Rescue and Relief 3

These kinds of paranoid tales inevitably follow any large-scale cataclysm, and how much truth was behind them is one of the many things about the fire that is impossible to ascertain. Virtually all such anecdotes were not based on personal observation but on hearsay, and it is likely that people like Wicker got their information from reading the papers. But there is no question that the fears which generated and sustained the rumors were real, especially for some middle and upper class native-born Chicagoans. In their eyes, what was immediately required was the assertion of authority. At the same time, however, they had little trust in local government, particularly the members of the Common Council. Such fears and distrust were prompted by notorious events that preceded Chicago's tragedy and influenced how people understood it. The fire was all too reminiscent of the Paris Commune, which had been put down in late May of 1871 in a bloody battle that ended with Paris set afire by radicals in a last-ditch act of defiance against the Versailles government. Closer to home, the exposure of New York's Boss Tweed bolstered suspicion of urban political organizations.

In this context Mayor Mason followed the urging of the city's social and economic elite in taking two extraordinary steps to assure the rescue and relief of Chicago. The first was to entrust the "preservation of the good order and peace of the city" to Lieutenant-General Philip Sheridan, the Civil War hero and Indian fighter who now lived in Chicago and who commanded the Division of the Missouri from his South Division office. Two days later, on October 13, Mason turned over the administration of the relief to the Chicago Relief and Aid Society, which had appealed to him to take this step. On the Society's board sat some of the Old Settlers who had established the organization two decades earlier, but its driving spirit was a younger group of businessmen and professionals that included merchant Marshall Field, sleeping car manufacturer George Pullman, and attorney Wirt Dexter. These men had a very substantial stake in the city's future and an equally firm belief that this future depended on reestablishing a defined social order that had been severely disrupted in the social chaos of the fire.