6. How did the great Chicago fire start:
source:altavista.com

The Great Chicago Fire
by Horace White
October 14, 1871


Horace White, editor-in-chief of the Chicago Tribune, wrote this eyewitness account of the most destructive fire in American history in a letter to Murat Halstead, the editor of the Cincinnati Commercial. The Chicago fire raged for two days and nights, covering over 2,100 acres, causing 200 deaths, destroying 17,450 buildings and leaving 70,000 homeless (out of a population of 324,000).
As a slight acknowledgment of your thoughtful kindness in forwarding to us, without orders, a complete outfit of type and cases, when you heard that we had been burned out, I send you a hastily written sketch of what I saw at the great fire...
The history of the great fire in Chicago, which rises to the dignity of a national event, cannot be written until each witness, who makes any record whatever, shall have told what he saw. Nobody could see it all -- no more than one man could see the whole of the Battle of Gettysburg. It was too vast, too swift, too full of smoke, too full of danger, for anybody to see it all. My experience derives its only public importance from the fact that what I did, substantially, a hundred thousand others did or attempted -- that is, saved or sought to save their lives and enough of their wearing-apparel to face the sky in...
I had retired to rest, though not to sleep (Sunday, October 8) when the great bell struck the alarm, but fires had been so frequent of late, and had been so speedily extinguished, that I did not deem it worth while to get up and look at it, or even to count the strokes on the bell to learn where it was. The bell paused for fifteen minutes before giving the general alarm, which distinguishes a great fire from a small one. When it sounded the general alarm I rose and looked out. There was a great light to the southwest of my residence, but no greater than I had frequently seen in that quarter, where vast piles of pine lumber have been stored all the time I have lived in Chicago, some eighteen years. But it was not pine lumber that was burning this time. It was a row of wooden tenements in the South Division of the city, in which a few days ago were standing whole rows of the most costly buildings which it has entered into the hearts of architects to conceive. I watched the increasing light for a few moments. Red tongues of light began to shoot upward; my family were all aroused by this time, and I dressed myself for the purpose of going to the "Tribune" office to write something about the catastrophe. Once out upon the street, the magnitude of the fire was suddenly disclosed to me.