by Owen J. Hurd
The reporters weren’t the only ones hassling Mrs. O’Leary. Once, a representative of P. T. Barnum knocked on her door, offering her a job in the traveling circus. Legend has it she chased him away, brandishing a broomstick (though this final detail may well be yet another journalistic embellishment).
Patrick and Catherine O’Leary had a son, James, who was two years old at the time of the fire. Later known as “Big Jim” O’Leary, he worked for a time in the stockyards, before opening a saloon on South Halsted, a short walk from his former workplace. By the 1890s he emerged as one of the city’s preeminent gambling kingpins. Along with Mike McDonald and Mont Tennes, “Big Jim” O’Leary headlined a generation of vice lords preceding the likes of Jim Colosimo and Johnny Torrio, who were followed by Al Capone and other Chicago mobsters. O’Leary was a brash impresario of the gambling industry, notorious for taking any bet imaginable, including the weather and presidential elections; he reportedly lost a half million dollars when Woodrow Wilson beat Charles Evans Hughes in 1916. But he obviously won more than he lost, if his brownstone mansion and palatial gambling house were any indication.
O’Leary’s gambling den was occasionally raided by the police and bombed by rivals, but the easygoing—and well-connected—Irishman shrugged it all off. He certainly greased the right palms and probably kept the right people well supplied with free booze and female companionship. However he managed it, O’Leary was never jailed, but he did have his business licenses revoked from time to time, and he was obliged to pay several fines—whenever the “goo-goos” (good government reformers) started making noise.
O’Leary’s devil-may-care nature was perhaps most adroitly on display in 1908, when he bet fellow gambler, Pat O’Malley, a thousand dollars that O’Malley could not travel from Chicago to County Limerick, Ireland, in a week. O’Malley arrived just in time, sending O’Leary a telegram that read simply, “You lose.” For the colorful O’Leary, it was a lark well worth the price.
O’Leary also never missed an opportunity to defend his mother from the charge of burning down the city of Chicago. Over the years he granted several interviews with newspapers, offering his opinion that the fire started as a result of spontaneous combustion. This might sound like a lame attempt to divert blame, but it turns out that densely layered green hay does have a tendency to burst into flames when the conditions are right. Earlier on the day of the fire, the O’Learys had just filled their barn with several tons of hay.
When he died in 1925, O’Leary was eulogized by notoriously crooked alderman Mike Kenna as a “square shooter” who “never welched on a bet.” Nine years later, O’Leary’s gambling hall and saloon burned down in the Stockyards Fire of 1934, thereby associating the O’Leary name with the first- and second-largest fires in Chicago history.
The story of the cow and lamp weren’t the only wild rumors flying around Chicago in the immediate aftermath of the fire. Reports of widespread looting and arson were compounded with tales of vigilante justice. Panicky citizens and imaginative reporters fabricated stories of looters shot dead and arsonists hung from lampposts. The tall tales helped create an atmosphere of chaos and fear, especially among members of the moneyed class. Relegated to homelessness, if only briefly, Chicago’s captains of industry found themselves sharing open-air tent cities with the rabble of Chicago. Personal safety concerns combined with an irrational fear of worker unrest led to an overreaction among Chicago’s business and social elite. A cabal of private citizens, including Marshall Field, George Pullman, and Chicago Tribune owner and the city’s next mayor Joseph Medill, asked Mayor R. B. Mason to call in federal troops under the command of General Philip Sheridan. Soldiers were stationed throughout the city, with orders to shoot anyone breaking the law.
A couple weeks after the fire, the city’s prosecuting attorney, Thomas Grosvenor, was on his way home. It was a little after midnight, and Colonel Grosvenor, a decorated veteran of the Civil War, had just exited a streetcar near the University of Chicago. A volunteer sentry in the University Patrol called for him to halt. Grosvenor told him “to go to hell and to bang away.” The overzealous student took him at his word and shot him dead. The incident provided much-needed ammunition to Governor John Palmer, who was outraged that federal troops would be permitted to usurp his authority over any part of the state of Illinois. Palmer wrote nasty letters to Chicago officials and eventually petitioned the Illinois legislature to censure President Ulysses S. Grant and Secretary of War William Tecumseh Sherman for violating states’ rights.
LOOSE ENDS
In 1915, a former reporter for the Chicago Republican, Michael Ahern, claimed that he was present when the story of Mrs. O’Leary’s cow and the lamp was invented by Jim Haynie, a reporter for the Chicago Times. But if the story had been invented by a Times reporter in the presence of a Republican reporter, why was it initially published only in the Evening Journal? It’s more likely that a reporter for the Journal overheard a rumor circulating in the neighborhood and got it past his editors, whereas other papers, if they even heard the story, found it too dubious to print. As historian Richard Bales has pointed out, Ahern’s story evolved over the years, with his own role expanding in each retelling. So, if not the cow, who did start the fire? Pointing out numerous inconsistencies in the testimony offered by Daniel Sullivan, Bales puts the blame for the fire on the O’Learys’ peg-legged neighbor. Partly in response to Bales’s sleuthing, the Chicago City Council passed a resolution in 1997 that officially absolved Mrs. O’Leary—and her cow—of any blame for the Chicago Fire.
In terms of financial losses, the fire’s biggest loser may have been William B. Ogden, Chicago’s first mayor. Ogden had created a vertical monopoly on Chicago’s primary construction material, lumber. Not only did he own the lumberyards in Chicago but he also owned lumber mills in Peshtigo, Wisconsin, as well as the railroads that connected the two cities. He lost it all on the same day. At the same time that the Chicago fire was ravaging the Midwest’s largest metropolis, a prairie fire was also consuming Peshtigo, Wisconsin. The less famous of the two fires claimed closer to a thousand lives and completely decimated the town’s infrastructure. As devastating as his financial losses were, they represented only about one third of his overall wealth, and of course, he still had his life. To his credit, Ogden helped resurrect the Wisconsin town before retiring to his New York estate.
Despite profound post-fire labor strife in Chicago, including the Haymarket bombing and the subsequent execution of four “anarchists,” the city still managed to rebuild itself in the years after the fire, to a much grander degree. This was in large part due to the opportunity presented by the clean slate created by the fire. From 1871 to the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, the city experienced a building surge that included gems such as the Home Insurance Building, Auditorium Building, the Monadnock Building, and the Rookery. An influx of architects, financiers, and workers resulted in a population explosion as well, from three hundred thousand to more than one million. Chicago’s rebirth culminated in the World’s Columbian Exposition held at the glimmering White City designed under the direction of Daniel Burnham.
Johnstown Flood
When it occurred on May 31, 1889, the flood of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, resulted in the largest death toll from a natural disaster in U.S. history, claiming more than two thousand lives. The heavy rains that inundated the hills and valleys of southwestern Pennsylvania could not be helped, but, the scale of the disaster was amplified by the poor design and questionable location of the dam fifteen miles upriver from Johnstown and six hundred feet higher in elevation.
Unequipped with release valves, the surface level of the man-made lake swelled to overflowing. When it inevitably burst, the dam released a twenty-ton wave measuring forty feet high that virtually swept the entire town of Johnstown off the map.
The results were grim. With so many of the town’s residents killed—including ninety-nine entire families—identification of the victims was difficult. What’s more, ma
ny of the bodies were severely battered or stripped of clothing, further complicating identification. More than seven hundred fifty bodies were eventually buried in a plot for the unknown dead. Some bodies drifted as far downstream as Pittsburgh and even Cincinnati.
Over fifteen hundred homes were destroyed. The town’s economic engine, the Cambria Iron Company, suffered extensive damage, but the company president, John Fulton, vowed to repair and reopen as soon as possible. In the meantime, surviving Cambria employees would be paid to help with the overall cleanup of the city. Widows and orphans would receive the pay due their late husbands and fathers.
Word of the disaster spread rapidly throughout the nation, as did the de rigueur rumors of lawlessness and vigilantism. If you were to believe the Chicago Tribune, lynched thieves caught scavenging jewelry from dead bodies adorned lampposts throughout the flooded city. Of course, the Trib also exaggerated the number of dead by a factor of five.
The charitable outpouring was impressive for its speed and generosity. Trainloads of clothing, food, building materials, and medicine arrived daily, along with ample supplies of embalming fluid and coffins. Cincinnati sent twenty thousand pounds of smoked meats. Pittsburgh sent thousands of loaves of bread, provided by the S. S. Marvin Company. Cities around the world organized fund-raising drives. Chicagoans raised over $100,000. Philadelphia, $360,000. New York, $750,000. In all, nearly $4 million was raised in the wake of the tragedy.
The job of delivering care and relief supplies was spread across many different ad hoc committees and organizations. Most notably, the emergency brought Clara Barton and the fledgling American Red Cross to Johnstown from Washington, DC. Established as a field hospital during the American Civil War, the Red Cross proved in its response to the Johnstown Flood that it was equally prepared to respond to peacetime disasters. Under Barton’s direction, the Red Cross arrived within days of the disaster, providing tens of thousands of survivors with shelter, furniture, and other supplies.
Dazed by the enormity of the disaster and consumed with grief, survivors, up until this point, were mostly preoccupied with the most basic needs—potable water, food, and shelter. Then something happened to change the tenor of their reaction to the flood. Johnstown residents started to wonder what had caused the South Fork Dam to fail. Was it the result of a storm of unfathomable proportions? Or was the fallible hand of human artifice in some way to blame?
On June 9, a crowd gathered for an informal prayer meeting. After two local ministers delivered their sermons, John Fulton, who had fortuitously been out of town when the flood struck, rose to address the crowd. The head of the Cambria Iron Company, Fulton offered uplifting words: The company was committed to helping widows and orphans of employees killed in the flood, it would rebuild bigger than ever, creating jobs for remaining residents. What he said next solidified a suspicion harbored by many of the town’s survivors: “I hold in my possession today…my own report made years ago, in which I told these people, who, for purposes for which I will not mention, desired to seclude themselves in the mountains, that their dam was dangerous. I told them that the dam would break sometime and cause just such a disaster as this.”
Who were “these people” and what were the nefarious-sounding purposes vaguely alluded to?
The report Fulton stood clutching had been commissioned in 1880 by Fulton’s boss at the time, Daniel J. Morrell, the previous head of the Cambria Iron Company. Getting wind of construction work taking place on the old dam at the South Fork of the Conemaugh River, Morrell decided to investigate. He sent Fulton up to the dam, where he was to make a formal inspection of the structure and report back to his boss.
The dam was originally constructed by the state of Pennsylvania to create a reservoir to feed a nearby shipping canal, but railroads soon rendered the canal obsolete, making the dam unnecessary. It was neglected for years and fell into disrepair. But this didn’t present a threat to the communities downriver, because the leaky dam was not now retaining enough water to cause significant damage during major storms.
What Fulton learned during his inspection disturbed him. The new owners of the dam, the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, an amalgamation of wealthy Pittsburgh industrialists and their ilk, had purchased more than 160 acres of land near the confluence of the Conemaugh River and the South Fork Creek. They planned to flood a portion of the land to create a private summer resort for upscale leisure activities. To do so, they would need to repair the dam. But for reasons unknown, the club hired a contractor who lacked engineering credentials for the job.
The rebuilt dam had several worrisome features. The height had been lowered, and the low point of the structure was in the center, making spillover and failure much more likely. The previous owner had removed the iron release valves, selling the metal for scrap, making it impossible to release excess water to make repairs or in the event of an unusually large storm. Most gallingly, the owners of the club had installed a screen designed to keep precious game fish from escaping downstream. During the flood of 1889, the screen became clogged with heavy debris, creating even more pressure on the earthen dam.
Newspapers seized on the story, inflaming class resentments. Mastheads were splashed with headlines like: “The Pittsburgh Fishing Club Chiefly Responsible,” “The Club Is Guilty,” and “May Be a Lynching.”
Members of the club didn’t stick around long enough to test this last theory, so “the rabble” resorted to vandalizing their luxurious cottages. From the safety of Pittsburgh, the members mostly kept mum. After the negative publicity broke, they decided to supplement their initial contribution to the relief effort, which had been a thousand blankets. As a group, the club donated thousands of dollars. Steel magnate Henry Clay Frick ponied up $5,000, banker Andrew Mellon gave a thousand. Several lawsuits were brought against the club, but none of them proved successful. The club itself had, by design, few assets, and no individual member was ever found to be legally liable for the disaster.
One member who managed to keep his association with the club a secret was Andrew Carnegie, the multimillionaire steel magnate. The flood occurred right around the time Carnegie was beginning to initiate his plan of distributing his vast wealth. He pledged $10,000 in cash and promised to cover the costs for a stately new gothic limestone library. This new building was among the first of some 250 newly constructed libraries Carnegie financed throughout the world.
The new library building and the city of Johnstown as a whole have survived two more floods of lesser impact, in 1936 and 1977. Today the former library building houses the Johnstown Flood Museum.
LOOSE ENDS
One of the reporters who descended on Johnstown to cover the story was rookie correspondent Richard Harding Davis. Davis went on to cover numerous major stories, from the first electric-chair execution in 1890 to Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897. His most famous war reporting occurred during the Spanish-American War, in which his dispatches were manipulated by William Randolph Hearst to make the case for war with Spain. Davis wrote nearly fifty books, including novels, collections of reportage, and travelogs.
Sylvester Stephen (S. S.) Marvin, the owner of a large bakery in Pittsburgh, donated tons of bread to the surviving citizens of Johnstown and served on a committee to organize relief efforts. His immense baking enterprise, which included bakeries in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan, became the centerpiece of the newly amalgamated National Biscuit Company, known today as Nabisco.
John Fulton remained in Johnstown, serving as a member of the city and state boards of health. Fulton was instrumental in securing access to clean drinking water for the city of Johnstown.
San Francisco Earthquake and Fire
Striking at about five o’clock in the morning, the Great Earthquake of 1906 caught most San Francisco residents in their beds, including Fire Chief Dennis Sullivan, whose third-floor apartment collapsed in a heap. Pinned beneath tons of loose bricks, splintered furniture, and the remnants of the building’s roof, Sulli
van would be of no help in putting out the ensuing fires that ravaged the city over the next four days. In all, the fire consumed about three-quarters of the city, approximately twenty-eight thousand buildings, worth between $350 and $500 million. Entire neighborhoods—Nob Hill, Telegraph Hill, and Chinatown—were wiped out. Of course, many of the structures that burned had already been demolished by the 8.3-magnitude earthquake, and many others were dynamited in an effort to deprive the fire of fuel—with varying degrees of success.
The job of handling the ongoing crisis fell to a hastily assembled Committee of Fifty, made up of elected officials, administrators, and private citizens dedicated to putting out the fires, preserving order, and administering aid. The committee was headed by Mayor Eugene Schmitz and included interim fire chief John Dougherty as well as prominent San Franciscans, such as capitalist James Phelan and real estate mogul Rudolph Spreckels. At the same time, the military force stationed at the Presidio also took swift and decisive action, under the command of Brigadier General Frederick Funston, a decorated veteran of the Spanish-American War and the Philippine-American War. Although martial law was never officially declared, Mayor Schmitz issued a proclamation ordering troops “to KILL any and all persons found engaged in Looting or in the Commission of Any Other Crime.”
Wild rumors of criminality abounded—that one man cut the hand off a dead woman to get her rings and that another man threw himself onto the prostrate form of his dead mother, only it wasn’t his mother and he wasn’t really kissing her face, but chewing off her ears to get at her diamond earrings. These certainly apocryphal stories were supplemented with tales of widespread military atrocities—that soldiers shot hundreds for looting, or for merely failing to follow random orders, covering their tracks by throwing the corpses into the fires or weighing them down and dumping them into the bay.