The Great Chicago Fire by Heather Cox Richardson Read on Substack
Today is the anniversary of several deadly wildfires that took place in 1871. While it was not the deadliest— that label went to the Peshtigo Fire in Wisconsin— the Great Chicago Fire tends to be the one people remember, not least because observers turned it into anti-immigrant propaganda even before the flames had died out.
A short history of the facts behind the popular memory of the Great Chicago Fire.
(This is not tonight’s letter, by the way. It’s just cool history, and I don’t get to do enough of that lately.)
Scottie's Playtime 
Weird coinkidink…when I was in college, lo these many decades ago, I worked as a night shift cook in a bar called ‘O’Leary’s Cow’. One of the owners counted Mrs O’Leary as a distant relative, hence the name.
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🌞 Sounds as if that was fun!
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Weirder coinkidink … I actually have (disaster planning) lectures prepared about such fires. We blame the cow but like San Francisco not too long afterward the fires were fed by busted gas-pipes. That why the cities burned: out of control fires fed by busted gas-pipes
Disaster planning, you ask: As example the so-called “Big One” everyone glued to the tube in the Pacific Northwest has got their panties in a twist over: yeah the quake will do some damage, probably a lot, buildings will literally leap into the air before collapsing; and there may even be some nearly significant flooding but not what the screeching harpies screech and certainly no tsunami the size of the one that wiped out coastal Japan the last time it happened. Big Oil has been piping gas into Pacific Northwest homes for over a hundred years. Feel free to weigh in on what it will be like to get out of Portland, or Seattle, when the roads are twisted and the city’s on fire fed by busted gas-pipes
The earthquake is the least of our worries …
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