When we leave Wisconsin and pass about two hundred and fifty miles eastward, over Lake Michigan and across the whole width of the State of Michigan, we find much the same condition of things, but not so terrible in the loss of human life.  Fully fifteen thousand people were rendered homeless by the fires; and their food, clothing, crops, horses, and cattle were destroyed.  Of these five to six thousand were burned out the same night that the fires broke out in Chicago and Wisconsin.  The

[1.  See “History of the Great Conflagration,” Sheahan & Upton, Chicago, 1871, p. 383.]

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total destruction of property exceeded one million dollars; not only villages and cities, but whole townships, were swept bare.

But it is to Chicago we must turn for the most extraordinary results of this atmospheric disturbance.  It is needless to tell the story in detail.  The world knows it by heart: 

     Blackened and bleeding, helpless, panting, prone,
     On the charred fragments of her shattered throne,
     Lies she who stood but yesterday alone.”

I have only space to refer to one or two points.

The fire was spontaneous.  The story of Mrs. O’Leary’s cow having started the conflagration by kicking over a lantern was proved to be false.  It was the access of gas from the tail of Biela’s comet that burned up Chicago!

The fire-marshal testified: 

“I felt it in my bones that we were going to have a burn.”

He says, speaking of O’Leary’s barn: 

“We got the fire under control, and it would not have gone a foot farther; but the next thing I knew they came and told me that St. Paul’s church, about two squares north, was on fire."[1]

They checked the church-fire, but—­

“The next thing I knew the fire was in Bateham’s planing-mill.”

A writer in the New York “Evening Post” says he saw in Chicago “buildings far beyond the line of fire, and in no contact with it, burst into flames from the interior.”

[1.  See “History of the Great Conflagration,” Sheahan & Upton, Chicago, 1871, p. 163.]

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It must not be forgotten that the fall of 1871 was marked by extraordinary conflagrations in regions widely separated.  On the 8th. of October, the same day the Wisconsin, Michigan, and Chicago fires broke out, the States of Iowa, Minnesota, Indiana, and Illinois were severely devastated by prairie-fires; while terrible fires raged on the Alleghanies, the Sierras of the Pacific coast, and the Rocky Mountains, and in the region of the Red River of the North.

“The Annual Record of Science and Industry” for 1876, page 84, says: 

“For weeks before and after the great fire in Chicago in 1872, great areas of forest and prairie-land, both in the United States and the British Provinces, were on fire.”

The flames that consumed a great part of Chicago were of an unusual character and produced extraordinary effects.  They absolutely melted the hardest building-stone, which had previously been considered fire-proof.  Iron, glass, granite, were fused and run together into grotesque conglomerates, as if they had been put through a blast-furnace.  No kind of material could stand its breath for a moment.