Lost to Time

by Martin W. Sandler

  Standing in the cold water of the river, or clinging to logs—sometimes the logs on fire, were men, women, and children, grasping for breath, their eyes blinded by smoke, and saving themselves from burning even in the water only by covering their heads with blankets which they kept wet, or wetting their heads continually. The roar of the tornado and of the fire was mingled with shrieks of anguish from the suffering, and groans and lamentations from those bereaved of relatives and friends. Cattle, too, rushed into the river and swam about bewildered, sometimes rolling over the logs to which wretched human beings were clinging, and sending them to a watery grave.

  Phillips had her own recollections:

  Ever’thin’ was driftin’ up against us, cows, water-logged sheep, dead fish. . . . Flashes of fire kept sweepin’ over the water. Ever’thin’ had to duck or be burnt to the waterline. . . . Ox swam by with a woman hangin’ to its burnt stub of a tail. I caught her and dragged her to the lee of the bank. Woman was in labor. . . . Baby was born in the water, never saw it. Old folks dyin’ couldn’t stand breathin’ that terrible stove heat. Old lady, not burnt, but dead, bumped up against us, had to push her off.

  Amazingly, in the midst of the horror, there would be what some survivors would describe as “miraculous incidents.” “Not far from me,” Father Pernin described, “[a cow] overturned in its passage the log to which [a] woman was clinging and she disappeared into the water. I thought her lost; but soon saw her emerge from it holding on with one hand to the horns of the cow, and throwing water on her head with the other. . . . what threatened to bring destruction to the woman had proved the means of her salvation.”

  Sadly, the “miraculous incidents” were all too few. “At the moment I was entering the river,” Father Pernin also wrote, “another woman, terrified and breathless, reached its bank. She was leading one child by the hand and held pressed to her breast what appeared to be another, enveloped in a roll of disordered linen, evidently caught up in the haste. Oh horror! On opening these wraps to look on the face of her child—it was not there.”

  Father Pernin and the others who were fortunate enough to survive spent almost five and a half hours in the river before the firestorm abated enough for them to feel it was safe to leave the water. Emerging from the river, youngster Fred Shepherd encountered a sight that would remain with him for the rest of his life:

  I looked up the street at the top of the bluff toward the north. Coming toward us down the road, silhouetted against the sky, I saw a long file of men, women and children who wended their way down to where we were [huddled around a pile of burning coal in an attempt to warm ourselves]. They had passed the night clinging to the booms and logs of the deep water above the dam. They were all of the remaining survivors of the village. Some were fairly well clothed, others only partially so, some with nightdresses only. All gathered in a circle around the pile of burning coal. Distress and agony were in their faces. They were asking each other, “Have you seen my Willie, my Mary; have you seen my wife, my husband?” So pathetic was this scene that even I, a boy of eight years, could not endure it and withdrew to a distance.

  One of the most horrendous stories of all was that of church construction worker C. W. Towsley and his family, who found themselves trapped inside their house encircled by a wall of flame with no means of escape. Pernin wrote how, after watching flames engulf and kill his wife and one of his youngsters, Towsley grabbed a kitchen knife and slit the throats of his two other children and then himself.

  Gradually, those who had managed to survive the hours in the river began to hear other accounts of fellow townspeople who had not been able to make it to the water. “My father saved his orphaned children in the mud of Bundy Creek,” one young girl reported, “but our neighbors died in their root cellar.” “My oldest brother got us children to the river,” a youngster explained, “but our mother fell behind with the baby in her arms. We found them in the potato field.” Another tale was that of William Curtiss. As fire engulfed his home, he, as did a good number of others, sought refuge in his well. But because of the prolonged drought, there was not enough water to immerse himself. As flames entered the well, Curtiss looped the bucket chain around his neck and hanged himself.

  A particularly tragic story was later recounted by Frank Tilton in the Green Bay Advocate.

  At the boarding house, a strange hallucination seemed to prevail that it could be saved, and a large number of people took refuge there. On the opposite side of the street was the fire-engine house, and the engine was taken out, the hose stretched across the street, and water thrown on the boarding house. The number who gathered inside the boarding house is variously estimated at from thirty to seventy-five persons. When the flames struck the building, the whole front was on fire in an instant. It was in fact completely surrounded with whirling, writhing coils of flame. The hapless inmates had their choice between an atmosphere of fire without and hell of fire within, and it mattered little which they chose, as few of them could have succeeded in crossing the street to the river. A heap of indistinguishable . . . bones and charred flesh in the ruins of the building, giving no clue to sex or number, was all that remained.

  Tilton was horrified by what had happened at the boardinghouse, but he was even more devastated by his walk through the streets of Peshtigo, after the fire had finally abated.

  Here lay a group of father, mother, and children, their clothes all gone and their bodies shriveled up to two-thirds their natural size; . . . the child of Mr. Tanner [was] found in a kneeling posture, as if in the attitude of prayer, his head bent down upon his hands and his body completely roasted; and there were groups lying all around the site of the village, some of the bodies with their limbs burned off, all of them naked, and, with one exception, all lying on their faces. . . . We leave our readers to picture, if they can, the grief of parents that morning on recognizing the bodies of their idolized children; and of a husband when he distinguished the blackened, unsightly remains of his beloved wife; and the agony, mingled with faint hope, of those whose dear ones were among the missing.

  The survivors’ desperate search for missing loved ones was heartrending. “Whilst wandering among the ruins I met several persons, with some of whom I entered into conversation,” recalled Father Pernin. “One was a bereaved father seeking his missing children of whom he had as yet learned nothing. ‘If, at least,’ he said to me, with a look of indescribable anguish, ‘I could find their bones, but the wind has swept away whatever the fire spared.’”

  Like Frank Tilton, owner and editor Luther Noyes of the Marinette and Peshtigo Eagle had made his way into Peshtigo almost as soon as the fires abated. Like Tilton, he was totally unprepared for what he encountered. Gigantic boulders lay split in half. All that remained of the seven-hundred-pound bell that had adorned the firehouse was a pile of melted metal. Amazing also were the stories Noyes heard. He found one account particularly incomprehensible. Eyewitnesses reported that at the height of the conflagration several Peshtigo residents, well away from the fire, had suddenly burst into flames.

  Noyes also heard stories of heroic, but most often futile, efforts by some of the townspeople to save their families and neighbors. But Father Pernin had another type of tale to tell.

  Alas that I should have to record an incident such as should never have happened in the midst of that woeful scene! . . . Enslaved by the wretched vice of avarice, [a man] had just been taken in the act of despoiling the bodies of the dead of whatever objects the fire had spared. A jury was formed, his punishment put to the vote, and he was unanimously condemned to be hanged on the spot. But where was a rope to be found? The fire had spared nothing. Somebody proposed substituting for the former an iron chain which had been employed for drawing logs, and one was accordingly brought and placed around the criminal’s neck. Execution was difficult under the circumstances; and whilst the preparations dragged slowly on, the miserable man loudly implored mercy. The pity inspired by the mournful surroundings softened at length the hearts o
f the judges, and, after having made him crave pardon on his knees for the sacrilegious thefts of which he had been guilty, they allowed him to go free. It may have been that they merely intended frightening him.

  THE CONFLAGRATION BECAME KNOWN as the Peshtigo Fire, because it was in this ill-fated village and the farming area immediately surrounding it that both industry and population were most concentrated and where the majority of fatalities occurred. But the fire was of far greater magnitude than the destruction of Peshtigo. Before the last fires had been put out, 2,400 square miles (1.5 million acres) had been ravaged, numerous settlements and isolated farms had been destroyed, and hundreds of lives beyond Peshtigo had been lost.

  One of the earliest accounts of the disaster that had taken place beyond Peshtigo came from Frank Tilton. “After daylight, stragglers began to pour in from the Sugar Bush farming settlements. . . . They told of square miles of flourishing farming settlements utterly depopulated; of houses and barns swept away, and of scores and hundred of dead bodies in the roads and fields. . . . In the entire extent of the three Sugar Bush settlements, but eight houses were left standing, and the loss of life was horrible in the extreme.”

  A LOCAL NEWSPAPER FRONT PAGE from October 14, 1871. The Peshtigo story was far overshadowed by the Chicago Fire.

  As described in the State Gazette Extra of October 10, 1871, none of the outlying settlements was hit harder than Brussels. The fire, the newspaper reported, “raged with terrific violence, destroying about one hundred eighty houses, and leaving nothing of a large and flourishing settlements but five houses. . . . On Monday morning two hundred people breakfasted on four loaves of bread. Hopeless and homeless, they camp out on their land, and seem struck dumb with their great losses.”

  As reports from the outlying area filtered in, stories as horrific as those that had emerged from Peshtigo began to be heard. One was that of the Karl Lamp family. Lamp and his wife were German immigrants who had cleared the land and carved out a farm in the Lower Sugar Bush. When the fire approached, Lamp hitched his team of horses to a wagon, put his wife and their five children inside it, and headed for Peshtigo. At one point, he heard his family screaming as their clothes had caught fire; however, Lamp knew he could not stop with the conflagration so close behind. They reached the main road when suddenly one of the horses fell. Lamp got off his seat and tried unsuccessfully to help the horse back on its feet. Turning then to speak to his wife, he discovered that in the brief time that he had gone to the horse’s assistance his wife and all five children had been enveloped in flames and were now dead.

  There were inspirational tales as well. Journalist and author Elias Colbert later described how the one house in the Upper Bush country that survived the inferno was saved. “In the entire Upper Bush country there is only one house left, the home of ‘old man’ Place,” Colbert wrote. “Many years ago this man settled here soon afterward marrying a squaw, by whom he has had many children. He has always engaged in trading with the Indians, who have had his house as their headquarters. When the fire came, about twenty Indians covered his house with their blankets, which they kept wet down, thus saving the house. One great big fellow stood at the pump for nine hours, showing an endurance possessed by very few white men.”

  The most common story that was told throughout the entire region, from Peshtigo to Green Bay and beyond, was what was later regarded as the most extraordinary phenomenon of the entire disaster. Typical was the account given by Lower Sugar Bush resident Alfred Griffin. “When I heard the roar of the approaching tornado,” Griffin stated, “I ran out of my house and saw a great, black, balloon-shaped object whirling though the air over the tops of the distant trees, approaching my house. When it reached the house, it seemed to explode, with a loud noise, belching out fire on every side, and in an instant my house was on fire in every part.”

  In the days following the Wisconsin fire, newspaper headlines screamed out the news of what had happened in Chicago. News of what had taken place in tiny, remote Peshtigo—a tragedy far greater in scope, far more horrific in loss of life—received far less attention. Fortunately, a telegram sent from Peshtigo on October 9 reading, “We are burning up; send us help quick,” did get through to the office of Wisconsin’s governor, Lucius Fairchild. And a real heroine emerged. When the telegram arrived, the governor was in Chicago, attempting to aid that city. The clerk who received the message, not knowing what to do with it, brought it to the governor’s house and gave it to Mrs. Fairchild.

  Frances Fairchild, the governor’s wife, was only twenty-four years old, but immediately after reading the telegram, she hurried to the state capitol. As her daughter later stated, once there “she took charge of everything and everybody, and they all obeyed her.” Appalled by the preliminary reports of what had happened in the lumbering districts, Fairchild redirected a train loaded with relief supplies for Chicago and had it sent instead to Peshtigo. She then sent telegrams to every major American city, pleading with them to send aid to the stricken area.

  The response was overwhelming. From throughout the nation, and even from some foreign countries, money and supplies poured into Peshtigo. A new village began to rise, in great part because of the contributions and efforts of one man, William Ogden.

  Ogden, who had lost over 1 million in property in the Chicago Fire, arrived in Peshtigo late in October and immediately announced, “We will rebuild this village—the mills, the shops,—and do a larger winter’s logging than ever before.” True to his word, Ogden worked timelessly drawing up plans, hiring work crews, and personally leading the rebuilding efforts. The fire had destroyed the construction of Ogden’s pet project, the building of a railroad connecting Peshtigo with the outlying districts, and he devoted additional efforts to restoring this construction, offering a 75,000 bonus to the railroad’s builder if he completed laying the rails to Menominee by the end of 1871. Spurred on by Ogden, tracks reached Marinette on December 22 and Menominee on December 27, 1871.

  THE CHICAGO FIRE WAS still front-page news at the end of October, as shown on the front page of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper of October 28, 1871.

  On February 24, 1872, in a tribute to what Ogden had accomplished, the Eagle exclaimed, “The action of [Ogden] since the great disaster, has been of more real advantage to the village of Peshtigo and her people, than all the ample and generous relief forwarded by a sympathizing and noble hearted public.” For the residents of Peshtigo, however, there was one major disappointment.

  It had been fully expected that Ogden would rebuild his woodenware factory, the soul of Peshtigo’s economic activity. But even before the fire, he had become more interested both in accelerating his railroad interests and in expanding his more profitable sawmill operations at Peshtigo Harbor. The woodenware factory would not be rebuilt. Peshtigo had made a remarkable recovery. But without the woodenware factory and its many allied operations, it never regained the vibrancy that had distinguished it from so many other small towns.

  WHAT WOULD ALWAYS SET PESHTIGO APART, however, was the unfortunate distinction of having been the center of the single deadliest fire in the United States, one that took more lives than the next two worst conflagrations combined. It has been estimated by several sources that 1,200 people died in Peshtigo and its environs. That number is probably far too low by half. As Father Pernin wrote,

  The true total will never be known, since whole farmsteads were erased, leaving no trace, and no one knows how many itinerant workers died in Peshtigo’s company boardinghouse or in its two churches to which many fled in panic, or in isolated logging camps deep in the surrounding woods. People simply became piles of ashes or calcinated bones, identifiable only if a buckle, a ring, a shawl pin, or some other familiar object survived the incredible heat.

  What is known is that for years after the fire, the remains of people who were killed in the firestorm were still being found in the woods and in Peshtigo itself. And there was another type of casualty. In a report to the Wisconsin state legi
slature, Captain A. J. Langworthy, chairman of the Peshtigo Relief Committee, stated that “many who escaped the fiery visitation . . . were paralyzed with fear, from the effects of which they will probably never recover.” Sadly, his prediction was correct. In Marinette alone there was a building in which sixty-five physically and emotionally traumatized orphans of the fire were housed.

  The Peshtigo Fire was not only catastrophic, but inevitable. As wildfire expert Stephen J. Payne explains, “A prolonged drought, a rural agriculture based on burning, railroads that cast sparks to all sides, a landscape stuffed with slash and debris from logging, a city built largely of forest materials, the catalytic passing of a dry cold front—all ensured that fires would break out, that some would become monumental, that flames would swallow wooden villages.”

  THE PESHTIGO FIRE CEMETERY MEMORIAL.

  That is exactly what happened. What is extraordinary is that the “monumental” fire took place on the very same day that one of the nation’s largest cities grabbed the headlines by suffering its own conflagration, and that the greatest American fire was, in great measure, forgotten.

  TEN

  GUSTAVE WHITEHEAD

  The First to Fly? (1901)

  Almost every schoolchild knows the story. On December 17, 1903, two bicycle makers from Ohio, Wilbur and Orville Wright, achieved immortality by performing the world’s first successful controlled, powered, and sustained heavier-than-air human flight. What has been lost to history is the fact that this historic breakthrough may well have been accomplished two years, four months, and three days earlier by a German immigrant named Gustave Whitehead. And there is a great deal of evidence to support that claim.