"Destruction of Chicago by Fire" by Ths. Kelly

Before the year was out, there were numerous lithographs available, as well as thousands of stereographs. They competed for public attention with a few dozen rapidly assembled fire histories, from flimsy paperbacks to handsomely bound volumes running over five hundred pages. These instant histories were closely related to the journalism of the fire since they were usually written by reporters, who supplemented their gripping narratives with illustrations taken from the weeklies. In addition to descriptions of the calamity, they featured sections on incidents of note, actions by officials, prospects for the future, "lessons" of the disaster, and great fires through the ages. Some of the histories could barely contain their excitement at their subject, starting off with titles a paragraph long and spiked with exclamation points. Perhaps because it was still a novelty, the speed with which events were reported became part of the story. As successive dispatches arrived faster than extras could be turned out, editors printed these updates--numbering in some cases into the teens--one right after another in a single edition, separated by datelines that noted the hour, so that readers far and wide could witness the fire's advance across Chicago in the columns of their local papers. When they then contributed relief supplies as the city was still burning, this became a major news story. Once Chicago newspapers were publishing again--most were back in business within a few days--local residents could then see reprints of the coverage that originally appeared in other cities. What the public everywhere was ultimately reading about was themselves as a community closely linked by what they read.

Ruins of the Mammoth Store of Field & Leiter

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