One Dark Night

Over the weekend I watched Unsolved History – The Chicago Fire. It’s kind of like a Mythbusters but with history questions instead. I’m not interested in fire recreation necessarily, but I learned some neat things about the fire.

Poor Mrs. O’Leary.

It most likely was not her fault, the story of leaving her lantern in the shed and the cow kicking it over is an unlikely story and the Unsolved History crew did everything in their power to prove that so. They set up a barn just like the O’Learys, they recreated the wind gusts, the drought conditions…all kinds of things. But the real proof came right at the end of the episode with a little aside no one seemed to think much about, but this one historian says “that night was very dark, there was a waning moon, there were no streetlights or lamps – so the theory of Mrs. O’Leary leaving the lantern in the shed makes little sense, she could never see her way back to the house without it.”

There was a neighbor, Mr. Sullivan, a smarmy man with only one leg. He kept a cow in the O’Leary’s barn and it’s entirely possible he was in the barn and sparked the fire. He told the firemen later that he had seen the fire from his place; ran over and tried to save the animals. He escaped with a cow (his cow) but by then the blaze was too great to save any more.

The Unsolved History guys surmised by their re-enactment that the fire grew so quickly that if Peg Leg Sullivan were really coming from his house, by the time he got there the fire would have been way too big to run in and get his cow; he must have been inside when it started.

And you know, poor Mrs. O’Leary was harassed for the rest of her life in Chicago, a pariah who was blamed for burning down an entire city, the ultimate scapegoat.

But I can’t help thinking about Mr. O’Leary. This poor sap. No one ever mentions him, at home sleeping while his wife goes to do a late night milking. Ooooh, can you imagine that argument the next day? Yeesh.

Here’s a fun video from the movie In Old Chicago. You have to slog through the first 4 minutes or so but then you get a really great fire scene.