This episode is about The Great Peshtigo Fire, the qualities of port, and an anecdote from "This Day in History". The Great Peshtigo fire is relatively unknown because it happened to occur on the same day as The Great Chicago fire on October 8th, 1871. The Great Peshtigo Fire burned over 1.2 million acres with an estimated 1500-2500 deaths. Of course, in comparison, this dwarfs the Great Chicago Fire, with 2000 acres and 300 deaths. The fact that Peshtigo was so remote and that Chicago hit the news first are both major factors to why this fire remained relegated to forgotten logs of history.
Map of peshtigo fire: https://www.weather.gov/grb/peshtigofire
Map of wisconsin : https://www.google.com/maps/place/Peshtigo,+WI/@45.0849951,-92.2312432,6z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x4d52b1606ab30d4d:0xd56d8ce5a4890b09!8m2!3d45.05443!4d-87.7492721
“The Great Chicago Fire received more attention because Chicago was a much larger city; there were over 300,000 people living in Chicago in 1871 compared to an estimated 1,700 in Peshtigo. Chicago also had better means of communicating and accessing the rest of the world. Peshtigo was a rough frontier town in the woods, with a single telegraph line that was destroyed by the fire. When news of the tragedy at Peshtigo reached Wisconsin's capital on Oct. 10, 1871, the Governor and other state officials were away at Chicago helping the victims of that fire.” --https://historyengine.richmond.edu/episodes/view/6356
Father Peter Pernin wrote “The Great Peshtigo Fire” (His first-person account) https://content.wisconsinhistory.org/digital/collection/wmh/id/46362
The summer of 1871 was very dry. Farmers and railroads took advantage of this by clearing land and burning the slash piles.
Very different attitude towards fire safety. No smokey the bear. Multiple fires had been burning all summer. Peshtigo had been fighting off fires for several weeks. Leading up to the week of the fire, Pernin and residents felt impending doom.
The evening of the 8th, the wind starts to rise quickly. Pernin gets more nervous and about 8pm he starts hearing a sound like thunder and train cars in the distance and a crimson glow in the western sky.
Page 12: he’s digging a trench next to his house to bury books and church valuables. “The only consideration that could have induced me to keep on working when i found it almost impossible to move my limbs, was the fear, growing more strongly each moment into a certainty, that some great catastrophe was approaching. The crimson reflection in the western portion of the sky was rapidly increasing in size and in intensity; then between each stroke of my pickax i heard plainly, in the midst of the unnatural calm and silence reigning around, the strange and terrible noise already described, the muttered thunder of which became more distinct as it grew each moment nearer.”
Now very windy. He says it goes from violent to hurricane strength.
Page 14: Now everyone is fleeing the fire towards the river “the neighing of horses, falling of chimneys, crashing of uprooted
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