Lost to Time

by Martin W. Sandler

  Located on both banks of a ninety-four-mile-long river that begins in the highest area of northern Wisconsin before descending more than one thousand feet into Green Bay (an arm of Lake Michigan), Peshtigo, like so many frontier settlements, was first inhabited by a succession of fur traders. The area, however, contained even richer resources—excellent farmland and, more important, some of the greatest forests of pine, spruce, and maple in America. By 1856, when Chicago millionaire entrepreneur William B. Ogden—who also served as Chicago’s first mayor from 1837 to 1838—purchased 13,542 acres of land and a sawmill that had passed through several previous owners, the stage was set for the development of a vibrant, booming, often rowdy lumbering town. Wisconsin Historical Society records note that the name “Peshtigo” comes from a Native American term meaning “snapping turtle,” or possibly “wild goose river” or “rapids.” What is for certain is that by 1870 the town contained two hotels, a blacksmith shop and foundry, a machine shop, a grocery and butcher shop, a dry goods and clothing store, a barbershop, a jewelry store, an apothecary, and a number of saloons whose main customers were the bawdy lumberjacks who worked the forests surrounding the town. A bridge spanning the river and joining the east and west sides of Peshtigo had just been built, as had a Congregational church, a Presbyterian church, and a Catholic church whose pastor, Father Peter Pernin, was fast becoming one of the town’s leading citizens. The pride of Peshtigo was its newly built schoolhouse, but the economic lifeblood of the town was the operations owned by William Ogden.

  AN 1885 ILLUSTRATION of loggers in northern Wisconsin.

  WILLIAM BUTLER OGDEN, photographed in 1912.

  Ogden’s Peshtigo Company was one of the largest sawmills in the nation, equipped with its own gaslight and waterworks systems. The Peshtigo Company had also established a barge line, which ran between Peshtigo Harbor and Chicago. The line allowed lumber manufactured at the sawmill to be transported to a Chicago lumberyard and warehouse, also owned by the company. By 1870, more than seven miles of railroad track running from the surrounding forests to the sawmill had been completed and Ogden had developed ambitious plans for expanding the line.

  Closely allied to the Peshtigo Company was Ogden’s Peshtigo woodenware factory, already the largest producer of tubs, pails, buckets, broom handles, barrel covers, clothespins, and other wooden household products in America. Ogden’s holdings also included a boardinghouse, where many of his lumberjacks, mill workers, and their families lived, and a company dry goods store.

  Although it was by far the largest and most fully developed town in the region, Peshtigo was surrounded by fast-growing communities. Six miles northeast was Marinette with its sawmills, the five largest of which produced 217 million board feet of lumber each year. Throughout the vast area known as the Sugar Bush (a popular term for areas of dense hardwood), divided into the Lower, Middle, and Upper Bushes, were scores of settlements inhabited by immigrants from Germany, Sweden, Norway, and other European and Scandinavian nations who had come to America to carve out farms on the frontier. One of the largest of these settlements was Brussels, established by Belgian Walloon immigrants, the first of whom had arrived in the area in 1853. By 1871 Brussels was a thriving community of sawmills, shingle mills, and flourishing farms. Schools, churches, and stores were being built, farms were being enlarged, and Brussels—like Peshtigo—was regarded as the very symbol of progress.

  A BIRD’S-EYE-VIEW MAP of Peshtigo, Wisconsin, in September 1871, one month before the fire.

  But there was also danger attached to this progress. It came in the form of deliberately set fires. As the lumberjacks felled hundreds of thousands of trees, they left in their wake enormous piles of tree limbs, pine needles, and sawdust. When they were done with an area, they set fire to the mounds and moved on to the next area of trees to be felled, leaving the wooden piles to burn down to ash.

  The lumberjacks were not the only fire makers. Father Pernin wrote in an eyewitness account published in 1874 that

  Farmers had profited [by enlarging] their clearings, cutting down and burning the wood that stood in their way. Hundreds of laborers employed in the construction of a railroad had acted in like manner, availing themselves of both axe and fire to advance their work. Hunters and Indians scour these forests continually, especially in the autumn season, at which time they ascend the streams for trout-fishing, or disperse through the woods deer-stalking. At night they kindle a large fire wherever they may chance to halt, prepare their suppers, then wrapping themselves in their blankets, sleep peacefully, extended on the earth, knowing that the fire will keep at a distance any wild animals. . . . The ensuing morning they depart without taking the precaution of extinguishing the smoldering embers of the fire. . . . Farmers and others act in a similar manner. In this way the woods, particularly in the fall, are gleaming everywhere with fires lighted by man, and which, fed on every side by dry leaves and branches, spread more or less. If fanned by a brisk gale of wind they are liable to assume most formidable proportions.

  Father Pernin may have been concerned, but the lumbermen, the hunters, the farmers, and the railroad builders were not. Even if some fires failed to burn themselves out, they were usually extinguished by the constant rains that characterized the Sugar Bush.

  But the fall and winter of 1870 had been particularly dry, and the spring and summer of 1871 were even drier. The many Native Americans who lived in and around Menominee were particularly feeling the effects of the drought. They had never seen the region so dry, with tall pines snapping in the wind and the grasses in the meadows turning brown earlier than ever before. Most alarmingly, by the summer of 1871 there was not enough water in the marshes to float the canoes that were used to gather the wild rice. The Native Americans were not the only ones affected. By the end of summer 1871, the men in the logging camps in both Peshtigo and Marinette found that the rivers were so low that logs could not be floated down them to the sawmills. They had been forced to pile the logs beside the rivers, waiting for rains to swell the rivers to normal size.

  AN 1869 ILLUSTRATION of a literal log jam in a Wisconsin river.

  To aggravate matters, by the third week of September, the serious lack of rain had caused many of the fires in the woods that had not burned themselves out to spread. Still, most of the area’s residents remained unconcerned. Father Pernin, on the other hand, learned firsthand that there indeed was much to fear.

  On September 22, I was summoned, in the exercise of my ministry to the Sugar Bush . . . where a number of farms lie adjacent to each other. Whilst waiting at one of these, isolated from the rest, I took a gun, and, accompanied by a lad of twelve years of age, who offered to guide me through the wood, started in pursuit of some of the pheasants which abounded in the environs. At the expiration of a few hours, seeing that the sun was sinking in the horizon, I bade the child reconduct me to the farmhouse. He endeavored to do so but without success. . . . In less than a half hour’s wanderings we perceived that we were completely lost in the woods. . . . The only sounds audible were the crackling of a tiny tongue of fire that ran along the ground, in and out, among the trunks of the trees, leaving them unscathed but devouring the dry leaves that came in its way, and the swaying of the upper branches of the trees announcing that the wind was rising. We shouted loudly, but without evoking any reply. I then fired off my gun several times as tokens of distress. Finally a distant halloo reached our ears . . . when a new obstacle presented itself. Fanned by the wind, the tiny flames previously mentioned had united and spread over a considerable surface. We thus found ourselves in the center of a circle of fire extending or narrowing, more or less, around us. We could not reach the men who had come to our assistance. . . . They were obliged to fray a passage for us by beating the fire with branches of trees at one particular point, thus momentarily staying its progress whilst we rapidly made our escape . . . I learned the following day, on my return to Peshtigo, that the town had been in great peril at the very time that I had lost myself in the wood
s. . . . Hogsheads of water were placed at intervals all round the town, ready for any emergency.

  Father Pernin’s narrow escape was a harbinger of things to come. So too was an unprecedented event that took place on the following evening. As the people of Peshtigo looked skyward toward the forests, they were amazed to see thousands of birds covered in white ash flying up out of the trees, many of them tall pines that had caught fire. Totally disoriented, the birds flew into one another before being pulled downward, sucked back into the branches of the burning trees. Peshtigo residents hardly had time to comprehend what they had just witnessed when the shrill whistle from the woodenware factory sounded. Sparks and cinders from the woodland fires had blown across the Peshtigo River and had set the sawdust and wood slabs next to the factory on fire. Hundreds of men instantly rushed to the river, formed a human chain, and passed buckets of water back to the factory, extinguishing the blaze before the factory itself could catch on fire.

  SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, DAWNED BRIGHT AND BEAUTIFUL, and many Peshtigo citizens, relieved that the town’s main source of employment and income had been spared, went off to church. Services had hardly begun when once again the Peshtigo Company’s fire whistle sounded. Sawdust and piles of slabs had been set afire again. Again, the men of the river formed a human chain, this time Father Pernin among them. By this time, the priest had become truly alarmed at what fate might be in store for his town and its people. “I have,” he wrote, “seen fires sweep over the prairies with the speed of a locomotive and the prairie fire is grand and terrific, but beside a timber fire it sinks into insignificance. In the timber it may move almost as rapidly, but the fire does not go out. . . . It is as though you attempted to resist the approach of an avalanche of fire hurled against you.”

  Again, the fires beside the woodenware factory were extinguished. Again, most of the Peshtigo residents were left with the belief that the town was in no real danger, a conviction made stronger by a sudden shift in the wind. “Monday, the wind veered to the south and cleared away the smoke,” Father Pernin wrote. “Strange to say not a building was burned—the town was saved. Monday the factory was closed to give the men rest, and today, September 27, all is quiet and going on as usual.”

  It would not last. In the first week of October the fires in the forest intensified. During the day, the sky glowed an eerie shade of yellow. At night it turned bright red. Then the wind changed direction, blowing directly toward Peshtigo. If modern meteorologists were describing what was about to happen, they would label it the “perfect storm.” More accurately, it would be described as the “perfect firestorm.” On October 7, a huge cyclonic storm swept in from the west, with winds up to as high as one hundred miles per hour. Natural gases, resulting from the burning trees and the peat that was part of much of the woodland soil, rose into the air. Burning coals began falling from the atmosphere like snowflakes.

  On October 8, the firestorm struck Peshtigo. A contemporary north Wisconsin journal reported that on

  Sunday evening, after church, for about half an hour a death-like stillness hung over the doomed town. The smoke from the fires in the region around was so thick as to be stifling, and hung like a funeral pall over everything, and all was enveloped in Egyptian darkness. Soon light puffs of air were felt; the horizon at the south-east, south, and south-west began to be faintly illuminated; a perceptible trembling of the earth was felt, and a distant roar broke the awful silence. People began to fear that some awful calamity was impending, but as yet no one even dreamed of the danger. The illumination soon became intensified into a lurid glare; the roar deepened into a howl, as if all the demons of the infernal pit had been let loose, when the advance gusts of wind from the main body of the tornado struck. Chimneys were blown down, houses were unroofed, and, amid the confusion, terror, and terrible apprehensions of the moment, the fiery element, in tremendous inrolling billows and masses of sheeted flame, enveloped the devoted village.

  As soon as the fires appeared on the edge of the town, Father Pernin set his horse free in the street and began digging a trench around his house, spurred on by a “fear, growing more strongly each moment into a certainty.” As he dug, he became aware not only of a growing crimson reflection in the western part of the sky, but also of a noise unlike any he had ever heard. “This sound,” he later wrote in his diary, “resembled the confused noise of a number of cars and locomotives approaching a railroad station, or the rumbling of thunder, with the difference that it never ceased, but deepened in intensity each moment more and more.” There was only one thing to do, he told himself. He had to seek safety in the river. Everyone else in Peshtigo, it seemed, had the same thought.

  To reach the river . . . was more than many succeeded in doing . . . How I arrived at it is even to this day a mystery to myself. The air was no longer fit to breathe, full as it was of sand, dust, ashes, cinders, sparks, smoke, and fire. It was almost impossible to keep one’s eyes unclosed, to distinguish the road, or to recognize people, though the way was crowded with pedestrians, as well as vehicles crossing and crashing against each other in the general flight. Some were hastening towards the river, others from it, whilst all were struggling alike in the grasp of the hurricane. A thousand discordant deafening noises rose on the air together. The neighing of horses, falling of chimneys, crashing of uprooted trees, roaring and whistling of the wind, crackling of fire as it ran with lightning-like rapidity from house to house—all sounds were there save that of the human voice.

  It was not just the residents of Peshtigo who rushed to the river. From throughout the outlying areas, hundreds also headed for what they believed to be their only chance of survival. Among them was Jane Phillips, who later wrote one of the most vivid accounts of the frantic flight:

  Horses’ manes and tails blowin’ to the right, on fire. Rigs comin’ out on the road ever’where. Could hardly get through. Some was wrecked, and the people started to run on foot. . . . Little crick, wood bridge burnin’. People diggin’ themselves into the mud of the crick bed. Wind about to tip our wagon over. Passed a buggy, upset, woman and children runnin’. . . . Open well by the road. Man shovin’ women and children down it. Teams, cows, people runnin’ for the river. Goin’ down hill. Rose, hold onto the babies! Hogs in the road! Hogs in the road! Wagon bounced right through a blazin’ herd of hogs. Horses and oxen jammed into trees on the riverbank. Bridge on fire. Wind, people, horses, screamin’. . . . My shirt was on fire, ripped it off. I jumped out and turned to get Rose and the little ones down to the water. Wagon . . . was empty. Nothin’ in the box . . . empty.

  Phillips was far from alone in her tragic discovery. Later the true story was told of the man who was carrying his wife to the safety of the river when he tripped over some obstruction and dropped her. Struggling to his feet, he looked frantically about him and finally found her. Picking her up, he made it to the river only to find that it was not his wife he was carrying, but a total stranger. He never saw his wife again.

  PREVIOUS SPREAD: A contemporary illustration of the rush to the river during the Peshtigo fire, by G. J. Tisdale.

  It had only been a matter of minutes, but Peshtigo was now enveloped in unbridled disaster. As publisher and editor Frank Tilton of the Green Bay Advocate later reported, “Scores failed to reach the river at all. Strangled by the smoke, or foul gases, or both, they fell, and their charred and shriveled bodies lying on the streets presented a ghastly and horrible sight next morning. . . . some were burned to death within a few feet of the river, some in their houses, some in the woods, and some on the roads attempting to escape.”

  Father Pernin did make it to the bridge at the river, but was greeted by sights and sounds he never could have imagined.

  The bridge was thoroughly encumbered with cattle, vehicles, women, children, and men, all pushing and crushing against each other so as to find an issue from it. . . . I was thus obliged to ascend the river on the left bank, above the dam, where the water gradually attained a great depth. After placing a certain
distance between myself and the bridge, the fall of which I momentarily expected, I pushed [myself] . . . as far into the water as possible. It was all that I could do. . . . The banks of the river as far as the eye could reach were covered with people standing there, motionless as statues, some with eyes staring, upturned towards heaven, and tongues protruded. The greater number seemed to have no idea of taking any steps to procure their safety, imagining, as many afterwards acknowledged to me, that the end of the world had arrived and that here was nothing for them but silent submission to their fate. . . . I pushed the persons standing on each side of me into the water. One of these sprang back again with a half smothered cry murmuring: “I am wet;” but immersion in water was better than immersion in fire. I caught him again and dragged him out with me into the river as far as possible. At the same moment I heard a splash of the water along the river’s brink. All had followed my example. It was time; the air was no longer fit for inhalation, whilst the intensity of the heat was increasing. A few minutes more and no living thing could have resisted its fiery breath.

  They had sought the waters of the Peshtigo for salvation, but if anything, the conditions in the river were even more disastrous than those that most had already experienced. The river was a struggling sea of humanity, filled with men, women, and children trying desperately to stay alive. As always, the Peshtigo was filled with logs, waiting to be floated to the sawmill. Set afire by the heat and flames, the logs became flaming missiles, crashing into the terrified hordes. The bridge above the river had itself become a weapon of death. As hundreds, attempting to flee across the bridge from the west side of town, bumped into those trying to cross from the opposite direction, the bridge collapsed under the weight, hurling all of them into the water.