Mimi Cowan

In yesterday’s post I gave you the basics of Chicago’s 1871 Great Conflagration, as they called it, and how Mrs. O’Leary became everyone’s favorite scapegoat. I also promised you a story about what French socialists, women with Molotov cocktails, Mrs. O’Leary, and the creation of modern Chicago all have in common.

So here’s where the story starts: as I flipped through a series of old images of Mrs. O’Leary, I realized that she looked different in every picture.
That’s because Mrs. O’Leary hid from the press; she didn’t want anyone to sketch her likeness in the papers. As a result, illustrators were free to depict her in anyway they chose. But if these aren’t accurate representations of Mrs. O’Leary, what were the models for these images?

Turns out that these depictions of Mrs. O’Leary bear a striking resemblance to images of the pétroleuses of the 1871 French Commune.

In March 1871, the citizens' militia and city council of Paris ran the French national government and army out of the city, and then declared a socialist-style government, referred to as the Commune. After taking back several Paris neighborhoods throughout April and May, the French army began their final attack on the remaining Commune-controlled areas. There were vicious street battles, and fires broke out and burned much of the city.

According to the French press, female radicals, dubbed pétroleuses, had supposedly started many of these fires, using petroleum-filled vessels, sort of like Molotov cocktails. While historians have not found any evidence that pétroleuses actually existed, the contemporary press nonetheless depicted these women as the source of the fires that ravaged the city.

Less than two weeks before the fire in Chicago, the Chicago Tribune ran an article detailing the Parisian trial of five supposed pétroleuses. The article claimed that the women were “repulsive in the extreme, being that of the lowest, most depraved class of women . . . their clothes were sordid, their hair undressed, their features coarse, bestial, and sullen” (Chicago Tribune, September 26, 1871).

This description of the pétroleuses could be applied to the images of Mrs. O’Leary. Images of the pétroleuses and of Mrs. O’Leary share the same wrinkled, masculine features; sharp, long noses; and wild, stringy, unkempt hair.

Perhaps the people who drew Mrs. O’Leary depicted her with characteristics of a pétroleuse simply because both were accused of burning their cities down. But I think it’s more than that.

In the early 1870s Chicago’s business elite had begun to worry that their large immigrant working-class population would turn against them and overthrow the city government to establish a Commune, just as they had in Paris only weeks before the Chicago fire.

So when Mrs. O’Leary was presented as a scapegoat for the fire, illustrators were able to use her to express the deepest fears of the businessmen of Chicago: that the large immigrant working-class population might embrace the ideas of dangerous European radicals and destroy the city. The myth of Mrs. O’Leary, then, was not necessarily a condemnation of the real, live Kate O’Leary. It was a warning to Chicagoans about the threat posed by radical working-class immigrants. Beware, these images said, because they’re already among us, destroying our city, just like they did in Paris.

The irony of all this is that the 1871 fire provided a clean slate of sorts and allowed Chicago to develop into a modern industrial powerhouse in the last quarter of the 19th century. Without the opportunity for rebirth provided by the fire, this may not have occurred. In addition to the fire, however, there was one other necessary ingredient for Chicago’s industrial transformation: the presence of a large working-class immigrant population.

Perhaps Mrs. O’Leary, then, did represent what working-class immigrants would do to the city, but the illustrators got it backwards: instead of destroying it, the fire, Mrs. O’Leary, and hundreds of thousands of hard-working immigrants just like her were, in fact, the future of the city.

So, next time someone blames the 1871 Chicago fire on Kate O’Leary and her fidgety cow, you can let them know that she didn’t do it, but she’ll be happy to take the credit.

Mimi Cowan

Yesterday I told my eighty-eight-year-old grandmother I was writing a blog post about the Great Chicago Fire. She replied, "the one the cow started?"

Yup. The one the cow started. Well, actually, no. Everyone and their grandmother have blamed Chicago's biggest disaster on Mrs. O'Leary and her incendiary bovine for the past 142 years, but here's the thing:

The cow didn't do it.

But that got me thinking. Why, almost a century and a half later, is her name often the one thing people know about the fire? I've got some theories so grab a mug of milk, pull up a stool, and keep an eye on that lantern.

First, a little background: Late on Sunday October 8, 1871, a fire broke out on the west side of Chicago. Legend tells us that Catherine O'Leary placed a lantern behind the hoof of the cow she was milking. The cow kicked and the lantern broke, catching the surrounding hay on fire. Within moments, the entire barn was engulfed in flames.

Whether or not Mrs. O'Leary and her cow were at fault, there was most certainly a fire in or near the O'Leary barn that night. Thanks to an unusually dry summer, a city made of lumber, and a stiff wind, the flames spread too quickly for firefighters to control. By 1:30am the fire had engulfed the city courthouse, almost a mile from the O'Leary home, (and in the process destroying most of the city's records, to the horror of twenty-first century historians. Ahem.). Two hours later, when the city's pumping station burned down, firefighters all but gave up.

The fire raged all day Monday, consuming the downtown and north side. Fortunately, rain arrived early on Tuesday October 10, mostly extinguishing the flames. But also extinguished were the lives of at least 300 people. Additionally, about 100,000 were left homeless (about a third of the city's population), and property worth nearly $200 million dollars (somewhere between $2 and $4 trillion dollars in today's currency) was destroyed.

All this at the hands (okay, hooves) of a cow. Except, um, not. Most historians agree that it probably wasn't Mrs. O'Leary and her cow's fault. In fact, the official inquiry into the fire, way back in 1871, found Mrs. O'Leary not guilty. But somehow the myth took off anyway.126 years later, the Chicago City Council again exonerated Mrs. O'Leary and her cow (see Chicago Tribune October 6, 1997). But even today, if people know anything about the Great Conflagration of 1871 in Chicago, they know about Mrs. O'Leary and her cow.

So I started wondering: how did Mrs. O'Leary become the scapegoat and, more importantly, why?

The "how" was pretty easy to find out: on October 18, 1871 an article in the Chicago Times claimed that Mrs. O'Leary was a seventy-something-year-old Irish woman (she was actually in her late thirties or early forties) and that she had lived off handouts from the county poor relief board for most of her life (also false; she helped support her family of seven with a small milk business). When she was denied aid one day, the article explained, Kate O'Leary swore revenge on the city and later enacted this revenge with the careful placement of a lantern.

Despite the fact that just about the only thing that was correct in this article was Mrs. O'Leary's name, it was the root of what turned out to be a lifetime of shame and ostracizing for Kate O'Leary.

I still wanted to know why this myth stuck if it wasn't the truth. Turns out that the answers tell us more about late 19th-century Chicago than they tell us about Kate O'Leary. Tomorrow I'll tell you what French socialists, women with Molotov cocktails, Mrs. O'Leary, and the creation of modern Chicago all have to do with one another.

But here's a spoiler: if I were Kate, I'd take credit for it after all.

As a young kid Ms. Cowan loved history, except Chicago history. And immigration history. And labor history. After spending her twenties working at some of the nation's top opera companies, she changed careers, enrolled in grad school, and discovered her passion for all things historical; especially Chicago, immigration, and labor history. She has been a resident of the City of Big Shoulders for the last four years while researching and writing her (Boston College) doctoral dissertation on Irish and German immigrants in 19th-century Chicago.