by Kate Klimo
Within the first hour, the wind drove the fire into neighboring yards. Barns, houses, chicken coops, trees, sidewalks, and fences went up in flames. Neighbors helped residents pull furniture, clothes, and family members to safety while the flames leaped from roof to roof.
Chief Fire Marshal Robert A. Williams, the citywide head of the fire department, arrived to supervise. He ordered the men to surround the fire. But the fire jumped over their heads and fanned out. The wind whipped up the flames, causing a phenomenon known as a fire devil. As heated air rose and met cooler air, it began to spin like a tornado. The fire “devils” whirled, carrying sparks, burning firebrands, and debris, spreading the conflagration far and wide.
The fire advanced, unchecked. Embers fell, according to eyewitnesses, like “a blizzard of red snow.” Some of them landed on St. Paul’s Church, four blocks away from the O’Learys’ barn. The steeple caught fire, and from there, the embers blew across the river into the business district and wealthy residential district. As the fire made its way through the city, it burned down shantytowns as well as mansions. It destroyed factories and businesses, hotels and department stores, theaters and bridges and office buildings. When the city waterworks burned down at three o’clock on Monday morning, the fire pumps stopped being able to draw water.
As Monday morning dawned, the mayor sent out an SOS: “Chicago in flames.” Help soon came pouring in from Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Dayton, Louisville, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and other cities. Despite all the efforts, the fire continued to run rampant. The streets were mobbed with looters, people fleeing the fire, and spectators watching in horrified fascination.
Thirty thousand homeless people flocked to Lincoln Park, on the shores of Lake Michigan. The fire burned all of Monday and well into the evening. It might well have gone on burning, too, were it not for the rain that started falling that night. The showers slowed down the spread long enough for firefighters to get the upper hand.
By the time the fire was out, it had destroyed an area four miles long and a mile wide, burning 18,000 buildings and 73 miles of street. It killed 300 people and left another 100,000 homeless. Newspaper writers called it the Great Fire.
Want to know more about the Great Chicago Fire? Go to chicagohs.org.
Did Mrs. O’Leary’s cow start the fire? Visit this site to read an in-depth investigation: greatchicagofire.org.
An Ancient Breed
The Percheron gets its name from the district in northern France known as Le Perche, where the breed is said to date back to the last Ice Age. Over the centuries, people used the Percheron to do farmwork. In 732, when the Moors invaded during the Battle of Tours, Arabian blood was mixed with Percheron. Perhaps it is the Arabian strain that accounts for the Percheron’s distinctive combination of strength and grace.
The Percheron is black or gray and ranges in height from fifteen to nineteen hands and weighs between 1,400 and 2,600 pounds. A willing worker with a good disposition, it also has enormous stamina, enabling it to travel up to thirty-five miles a day at a trot! Owing to its size, strength, and intelligence, the Percheron was the breed favored by firemen to haul heavy equipment in the days before motorized vehicles.
For more information about Percherons, visit percheronhorse.org.
Heroes on the Hoof
In 1832, New York’s Mutual Hook & Ladder Company No. 1 purchased a horse. It was probably the first official fire horse. Up until this time, firemen carried their own tools or hauled them in a wagon. But as cities grew larger, firefighting equipment got heavier, so horses became a necessity.
Why horses? Horses are sensitive creatures that spook easily, and fires are terrifying. But firemen maintained that a properly trained horse was as good as gold. In fact, it cost ten times the salary of a single fireman to buy and train a fire horse over a two-year period. And not just any horse would do. The horse had to be smart and strong and sure-footed. The Percheron was the breed most commonly chosen, but draft horses, saddlebreds, and Thoroughbreds were also used.
The city of Detroit even had a “college” devoted exclusively to training horses. But in most cases, firemen trained horses at their own stations. Learning to stay calm and cool at the site of a fire, however, was something that only came to a horse with on-the-job experience. And that experience was often scary and dangerous. Running across cobblestones or ice and snow, horses sometimes slipped and fell on the way to a fire. Or, like the firemen they worked with, they got burned—sometimes fatally. Because the job was so stressful and dangerous, the career of a fire horse was usually between four and eight years.
With the invention of motorized engines in the early 1900s, firefighters no longer needed horses to pull their equipment. After sixty years of brave and valiant service, fire horses became a thing of the past.
Check out this site dedicated to keeping the memory of fire horses alive: firehorses.info.
Cinders and the horses of the Maxwell Street fire station are fictional characters. To read about some actual fire horses in history, go to: equitrekking.com/articles/entry/famous_horses_in_history_-_the_fire_horse.
From Coach Dogs to Fire Dogs
Built for speed and endurance, Dalmatians have served as sporting dogs, war dogs, ratters, shepherds, and coach dogs. Here in America, Dalmatians are best known as fire dogs. Their job was to run alongside the fire horses, helping them stay on course and not spook, either on the way to the fire or once they were on-site. Fires are noisy, scary places, and horses are high-strung. There was something about the Dalmatians that kept the horses calm and steady.
In the years since motorized trucks have replaced horses, firefighters still keep Dalmatians as firehouse mascots, in memory of how it was in the old days.
For more information on this wonderful breed, visit akc.org/dog-breeds/dalmatian.
Kate Klimo wakes up every morning and mucks out the paddock and stalls of her two horses, Harry (a paint gelding) and Fancy (a quarter-horse mare). Kate and her husband (who is also named Harry) like to ride as often as they can on the trails of Mohonk Preserve, behind their house in New Paltz, New York, where the footing is great and the views are spectacular. They go on horseback-riding vacations once or twice a year and have ridden all over the world, from South Africa to Costa Rica, from Patagonia to Iceland. There is no day that is so bad, Kate claims, that it can’t be vastly improved by getting on the back of a good horse. When she isn’t riding, she is writing. She is the author of the Dog Diaries books and the Dragon Keepers series.
Ruth Sanderson grew up with a love for horses. She has illustrated and retold many fairy tales and likes to feature horses in them whenever possible. Her book about a magical horse, The Golden Mare, the Firebird, and the Magic Ring, won the Texas Bluebonnet Award.
Ruth and her daughter have two horses, an Appaloosa named Thor and a quarter horse named Gabriel. She lives with her family in Massachusetts.
To find out more about her adventures with horses and the research she does to create Horse Diaries illustrations, visit her website, ruthsanderson.com.
Sparky the fire dog is so good at her job that she knows when the alarm is going to ring before it even rings! But today is no ordinary day. There’s no choice but to put Cinders—a rescue horse with an attitude—to work. But Cinders’s very first fire is destined to become one of the greatest disasters of the nineteenth century!