The Fire That Killed Two Thousand and Got Forgotten the Same Night

At approximately 9:00 in the evening of Sunday, 8 October 1871 — about the same time that Mrs. O’Leary’s barn was beginning to burn in Chicago — a wildfire that had been smoldering for several weeks in the dry pine forests of northeastern Wisconsin and the western Upper Peninsula of Michigan suddenly transitioned, under a sustained southwesterly wind, into a self-organizing firestorm. The transition happened in front of perhaps a hundred direct witnesses, almost all of whom were dead within the following twenty minutes. Over the next four to six hours the firestorm consumed an area of approximately five thousand square kilometers, destroying at least sixteen named towns and an estimated twelve hundred farm settlements, killing somewhere between twelve hundred and twenty-five hundred people, and reaching temperatures sufficient to vaporize sand into glass.

The center of the destruction was the small lumber town of Peshtigo, Wisconsin, on the Peshtigo River about ten kilometers inland from Green Bay. The town had a population of approximately two thousand on the evening of 8 October. About eight hundred of them survived, by various means; the rest died over the course of less than thirty minutes during the height of the firestorm. It was, by every measure, the deadliest wildfire in American history. The exact death toll has never been established because many of the dead were itinerant lumber workers whose names were not on any local census, because many of the dead were burned to the point of being unidentifiable, and because the village registers themselves were burned along with the rest of the town.

The fire happened on the same evening as the Great Chicago Fire, which killed approximately three hundred people in a major American city with telegraph access and an established press corps. The Peshtigo Fire killed at least four times as many people, in a remote area, with no telegraph access and almost no surviving press witnesses. The Chicago Fire became the dominant American news story of the autumn of 1871. The Peshtigo Fire received almost no coverage for two weeks and has never, in the century and a half since, been remembered with anything approaching its scale.

It is the worst-remembered American disaster of comparable magnitude.

What had been smoldering since August

The summer and early autumn of 1871 had been, across the upper Midwest, the driest on record. Wisconsin had received less than half its normal rainfall between July and September. The pine forests of the northeastern part of the state — the heart of the Wisconsin lumber industry — had been suffering from continuous low-grade fires since mid-August. Lumber camps used controlled burning to clear the slash (the broken branches and stumps left after logging) and the practice had become difficult to control in the drought conditions. By late September, large parts of the northeastern Wisconsin forest were continuously smoldering at low intensity. The smoke was visible from Green Bay on most days. The federal Weather Service official Increase A. Lapham, observing conditions from Milwaukee, had been writing increasingly urgent letters to the state government about the fire risk since September. The letters had not produced any state-level response.

The smoldering continued through the first week of October. On Sunday, 8 October, a substantial dry cold front moved south across the upper Midwest. The front produced a sustained wind from the southwest at speeds estimated by survivors at sixty to eighty kilometers per hour. The wind hit the smoldering forest at approximately the same time across all of northeastern Wisconsin. The smoldering fires merged, accelerated, and transitioned into the firestorm state — a self-sustaining convective system in which the fire generates its own wind and creates a vertical column of rising hot gases that pulls in oxygen from the surrounding landscape at high velocity.

Once a firestorm reaches the self-sustaining state, it cannot be extinguished by any normal means. It burns until it runs out of fuel or hits a major topographical barrier (a large river, a coastline, a substantial mountain range). The Peshtigo firestorm of 8 October 1871 ran out of fuel at the western shore of Lake Michigan in the early morning hours of 9 October. By that point it had burned the entire interior of the northeastern Wisconsin lumber region.

Peshtigo at 9 p.m.

The town of Peshtigo on the evening of 8 October was an ordinary lumber-mill settlement. It had grown up around the Peshtigo Company sawmill and the boarding houses for the company’s workers. The streets were laid out on a rectangular grid. The buildings were almost entirely of pine — the buildings, the sidewalks, the wooden roadways. The population was approximately two thousand, distributed among about three hundred buildings.

The first sign of the approaching firestorm was a roaring sound from the southwest, audible to residents by about 9:00 p.m. The sound was described by survivors as “like a freight train,” “like the sound of an enormous waterfall,” or — in the contemporaneous account of the parish priest Peter Pernin, the only fully literate eyewitness whose written account would survive — “as if a hundred trains were converging on the town from the same direction.”

Within minutes the air was filled with burning embers, then with whirling columns of fire. The fire reached the southwestern edge of the town between 9:30 and 9:45 p.m. Within twenty minutes it had crossed the entire town. The Peshtigo Company sawmill, with its accumulated stocks of cut lumber, exploded in a single fireball that was seen by witnesses up to forty kilometers away.

The townspeople did not have time to organize a coordinated response. Survival depended on individual decisions made in the first few minutes after recognizing what was happening. The most successful strategy — and the one taken by Father Pernin and a few hundred others — was to go to the Peshtigo River and stay submerged. The river was approximately two meters deep at the town center, narrow enough for the firestorm to leap over but cold enough (and wet enough) for submerged people to survive. Survivors stayed in the river for between four and six hours, periodically lifting their heads to breathe air that was hot enough to scald the inside of the mouth, then ducking again to wait out the heat. Several drowned during the long submersion. Many survived.

Other people sheltered in wells, in cellars, in stone foundations of public buildings, in the surrounding cleared farm fields where the fuel was thinner. The shelters in wells and cellars were generally fatal — the oxygen was consumed in the firestorm and the sheltering people suffocated. The cleared-field shelters were generally fatal because the radiated heat at close range was sufficient to ignite clothing. The most successful single shelter was a railroad water tank near the Peshtigo Company mill, into which approximately thirty people climbed before the firestorm arrived. Most of them survived.

The fire moved through the town in approximately twenty-five minutes. By 10:30 p.m. the town no longer existed.

The morning of 9 October

The survivors emerged from the river, from the wells, from the surrounding farms, in the cold early dawn of 9 October 1871. The temperature had dropped sharply in the hours after the firestorm passed. The wind had reversed. There was no town. The streets were ash. The mill was an open pit. The bodies of the dead — those who had been killed in the open air rather than in shelters — were not, in most cases, recognizable as human. They had been reduced by the heat to fragmentary skeletal remains scattered across what had been the streets and yards of Peshtigo.

The survivors walked toward Green Bay, where the nearest railhead was. Father Pernin’s account, written four years later in his memoir, describes the walk in detail: the survivors moving in small groups, mostly barefoot, mostly burned, carrying small children in their arms. They reached Marinette, the nearest surviving town fifteen kilometers north, by mid-morning. The Marinette authorities had no idea what had happened. The first telegraph from Marinette to Milwaukee did not go out until the afternoon of 9 October. The first newspaper coverage of the disaster appeared in the Milwaukee Sentinel on 10 October — a brief notice that “a destructive fire” had struck the Peshtigo area. The Sentinel’s reporter could not get to the site for another four days because the rail line had also been destroyed.

By the time the press finally arrived in any numbers, on approximately 15 October, the Great Chicago Fire had been dominating the national news cycle for a full week. Reporters from the eastern papers were almost all in Chicago. The Peshtigo coverage, when it eventually appeared, was on inside pages.

The final count

The official death toll of the Peshtigo Fire was first established by a Wisconsin state commission of inquiry in 1872 at approximately twelve hundred. The number was almost certainly an undercount. The 1872 commission worked from the surviving local records (which had largely been destroyed) and from interviews with survivors (who could only account for those they had known personally). Modern historians (Gess and Lutz 2002; Pyne 1982) estimate the actual death toll at between fifteen hundred and twenty-five hundred, with the higher end being the more probable given the substantial population of itinerant lumber workers, recent immigrants, and Native American Menominee residents who had been in the affected area but had not appeared on any subsequent census of survivors.

The damaged area covered approximately five thousand square kilometers of Wisconsin and Michigan. Sixteen named towns were destroyed. The number of farm settlements destroyed has never been counted precisely, but is in the range of twelve to fourteen hundred. The combined property loss has been estimated at over five million 1871 dollars — roughly comparable, in adjusted terms, to the Chicago property loss, although the loss-per-capita rate was substantially higher for the rural northeastern Wisconsin economy.

The town of Peshtigo was rebuilt, slowly, over the following decade. The Peshtigo Company sawmill was rebuilt within two years and continued operating until 1900. The town now has approximately three thousand residents — about fifty percent more than in October 1871 — and contains a small Peshtigo Fire Cemetery and a one-room Peshtigo Fire Museum at the corner of Oconto Avenue and Ellis Street.

The museum is open from May through October. The cemetery is open continuously. The mass grave at the cemetery’s center contains the bones of approximately 350 unidentified victims of the firestorm, gathered from the burned ground in the weeks after 9 October and reinterred together when no identification was possible. The grave is marked by a single granite obelisk installed by the Peshtigo Fire Memorial Association in 1951. The inscription gives the date and reads simply: Here lie the lost of the Peshtigo Fire, October 8, 1871.

The number of the lost is not given.