The Peshtigo Fire, The Night Half a County Burned

October eighth, eighteen seventy-one. The same night the Great Chicago Fire began, a fire of incomparably greater destruction swept through the forests and farms of northeastern Wisconsin.

It started in the slash piles left by the lumber industry: the branches, bark, and scrub left behind after the big trees were taken. The summer of eighteen seventy-one had been the driest in memory. The Peshtigo River country, Marinette and Oconto counties, was covered in dried debris. A cold front arrived from the northwest on the evening of October eighth, bringing high winds. The fires that had been smoldering in the slash piles for weeks went instantaneous.

Peshtigo was a mill town of roughly two thousand people. The firestorm reached it in minutes. Survivors described a sound like an oncoming freight train, then a wall of fire that moved faster than any person could run. The fire was not a conventional forest fire. It was a firestorm: a self-generating vortex of superheated air that created its own wind, pulled oxygen toward its center, and generated temperatures high enough to ignite the soil itself. People who ran for the Peshtigo River survived if the current kept them under water. People who ran for the fields died in the open.

The death toll at Peshtigo and in the surrounding townships has been estimated at twelve hundred to twenty-five hundred people. The range remains wide because so many communities were entirely destroyed, with no survivors to count the missing. The Peshtigo Fire killed more people in a single night than almost any other fire in American history, more than the Great Chicago Fire, and more than the Iroquois Theatre fire and the Triangle Shirtwaist fire combined. Whether it also surpassed the nineteen oh six San Francisco fire is disputed, since estimates of that disaster's death toll range widely.

It was almost entirely forgotten. The Chicago fire happened the same night. Chicago had newspapers. Peshtigo had lost everything, including the people who would have written it down.