 A Visual Record
The Waud Drawings
An Anthology of Fire Narratives
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The Great Chicago Fire first entered the web of memory through the senses of
those who experienced it first-hand--who gaped at its brilliance, choked on its smoke,
shuddered at its roar, and withered in its heat. No matter how stunned they were, they
knew at the time that they were unwilling participants in the most critical moment in their
young city's hurried history of continuous transformation. "[T]he world as it is to people
of this vicinity, has changed," one resident wrote the Saturday following the disaster, "an
age has closed, and a new epoch, obscured in doubt and uncertainty, is about to begin." A
day later another told his family, "Everything will date from the great fire now."
The eyewitnesses soon gathered their thoughts and communicated them to others.
As H.A. Musham, author of the first carefully documented account of the fire (which
didn't appear until 1940), observed, "Every one of the 334,270 people in Chicago on those
fateful days had a story to tell, and they never tired of telling it." They told and retold their
stories because the fire was the most remarkable thing that had ever happened to them, and
because talking about it was a way to try to capture its terror and
magnificence through memory. And many eyewitnesses, some as late as the 1940s, wrote
their recollections down. They did so not only because of their own sense of the
importance of the occasion or at the prompting of relatives and friends, but also because
there was a continuing demand for their stories from the world at large. Newspapers,
magazines, and contemporary histories sought out first-person accounts to include
prominently in their pages. Over the years numerous narratives were privately printed, and
several collections have appeared, the most recent in 1979. Up to the 1940s, the Chicago
Historical Society solicited fire narratives, so that its archives and library now include
more than 150 of them.
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