Wisconsin magazine of history: Volume 54, number 4, summer, 1971

              THE GREAT PESHTIGO FIRE:
AN EYEWITNESS ACCOUNT
By Reverend Peter Pernin
Introduction
ICTOBER 8, 1971, marks the centennial of the two greatest natural catastrophes in the history of the Middle West. Ironically, both happened not only on the same day but almost at the same hour; both had been preceded by ample but disregarded omens; and both stemmed from the same fundamental causes—¦ wood rendered tinder-dry by prolonged drought, plus the factor of human carelessness. In Chicago, a lantern thoughtlessly placed with¬ in kicking distance of a cow in a barn on De Koven Street is reputed to have set off the most destructive metropolitan blaze in the nation's history, resulting in a property damage of $200,000,000 and virtually annihilating the city's core. In northeastern Wisconsin, fires set by hunters, Indians, lumberjacks, railroad workers, and farmers burning stumps and rubble culminated in the nation's worst forest fire, in terms of lives lost.
Although the Wisconsin fire ravaged 2,400 square miles and destroyed numerous settle¬ ments and isolated farms on both sides of Green Bay, it has gone down in history as the Peshtigo fire, because it was in this village and in the farming area immediately surrounding it that industry and population were the most concen¬ trated, that the fire reached its greatest viru¬ lence, and that the majority of the fatalities occurred.
In the fall of 1871, like other localities to which the expanding railroads were bringing an undreamed prosperity, Peshtigo, on the river of the same name in Marinette County,
was exploiting the surrounding forest lands to the fullest advantage. William G. Ogden, the Chicago millionaire, had invested heavily in what was then the country's largest wooden- ware factory to convert the river-borne logs into such articles as pails, tubs, broom hand¬ les, barrel covers, and clothespins. There was also a sawmill, a sash, door, and blind factory, a foundry and blacksmith shop, stores, hotels, a boarding house, and, to the villagers' con¬ siderable pride, a schoolhouse, and a Protes¬ tant as well as a Catholic church.
All this was as of the early evening of Octo¬ ber 8, when the village's official population of 1,700 was swollen by an influx of recently ar¬ rived laborers to work on the railroad right-of- way, in addition to the usual number of sales¬ men, travelers, and visitors to be found in any similar village. By daylight less than 1,000 of this number were still alive, and only one struc¬ ture, a partially constructed house, remained standing.
The occurrences of that dreadful night have never been accorded their proper place in the history of American disasters, primarily be¬ cause Chicago's ordeal was by its very nature more spectacular, more universally publicized, and more often revived in print. Peshtigo's chief historians have been two journalists and a novelist, Frank Tilton—a Green Bay news¬ paperman who in 1871 put together a book of eyewitness accounts and his own reportage to sell for the benefit of the survivors—Robert W. Wells of the Milwaufcee Journal, who in 1968 gave the Peshtigo story a skillful and readable reconstruction, and William F. Steuber, Jr.,
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