Fire: Chicago 1871

For the women who taught us the meaning of courage:

Erma L. Kosanovich

Katherine B. Bale

Mary E. Peery

Nate Cooper swung the empty milk pail as he walked down Canal Street. It was a warm, breezy morning, and he was glad to be out of his Sunday suit. Aunt Ruth always made him go to church. This morning, aptly enough, the preacher had done a whole sermon on hellfire and brimstone.

The air was still filled with the acrid smell of smoke from the fire the night before. With the breeze coming from the southwest, that was a blessing. Usually when the wind came from this direction, it carried the heavy stench of the Union Stockyards.

Pushed by the light wind, ashes drifted aimlessly along the ground. Last night's fire had been a bad one—the worst one yet. A slat-ribbed horse pulling
a salvage wagon clopped past. The horse and the driver looked exhausted.

“Hey, Nate!”

Nate turned. Ryan Wilson was standing on the corner of Washington Street, hands on his hips. He must have managed to slip away from his father's livery stable. Usually, his whole Sunday was spent mucking stalls. Nate waited for Ryan to catch up with him, then they fell into step.

“Did your aunt let you go watch the fire last night?” Ryan picked up a cinder and threw it across the street. Water from the pump engines, black and foul, stood stagnant in the gutter.

“Not exactly.”

Ryan laughed.

“I didn't go out for long,” Nate admitted. “If she checks on me and I'm not in my room, she gets worried.”

Ryan glanced at him. “Was it as bad as they say? My father was concerned for a while. Thought we might have to get the horses out.”

Nate let Ryan stare eagerly into his face for a few more seconds, then he nodded. “I climbed some lady's roof on Madison Street. The lumberyards and
the Lull & Holmes Planing Mill went up like a bonfire. The coal yards looked hot enough to melt iron.”

Ryan kicked at a charred board. “I could hear the engines clanging almost all night. I guess the police had a hard time holding the crowds back.”

Nate nodded, gesturing. A mounted policeman rode along the edge of last night's burn. His horse was a tall bay with a wide blaze. It reminded Nate of one of Ryan's father's geldings—a spirited animal Nate rode every chance he got. Sometimes Ryan's father needed help exercising the horses that were boarded at his livery stable. Once in a while, he even paid Nate to ride them.

The policeman was turning people aside. Compared to the night before, the area was almost deserted—but it wouldn't be for long. A few blocks down, Nate could see people crossing the Adams Street Bridge. Now that church was out, there would be more coming to gawk at the places where the plank streets had burned through, collapsing to the soil ten or twelve feet below.

“Gee whiz, look at that!”

Nate followed Ryan's gesture. The viaduct was a wreck. All the wooden timbers supporting the
roadway above the railroad tracks had burned and fallen. The metal structure below was twisted, bent every which way. On the far side of the viaduct, the fire had destroyed everything, even the boardwalks. The rank soil beneath them had been dried out by the fire.

Now that the raised boardwalks and plank streets had been burned away, it was strange to see the exposed stone foundations of the buildings. Even the rocks were stained with smoke and split from the heat. Aunt Ruth had told him that ground level in this part of town had been raised eight feet back in the fifties and sixties, just to get it up above the sea of mud. All of Chicago had been built on a marsh, and the city workers had used dirt dredged up out of the river bottom, lifting the old buildings with jacks, a few inches at a time.

As the boys picked their way across the railroad tracks east of the collapsed viaduct, Nate slid on the chunks of charred wood that graveled the ground. “The paper-box factory nearly exploded, it went up so fast,” he said over his shoulder.

“I wish I could have seen it.” Ryan's voice was wistful as he caught up.

Nate led the way up the slope, crossed the railroad tracks, then went back down. Abruptly, without meaning to, he stopped, stunned. Ryan stood beside him, and for a few moments, neither one of them said a word. The fire had erased a whole neighborhood.

“You can't even see where some of the houses
were
,” Ryan whispered.

Nate glanced at him, then looked back at the blackened jumble of wood and ash that had been homes, saloons, lumberyards, and factories the day before. Staring at the destruction made Nate feel strange. Last night, the fire had been beautiful. This was so ugly he felt almost sick. Behind them, he heard a woman weeping, saying something over and over in a voice so distorted her words were impossible to understand.

“Let's get out of here,” Ryan said quietly.

Without answering, Nate began to walk, swinging the bucket again. He led the way, veering eastward, cutting through the destroyed neighborhood slantwise, avoiding the worst of the wreckage and the piles of still smoking timber. Once they were on the far side, where the houses still stood and the planked
streets were only dusted with ash, he slowed down.

“It came close to us,” Ryan whispered.

Nate didn't answer. He tried to shake off the eerie feeling that had taken hold of him. “I have to go all the way down to O'Learys'. My aunt wants milk for the boarders.”

“That's clear down on De Koven Street, isn't it? The place behind McLaughlins' house? Doesn't that lady drive a milk wagon?”

Nate climbed the steps up onto the boardwalk. “My aunt says O'Learys' milk is cleaner than most—she almost never finds cow hair or flecks of hay in it. But Mrs. O'Leary won't deliver on Sundays.”

Ryan whistled through his teeth. “You still have that bald man, don't you? The one who—”

“Drinks half a gallon of milk a day.” Nate nodded. “Mr. Dwight. Aunt Ruth has tried to make him cut down, but he won't.” Nate shrugged as he went down three steps where the boardwalk changed levels. “He pays his room and board on time, he's quiet, and he gets along with all the other boarders just fine.”

Ryan laughed. “That's because they don't have to pay his milk bill.”

Nate grinned. “Aunt Ruth likes him. He's been
there longer than I have. And he brings her lace and notions from the dry goods where he works.”

“Why don't you tell him he can only have a pint of milk a day?” Ryan asked, narrowing his eyes.

Nate saw Ryan's mouth twitching. “You know why. He weighs as much as a draft horse and he has arms like piano legs.”

Ryan nodded somberly, turning to walk backward, facing Nate. “It's all the milk he drinks. This is the kind of dilemma that has no answer, Nate.”

“That's true,” Nate agreed, grinning again. He swung the bucket in a high arc over his head, then brought it back down.

“Can you get out again tonight?” Ryan asked, turning around to walk beside Nate again.

Nate shrugged. “I'm not the one who has trouble getting out.”

Ryan stopped abruptly, just in front of the next set of steps. “I'll meet you on the corner of Clinton and Randolph at nine o'clock. Will your aunt be in bed by then?”

Nate nodded. “Sure. But if I take all morning getting the milk, she'll be after me the rest of the day. I still have a lot of chores to finish.”

Ryan ran down the steps and waited for Nate. “Even on Sunday? Doesn't she keep Sabbath?”

Nate swung the pail again. “She says a boardinghouse has to be run every day of the week. It won't run itself and it never closes.”

Ryan wasn't listening. “Race you to the corner,” he said over his shoulder, already two steps ahead. Nate sprinted after him, forgiving Ryan for cheating. He never won anyway.

“Julie, will you come in and talk to me for a moment, please?”

Reluctantly, Julie looked up from her book. She had run out of her favorite dime novels—the exciting stories about the West she and her father loved—and had begun this new
Elsie Dinsmore
novel. She had expected to be bored, but she wasn't. Martha Farquharson was becoming one of her favorite authoresses.

“Julie Flynn, do you hear me?”

Julie laid her book aside and leaned back in the overstuffed chair. She ran her hand along the red velvet cushion, trying to ignore her mother's voice from the parlor. She glanced up at her father. He
was sitting in his worn leather chair, reading his newspaper.

Julie loved Sundays because she was allowed to spend quiet time with her father in the library. Usually it was peaceful. This Sunday was different. Her mother was agitated and pacing the carpet in the parlor. Julie wished she had never asked permission to go with her father. She should have known how her mother would react.

“You'd best go talk to your mother, Julie,” her father said.

“Why does she have to make such a fuss? I just want to go down to the Cass Street store with you.” Julie didn't look at her father directly. She pulled at her sleeve, tracing a bright yellow strand of the plaid pattern. Then she glanced up through her lashes.

Her father shrugged, a discouraged look on his face. “Your mother is so upset. Maybe you should just do as she says tonight.”

Julie shook her head. “I always do as she says.”

Her father winked. “She only worries for you because she loves you.”

Julie nodded quickly. She didn't want to hear him defend her mother. She had heard it a thousand times.
She was her parents' only child, and her mother was high-strung and anxious by nature. Since July, there had been at least one fire somewhere in the city almost every week—Julie's mother had been fluttery and short-tempered for months.

Julie met her father's eyes. “Please, talk to her. I'll just sit in the wagon. Tell her that.”

“I will try once more, Julie. But after the fire last night—”

“There will be fires until it rains,” Julie interrupted him. “Everybody knows that.” Julie watched her father's face darken.

“If your mother hears you say that, she'll have me standing fire watch atop the roof until Christmas.” He reached out and touched her cheek. “I have to get more groceries down to the parish below Vernon Park. What we took to St. Paul's this afternoon isn't going to be enough. The families who got burned out last night weren't well-off to begin with. Most of them haven't got a penny left in this world.”

“Please ask one more time,” Julie pleaded. “I know the fires have scared Mother, but she hasn't let me go anywhere lately.”

Julie's father looked at her. “I've been thinking
that maybe you should go to school, Julie. We could get rid of that dandy your mother hires to tutor you and—”

“Do you think Mother would let me?” Julie asked quickly. The idea of facing a room full of strange children made her nervous, but it was exciting, too. She had never been in a classroom. Every morning she watched girls walking arm in arm along Michigan Avenue on their way to school—and envied them. When Julie's father didn't answer her, she sighed. “I just want to go with you tonight. Please.”

“I'll go talk to your mother.” He touched her cheek again. “But as upset as she is, I can't promise anything.”

Julie watched her father leave the room. Then she slid out of the overstuffed chair and went to the window. She pulled back the lace curtains and looked out. It was getting dusky. The tops of the birches that lined the street were arching away from the wind. The brownish water close to the river mouth was choppy; farther out, Lake Michigan was bluer, and she could see little wind-crests of white foam.

Julie crossed to the west-facing window and looked down at her mother's flower garden, then past it, toward the stables. What she really wanted to do was to have the groom saddle one of the horses and go riding. Riding with her father was one of her favorite things. He was proud of how well she could sit a horse. But there was no point in bringing up riding alone—especially now, this close to dark.