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Late one night, when we were all in bed, Mrs. O'Leary lit a lantern in the shed. Her cow kicked it over, Then winked her eye and said, "There'll be a hot time in the old town tonight!" |
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   A Star is Born The Saga Continues A String of Endorsements  "Kate the barn is afire" The Official Report Mrs. Leary's Cow |
Did Mrs. O'Leary's cow start the Great Chicago Fire? There's evidence that suggests she did. The conflagration almost surely began in the vicinity of the crowded family barn, where, in addition to a horse, a calf, and a wagon, Kate O'Leary kept the five cows she milked twice a day for her local dairy business. The O'Learys had just laid up plenty of coal, wood shavings, and hay to see them and their livestock through the winter--and to feed any fire once it got going. Kate supposedly revealed to different people the morning after the blaze began that she was in the barn when one of her cows kicked over a lantern. A few curiosity-seekers claimed to find the broken pieces of such a lantern while snooping behind her cottage, whose survival was one of the great ironies of the disaster. But one can find good reason to think that poor Mrs. O'Leary and her benighted cow--named Daisy, Madeline, and Gwendolyn in assorted retellings--were innocent. There's testimony to corroborate Kate's contention that she was in bed early that evening, and the official inquiry found no proof of her guilt. Those who heard her "confess" offered different reasons why she said she was in the barn, and a person who years later said that as a boy he found the broken lamp under some floorboards and took it home never explained why the barn had floorboards at all or how they made it through the inferno. As for the lamp itself, he said that he couldn't produce it because an Irish servant, as part of a cover-up, "borrowed" it and then disappeared. |
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