The great fire in New York began in Merchant street, Dec. 16, 1835. No lives were lost, but the property loss was $15,000,000 and 52 acres were devastated, 530 buildings being destroyed. Ten years later a much smaller fire in the same district caused the death of 35 persons.
July 9, 1850, thirty lives were lost in Philadelphia, and February 8, 1865, twenty persons were killed by another fire. Large fires in that city have almost invariably been accompanied by loss of life.
As the result of a Fourth of July celebration in 1866, nearly half of Portland, Md., was swept away by fire. The property loss was $10,000,000, but there was no loss of life. In September and October of 1871 forest fires raged in Wisconsin and Michigan. An immense territory was swept over and more than 1,000 persons lost their lives.
The greatest fire of modern times was the one which started in Chicago, October 8, 1871. A strip through the heart of the city, four miles long and a mile and a half wide, was burned over. The total loss was $196,000,000 and 250 persons lost their lives. By the fire 17,450 buildings were destroyed and 98,860 persons were made homeless. Within four years the entire burned district had been rebuilt.
Fires in Chicago attended with loss of life have been of increasing frequency in the past few years. Fire in the Henning & Speed building on Dearborn street, in 1900, caused four girls to lose their lives. Since it and before the Iroquois disaster have come: The St. Luke Sanitarium horror, 10 lives lost, 43 injured; the Doremus laundry explosion, 8 lives lost; the American Glucose Sugar refinery blaze, 8 killed; Northwestern railroad boiler explosion, 8 killed, Stock Yards boiler explosion, 18 killed, and about a year ago the Lincoln hotel fire, 14 visiting stockmen suffocated.
In view of this terrible array of suffering and death, it would seem that no precaution could be too great to avert future calamities. But although human life is beyond price, it is probable that the world at large will move on very much in the same old way—an arousing and an upheaval of public sentiment for a time after the burned and maimed have been laid away, and then a gradual return of carelessness. It would seem impossible, however, that the United States could forget for many generations the Iroquois disaster, and that it must result in a final reform of all arrangements looking to the safety of theater goers.
CHAPTER XIV.
STORIES AND NARRATIVES OF THE HOLOCAUST.