Detail of Crosby's "Origin of The Great Chicago Fire"

But Mrs. O'Leary offered a far better scapegoat. While as a specific person she may or may not have been at fault, what she represented was a more plausible and acceptable cause for the fire. Unlike the Communard, she was a familiar and recognizable type who could readily be made to stand for careless building, sloppy conduct, and a shiftless immigrant underclass. Blaming her simply involved adapting existing anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant sentiments to the terrible calamity at hand. As a poor clumsy Irishwoman and not a sworn enemy of the social order, she was a disempowered comic stereotype, the damage she caused the result of accident, not conspiracy. Given that the catastrophe could not be undone, there was even something imaginatively satisfying in the tale that this epic fire had such a humble beginning. The lasting nature of the O'Leary legend is attributable to the fact that she also was such a malleable figure, who could be used to discover and express different and even conflicting meanings. From the outset, people were interested not in knowing the real Catherine O'Leary, but in turning her into a repository for their presuppositions. She was in her early forties at the time of the fire, sober and hard-working. In some popular anecdotes and illustrations she was depicted as an aged crone and a drunkard. The Chicago Times, while not naming her specifically nor accusing her of setting the fire deliberately, described her as a welfare cheat who, "when cut off, vowed revenge." But as it became clear that the city had fully triumphed over catastrophe and was hurtling on to an even grander destiny, she became increasingly quaint and benign. In 1881 the Chicago Historical Society installed a marble plaque marking the spot on the much more solid home that had been built at 137 DeKoven. The alley behind the house became a kind of sacred site for local residents, who protested when the city finally filled it in and paved it two decades after the great conflagration. And when Chicago constructed a new fire academy in the early 1960s, it selected as the location the block where the calamity began.

Chicago Fire Academy

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