Quoted By:
Okay wht the FUCK happened here?
>On Oct. 8, 1871, even as the Great Chicago Fire roared 250 miles south, the arguably greater Peshtigo Fire — still considered the deadliest fire in United States history — leveled more than 1 million acres, flattened 16 neighboring towns and killed between 1,200 and 1,500 people.
>Some historians insist that figure is probably a thousand victims too low. Eyewitness accounts described fireballs, mass drownings, an atmosphere marked more by flame than sky, a veritable hurricane of fire, coupled with actual tornadoes of flame that lifted entire buildings from foundations.
>Stand in the center of Peshtigo and try to imagine this.
>You don’t come close.
>One day Peshtigo was a steadily growing company town, spurred to success by railroad and lumber tycoon William Ogden, the first mayor of Chicago, who owned much of Peshtigo.
>The next day, after a firestorm that lasted only two hours, almost nothing remained.
>“I’m old enough to have known survivors,” said Cubby Couvillion, 95, the town historian. “I recall well a lady in our neighborhood, at our backyard fence, leaning over, talking, telling me about that night, how her mother gathered up a suitcase, her father said it was time for the family to head to the river, how a woman crossed their path in a nightgown, running down the road, screaming, because her head was on fire.”
>So intense was the inferno that entire families vanished.
>A father, cornered by the fire, slit the throats of his own children. Among the few things that survived the fire were firsthand accounts, preserved in diaries, by local historians and in journals. Cattle trying to escape the flames stampeded residents who escaped into the river.
