The Peshtigo fire was a very large forest fire that took place on October 8, 1871, in northeastern Wisconsin, United States, including much of the southern half of the Door Peninsula and adjacent parts of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The largest community in the affected area was Peshtigo, Wisconsin. The fire burned approximately 1,200,000 acres and is the deadliest wildfire in recorded history, with the number of deaths estimated between 1,500 and 2,500. Occurring on the same day as the more famous Great Chicago Fire, the Peshtigo fire has been largely forgotten, even though it killed far more people. Several cities in Michigan, Holland and Manistee and Port Huron, also had major fires on the same day, leading to various theories by contemporaries and later historians that they had a common cause.
Firestorm
The setting of small fires was a common way to clear forest land for farming and railroad construction. On the day of the Peshtigo fire, a cold front moved in from the west, bringing strong winds that fanned the fires out of control and escalated them to massive proportions. A firestorm ensued. In the words of Gess and Lutz, in a firestorm "superheated flames of at least 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit ... advance on winds of 110 miles per hour or stronger. The diameter of such a fire ranges from one thousand to ten thousand feet ... When a firestorm erupts in a forest, it is a blowup, nature's nuclear explosion ... " By the time it was over, 1,875 square miles of forest had been consumed, an area fifty percent larger than the U.S. state of Rhode Island. Twelve communities were destroyed. An accurate death toll has never been determined because all local records were destroyed in the fire. It's estimated that anywhere between 1,200 to 2,500 people lost their lives. The 1873 Report to the Wisconsin Legislature listed 1,182 names of dead or missing residents. In 1870, the Town of Peshtigo had 1,749 residents. More than 350 bodies were buried in a mass grave, primarily because so many people had died that there was no one left alive who could identify them. The fire jumped across the Peshtigo River and burned both sides of the town. Survivors reported that the firestorm generated a fire whirl that threw rail cars and houses into the air. Many escaped the flames by immersing themselves in the Peshtigo River, wells, or other nearby bodies of water. Some drowned while others succumbed to hypothermia in the frigid river. The Green Island Light was kept lit during the day because of the obscuring smoke, but the three-masted schooner George L. Newman was wrecked offshore, although the crew was rescued. At the same time, another fire burned parts of the Door Peninsula; because of the coincidence, some incorrectly assumed that the fire had jumped across the waters of Green Bay. In Robinsonville on the Door Peninsula, Sister Adele Brise and other nuns, farmers, and families fled to a local chapel for protection. Although the chapel was surrounded by flames, it survived. It spared the then Village of Sturgeon Bay, which at the time remained east of the village's bay.
Comet theory
One speculation, first suggested in 1883, was that the occurrence of the Peshtigo and Chicago fires on the same day was not just a coincidence, but that all the major fires that occurred in Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin on that day were caused by the impact from fragments of Biela's Comet. This theory was revived in a 1985 book, studied in a 1997 documentary, and investigated in a 2004 paper to the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Additionally, various aspects of the behaviors of the Chicago and Peshtigo fires were cited to support the idea of an extraterrestrial cause. However, scientists with expertise in the area point out that there has never been a credible report of a fire being started by a meteorite. In any event, no external source of ignition was needed. There were already numerous small fires burning in the area from land-clearing operations after a tinder-dry summer. These fires alone generated so much smoke that the Green Island Light was kept lit continuously for weeks before the main fire started. All that was needed to generate the firestorm, as well as other large fires in the Midwest, was a strong wind from the front, which had moved in that very evening.
Legacy
The Peshtigo Fire Museum, just west of U.S. Highway 41, has a small collection of artifacts from the fire, first-person descriptions of the event, and a graveyard dedicated to victims of the tragedy. A memorial commemorating the fire was dedicated on October 8, 2012 at the bridge over the Peshtigo River. The chapel where Sister Adele Brise and others sheltered from the fire has become the National Shrine of Our Lady of Good Help. The site is a Marian shrine, where visitors can make religious pilgrimages. The combination of wind, topography and ignition sources that created the firestorm, primarily representing the conditions at the boundaries of human settlement and natural areas, is known as the "Peshtigo Paradigm". The condition was closely studied by the American and British military during World War II to learn how to recreate firestorm conditions for bombing campaigns against cities in Germany and Japan. The bombing of Dresden and the even more severe bombing of Tokyo by incendiary devices resulted in death tolls comparable to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
