A Letter from the Fire: Being an Account of the Great Chicago Fire

Since the days of Sodom and Gomorrah, now slumbering eternally beneath the waters of the Dead Sea, the pages of history have been illumined at intervals by the glare of mighty conflagrations, and the Fire Fiend has never ceased to exact his toll from the world’s most famous cities.

In the year 504 B.C. the Ionians and Athenians burned Sardis, once one of the most splendid and opulent cities of the East; one hundred and seventy-six years later Alexander the Great startled the world when he applied the torch to the wonderful marble palaces of Persepolis, which, with the greater portion of the city, were reduced to a heap of blackened ruins.

On the night of July 18, 64 A.D., an insignificant blaze caught in some wooden booths at the south end of the Circus Maximus, in the city of Rome. This fire, spreading rapidly and unchecked, burned itself out when it reached the Tiber and the solid barrier of the Servian Wall; then it started afresh in another section, and when finally quenched, after eight days, had destroyed over two-thirds of the Eternal City, but then little past the zenith of its power and glory. From a political viewpoint, this was the most important fire in all history, for it marked the beginning of the downfall of Nero, whose suicide a few years later ended the line of the Caesars. Gossip had it that Nero—monster of ungovernable passion—started the fire himself, but historians are uncorroborative; nor is it likely that he “fiddled while the city burned.”

In the year 70, Titus burned Jerusalem and the temple of Solomon. Josephus tells us that over one million people perished in the holocaust by fire and sword.

In more modern times the great fire of London holds the center of the stage. In extent and results it was not unlike the Chicago fire of two centuries later. How little does man profit by the lessons and the losses of the past! London burned for four days and five-sixths of the City within the walls was consumed.