Growing up in a suburb of Chicago, I, of course, learned about the Great Chicago Fire. It’s a fire that many across the country learn about. After all, in just three days, 2,100 acres burned, leaving over 100,000 people homeless and taking the lives of over three hundred people. Historians still debate the impact of the fire, some believing that without it, the city would probably have simply been a ‘much smaller metropolis and not the second largest city in the United States.’ (In the two decades that followed, the city’s population more than tripled – to one million.)

Then I moved to Wisconsin – and I learned about that other fire, the one most people outside of the state have never heard of.

On the very same night as the Great Chicago Fire, another fire took hold two hundred and fifty miles north – in the town of Peshtigo (PESH-tih-go – the fact that I feel compelled to include a pronunciation should be telling to how few people I’ve met who have heard of it – well, that and how it was mispronounced as pesh-TEA-go in a film staring Michelle Pfeiffer).

This fire is believed to have been started by railroad workers clearing land for tracks, starting a brushfire – that became an inferno. (Not as glamorous a story as Mrs. O’Leary’s cow*.) It had been unusually dry that summer, and the fire moved so fast that some survivors said it was like a tornado (in fact, it is referred to as a firestorm).

In its wake (which included jumping over the bay, a distance of about fifteen miles), the fire consumed 1.3 million acres and destroyed seventeen towns, taking a couple thousand lives with it. The reason it’s called the Peshtigo Fire when so many other towns were involved was because this is where the first started, the entire town was consumed in an hour, and eight hundred lives were lost here alone. (The image below shows the difference in scale of the two fires – that red blip on the right is the Chicago fire’s burnt district. NOTE: This is not a contest of which was worst – this is simply a way to help folks better understand the true scope of this particular fire.)

So, if the Peshtigo fire was so destructive, why is it that most have never heard of it when they have heard of Chicago’s? Some believed it was because a city’s fire made better news than a series of small towns. But it may actually have been that Peshtigo’s only telegraph line had been destroyed in the blaze, and news of the fire didn’t make it out until much later. (Remember, this was the late 1800s.) By the time news of the fire spread, it was old news. (I also acknowledge that many other fires occurred around the Midwest around the same time that I also didn’t learn about in school.)

You may also be asking why on earth I’m telling you all this.

Well, recently, I took a spontaneous road trip, and on the way home, I stopped by the Peshtigo Museum**, which includes artifacts and information about the fire – something I’ve wanted to see in person for some time. I’d never been to Peshtigo before.

In grad school, I had written a poem*** about the fire based on a detail that remained with me – that people who could escaped to the river in the hopes of hiding from the fire. The fire was so intense, it continually flamed out over the river, and the air was so hot that people had to constantly splash their faces with water, some covering their faces with drenched clothing so that the air wouldn’t scald their lungs. And they had to do this all night. Some managed to survive this way. (I made the date the name of the poem, but I had to add ‘Peshtigo, WI’ to it because my classmates, of course, thought I had written about the Chicago fire.)

Well, I finally got to see the river I had written about in person.

Outside the museum and plaques around town, there is not sign of the fire that ravaged this area over a hundred and fifty years before – but staring at that river, I could still feel the history of it.

Had you heard of the Peshtigo Fire before reading this?

Some tidbits for ya:

*Mrs. O’Leary’s cow has since been exonerated – apparently a journalist had made up the story in an effort to create some drama (because a city decimated by fire wasn’t dramatic enough?). Even after said journalist admitted to this, the story carried on. Probably (at least partly) because we don’t know what started it.

**The Peshtigo Museum resides in an old church, which sits on the site of the original Catholic church that was lost in the fire. The church that had been rebuilt on the same spot was struck by lightning and burned again. The current church had actually been one that had been rebuilt on the other side of the river (see images to the left – or above depending on the size of your screen), and when the second church burned, a plan was made to move this other existing structure. It took three days to move it across the river – and then, once placed, they realized that they had set it down backwards, and they spent another half day turning it around.

The image below shows some artifacts that were found on the site, including a bible that had been found sitting opened, severely charred. If you zoom in on it, though, you can still read the print.

***My poem found a home at a creative nonfiction journal, and then a few years later, I read it at an event for UntitledTown. After I was done with my reading, my former undergrad professor/advisor, who has done extensive research on the fire in support of a novel she’s writing, informed me that like many people, animals also sought the river to escape the first. Herds of cattle, for instance, who inadvertently drowned many of those people. In my own research, I did find an account of one thirteen-year-old German immigrant girl who managed to survive by holding the horn of one of those cows all night.

I don’t remember when I first heard someone say never to judge someone for mispronouncing a word because they probably learned that word from reading. But it has stuck with me.

Here’s the thing – English is hard. It’s, quite honestly, a mistake. It’s what happens when you take German people and French Latin people and force them to live together. English falls out. Accidentally.

Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard someone speak German or someone speaking French – but these two languages sound nothing alike. And they follow (very) different rules.

And every word in the English language follows a specific rule for things like conjugation or pluralization. The issue is that they don’t all follow the same rules. Because they don’t all descend from the same language. (In cases of silent letters, shifts in pronunciation after the invention of the printing press are to blame. Yes, we used to pronounce the ‘k’ in knight and knife.)

Certain English words follow those German rules and others follow the Latin rules. Not to mention all the words we’ve absorbed from other languages (referred to as ‘loan words’). (And English is one of the languages with the most words. That’s saying something given there are over seven thousand languages spoken in the world today.)

Take the word mouse (or louse – but not house). This word descended from Germanic roots, where the ‘ou’ becomes ‘i’ (due to what is called strong declension – they pluralize irregularly rather than by adding an -s or -es suffix). (House is an outlier because while it used to follow this pattern, it no longer does – it got ‘regularized’.) The same happens with goose (or foot or tooth) where the ‘oo’ becomes ‘ee’ in pluralization.

So what about moose? What happened there? The ‘ou’ doesn’t become an ‘i’ when pluralized. Actually, nothing happens to it when it’s pluralized…? Well, it’s a loan word – it’s roots are Indigenous (from several Indigenous languages). It doesn’t follow the Germanic rules because it’s not Germanic. It follows the rules of its Indigenous roots. Thus, moose is both singular and plural.

Shifts in pronunciations post printing press are also to blame for words not always sounding like they look. Not to mention dialects/accents with different pronunciation rules. I mean, look no further than American vs British English. There are words we spell differently, and many that we pronounce differently. And it’s the same language. (Well, sorta. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)

All this to say – no wonder if we’ve only read a word and never heard it out loud that we might pronounce it incorrectly.

We should really consider why we find it charming when someone with a different accent pronounces a word in a unusual (to us) way, but when someone mispronounces it from only having read it, we don’t. Instead, we should be applauding the attempt.

These days, the days of streaming TV shows and films and music, of ebooks, of endless scrolling on your social media platform of choice – it seems like there is very little in the way of tangible goods anymore (when it comes to the arts – there are still box stores full of…stuff). Which, when you grew up in the 80s and 90s, when you had to transition from records to cassettes to CDs to MP3s… it’s strange to realize how little of our content (that we’ve paid for) that we actually own anymore, that we can actually hold in our hands.

And as someone who grew up in the 80s, I do prefer to be able to hold the things that I own. Strange, I know.

But even more important than that, I also want to make sure that as much of the money that I’m spending on the…thing – book, record, whatever – gets into the hands of the person who was responsible for creating it. And that is getting increasingly more difficult. For many reasons. Not just that we are living in a digital world. Not just that the shifts to digital also have shifted profits from the artists’ hands to those that produce them or to the platforms that stream them. (Not to mention AI.) We also have a stagnant minimum wage and increasing inflation. A lot of people don’t have the disposable income to spend on things we currently call a luxury (because we have short memories and forget how it was the arts we turned to to save us during the pandemic).

I realize this can sound self-serving – I’m a writer who wants to sell books. But I’m not saying buy my book here. (Though, if you feel so inclined…) I’m saying if you can, if there is a musician that you like whose music you stream often (which gets them pennies, if they are lucky), maybe consider outright buying an album. If there is someone whose visual art you enjoy, instead of taking another screenshot, perhaps consider buying their art on something (it doesn’t have to be an original or anything big – even buying a print on a card can help them). Like an author but don’t have the means to buy a new copy? Check it out of the library. (If your library doesn’t carry it, request it.) Every little bit helps.

Even more simple things you can do that don’t cost anything but could potentially get them royalties down the line – follow them on social media and help to spread the word: