Wisconsin Public Television University Place  The Great Peshtigo Fire  Scott Knickelbine  10/12/13 UP928  cc >> Today we are pleased to introduce Scott Knickelbine, author of more than 30 nonfiction books, as a part of Wisconsin Historical Museum's History Sandwiched In lecture series. Today we will learn about the history, science, and legacy of America's deadliest firestorm: the Peshtigo fire. The opinions expressed today are those of the presenter and are not necessarily those of the Wisconsin Historical Society or the museum's employees. So please join me in welcoming Scott Knickelbine. [APPLAUSE]  >> Thanks very much. I'm glad that you could all turn out today. The book that brings me here is called The Great Peshtigo Fire: Stories and Science from America's Deadliest Fire, and it's a book for fourth graders. And unless I'm very mistaken, none of you are in fourth grade. Is that true? [LAUGHTER] Okay, great. So what I like to do when I'm talking to, say, a more mature audience about this is really to kind of talk a little bit about my own process as I went through writing this book because I realized as I was researching it that they really didn't teach me. 

I grew up in Manitowoc, Wisconsin. So I went through fourth grade there. That's the year you learn about Wisconsin history, and we learned about the Peshtigo fire. And it struck me that they didn't really teach me anything very interesting about it. In fact, they didn't really teach me the most important things about it. How many of you grew up in Wisconsin? Okay, so most of you. So if you think back to what you learned in school, not what you may have learned since, particularly not if you're a history buff, but what you learned in school about the Peshtigo fire, I think that it kind boils down to this, at least this is the way that it worked for me. The Peshtigo fire was a really big, bad forest fire. Coincidentally, it occurred on the same night as the great Chicago fire, and sometimes you'll learn that that's why nobody's heard of the Peshtigo fire. In fact, when I ask audiences what they remember learning about the Peshtigo fire, this is normally the first thing they will mention. 

Oh, it was on the same night as the great Chicago fire. And that the Peshtigo fire was an important event in Wisconsin history because many people were killed in it. I think if you ask, I don't know if it's so true anymore. I did a presentation for some fourth graders earlier this year down in Janesville, and they really knew their stuff on the Peshtigo fire. Certainly if you ask any of my peers coming out of fourth grade, that's about what we retained. And what was interesting was that as I was researching the book I found that all three of these are either false or misleading in some extremely important way. What they didn't teach us about the Peshtigo fire is that it wasn't just a forest fire, it was a firestorm and, in fact, one of the first firestorms in recorded history. A firestorm is like a forest fire the way that a hurricane is like a really bad thunderstorm. It's an entirely different beast. Its physics change dramatically once it becomes a firestorm, and we'll be talking about that in a minute or two. 

The timing of the Peshtigo fire was no coincidence. It didn't just happen to be our bad luck that a really famous fire happened on the same night as the Peshtigo fire. In fact, the two fires were intimately linked in a lot of different ways. Again, I think once you see how these links occurred and the chain of events that Peshtigo and the Chicago fire were just two parts of, you'll see that there's this enormous story that none of us learned in school but, in fact, was one of the most tragic days in the history of the United States. And the Peshtigo fire wasn't just Wisconsin's deadliest fire. It was, in fact, the single deadliest fire in US history. That's a fire of any type, urban fires, rural fires, forest fires. The Peshtigo fire is far and away the most deadly. In fact, it is one of the most deadly natural disasters of any kind in the United States. Up there probably in the top three or four. 

Well, we'll get to the narrative, sort of the chronological description of the firestorm in a minute, but what I'd like to talk about first is what firestorms are. Now, a firestorm is essentially a fire that is so hot and intense and localized that it creates its own weather pattern, its own weather system. So you've got a fire you see at point 1 down there. Let me see if I can bring up a cursor here. So you've got this fire, and of course fires heat up air and hot air rises. As this air rises, it creates a vacuum down here at the base of the fire, and air on the inside comes in to replace that air. Now, this happens with any fire. It will happen with a candle. It happens with a match. Anything that's burning has this same type of situation. 

However, when this fire in the center gets very intense and localized, the updraft is such that starts to create enormous winds that come in from all sides of the fire and feed it more oxygen. So you see the fire beginning to burn at temperatures much hotter than a normal forest fire is capable of. And you have the additional complication that the winds that are coming in toward the center of the fire are blowing dust and debris, and you have this enormous amount of uplift in the center. Things are being sucked sometimes miles into the air. This is a picture of a forest fire that occurred a few years ago out west that actually developed into a firestorm. The picture is a little dark up here, but if you see, you've got these little tiny pine trees down here that are actually massive full grown pine trees. And here you have this column of flame going hundreds and hundreds of yards up into the air. So this is sort of what a firestorm looks like. If it gets large enough, it can actually develop into what's called a mesocyclone and start spinning off its own tornadoes. It's thought that this is what happened in the Peshtigo fire. 

This is an example of a fire tornado that occurred in eastern Europe, I believe it was two years ago. Now you can just imagine if you've seen, for instance, videos or pictures on YouTube of what it's like to go through a tornado, just a regular tornado, that the amount of chaos and havoc that they can create is immense. Now you add the fact that all of that material that's being blown around is on fire and you get the sense, I think you begin to get the sense that we are talking about one of the most terrifying manifestations of a natural disaster. Now, why did the Peshtigo fire develop into a firestorm? And why was it one of the first firestorms in history? I think that one of the primary reasons is that we had land use up in northeastern Wisconsin that created massive amounts of dry available fuel. We started to see logging operations on an industrial level. I'm sure all of you have heard it said that in the early part of the 19th century a squirrel could travel from Minnesota to Michigan through northern Wisconsin without ever touching the ground. Of course, much of that timber is gone. Much of the timber that's there is actually second or third growth timber. So a huge amount of logging was taking place. And one of the byproducts of that logging is what they call slash. 

These are some pictures of the 19th century logging operation. And so what they were doing is they would cut these trees down and everything that they didn't need, branches, smaller trees, brush, basically anything that got in their way was simply cut and left there. The thought was that if somebody wanted to use that land further on down the road, it would be their problem to clear all of that out. So for more than a decade prior to the fire you had this kind of logging operation occurring all through northeastern Wisconsin. So you had basically piles of almost stacked up bonfires, if you will, just waiting for some sort of ignition. In addition, we had wood products manufacturing. Many people don't realize that Peshtigo, in addition to producing logs and also lumber, was manufacturing wood products, barrel staves, buckets, wooden spoons, broom handles, you name it. In fact, the factory at, the wood products factory at Peshtigo was the largest of its kind in the world at that time and employed hundreds of men. As you know, those of you who do any woodworking, the primary waste product from woodworking is sawdust. And they made a lot of it in Peshtigo. 

The first thing they did was thought, well, it'd be great to line the sidewalks with it. So they lined all the sidewalks with it, and they still had a lot of sawdust left so they said, well, let's line the streets with it. So they lined all the streets with it, and they still had mountains of it left. And as you know, airborne sawdust can actually explode. Here's an example of just one of the mills that was operating in Peshtigo. This is a stereopticon photograph. So you're not seeing double. This is meant to produce a stereo image if you look at it in the right viewer. So you also had slash and burn farming. You had farmers buying that cut over land, and then they needed to clear it. 

And the fastest way to clear it was to set that stuff on fire. The thought was that the wooded area in northeastern Wisconsin was just so vast that even if you couldn't control the fire yourself it would go out eventually. And there was a huge push at the time, the people who owned these acres of timber... [COUGHING] Excuse me, needed to get rid of the land once they'd taken all the logs off of it. So they thought it would be great to encourage some of the waves of immigration, the people who were coming into the United States at the end of the latter part of the 19th century, to come on up there and buy some land and start farming. So they were moving in, and they were setting the slash on fire, they were setting the stumps on fire, and, again, pretty much letting them burn. And then, of course, you had railroad construction and widespread use of fire for domestic and business purposes. Remember, this is the 19th century. Anything that was mechanized ran on steam. So it was either burning wood or coal and generally sending sparks up the smokestack. 

That doesn't just include railroad engines. It also includes power saws and lumber mills and basically anything, any kind of equipment that was powered was powered by steam. And then of course you still had blacksmiths. You had people with cooking fires in their homes. Everything was on fire, basically, back then. In addition to the land use and the human components of the fire, you had weather conditions that were just perfect for fostering large fires. You had dry, hot weather that was basically the driest in memory. Even some of the Native American tribes couldn't remember when it had gone that long without raining. By the time that the fire occurred, they had gone for the better part of three months without rainfall. So it was extremely dry, very hot, and then you had lots of little fires that were starting and going on all over the place in the area. 

So you had a situation in which there were lots of sparks from small fires. You had lots of smoke in the air. This was days and weeks before the Peshtigo fire. Peshtigo had situations and Marinette and some of those other towns in that area had days where they had to close school because there was literally so much smoke in the air that students couldn't see to read indoors. People couldn't recognize their friends more than a few feet away in broad daylight because of the amount of smoke from some of the smaller fires that were going on. Then, as we got into the last days of September and early October, we had a massive low pressure cell over the United States. You can kind of see that huge cyclical pattern there. That is from actual weather data that was gathered at the time. So, you have this situation which is going to create massive winds that are going to sweep through the upper Midwest. You put that all together and you have the elements for a firestorm. 

So, the Peshtigo fire, as it's called, started on evening of October 8, 1871. They knew about it in Peshtigo about five o'clock. This huge wind came in, and in Peshtigo people were kind of going to bed. They were exhausted from actually having fought smaller fires in town just a few days before. They had to put out a fire that caught in one of the huge piles of sawdust at the primary wood products manufacturing company. So people were tired. They went to bed. As it started to get dark, and it got dark early because of the smoke, suddenly they began to hear this massive rushing sound coming from the woods and a red glow. And suddenly the fire started to burst in on Peshtigo from the southwest. The men of the town knew what to do. 

They ran down to the center of town, and they got out the town's pumper truck. These folks were so used to fighting fires that they'd actually imported their own water pumping truck to be able to deal with them. So these folks knew what to do in the case of an ordinary forest fire, but as they got the pumper truck out of its shed and turned around, they saw that the southern and western part of the town had already disappeared. The winds grew to, I've got a couple of images here from artists who tried to imagine what the scene looked like as that fire began to sweep through. But really, if you had been there, you wouldn't have had this kind of visibility because dust and smoke were blowing through the air probably at speeds approaching between 70 and 100 miles an hour. So people basically panicked and ran for their lives. Many of them ran down to the Peshtigo River and jumped in, as did their livestock. Some people thought because the fire was coming up both banks of the Peshtigo River, many people thought they would be safe on the other side of the river. Unfortunately, people on both sides of the river thought they would be safer on the other side of the river. And as you can kind of see in the back of this image, there was a massive traffic jam, if you will, a collision in the middle of the town's only bridge going over the Peshtigo River. 

That bridge, which was itself on fire, then collapsed, throwing everybody on it and their horses and wagons into the water. Some people tried to outrun the fire, heading north or south out of town. Generally, they didn't get further than the outskirts before they were completely consumed. The people in the water had a hard time surviving, not only because you had panicked animals all around, but also because the air itself was so hot that if you stuck your head out of the water for very long to breathe, your hair would dry instantly and then begin to burn. Some people had taken the precaution of bringing a blanket with them. This was a typical way of staying safe in a forest fire because you could get it wet, put it over your head, and keep ashes and cinders from landing on you, but even they found that their blankets would dry out and begin to burn within minutes of being above the surface of the water. So most of the evening, people were fighting for their lives in that water, not just sitting there and watching the view.  The sorts of things that people were reporting were things that people had never talked about in a forest fire before. We talked about the enormous heat. The bell, the iron bell from the Catholic church in Peshtigo was blown out of its belfry and partially melted by the time it hit the ground. 

Sand in certain areas out in the sugar bush area was melted into glass. The thing moved at incredible speeds. Survivors told stories of getting in their wagons and running full tilt into town or toward the river and still not being able to outrun the fire. People reported that the air itself was burning. And other people reported that people they had seen seemed to burst spontaneously into flames even though they didn't appear to be close, directly contacting any flames. We know a lot of this now was what's called flashover, huge amounts of organic gasses being released into the air by all this heating organic matter, and when it reaches a high enough concentration, essentially the air itself explodes. This normally doesn't happen outdoors. Flashovers are usually phenomenon seen in buildings. But the stories that were told by survivors were consistent with flashover. Many people ran into, jumped down into wells as a way of staying away from the fire. 

They were surrounded by stone. They were well underground. They were in water, usually, if the well hadn't gone dry. Most people who did this died of suffocation because the updraft from the firestorm was so intense that it simply sucked all of the air out of the wells. So families were found not harmed by fire but simply dead of suffocation at the bottom of these wells. This is a picture of an artifact that was discovered in an excavation of the cellar of one of the few stone buildings that was in Peshtigo on the night of the fire. This is a small bible that apparently somebody was reading the night of the fire, and it was left open to a particular page. The fire, the heat was so intense that the bible did not just burn, it carbonized. It's actually, it looks very delicate. It looks as if you could crush it by touching it, but it's actually hard as a rock. 

You can still read some of the type, interestingly enough, on the outside of this. This is the kind of, here's an example. And, again, this picture is very dark, but it's a picture of a dime that was sitting, somebody left sitting on a silver dollar, and the heat was so intense that the dime actually melted into the silver dollar. This is the reason why when Governor Lucius Fairchild, several days later, October 13th, got up as far as Green Bay and got into Peshtigo to see the fire, he issued a proclamation for aid to the state and the first thing he felt he had to say was: the accounts of the appalling calamity which has fallen upon the east and west shores of Green Bay have not been exaggerated. I think most people simply didn't believe the stories they were hearing from the survivors. So this is a map of the burned over area of the fire, as you see. Basically, it ran along the shores of the bay of Green Bay from about the Oconto area up to Marquette and then out west into the sugar bush area in Oconto County. But it also lapped the bay of Green Bay. Fire tornadoes were actually sighted in Door County that evening. Survivors who were in Marinette and who got on ships, because only the western part of Marinette was destroyed, they got on boats and went out into the bay of Green Bay to get away from the fire. 

More than a mile out into the bay, they still had hot cinders raining down on them. This is the primary area of the firestorm. There were ancillary fires burning in all directions around here. There was fire damage from this fire event out nearly as far as Wausau and down into Manitowoc County. They used to take us to the Manitowoc School Forest and they had a little trench dug in the woods out there and they would show us this thin layer of black about a foot down from the surface of the sandy soil. And they told us that strata was the remains of the ash from the Peshtigo fire. So, well down from where we normally think of the Peshtigo fire occurring. In Peshtigo itself, basically complete devastation. You're looking, those little bumps over there are actually freight car wheels that have been fused to the tracks and everything else basically consumed. This was taken some time later. 

That deer obviously died after the fire. It certainly would not have been in that condition had it gone through the fire. This is that one stone and mortar building that I talked to you about, and it looks like it's been bombed. Of course, there was so many bodies, many of them reduced to ash, others simply undistinguishable. And yet, others, people who had died of suffocation for instance, dead nevertheless even though they weren't burned. I wanted to show you, when we say that it was America's deadliest fire, we're really kind of underplaying the story. These are the deadliest fires in American history. I put the great Chicago fire down there not because it, it really belongs a few notches further down but I wanted to put it in there for reference. So you're looking at fires that occurred, many of them were urban fires that occurred in areas where you had huge numbers of people trapped in small areas. Even in those situations, you had death tolls of maybe 600 or 500. 

At the end, we have the Peshtigo fire. The death toll is estimated to be somewhere between 1700 and 2500 people. So to say, well, this was a deadly fire, again, I think it really understates the amount of devastation that occurred. I wanted to end up by talking a little bit about the Peshtigo connection. Again, I was always taught in school, again, wow, this was just this big coincidence that the two fires happened at the same night. And the reason that I was left with that impression is that, really, we have forgotten in American history how bad the evening of October 8, 1871, was for the United States as a whole. Increase Lapham, who was the father of the National Weather Service, wrote about that night, and he said, fires have swept more or less, actually, not only that night but the days prior to it, fires have swept more or less completely along the whole northern frontier from the Rocky Mountains through Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan and even into New York and Pennsylvania. Just in that night you had the Peshtigo fire, you had the Chicago fire, you had a large fire in Holland, Michigan, the Manistee fire that's basically cutting across the top part, and then the Heron fire, Port Heron fire which destroyed most of the thumb tip of Michigan all on the same night. You look at this map and suddenly the fact that Chicago and Peshtigo happened on the same evening doesn't look like a coincidence anymore. In fact, these fires, because you had massive prairie fires in the days prior sweeping in from the Great Plains into Minnesota and Wisconsin, two nights later you had devastating fires in Ontario, essentially due east. 

So this was basically a massive fire event that swept the entire northern United States. To look at these as isolated fires is, again, misleading. They were really a part of this much bigger disaster that occurred. Another connection is this guy here, William Butler Ogden, who was the first mayor of Chicago. Although, by all accounts that's not the worst thing that he did. [LAUGHTER] William Butler Ogden was a massive promoter of development in Chicago. He was a real estate developer. He owned canals, he owned steamships, he owned railroads, and he knew to build up Chicago the way he wanted to, he needed lots, a big source of cheap timber, and so he built the Peshtigo Company. The Peshtigo Company's primary purpose, its first purpose, was to provide wood for the development of Chicago. There was actually, if you look at the red line there, is the railroad path from Green Bay. 

Normally these things were taken to steamers as far as Green Bay and then either brought via railroad down to Chicago or via steamship to Milwaukee and from then down to Chicago. So you had this massive supply chain that was running from Peshtigo down to Chicago. William Butler Ogden lost a huge part of his fortune in both cities on that evening. A night in which the woods of Peshtigo could truly be said to have been burning in both locations. So what I'd like to do, that's the end of my prepared remarks. We do have a few minutes for questions, if anybody has any. Thank you. [APPLAUSE]