Don’t blame Mrs OLearys’ cow for the great Chicago fire

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CHICAGO Chicago seems to want to blame the animals on the farm for its misfortune. For decades, the Cubs’ failure to make it to the World Series was the fault of a goat that had already been kicked out of Wrigley Field. And for over a century, a cow owned by Mrs. OLeary caused the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

But just as baseball fans know that the Cubs’ shortcomings before 2016 had nothing to do with a curse cast on the team by an angry goat owner, historians say there is no evidence that the massive fire that destroyed a huge part of Chicago and displaced about a third of its residents began when the cow Catherine OLearys kicked a lantern.

Indeed, no one puts much importance in this story these days. In 1997, Chicago City Council went so far as to exonerate the cow and its owner.

The family are still angry with the way they were treated, OLearys great-great-granddaughter Peggy Knight said on Thursday on the eve of the 150th anniversary of the start of the blaze. She didn’t deserve this.

How the Irish immigrant was blamed is a familiar story: she was the victim of prejudice and circumstance.

The fire started in or near his home and his family’s barn. And while he destroyed much of the city, he miraculously spared his own home.

Most importantly, OLeary was easy to blame for who she was and what she stood for.

Irish immigrants were often seen as the scum of American society in the 1870s. They were easy targets, said John Russick, senior vice-president of the Chicago History Museum. The museum recently put on its website an interactive exhibit in which visitors can maneuver around a fire painting to, among other things, follow its path.

In the mainstream Yankee press, it fit into a whole set of existing prejudices, said Carl Smith, author of Chicagos Great Fire: The Destruction and Resurrection of an Iconic American City. She was poor, immigrant from Ireland, Catholic and female.

The lousy treatment made life so unbearable that the family moved to the far south of the city, where they lived as Walsh, Knight said.

The blame continued for years, even though the Chicago Fire Department held a hearing a few weeks after the blaze in which it concluded the cause could not be determined.

She was exonerated and everything continued, Knight said.

It accelerated when in the 1890s someone added lyrics to the song Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight which involved OLeary and his cow.

So how did the fire start?

Smith said it might never be known.

Others, including Knight and Richard Bales, author of The Great Chicago Fire and the Myth of Mrs. O Learys Cow, accuse a man named Daniel Sullivan, who was the first to sound the alarm about the fire.

Knight believes the one-legged cart driver known to everyone at the time as Peg Leg Sullivan was drinking when he accidentally dropped his cigar in the barn.

Bales researched property records and read transcripts from the Chicago Fire Department hearing in which Sullivan and OLeary testified. Sullivan said he saw the blaze outside a neighbor’s house, but Bales said photographs and housing records showed his view had been blocked.

I am 100% convinced that Daniel Sullivan started the fire, he said.

But a mock trial at John Marshall Law School held shortly after OLeary’s exoneration by city council ended with a jury equally convinced that Sullivan had not lied about the events of this night.

All of this makes Russick wonder if picking the cow as the culprit has always been the town’s way of admitting that it doesn’t know what happened.

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