What is in the book
Everybody knows the cow kicked over the lantern. Nobody has ever produced the cow.
On the evening of Sunday 8 October 1871, fire started in a barn behind a cottage on DeKoven Street. Thirty six hours later about three and a third square miles of Chicago were gone, roughly a hundred thousand people had nowhere to live, and nobody could say how many of the dead were under the ashes. Nobody can now.
This Turbo History short tells the fire straight, from the driest autumn on record to the legend that outran it:
- A city that was not a city with a lot of wood in it, but a wooden object with some stone stuck on the front
- The alarm that was struck for a box a mile past the fire, and the operator who was told he was wrong and decided not to change it
- The Court House bell that rang until the tower came down on top of it, the waterworks that burned, and the crib keeper two miles out in Lake Michigan fighting sparks off his own roof
- The same night in Wisconsin, where a fire nobody telegraphed killed at least four times as many people
- Two weeks of martial law, a relief society that decided who deserved help, and the second, smaller fire that actually wrote the building code
- Catherine O'Leary, the newspaperman who boasted that he invented the cow, and the inquiry's own verdict: we are unable to determine
The fire burned for thirty six hours. The story has been burning ever since.
Read it in under an hour. Free on Kindle Unlimited.
These are not academic books. You will not find footnotes to chase, family trees to memorise, or ten pages on the logistics of a treaty. Every book ends with a page of proper ones to go to next if you want that depth. If you want the story and the big picture in an hour, you are home.
This book is free sometimes. Want to know when?
Great Chicago Fire goes free on Amazon from time to time, along with the rest of the series. Leave your email and we will tell you the moment it does.
More from the series
One figure or one event per book. Under an hour each.
