SYSK Selects: Did a cow start the Great Chicago Fire?

I hope you enjoy it. I hope you have a great weekend. Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from House Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck O'Brien. Uh. I guess that makes me the cow. That's the stuff you should know. Daisy the cow? Is that the boarding count? No, that's Lizzie. No, they wouldn't have named the boring cow Lizzie. That'd be bad ad marketing move. Elsie. Yeah, apparently this

cow was either Daisy, Madaline or Gwendoline. There's been different accounts. Well, one of the counts there wasn't even hers. Who's who are we talking about? Maybe we should clear everybody in um Chuck, have you ever seen fire? Yes, well there happened to be one akin to what you saw, except there was massive as a matter of fact, Chuck, let's go back in the way back machine. Oh yes, it's been a while. All right, here, blow blow the dust off flex capacitor of flexing man Jerry hated that. I

think it's still working. Let me press a couple of buttons. Here's all right, all right, here we go in Chicago. End of the year, Oh yeah, eighteens. Anymore, let's go the end of the date, October eight. It's a Sunday. Maybe we should go back on a Saturday and stop it. I'm not supposed to do that, that's right. Contract, it's based on continuing yet. Okay, so here we are, Chuck, what a dump? Yeah, it smells like the death of cows and the manure. Can't they excrete? Because Chicago is

a huge stock carreed town. If you can't tell the World's Fair is twenty two years off, Ghostbusters is a hundred and thirteen years away. Did you just do that in your head that this is just like basically the middle of nowhere? Temporally speaking, it's yeah, okay, eighteen seventy one four mins. Eighteen seventy one is a thirteen? Okay? Am I wrong? No? I think it's right. Okay, man, we just had a math argument and I can't do then cargo in the nineteenth century. You think we're throwing

darts or something. So anyway, there's there's some there's some things I want to point out to you, Chuck. Do you see the streets are paved with wood? Yeah, and the sidewalk we're on is wooden. Yeah, and like the structures around here all would everything's would. I want you to make note of that. Also make note of the temperature. It's October, and yet it's like in the eighties, right, it's pretty hot and it's been really it was really dry this summer. Dry. Do you see all this dust?

A lot of it again is dry cow manure just kind of floating around? Um. But it's also it's because there there hasn't been any rain at all. Okay, yeah, are you ready again? Yeah, let's get out of here. Is that a steak first? The milk steak? All right? Are we back? And we're back? Okay? Okay, So Chuck, um, that's pretty good steak. Huh yeah, nothing like a good

milk steak. So what was about to happen? And I really do feel for these people for not being able to stop it, especially the three hundred who are about to die. Three hundred people will die because we were too busy filling our faces with steak rather than warning anybody. But that's the that's the way of history. That's right. You can't change it. Um. What's about to happen is what's known as the Great Chicago Fire of October eight um. Three people will die, three point five square miles of

the city will be utterly destroyed, eighteen thousand structures. Yeah, I've got some stats here if I may please. Because you hear about the Great Chicago Fire in the eight hundreds, is easy now to say you're like, oh, yeah, that was the heck of fire. But dude, it was insane how big this fire was. I know the West Division they were divided into two divisions back in the day. Hundred acres burned. Uh, five buildings, two thousand, two hundred

and fifty people homeless. South Division four hundred and sixty acres burned. Uh. This is like where all the expensive stuff was. This is where March County seat, the courthouse, the newspapers, the lofts, is the banks, all the good stuff. Thirty six hundred fifty buildings, hotels, twenty one thousand people homeless. When you say buildings, you're saying utterly destroyed, burned to the ground, burned to the ground. UM North Division most devastating.

Four hundred and seventy acres burned out of the two thousand, five hundred acres in that division, so almost the whole division burned. Uh, thirteen thousand buildings burned. I'm sorry, Yeah, thirteen thousand buildings burned, seventy four thousand homeless in total. Because Molly, she did a good job, but she really

didn't hammer home how severe this was. In total, two thousand one four acres burned, UM, seventeen thousand, four hundred fifty buildings burned to the ground, and almost a hundred thousand people, which is a third of this city. We're homeless. And if you go and type in Google Earth Great Chicago Fire and hit images, it has a picture of modern day Chicago and it hasn't read what was the fire, and it's like it looks like in the city. Wow,

that's really neat. Yeah, it's really really scary and neat and neat. So the whole thing came to damage is surprisingly for that much of Chicago. Um, I guess there wasn't a lot of valuable stuff there, just a hundred and ninety two million dollars worth of damage, which three and a half billion. Now, oh so that's in that that eras Yeah, okay, yeah, that's okay, that makes a lot more sense. Um. So it was a huge fire. It was an enormous fire. And again like three people

lost their lives. Yeah, it was. I think it's number three all time in the US, behind World Trade Center and um or San Francisco, San Francisco. And uh. The crazy thing about this fire is just about every buddy points to the same location as the source today. Back then it was um in a barn at one three seven to Covid Street. And that barn did happen to belong to a woman named Mrs O'Leary, Katherine Kate O'Leary

and Mr H. Leary. Yeah. Mr and Mrs O'Leary and their children, um lived at one seven to Covid Street. They had a house. They rented another house to another family that was right in front of them, and then behind them was the barn. And in the barn they had three cows. Three cows, yeah, no, five cows total I think, okay, five cows I believe a calfine horse.

And then also in this barn, wooden barn, two tons of hay and two tons of coal and apparently like hundreds of pounds of wood shavings which they kept to use as kindling, and their pyromaniac nephew in a straight jacket. It was just pretty much a big accident waiting and a halfpen. Yeah, and you meant that they owned another house. But they were poor. They weren't like some rich family that owned these houses. Like they were poor family. Right. Mr O'Leary, he was a laborer. I couldn't find what

kind he was. They were definitely working class. And Mrs O'Leary um sold her milk in the neighborhood. But they were on welfare as I understand it. Yeah, and ridiculously the Chicago Chicago Tribune claimed early on that one of her motives was that she was booted off of welfare when they found out when the city found out that she was selling her milk and she was like, I'll get you. I'll burn the city down right, and um, which is starting with all my stuff? This is the

Chicago Tribune still around today, Um, the Tribune. Immediately they pointed to the O'Leary's as the source of the fire. It was either Mrs O'Leary or another Tribune reporter made up the idea that it was possibly her cow. A guy named Michael ahearn Um later confessed to just making up the cow story. And so Mrs O'Leary cow kicking over a lantern and setting the barn on fire that started the Great Chicago Fire gained a lot of traction before Um ahearn ever admitted to making it up. I

think in many years later. Apparently he was quite the drunkard of newspaper reporter in nineteenth century Chicago is a drunkard, so you're right. Over the years, through song and legend and story, Mrs o leary's cow was always blamed. And if you ask people on the street Jay Leno style, I bet eight out of ten people would say, if they have heard of the Great Chicago Fire, that it was started by a a cow of some sort. And then jay Leno's NBC lawyers would serve you with cease

and desist papers, and Jay Len will go. Um. One of the other reasons that this cow has persisted for so long, this cow leg And it's not just because it's like it makes a great story, like a cow set Chicago on fire, um, but also because they never really figured out who the source was. Mrs o'learys just kind of went down um in history as this as the villainous whether it was accidental or on purpose or at the very least the causer of the Great Chicago Fire.

It was her barn. Yeah, no matter which way slice it right exactly. UM. And this was despite like an exhaustive inquiry. I mean you were saying, it's an enormous fire, Chicago burned. They did a really big investigation into this. There was eleven hundred pages of testimony taken, all taken by shorthand of some court stenographer took it all by hand. Um. And they still never figured it out. But history has shown us possibly who the culprit was. But let's talk

about UM. Let's talk about Mrs O'Leary first and why she may or may not have been culpable. Um. She testified that her neighbors and was it in the house that they were renting from her and the McLaughlin's in the house in front of hers um. She said, they threw a big party. They're all partying, and some of them went into my barn to get milk for milksteak for oysters. Oysters or a punch that required milk. Yeah, a milk punch. I looked it up. Milk punches. The thing.

It's so sugar and vanilla and bourbon and milk, which sounds well, there's a lot of different milk punches. That sounds disgusting. It's got the bourbon in it. Yeah, just drink the bourbon and milk with the oysters. Sounds really disgusted. Yeah, it was really curious what that's like. But I mean oysters, rocket feller, it's cheesy. I mean, what's cheese if not milk at its heart? Yeah, I don't like the rocket feller though, I'll just go raw. I like it both ways. Really,

Oh yeah, do you like him fried? Um? Yeah? Only oysters pretty much anyway, as long as they're good. Yeah, all right, So anyway, Mrs o Leary contends that the party or's the revelers went into her barn seeking milk for some odd meal time or drink time. We're sitting there milking the cow. We're like, oh, I'm so wasted exactly, And then kicked over a lantern, right, either kicked over a lantern or you know, it was smoking out there.

Something happened, they don't know. Um. There was another suggestion as recently it's two thousand four, that Bila's comment split into pieces that night, and chunks of it set fires in various points all over the Midwest on the same night, which is not possible. Not possible. A scientists say that when a comment enters our atmosphere, it's not going to be what hot enough a meteorite to set a fire, right, it's gonna cool down too much to to be able to set a fire by the time it makes contact

with the ground. So how do this abtraction in oh Ford? You know, I couldn't find that fringe a big foot expert. Yeah. Um, so those are a couple of the other theories. Um, what about Mrs O'Leary herself. Oh well, they said that she was out there milking the cows at night, and she said, no, I was asleep. She was asleep with a sore foot. And the piece of evidence that probably exonerates her more than any other is that none of her stuff was insured. Well, yeah, exactly like I said earlier.

Why would she burn down, especially in retribution for being put off welfare? Why would she burn her house down, her livelihood or livelihood down, possibly killing her her her family cows, which is like tantamount to killing the goose that lay the golden egg. Um. Yeah, the fact that I wasn't insured. It doesn't matter what kind of person she is. Right out the window, nobody is going to do that on purpose. So at the very least she didn't do it on purpose, correct, But she also probably

didn't do it on accident either. She probably really was in bed with the sore foot. No one saw her. There were no reports of any of her being around the barn. Right, And how did Mr Leary escape all this? I don't know. I wonder if he was at work or something. I guess she was really strongly associated with the cow. I mean, yeah, you always only hear about her. Mr o Leary is just like I guess he enjoyed his anonymity. Well she did too, just like her as

you find later on right exactly. He just didn't even say anything. She's like, say something, what I don't want to be in the papers? So where are we then? So Mrs O'Leary, we're gonna go ahead and just kind of exonerate her at this point, which officially happened in right, there was a guy named Lewis M. Cone who went on to Great Wealth in Chicago. Uh and later on he after he died, somebody came forward, I think in

the forties and said, remember Lewis Cone. He told me that when he was eighteen, he was gambling in the O'Leary's barn with one of the O'Leary boys, which kind of holds water because James O'Leary went on to become one of the biggest gambling bosses in Chicago, one of the Sun's um and we kicked over a land and accidentally and set the set the place on fire, and we accidentally started the Chicago Fire. Oh. This guy was apparently kind of a boastful type, so it's possible that

he made it up. Even said I was winning at the time, like he bragged about it. Yeah, so you've got all these people and none of them really though, can hold the candle. Even Mrs A Leer herself to one Daniel peg leg Sullivan leg for a very good reason. He had one wooden leg and then went clop clop clop. That's right. And he testified, he testified, and it sort of became a case of that doth protest too much, sir, because he made up the story. We'll remember in the

lying episode. It's like when you add stuff that I need to be in there, it's usually a pretty good sign. And I'll bet he didn't use any contractions when he gave his testimony. He did not. And he's like, you want to know. I can't believe you want to know why I was sitting on the curb in front of someone else's You want to know, then I will tell you, But I can't believe you want to know. In the meantime,

he's cooking this little story up. He testified that he had gone to visit the Olearies about eight o'clock that night, said Ms O'Leary was in bed um. Again I mentioned Mr O'Leary at all. After the visit, he apparently start went to go home. See this is one I don't get it says that he started for home, but then later it says he passed his home and to smoke a pipe in front of house. So I'm just gonna go have a little pipe smoke for some reason, I'm gonna walk by my house to do it in front

of Willie White's house. Do you know why. Here's why he said that, because that places him near enough the fire that he could reasonably say he saw it, but not so close to the McLaughlin's house. Like his house was closer to the McLaughlins. You could have been like, I didn't see you there, and I was standing right outside looking at in front of your house. Very clever, mr,

Mr peg leg um. He claims that he spotted the fire and ran for help, screaming fire a hundred and ninety three ft with his peg leg um and tried to extinguish the fire and then escaped to the burning barn, freeing animals too. He freed the animals and he actually did do that. Yes, so this guy was there. He was, he was around the fire. But the problem is is placing him on the curb in front of William White's

house has some real problem. So no one disputes that this guy was near the fire, but exactly where that was changes everything. So he was a pig leg pig legged man, so he couldn't um. He couldn't run fast and certainly not closet. No one heard anybody shouting fire alongside the house. It's definitely not him, so he definitely didn't um. Another problem was that he his mother kept a cow in the O'Leary barn, and he admitted to frequently visiting the cow in the evenings. Really yeah, okay.

And then it's also possible that another man named um Dan Dennis Reagan was present. It was something of an accomplice or at least a sympathetic witness to peg Leg because he had another part of the story that didn't quite add up. He was about a block away in his home, ah and he testified that he heard someone

yelling fire jumped out of bed to help. But Richard Balees, this attorney modern day attorney for a title insurance coming in Chicago's one that dug this all up, pieced it together and said, how would this guy block away have heard this? And none of the other people, the aleries

especially not have heard this. Not only that he got his hands on the property diagrams of the area at the time and mapped it out and placed peg leg where he said he was and showed that he would have had to have been able to look clear through a two story house to see the barn. There's no way he could have seen that it was on fire from where he said he was sitting. So the fact that this guy confabulated all of this story suggests that

he may have done it. And probably what he did was he was visiting his mother's cow, decided to have a smoke afterward, and um accidentally set the barn on fire. The lawyer Richard Bales is very understanding. He said it was probably an accident, but that once he saw that he pretty much burned a third of the city of Chicago down. Um, he just kind of kept his mouth shut and let Mrs O'Leary take the full Yeah, once that rumor circulated, I'm sure he was like, yeah, that's

how it went down, Alright. I was there, So I think I feel bad for the guy. He's there, probably starts his fire, probably gets out of hand and freaks out, and the animals first kind soul and uh, in the end, they couldn't put out the fire for some of the reasons you talked about earlier. All the wood, Um, the dryness. There was a strong wind. Did you notice the strong

wind when we visited Chicago. I don't know if they did, but it was strong, josh Um, fifty six miles a wooden street eats five d sixty miles of wooden sidewalks and only about two firemen in the whole city. That was about a sixteen acre fire. The night before that they had put out, and well it had started the they had fought it all through the night before and into the Sunday afternoon. So most of these guys hadn't like eaten or slept, and the fire the fire brigade

damaged their equipment in some cases. Um. Then some of the fire engines went to the wrong address to begin with. Right, there was a guy whose job it was to look out for fires, like he sat in a basically a crows nest in the courthouse fire watcher. You're right, and um, he didn't see it for a while. He finally did, but he picked the wrong department to activate. Yeah, like the wrong like little segment that he was supposed to guess.

And so some people went to the wrong place first, and it took a little while to correct it, so there's some confusion. So that happened too. And then apparently the fire destroyed the building that housed the water pumps for the city, and then they tried to get water from Lake Michigan and that didn't work out so well. And uh, all these things added up to the third

biggest fire disaster in the nation's history. And like you said, the longhead idea of connecting the the wooden buildings with wooden streets and wooden sidewalks that I think fell out of fashion pretty quick after the Chicago fire, I bet, and people smoking on the streets, and well that probably involved keeping two tons of hay and two tons of coal. And apparently it burned what through the following evening and then thankfully it finally rained and that helped put it out.

And that is a great Chicago fire. You want to hear in irony of it all, I'd love to The O'Leary house was spared, no way, it was not burned, So it just took off in one direction and from the from the barn and now um, the O'Leary's house, the house they ran to the mclaucklin's William White's house. All this stuff is gone, and uh, in its places the Chicago Fire Department's training academy and they have a Maltese crossed on the floor. Um, they have a cross

on the floor. Uh, that marks the spot where the barn stood. I thought you're gonna say, like a CBS. No, No, it's very appropriately it's the fire department. Did they do that there on purpose? I believe so. Okay, that would have just been too much of a coincidence exactly. And then Mrs O'Leary really did not like the well, she didn't like the limelight. I get the impression anyway, but she really didn't like being, you know, treated like this

horrible person. And she was not shy about taking a broom to people like reporters who came to her doorstep. And um, she also chased off a representative of P. T. Barnum's at least sent somebody to go offer a job traveling with this circus like the Scapegoat. I guess yeah, they would bring out a cow and her and oh no, we forgot to mention she had a pretty healthy beard. Would It's like, man, he's in the wrong line of work. Um, yeah, it would have gone right up with the fire. Her

house is spare bitter beard burned off. Yeah, that's good. So yeah that's the Chicago fire. Um you said she was exonerated, right, Yeah, she was exonerated. Richard Bale's worth and Um I had something else. Oh, I think it's just remarkable that did you have the number of three hundred people died. I've seen varying accounts, but that's the max that I've heard. And it's just amazing that that much of the city burned in eighteen thousand. Eighteen thousand

buildings burned down. Like you hear about a fire today that hits like three buildings on a block in a city, it's a huge deal. Um, I'm surprised only three people died. It's pretty remarkable and that's a lot. But I'm surprised that it wasn't, you know, like five thousand people. They always say God loves Chicago. Yeah, except when it comes

to the Cubs. Yeah, that's true. Uh. If you want to learn more about Mrs O'Leary, her cow, the Great Chicago Fire, fires in general, anything, you can type whatever you want into the search bar. How stuff works dot com, I said, search bar, and that is time for listener mail. But first, mm okay, listener mail, Josh, I'm gonna call this a fish called ganja. You're getting pretty good today

with them. I appreciate that. Hey, guys, I'm a tender of bar in the Para city of New York and one of my regulars turned me onto your podcast if You short months ago. He even gave the guy's name. But in the interview, it's a funny when they put it like that, like, hey, man, turned me onto that podcast, like in a backga. Since then, I've been playing catchup and listening to as many episodes as I can on

a daily basis to quench my thirst for knowledge. I currently lived near Philly with my wife a new daughter, but I sling drinks in New York. Before I had been turned onto 'all, I dreaded my two hour commute. Now I look forward to it and have managed to listen to a hundred and ninety two episodes some dedication that's hardcore. Uh. Several years ago, my uncle decided to purchase a new saltwater aquarium and ended up purchasing an

enormous one hundred and fifty gallon unit. He bought the tank online from a reputable website, but to save money, he purchased most of the accoucher malts, including lighting, fish, coral and plant light, from a local pet store. This is where it gets good, because the lighting he purchased was a special type of lamp, also very commonly used

in grow houses. You must have been flat by the d A at the moment of sale, because about a month later after the tank was finished, on a Tuesday evening, my uncle, my aunt, and three cousins, all under the age of seven, we're sitting down to dinner. In an instant, six fully armed d e A agents burst into the house, including the front door, back door, and from the garage, and proceeded to scream things along the lines of on

the floor, hands behind your head. They even held my aunt and uncle at gunpoint while they looked around the house. After searching from top to bottom, realizing they made a huge mistake, they calmly apologized and left. I'm not a hundred per cent sure if the lawyers were involved, but I believe my family received a handsome compensation for the mistake, and that it's from Ben the bartender and he has a hook up for us in New York if we want to have an event at a bar hanging on

to Betty. No man to do that again, sintimes. I know we miss you New York. All of our work travel has been on the West Coast, Um and certain others. Yeah, uh so, let's see what else? What I can't top that I can't send? Send your other misinformed d A stories. How about any anyone that has any Chicago fire like I always wondered about the olearies if their family line continue. Yeah, so, if you have any family members that had anything to do with the Chicago fire, we'd have to know about it.

I don't even know why I'm here anymore. Did you just take a chuck for more on this and thousands of other topics? Does it how stuff works dot com