Peshtigo Fire

Extent of the fire in red

One of the few pieces of lumber to survive the fire

The October 8, 1871 Peshtigo Fire in Peshtigo, Wisconsin, was a firestorm which caused the most deaths by fire in United States history, killing as many as 1,500. Occurring on the same day as the more infamous Great Chicago Fire, the Peshtigo Fire is mostly forgotten. On the same day as the Peshtigo and Chicago fires, the cities of Holland, and Manistee, Michigan, across Lake Michigan, also burned, and the same fate befell Port Huron at the southern end of Lake Huron.

Firestorm

On the day of the fire, a cold front moved in from the west, bringing strong winds that fanned smaller fires and escalated them to massive proportions. By the time it was over, 1,875 square miles (4,850 km² or 1.2 million acres) of forest had been consumed, an area approximately twice the size of the state of Rhode Island. Some sources list 1.5 million acres (6,000 km²) burned. Twelve communities were destroyed. An accurate death toll has never been determined since local population records were destroyed in the fire. Between 1,200 and 2,500 people are thought to have lost their lives. The 1873 Report to the Wisconsin Legislature listed 1,182 names of deceased or missing residents. Peshtigo had an estimated 1,700 residents before the fire. More than 350 bodies were buried in a mass grave, primarily because so many had died that no one remained alive who could identify many of them.

Mass grave

The fire was so intense it jumped several miles over the waters of Green Bay and burned parts of the Door Peninsula, as well as jumping the Peshtigo River itself to burn on both sides of the inlet town. Surviving witnesses reported that the firestorm generated a tornado that threw rail cars and houses into the air. Many of the survivors of the firestorm escaped the flames by immersing themselves in the Peshtigo River, wells, or other nearby bodies of water. Some drowned while others succumbed to hypothermia in the frigid river. The Green Island Light was kept lit by day due to the obscuring smoke, but the three-masted schooner George L. Newman was wrecked offshore; the crew was fortunately rescued without loss.

Legacy

The Peshtigo Fire Museum, just west of U.S. Route 41, has a small collection of artifacts from the fire, first-person descriptions about the event told by the survivors, and a graveyard dedicated to victims of the tragedy.

National Fire Protection Week in October was started to commemorate the Chicago fire, which was ironically dwarfed by the unremembered Peshtigo conflagration. Firestorm at Peshtigo: A Town, Its People, and the Deadliest Fire in American History (ISBN 978-0-8050-6780-4), a recent publication by Denise Gess and William Lutz, gives a detailed account of the event. In the words of Lutz, "A firestorm is called nature's nuclear explosion. Here's a wall of flame, a mile high, five miles (8 km) wide, traveling 90 to 100 miles per hour (160 km/h), hotter than a crematorium, turning sand into glass."

Peshtigo Fire Museum

The combination of wind, topography, and ignition sources that created the firestorm, primarily representing the conditions at the boundaries of human settlement and natural areas, is known as the Peshtigo Paradigm. This paradigm was closely studied by the American and British military during World War II to learn how to recreate firestorm conditions for bombing campaigns against cities in Germany and Japan. The bombing of Dresden and the even more severe one of Tokyo by incendiary devices resulted in death tolls comparable to or exceeding those of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

During the 2004-05 school year, the Peshtigo High School Band performed a piece titled "The Finger of God" inspired by the Peshtigo Fire. The work, composed by John Georgeson, used quotes throughout from survivors of the fire.

Comet theory

One speculation, first suggested in 1883, is that the occurrence of the Peshtigo and Chicago fires on the same day was not just a coincidence, but that both fires (and other major, simultaneous fires in Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin) were caused by the impact of fragments from Comet Biela. This theory was revived in a 1985 book and investigated in a 2004 paper to the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

However, scientists with expertise in the area dispute that meteorites can ignite a fire; meteorites in fact are cold to the touch when they reach the Earth's surface, and there are no credible reports of any fire anywhere having been started by a meteorite. Additionally, various aspects of the behaviors of the Chicago and Peshtigo fires attributed to extraterrestrial intervention have more mundane explanations. In any event, no external source of ignition was needed; numerous small fires were already burning in the area after a tinder-dry summer, generating so much smoke that the Green Island Light was kept lit 24 hours a day for weeks before the main fire. All that was needed to generate the firestorm, as well as other fires in the Midwest, were the winds from the front that moved in that evening.

In popular culture

In the book Fire Rose, the first of the Elemental Masters series by Mercedes Lackey, the fires are said to be the result of combat between two Firemaster mages, one in Peshtigo and one in the South Side of Chicago.

A song called "Fire on Peshtigo" is featured on the 2008 album Broken Hymns, Limbs and Skin by American folk rock group O'Death.

See also

Other October 8, 1871, fires

• Great Chicago Fire
• Great Michigan Fire
• Port Huron Fire of 1871

Other fire disasters in the Great Lakes

• Thumb Fire of 1881
• Great Hinckley Fire of 1894
• Baudette Fire of 1910
• 1918 Cloquet Fire

External links

• Fire site with more survivor's stories.
• Geyer, Rev. Kurt. "History of the Peshtigo Fire, October 8, 1871,"
• Hipke, Deana C. The Great Peshtigo Fire of 1871. Website about fire with survivors' stories.
• "Midwest Fire of 1871" Library of Congress American Memory Project.
• "The Fire Fiend" New York Times, October 13, 1871.
• Pernin, Peter, "The great Peshtigo fire: an eyewitness account," Wisconsin Magazine of History, 54: 4 (Summer, 1971), 246-272. Peshtigo Times, Oct. 6, 1921.
• Pictures of the fire memorial from Find-A-Grave.
• Wisconsin Historical Society. Dictionary of Wisconsin History, "Peshtigo Fire."
• Aurandt, Paul (1984). "15. The Night Sin City Died". Paul Harvey's the Rest of the Story. London: Bantam. pp. 33–34. ISBN 0553259628. 
• Gess, Denise; Lutz, William (2002). Firestorm at Peshtigo. New York, NY: Henry Holt and Co.. pp. 320. ISBN 978-0805072938. http://google.com/books?id=7ALzHG4sRmAC&printsec=frontcover. 
• DeLaluzern, Guillaume (Oct 1871). "IN WISCONSIN. Particulars of the Burning of Williamsonville and Peshtigo - Frightful Number of Deaths". Peshtigo, WI: Green Bay Wisconsin Advocate. http://www3.gendisasters.com/wisconsin/8616/peshtigo-wi-forest-fire-oct-1871. Retrieved 22 November 2011.