1871 | Environment
Environment
Fire consumes the Tuileries Palace at Paris during the "Bloody Week" in May, and much of the Louvre Palace is gutted.
The Chicago Fire that rages for 30 hours from October 8 to 9 destroys 3½ square miles of the largely wood-built city, destroying nearly 18,000 structures, killing perhaps 250 people and leaving 100,000 homeless. It has allegedly been started on the warm Sunday evening in DeKoven Street on the Southwest Side by a cow kicking over a kerosene lantern belonging to one Catherine (Mrs. Patrick) O'Leary, a working-class wife with five children, and did, in fact, start in the O'Leary barn (but she would hardly have been milking a cow at 9 o'clock at night). The city's new water tower survives, but burned to the ground in the general conflagration is the Palmer House, a $3.5-million hostelry built by local merchant Potter Palmer, now 45, who has made a fortune from dry goods and cotton during the Civil War and has put up the grand hotel as a wedding present for his Louisville-born bride, Bertha (née Honoré), now 22. Although he also loses most of his other 31 buildings, she persuades him not to leave Chicago but rather to stay and help rebuild it; he will borrow $1.7 million, erect larger buildings (including an even more luxurious new Palmer House), and turn the swampland north of the city's commercial district into the Lake Shore Drive area; she will become the city's society queen, as prominent as Mrs. Astor in New York, while making it fashionable for women to give their time and money to civic and charitable causes (see philanthropy, 1889).
Sparks from the Chicago Fire start forest fires that destroy more than a million acres of Michigan and Wisconsin timberland. They continue from October 8 to October 14, killing at least 1,200 people (and possibly 1,500) in the logging town of Peshtigo, Wisconsin, and in 16 surrounding communities, making this the worst fire tragedy in the recorded history of North America.
Passenger pigeons nesting in Wisconsin occupy 750 square miles and will continue such mass nestings until 1878 despite the great October fire, but fewer and fewer migratory birds return to their old habitats, possibly because market hunters have taken too large a toll, possibly because wetlands covering an area greater than New England are being drained and forests being cleared for farms and for fuel (see 1878).