readers earlier. I got tired of reading quotes of silly newspaper boosterisms, and advertisments. The photos of the woodworks, if placed earlier in the book, would have helped erase the image of Peshtigo being a woodsy parallel of a one-horse town.

I did however totally relate to the mentality of the pioneers -- lumbermen, immigrants, and farmers like my uncle. How did anyone manage to avoid the flames during that terrible hot, dry, smoky summer and fall? Scary how close my ancestors were to the firestorm. Fifty years on, the mere whiff of smoke from a wildfire anywhere in northern Wisconsin, and a town would be deputized and mobilized to put out the flames-- shirking the call would be cause for immediate arrest. The State's fire fighting command center was in my hometown and we knew many employed there full time. Like Peshtigo, my hometown is surrounded by bogs and peat marshes, with a river running through it. Clearly the State's attitudes and measures were a response to the disaster -- how long did it take to get organized? If the humus was burnt out over two feet below the surface, what has happened since? How long before it was viable? What's there today?

The conclusion: the weather, drought, topography, and the continued presence of unchecked fires that fall, all combined to generate the firestorm. I would have liked more details on topography, and a better description of just what "Sugar Bush" is like, what the Peshtigo River was like .. how big, how wide,.. and most of all, where were the peat bogs that caught fire earlier and never went out? Nothing illustrated what was going on better than the descriptions by survivors of lines of wooden fenceposts spontaneously bursting into flames like giant matchsticks. It is still common for farmers to build a "root cellar" near the house to store potatoes, carrots, cabbage, in the winter.. a cool place, normally. But with the sod and peat underneath them on fire, they could literally turn into oxygen-less ovens.

Even being from Wisconsin, with immigrant grandparents who were loggers and farmers whose children grew up just to the west of Peshtigo, I didn't know the story. The biggest surprises: the connection between Chicago, and Peshtigo -- the first mayor of Chicago was the principal investor in the sawmill, logging and woodworking businesses in Peshtigo. There is scarcely a mention of the Menominee peoples who lived there before the white settlers moved in. Surely there would be stories from that community that would have been passed on even if they didn't have a newspaper, and finally, I found it creepy that during WWII that the military studied firestorms so they could create them in Germany and Japan.

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I had never heard of Peshtigo, Wisconsin before reading this book, and now I will never forget it or its people. A friend lent me this book as we struggled to come to grips with the 3rd huge fire in less than 2 years to ravage California; and two of those fires had burned homes of my extended

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family.
In 1871 the Peshtigo fire destroyed the town, farms, forests, and parts of Chicago, even burning towns into Canada. But what most people remember is only the Chicago Fire. The loss of life was immeasurable; some accounts were over 2500 men, women and children perished. The survivors not only dealt with recovering from horrific burns, they also had nothing to come back to having lost members of their families and their homes. The town of Peshtigo was built around a farming community whose main industry was lumber, and the forests were plentiful—huge trees, by lakes, rivers to move the logs. Railroads being built, telegraph lines, new roads being cleared; but the push for rapid expansion left waste like sawdust, and timber piles in a town where everything was made out of wood, even the sidewalks. This created hazards, which were helped by a long drought and extreme weather conditions that ignited a devastating firestorm. So many things contributed to the fire, but only a few saw the danger, and those few had only small pieces of the bigger picture. It is good that we have their accounts, because a lot of what we know now about fires, weather, and fire science came from those few people. Unfortunately we are still making mistakes when it comes to helping people recover after these types of disasters. The authors did a magnificent job telling this part of America’s history, it is well researched and the writing isn’t boring or cumbersome: I was pulled in and touched emotionally, so I’m strongly recommending it with a little caution because there are some graphic accounts about the people and animals in the fire. 4 stars

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