1871
THE GREAT FIRE
SUNDAYS WERE STEPHEN’S day off. He usually spent them in Evanston, which meant leaving in the dark on the first carriage for the two-hour ride into Chicago on Monday morning. His mother would wake him and, after gulping down a bowl of porridge dipped with biscuits, he would hurry toward the junction. On this particular morning, when he first became aware of her attempting to rouse him, he was reluctant to wake up. His body was telling him it was too early. It would be cold outside. A wind whistled through the eaves. He was warm and comfortable, and in the middle of a dream. “Get up, Stephen. Get up.”
It was the edge of terror in her voice that convinced him to bestir himself. Perhaps something had happened to Uncle Jearum. Maybe the house had been robbed. Had the wind blown the roof off? He turned onto his back. Or was the house on fire? Hardly a drop of rain had fallen for the last three months. Everybody was talking about the risk of a stray spark setting something off. He opened his eyes. The room was filled by a faint, flickering light. The light was neither the gray of dawn nor the crimson of sunset nor the glow of a candle.
“Mildred,” said his mother, with blank, staring eyes.
He sat up. Something had happened to Mildred? He was close to his sister, closer now than ever before, and he was responsible for her. But he was confused. He saw her only yesterday … no, not yesterday, it was on Saturday morning … before he left for work. They both had rooms at Mrs. Creeley’s boardinghouse. He had arranged the lodgings for her when she began, just a few weeks ago, to train as a nurse. Unlike him, her Sunday had not been free. She was still in Chicago. What could possibly have happened to Mildred, that they were learning about it here in Evanston, in the middle of the night?
He jumped out of bed at the same moment as his mother drew back the curtain. “Look,” she said. Tears were welling up in her eyes and she made no attempt to wipe them away.
That was how he first saw the Fire, at some hour before dawn, through the window of their house in Evanston. He had seen pictures of volcanoes erupting, but they did that out of mountaintops. This was the flattest land in the world. The effect, though, was the same. It was a horrifying, unnatural sight. A smoke cloud had spread so high and wide, it hid the moon. Beneath it, the city was burning, ragged and enraged, tongues of flame leaping from a bright orange core.
He let his mother lean her head on his shoulder.
* * *
All day, they waited at the carriage stop in the village. There were all kinds of awful rumors about where the Fire had reached, how it had left nothing in its path, how some of the most fireproof buildings in the downtown area had been destroyed. Train stations, hotels, banks, churches, the big central Courthouse, and the Post Office had all been swept away. And if they had gone, what else could have survived? Bridges had gone up in flames, or collapsed because of the weight of people trying to cross. Women with their clothes on fire had been seen jumping into the river. Looters were ransacking any building not yet burned down. The firefighters had run out of water. Nobody knew how many people had been unable to escape in time. Hundreds, maybe thousands.
Late in the day, Stephen saw a colleague from the Field & Leiter store on a carriage passing through Evanston on its way north. He was quite certain, said his friend, that the whole of State Street had been flattened. “If the Palmer House Hotel has gone—and it has—you can be sure Field & Leiter went too.” Stephen found it hard to imagine, those six vast floors, filled with everything from Persian carpets to French furniture to the finest New York jewelry, going up in flames. Later, he overheard someone else saying that the Waterworks building had also been destroyed. Sheer rumormongering, he decided. He had once walked around it, and he knew the place was built like a castle. Even from outside its solid stone walls, you could hear engines ceaselessly pumping water into the huge elevated storage tank across the road. If the Waterworks had burned down, they might as well start believing in the fairies.
Whenever a vehicle pulled into the village, there were chaotic scenes. Stephen saw more pitiful sights, in those few hours, than he had ever seen in his life. People alighted, cut and bruised, their clothes torn and blackened by soot and ash, clutching a few belongings wrapped up in a cloth or bedsheet. They looked dazed and frightened. Everybody had lost someone.
Their overwhelming anxiety, of course, was Mildred. With the appearance of each carriage, their hopes were revived as they pushed forward to see the new arrivals. And when she was not there, he would try to console his mother and assure her there was every chance she would be on the next one. They questioned everyone they could, trying to understand how far the Fire had gone and whether it had reached the Sixth Ward. Some said it had, others said it hadn’t.
All day, he kept trying to imagine a good outcome. Mildred was a light sleeper, she would have woken as soon as an alarm was raised. Her room was on the second floor. It would have taken her no more than two minutes to dress and leave the house. She would have gone south, not north. She must know her way around well enough by now to recognize the difference. Anyway, Mrs. Creeley and the other lodgers would have been there too. And by going south, how could she possibly have found a carriage headed to the north? If, that is, she had been able to find a carriage at all. From what they’d heard, drivers were charging extortionate fares.
They were wasting their time, he assured his mother. Anyway, Mildred had a friend who lived on Adams Street. That’s where she would go first. “And one more thing,” he added, “the Fire would have had to cross the river to get to the Sixth Ward, and what are the chances of that happening?” By the time it began to rain on Monday night, they had been waiting for roughly fourteen hours, and there was no word of her.
It was a mostly sleepless night. He finally nodded off in a chair in Uncle Jearum’s room, where they all waited together until the early hours, in the hope that there would be a knock on the front door and they would open it to find Mildred standing there.
The next morning, Stephen took the first carriage he could find going into Chicago. His mother gave him a package of sandwiches. “You’ve made a lot,” he said, thanking her.
“She’ll be hungry,” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “Of course.”
He let her hug him. “Be careful, Stephen.”
This crisis had renewed feelings of tenderness in him toward his mother. His relations with her had never been easy. She could be overbearing. She expected too much of him. She wanted to know everything. And she was always putting on airs. But as they waited in vain for Mildred, he found himself desperate—but helpless—to protect her. He could not imagine what might happen to them all if she were to lose Mildred too.
* * *
The carriage would go no farther than a point on North Avenue. Stephen stepped out and observed a world so altered, he could hardly make sense of it. The air was swirling with ash, and he could already feel the heat. He narrowed his eyes, put a hand up to shield his face. The houses were blackened with soot, a layer now firmly imprinted by the overnight rain. The sky was a limpid gray. The sun must be somewhere in the background, but it was hard to tell how much of the gray was smoke, and how much cloud.
He crossed what felt like a border. Beyond lay nothing but ruins. The ground was soft and warm, layered with ash, the horizon cluttered with blackened masonry and a few surviving timbers grizzled to silvery charcoal. In what must once have been a house, an old iron clothes mangle lay twisted and deformed, a sewing machine congealed into a lump. Stretching out into the wasteland ahead, for as far as he could see, staggered the remnants of whatever buildings had once lined the street. A few tumbling walls, broken and charred, stood like broken teeth. For no obvious reason, the odd building was still standing, almost untouched.
Trees burned down to jagged stumps sometimes gave the best clue as to where a street had been. Smoking embers, in all directions, littered the wasted landscape. Heat came off the earth in flurries. Occasionally, there was a burst of new flame. But
mostly there reigned a silence almost as profound, at times, as a fall of snow.
He passed people walking the other way, hollow-eyed, faces streaked with grime and soot, children crying. Sometimes they were alone, sometimes in bedraggled groups led by militia. They were on their way, he learned, to an emergency camp set up to the west of the city for all those who had been made homeless. Perhaps, he thought, that is where I should go to search for Mildred, if Mrs. Creeley’s—please, no—has been burned down.
He kept a wary distance and avoided eye contact with men climbing over rubble, kicking things and poking with sticks. Maybe some of them were former residents, but more likely they were looters. From time to time, he saw a hog or wild dog rooting through the debris. With their fur grayed by ash, they looked like hideous phantoms. And once, in a vision that brought him to a halt, he saw a hand. It was a small hand, perhaps a child’s or lady’s hand, protruding from underneath a pile of charred bricks. He repressed the urge to retch. He glanced again, furtively this time. Maybe it wasn’t what he thought it was. But it was. Should he try to do something, or pretend he had not seen? What could he do? Life had long since left that hand. And there was no time to waste. He had to find Mildred.
He got lost. In places, it was impossible to tell where one street began and another ended. The sidewalks had all been obliterated. So had any streets whose surfaces were laid with pine blocks. Over the last three years, he had come to know the downtown area well. But the Fire had devastated the new brick palaces as comprehensively as the old timber frames. There was only fallen rubble, piles of blackened bricks, occasionally part of a wall still standing. That was why he even struggled to recognize the ruins of State Street. Field & Leiter had vanished.
He had been using occasional sightings of the water storage tower—that, at least, was in one piece—to guide himself south. This was how he came upon the Waterworks itself. What he had heard was true. Even this great building had gone. He stood, gawping at the massive scene of destruction. Only one corner wall was partly in place. Smoke drifted off the tangled iron remains of its engines. What looked to have been a giant wheel lay on its side, fractured, one rim sticking up. Two men with a fire trolley were directing a hose at an outbreak of flames.
He was not the only person who had stopped to look. Militia were stationed at the perimeter, keeping people away. He watched as three gentlemen stepped gingerly around the great wheel that lay upended, apparently inspecting the damage. Stephen found himself standing next to one of the firefighters. The man was sweating, wiping his forehead with an elbow. His eyes were red. He swigged from a flask. “The older one in the middle with the long gray beard is the chief engineer,” the man said, “probably cursing himself, that he didn’t see it coming.”
“How could this burn, though,” asked Stephen, puzzled, “with all that water inside?”
“How do you think? We’ve been telling them for years,” complained the fireman. “Roofs should be made from iron, not timber. If you don’t, all you’ve done is create a sockdolager of a firetrap. One live ember on a dry timber roof, and up she goes. But oh no, the Council won’t have it. That would mean more rules and higher taxes. Do that, and you’d drive business away, wouldn’t you?” He spat. “Pisspot politicians. See what they’ve done?”
“I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t mean to…”
“Oh, ease off, son. Unless you’re one of them? No, you look too young for that kind of nonsense.”
Stephen assured him he was, and then checked for directions toward the Sixth Ward. “Do you know, sir, if the Fire went that far?”
The fireman gestured with his chin. “There’s no telling where this one went. Probably landed on the darned moon.”
Stephen set off again.
The man shouted after him: “Good luck, son. Hope you find who you’re looking for.”
* * *
He quickened his steps. The closer he got, the more inevitable it became that Mrs. Creeley’s house would not have escaped intact. Here, south of the downtown, almost nothing at all had survived. Fires still burned. The heat was scalding and the ground treacherous. He picked his way through. There were few relics of stone walls or twisted iron. Everywhere, here, lay scorched smoking earth. He must have become inured to the stench because he hardly noticed it anymore. When he blew his nose it was black, his eyes were sore and weeping, and his lungs felt dry as tinder. The package of sandwiches his mother gave him, which he had not once thought of opening, was covered in soot. He paused to take a careful sip of water from the flask he carried. He did not know how long it would have to last. The farther he went, the less believable it became.
When he reached the south riverbank, he finally knew where he was. It had been stripped virtually naked. The remains of what might have been a lumberyard were still smoking; miraculously a warehouse still half-stood, its roof capsized. But everything else—the other warehouses and coal yards and grain storage depots—that had lined the river when he passed here on Saturday were gone. The river itself, the water littered by charred driftwood, was crowded with boats and skiffs, some loaded only with people, others packed high with household goods that had been rescued. The scene was frantic and upsetting. The boatmen were bargaining hard, the prices they quoted absurdly high. Everybody was pushing to get aboard. The boatmen, he thought, might be the only people to benefit from this disaster.
He had to pay five cents, double the normal rate, to get across in a leaking skiff. The Fire had indeed crossed over the river too. He found Mrs. Creeley’s, or at least he thought he did. It was impossible to be certain about exactly where it had stood. Nothing on that street was there, nor on the street in front or behind or beyond. Stephen began to imagine the worst. There was no warning, Mildred was fast asleep when the flames, fanned by that evil wind, whipped along the street. The houses fell like dominoes. She did not even have time to get downstairs …
Pull yourself together, he told himself. Mildred is fine. She’s probably back in Evanston already. But what if she isn’t?
He began to wander aimlessly, wondering where to look next. Should he try to find that camp in the prairies to the west, where they said homeless people had been taken? There was no point trying to find Adams Street, even if that still stood, where he told his mother Mildred had a friend. He had made that up. He was beginning to feel a touch light-headed, as if intoxicated, as he trod the ash and cinders, bombarded by the kinds of big questions he rarely put to himself these days. Who was he? What was he doing here? Why was he alive? What for?
He asked a couple of patrolling militia for directions to that camp on the prairies. He was told to head west, and was making his way there when he came across a crowd, gathered around a wagon. The wagon had been turned into a makeshift platform. There must have been twenty or thirty people listening to the man speaking. Behind the speaker, daubed in red paint on a banner stretched between two stakes, were the words CHICAGO WILL RISE AGAIN. He was going to walk straight past until he was pulled up short by the voice. A chill ran through him. It was a voice he thought he recognized. He edged closer to take a look.
Mr. Wright was on the platform. He had the pale, ghostly appearance of an Old Testament prophet. His long white hair blew in the wind, his torn black coat was mottled with ash, and there was a piercing intensity to his darting gaze as he harangued the crowd. He was gesticulating, urging them to have faith in the future in a voice that rang out with eerie clarity in the stillness of the ruins. “In five years’ time,” he declared, “Chicago will have more men, more money, more buildings, more railroads, more business than it would have had WITHOUT this Fire.”
Nobody applauded.
Stephen watched with a mixture of pity and shame, glad his mother was not there to witness it.
“I shall make a prophecy,” raved Mr. Wright. “One day we will be grateful for the opportunities this Fire has created. Where I am standing now, we shall build a bigger, better and more magnificent church than was here before. And what is true for ou
r church is also true for the city. I shall say that again, my friends. What is true for our church is also true for Chicago. Chicago will be bigger, better and more magnificent than it could have ever been without this Fire.” He threw back his head and raised both hands high in the air. “CHICAGO WILL RISE AGAIN.”
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