The Deadliest Disaster You Never Heard Of

The Titanic. The Hindenburg. The Great Chicago Fire. These are disasters we are all familiar with, terrible events that killed far too many people and traumatized even more. But is it possible that today, in the age of Google and endless information at our fingertips, there could be another tragedy, perhaps even worse, that most Americans are unaware of?

The Summer of 1871 was hot and dry in the Upper Midwest. Weeks of drought and soaring temperatures had dried up the brush in the dense Wisconsin forest. The men who worked William Ogden’s mill, in the town of Peshtigo, worked with sweat constantly dripping into their eyes.

Peshtigo, Wisconsin was a town of some two thousand people near the western shore of Lake Michigan’s Green Bay. Its main business was lumber: Peshtigo was home to one of the largest sawmills in the country. William Ogden, a former mayor of Chicago, had come to the area with the aim of profiting from the vast woodlands of Wisconsin. He bought thousands of acres of forest, built the sawmill and the boardinghouse and the general store, plus a factory to produce the hundreds of wooden goods Americans used in their everyday lives- broom handles, clothespins, buckets. Peshtigo lived on lumber.

Manufacturing wasn’t the only business in the area. In the surrounding woods, farmers were clearing their land by setting small fires. “Slash and burn” was a common way of clearing land, and it wasn’t considered particularly dangerous.

Evidence of Ogden’s mill was everywhere in Peshtigo. The roads were dusted with sawdust. Mattresses were stuffed with sawdust. Most of the town’s buildings were made of wood, milled at Ogden’s mill. The most important bridge running in and out of town was also wood. And Ogden’s mill, factory and other enterprises kept people employed.

The citizens of Peshtigo were used to the faint scent of smoke drifting through the air, both from small brushfire and the slash-and-burn fires the farmers used to clear their land. Woodsmoke, although worrisome, was part of life in the any lumber town. So no one thought anything unusual was happening when they headed for bed on the night of October 8, 1871.

Then, in the words of one survivor, “all hell broke loose.”

In the heat and the dryness a handful of those small fires out in the woods merged into one huge fire. Before anyone knew what was happening, a firewall bore down on Peshtigo with terrifying speed. When the wind changed suddenly, the wall of fire whirled itself into a fiery tornado that tore through the town like a locomotive. Modern estimates tell us that this fire tornado moved at the speed of at least ninety miles an hour, shooting off fireballs in every direction.

Within an hour most of Peshtigo was gone. But the fire was only getting started.

Fanned by powerful winds, the flames grew taller and hotter. Embers flew through the air like swarms of fireflies on a summer evening. Then the winds shifted, and started coming from the west. Borne on the powerful winds, the embers flew over nearly 20 miles of open water, crossing Green Bay to Door County, where they started another fire.

Before long the fire was on the move again. It tore north from Green Bay to the town of Little Sumiaco. From there it headed east across the Door Peninsula to Lake Michigan.

Meanwhile on the western side of the bay, the fire was racing north to the Menominee River. It burned homes and villages to the ground, and part of the larger town of Marinette was reduced to ashes. The fire then crossed the river and ran another forty miles up the shore of Green Bay into Michigan.

Peshtigo was a small rural town. It was completely unequipped to deal with a fire of this magnitude. The town had only one horse-drawn steam pumper which was clearly incapable of battling this monster. But even if it could have, the heat of the fire was so intense that it melted the pumper’s metal. Nor was there any way to plead with the outside world for help: Peshtigo had one telegraph office, and it had already burned down. The temperature of the fire reached 2,000 degrees. Sand melted into glass.

Panicked citizens tried desperately to survive. Many ran for the Peshtigo River, the flames hard on their heels. Eyewitness accounts say that man children burst into flame as they ran. Another tells us that one man was driven insane when he discovered the woman he had dragged to the river was not his wife, but a stranger. A larger number of people survived by huddling in the marshes on the other side of the river.

Many people survived in the river. But most people were not so fortunate. A group of boys who tried to survive by climbing into a well were boiled to death. Hundreds of others died from suffocation- the fire had sucked all the oxygen from the air. An eyewitness reported seeing two men trying to kill themselves by slamming their heads into a tree trunk, while the rest of their bodies were on fire. All 75 residents of Ogden’s boarding house perished.

The fire only stopped when it had run out of fresh fuel. The following day, Monday October 9, it rained. The fire burnt itself out.

The long-term effects of the fire were dreadful. More than a month after the fire, a reporter wrote, “[Even now] the woods and fields are full of dead bodies…we found some teeth, and jack knife and a slate pencil. It must have been all that remained of a promising boy.”

The Peshtigo Fire destroyed 1.25 million acres of forest and wiped out towns, villages and businesses. It killed somewhere between 1,200 and 2,400 people, and left countless others maimed, or homeless, or both. At least 350 people were buried in a mass grave, their remains too charred to be identified.

No natural disaster on American soil comes close to the destruction wrought by the Peshtigo Fire. So why have so few people heard of it?

The answer lies in the first sentence of this essay.

The Peshtigo Fire broke out on October 8, 1871. That same day, some 250 miles to the south, the Great Chicago Fire was roaring to life.

The Chicago Fire was a disaster for the city. 90,000 people were left homeless. Over 3 square miles of the city were burned to the ground. Some 300 people were killed.

Chicago was the fourth largest city in the United States. Over 330,000 people lived in Chicago. It had banks and parks and universities, all the trappings of a big and important city. The public imagination was captivated by the thought that a great city like Chicago could be so vulnerable to such an ordinary thing as fire. In the weeks following the fires, newspapers were full of stories about the Chicago Fire. Harper’s Weekly reported on October 12, “The grief of Chicago is the sorrow of the country, and private and public bodies are rivals in generosity.”

But Peshtigo’s grief was its own.

There is a fascinating coda to the story of the Peshtigo disaster.

In October of 1859, a young Belgian immigrant named Adele Brise was out walking near her home in Champion, Wisconsin. Champion is about sixteen miles from the center of the town of Green Bay. Suddenly before her she saw a lady. She was clothed in white, with a yellow sash around her waist and a crown of stars on her head. Adele was, quite understandably, frightened out of her wits. She ran away.

The following Sunday while on her way to Mass, Adele saw the Lady a second time. She went on to church and asked her parish priest what she should do if she ever saw the Lady again. Ask her who she is and what she wants of us, the priest said.

When the Lady appeared a third time, Adele asked her the questions given to her by the priest.

The apparition answered, “I am the Queen of Heaven, who prays for the conversion of sinners, and I wish you to do the same.” She also told Adele to “gather the children in this wild country and teach them what they should know for salvation.” She ended with “Go and fear nothing. I will help you.”

Adele, who was 28 years old at the time, devoted the rest of her life to teaching children about God. Her father, Lambert Brise, built a small chapel at the site of the apparitions. They named it the Chapel of Our Lady of Good Help. A few years later Mrs. Isabella Doyen donated five acres surrounding the site, and a larger church was built there in 1861.

Ten years later, when the Peshtigo Fire threatened the chapel, Adele refused to leave. When local families fled to the shrine to beg for protection, Adele organized a procession to beg the Virgin Mary for help. They prayed through the night.

When the rains came the next day, Adele and the others saw that all the surrounding land had been destroyed by the fire. But the five acres on which the chapel stood, as well as the chapel itself and all the people who had taken refuge there, were unharmed.

The Catholic Church approved the apparitions in December, 2010. Eight years after the approval, the chapel was declared a National Shrine. Today the Shrine of Our Lady of Good Help is the only approved apparition in the United States.

And the only one, that I know of at least, where the Virgin Mary saved the people from a forest fire.