INTRODUCTION
Since the days of Sodom and Gomorrah, now slumbering eternally beneath the waters of the Dead Sea, the pages of history have been illumined at intervals by the glare of mighty conflagrations, and the Fire Fiend has never ceased to exact his toll from the world’s most famous cities.
In the year 504 B.C. the Ionians and Athenians burned Sardis, once one of the most splendid and opulent cities of the East; one hundred and seventy-six years later Alexander the Great startled the world when he applied the torch to the wonderful marble palaces of Persepolis, which, with the greater portion of the city, were reduced to a heap of blackened ruins.
On the night of July 18, 64 A.D., an insignificant blaze caught in some wooden booths at the south end of the Circus Maximus, in the city of Rome. This fire, spreading rapidly and unchecked, burned itself out when it reached the Tiber and the solid barrier of the Servian Wall; then it started afresh in another section, and when finally quenched, after eight days, had destroyed over two-thirds of the Eternal City, but then little past the zenith of its power and glory. From a political viewpoint, this was the most important fire in all history, for it marked the beginning of the downfall of Nero, whose suicide a few years later ended the line of the Caesars. Gossip had it that Nero—monster of ungovernable passion—started the fire himself, but historians are uncorroborative; nor is it likely that he “fiddled while the city burned.”
In the year 70, Titus burned Jerusalem and the temple of Solomon. Josephus tells us that over one million people perished in the holocaust by fire and sword.
In more modern times the great fire of London holds the center of the stage. In extent and results it was not unlike the Chicago fire of two centuries later. How little does man profit by the lessons and the losses of the past! London burned for four days and five-sixths of the City within the walls was consumed.
Other notable fires that might be mentioned are those which devastated Constantinople in 1778-82; Moscow in 1812, and Hamburg in 1842. The first great fire in the United States occurred in New York in 1835. Boston in 1872 suffered a loss of $75,000,000, and in 1906 San Francisco was visited by earthquake and fire that took five hundred lives and wiped out property variously estimated at from three hundred and fifty to five hundred millions of dollars.
Possibly no fire of modern times has received as much publicity as the one which swept over Chicago on Sunday night, October the 8th, 1871, and the following day. Exactly who was responsible for starting the fire is a matter of conjecture, but until about a dozen years ago it was generally believed that an obstreperous cow, belonging to a certain Mrs. O’Leary, was the culprit. Now cows in history, from the time of the Golden Calf, have oftener been infamous than otherwise, and Mrs. O’Leary’s had been no exception until Michael Ahern, reporter for the Chicago Tribune, who had “covered” the fire at the time and had known Mrs. O’Leary well, by publishing the real facts in 1921, removed the stigma of fifty years memory and restored her bovine ladyship to her rightful place in the annals of cowdom.
To be sure, Mrs. O’Leary had a cow; in fact she had five of them. She was a truthful woman, and a few days after the fire, while her movements on that memorable Sunday night were still fresh in her memory, she branded the cow story as a fabrication, and positively disproved it by the testimony of a neighbor who discovered the fire in Mrs. O’Leary’s cowshed, after she and her family had retired. Ahern’s story runs: “There was a social gathering in the neighborhood that night in honor of the arrival of a young man from Ireland. One of those present told me in after years that two women of the party went to the O’Leary shed to get some milk for punch. One woman held a lighted lamp while the other milked the cow. They thought they heard someone coming, and in their haste to escape, the lamp was dropped, setting fire to the place. This, I believe, was the true cause of the fire.”