The Great Fire by Jim Murphy

Bibliographical citation:  Murphy, J. (1995). The Great Fire. New York: Scholastic. 144 pages. ISBN: 0439203074.

Awards: NCTE Orbis Pictus Award (1996)

Author's website: www.jimmurphybooks.com/

Annotation: The Great Fire in the city of Chicago in 1871 is depicted in this narrative using firsthand accounts, maps of the city, and historical sketches and photographs.  Readers experience this chillingly catastrophic disaster through the fearful eyes of survivors.

Personal Reaction: In the Fall of 1871, the city of Chicago was in the midst of a drought.  This fact, along with many other incidents, throws this city into a crisis and disaster which is later referred to as "The Great Fire."  As usual, author Jim Murphy engages readers by putting faces among the large number of people who were victimized by this fire.  We hear the voice of a young girl separated from her family as they abandon their home, a wealthy man who is searching for his sister in law and he children, a young man who is a reporter for the Chicago Evening Post, and the editor of the Chicago Tribune.  We experience this frightening reality just as they did.  These people that he follows are from very different walks of life, and Murphy shows how these people survived during the thirty one hours of terror that this fire raged.

The great fire started out as a small fire that occurred in a barn in the early evening hours.  This fire was small enough to be contained, but the fatal errors that occurred led to the fire becoming a raging out-of-control powerhouse of destruction.  The city had been subjected to so many fires because of the very dry and flammable conditions.  There was no initial panic since residents figured it was just another one of the many that they had been experiencing.  However, once the realization was made that this fire was a cause for concern, one by one errors were made preventing fireman from reaching the exact area of the fire. Confused with a fire from the night before, when people saw the flames and smoke in the distance, they thought it was left over from the previous night's fire. For this reason, second alarms were not sent.  There is also some question of whether or not the appropriate people rang the alarm in the first place, and that the correct stations were notified.  All of this confusion led to a situation where firemen were wasting time driving around trying to find the cause of the flames and smoke.  This wasted time was a pivotal moment in determining the containment of the fire.  After the first few hours containment became impossible once gusty winds appeared.  As the fire fed and grew, firefighters tried desperately to respond in the normal fashion of circling the area on fire with their engines to try to contain it until larger steamers arrived.  This didn't work and the fire became so hot that firefighters were burned and injured.  When the steamers arrived, they tried to put the fire out, but ran out of water.  With all of the mishaps that occurred, it seems as though the city of Chicago was doomed from the very moment the fire began.

As the fire quickly spread throughout the city, people were warned to flee, but many ignored the warnings and didn't realize the potential danger of this situation.  Once the fire raged and moved on, mass panic quickly erupted.  There were people running in the streets with whatever possessions that they could gather from their homes.  Others were loading up carriages and trying to fill them with as much as they could.  This panic caused shoving and general chaos further preventing many people from safely leaving the city.  There was also looting happening as people fled their homes.  It seemed as though the fire was everywhere-burning bridges of escape, and causing sparks to fly and people to catch on fire.  At one point Murphy describes how onlookers watched helplessly as a church steeple caught fire and sent sparks across the river, thereby setting buildings across the water on fire. There was really nothing further that the firemen could do, having exhausted all their resources.  The fire was simply out of control.

The Great Fire would have continued destroying the city if it were not for the rain that started coming down.  It was this that is credited with stopping the fire.  Before the ashes had stopped smoldering, the citizens of Chicago were already calling for justice.  Who was to blame for this fire?  Of course much of the public believed that it was the owner of the old barn, Catherine O'Leary.  The O'Leary Family became the scapegoats and were demonized by the public.  When that wasn't satisfaction enough, the Firemen were to blame.  The blame went around and around.  In the midst of all of this there were the poor citizens of Chicago, many of whom could not afford insurance and had lost everything. There was no assistance for them and many were homeless and forced to put up shanties or leave the city.   When all was said and done, the fire had burned an area 4 miles long and 1 mile wide leaving rubble and ashes in its wake.  The devastation is accurately portrayed using maps of the city, historical sketches and photographs, and firsthand accounts.  Using these, Jim Murphy paints a riveting portrait of a city in terror.


Front/Back Matter: Table of Contents, Introduction, Bibliography and Sources, Index.

*Bibliographical citation information, award information, as well as image retrieved from www.bwibooks.com (Titletales).