Chicago burned in 1871 and the cow was a press invention

In October 1997, Chicago City Council passed a resolution formally exonerating Catherine O'Leary, an Irish dairywoman who had died a hundred and two years earlier, and her cow. The text said, in short, that neither she nor the animal had caused the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. It had been pushed through by alderman Edward Burke on the back of work by Richard Bales, an amateur historian who was, by trade, a title company lawyer and who had spent years reading the 1,100 handwritten pages of the original inquiry. The session was held half in jest. It was the first time in a hundred and twenty-six years that a Chicago institution had put in writing that the cow kicked over no lantern.

1937. Hollywood releases In Old Chicago, a Twentieth Century-Fox blockbuster in which Alice Brady plays Mrs O'Leary and wins the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for the part. The film puts the cow, the barn and the kerosene lamp on screens around the world. By then the myth no longer needed newspapers: it was sung in popular songs and told to children. One of the family's sons, James O'Leary, known as Big Jim, became the owner of Chicago's biggest gambling house, and the press always introduced him as the son of the woman with the cow.

The O'Leary house did not burn. That night's wind pushed the fire north-east, that is, in the opposite direction, and the family accused of destroying Chicago went on living in one of the few structures on their block left standing. Sightseers came to look at it.

1927. Michael Ahern, crime reporter and the last survivor of those who covered the fire, dies in Chicago. Six years earlier he had signed the only retraction on this subject that carries a date and quotation marks.

1921. The Tribune, the city's great newspaper, 9 October, fifty years to the day after the fire. Ahern writes: "I wish to state that the fire was not started by Mrs. O'Leary's cow kicking over a lamp. Nothing of the kind occurred. That version of the origin of the fire was a concoction which the writer of these reminiscences confesses to a guilty part. In justice to the maligned animal and to Mrs. O'Leary, who died many years ago, I make this belated reparation." The cow had been made up by him and two colleagues who were dead by then.

Not even the retraction is clean. Many reference works date Ahern's confession to 1893, and the Chicago History Museum's documentary project on the fire places it on the fortieth anniversary, in 1911, with an awkward detail: a colleague later claimed he had written that column himself and that Ahern's byline was put on top of it. The only version anyone can read today with an exact date and in quotation marks is the one from 1921.

What is dated is the damage. Catherine O'Leary died on 3 July 1895 in the same city that pointed at her. She died twenty-six years before Ahern signed his reparation and a hundred and two before the council's resolution. Neighbours recognised her in the street. Newspapers ran drawings of her with the cow. She stopped leaving the house.

1871, November and December. The Board of Police and Fire Commissioners opens the official investigation into the origin of the fire and centres it, precisely, on the O'Leary barn. Over nine days it takes statements from some fifty people: firefighters, neighbours from DeKoven Street, the man who raised the first alert. The transcripts run to more than eleven hundred handwritten pages. Catherine O'Leary testifies under oath that she was in bed when the fire started; she and her husband, Patrick, had gone to bed early because he was working the next day.

The board's conclusion is a single sentence, and it is exactly the opposite of what the city already took for granted: "Whether it originated from a spark blown from a chimney on that windy night, or was set on fire by human agency, we are unable to determine."

There it was, in the case file, in December 1871. It made no difference. By then the cow had been circulating for two months.

9 October 1871. With the fire still burning, the Chicago Evening Journal runs an extra edition carrying the version that will last a century and a half: a woman is milking at night, the cow kicks the lamp over, the hay catches. The Evening Journal did not print her name; the name arrived in the days that followed and never left. The story came with the culprit built in, and with an address: an immigrant, a Catholic, a poor woman, in a city where some forty thousand residents had been born in Ireland, one in eight, and where the press treated them accordingly.

8 October 1871, between half past eight and nine in the evening. The fire starts in the barn behind 137 DeKoven Street, or beside it; Chicago's fire academy stands on that site today. That has never been disputed. What is disputed is who or what lit it.

Chicago in 1871 was a city of more than 300,000 people built of wood: two thirds of its buildings, including the pavements and many roadways, were pine boards. Two and a half centimetres of rain had fallen in three months. A strong south-westerly was blowing. The tower watchman flagged the fire in the wrong place and the firefighters set off for another block; the telegraph operator refused to correct the alarm so as not to confuse the crews. The same men had spent sixteen hours putting out a fire that broke out on the Saturday night some ten blocks to the north and took four whole blocks with it.

The result: some 300 dead, 3.3 square miles levelled — about 8.5 square kilometres, with more than 17,000 buildings inside — and close to 100,000 people homeless, a third of the city. The fire burned until the early hours of 10 October and was put out by rain.

One fact remains that no city resolution has ever repaired. On that same night of 8 October 1871, some four hundred kilometres to the north, in Peshtigo, Wisconsin, a forest fire fed by the same drought and the same wind killed between 1,200 and 2,400 people and burned several whole towns: it is the deadliest fire in the history of the United States, four to eight times more lethal than Chicago's. There is no exact victim count because the civil registers of those towns burned inside them.