The Eyewitnesses 4

So what does the reader take away from these accounts? Quite a bit, even if it is not the coherent, comprehensive, and reliable information about the nature and progress of the fire that Musham was seeking. Although people experienced more than they could ever remember, that what they did write down was only a fraction of what they could recollect, and that words could never fully capture what had happened, the fire narratives still eloquently reveal how Chicagoans saw their world in this moment of destruction. They offer a great deal of insight into individual and public experience. They show how these people made sense of the trauma of the fire, how they explained and integrated it into their understanding of their lives, their city, and their world. Given the nightmarish quality of what the accounts describe, many of them seem surprisingly understated, especially in comparison with the sensationalism in the work of professional writers playing to a mass audience. Their measured record of the confrontation with pain and loss and with the uncertainties of the future, even if they sometimes also express certain social prejudices, possess a deeply moving quality.

While they do vary a great deal on particulars, the personal accounts generally follow a similar sequence: the first news of the fire and the feeling that it will be contained; the author or a relative (usually the men of the house) heading toward the fire to view the blaze and, in several instances, to check on the condition of a downtown office; the realization that no one is safe, followed by the frantic gathering of family and goods; the retreat (often in several stages) to some point of safety; the post-fire scene and mood; and reflections on the whole experience, colored by a shifting mix of fear and hope, depression and exhilaration. Chicagoans repeatedly focused on the small details amidst the cosmic horror: the putting in good order of a home about to be destroyed, the obsession with saving the beloved portrait or rag doll or pet parrot while everything else was relinquished to the flames, the last look back at a way of life gone forever.

There are other forms of eyewitnessing than the written narratives, but these are scarce. A few of the letters contain maps and drawings, and the memoirs of one woman, Julia Lemos, include a vivid painting as well as a narrative. Unlike, for example, the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906, there are no photographs of Chicago's ordeal, however exhaustively the ruins and rebuilding were recorded on film. Some leading periodicals, like Harper's Weekly, had artists on the scene, but their sketches were often reworked in editorial offices. A significant exception, however, is a series of on-the-scene drawings prepared by Alfred R. Waud, one of the most popular illustrators of the period. Like the narratives written amid the ashes (some people self-consciously put at the top of letters describing the catastrophe, along with the date, "Among the Ruins" or "Debrisville"), the Waud drawings have a freshness that makes them stand out among the other memories of the Great Fire.

Trying to Save a Wagonload of Goods