A Fiery Business

When 12-year-old Julia is sent to stay with her cousin Fannie in Chicago, neither girl likes the arrangement. Then the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 sweeps through the city and separates them. Can they survive on their own?

I am pleased to announce that I just released my third middle-grade historical novel, Inferno, which is available in paperback or on Kindle. If you or your friends have daughters or granddaughters in 3^rd through 6^th grade, please consider recommending it or buying it for them.

Anyone local to Northwest Indiana can purchase Inferno or any of my other books in person at the following events: 

• Saturday, April 23, 2022, from 12–3 p.m. at the Local Author Fair, Hammond Public Library, 564 State Street, Hammond, Indiana; and
• Saturday, May, 21, 2022, from 12 – 4 p.m. at the Creative Arts Summit, Lake County Public Library, 1919 W. 81^st Ave., Merrillville, Indiana.

If you are local, I’d love to see you at one of them.

For readers who can’t make either book signing, Inferno is available on Amazon at this link Inferno on Amazon. It will soon appear on the Barnes & Noble website, as well.

Sifting through the Rubble



The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 is one of the best-documented events in history. Chicago was a newspaper town, and within 48 hours most of the major papers were back up and running. They had plenty of eyewitness accounts to choose among, including those from their owners and reporters. Other educated persons quickly published their own eyewitness accounts. Then the Board of Police and Fire Commissioners held a public inquiry, heard sworn testimony from fifty-one witnesses, and published its report—all before the end of the year.

Even so, much of the evidence is inconclusive. We know where the fire started, but we don’t know how. We don’t even know exactly when. (The evidence puts it anywhere between 8:30 p.m. and 9:30 p.m.) We know that the early response to the fire was a comedy of errors (combined with circumstances beyond anyone’s control), but we don’t always know who was responsible for the errors or the reasons for them. And only God knows whether the fire could have been controlled if everything had gone right.

In 1871, even the most reputable newspapers had a taste for sensationalism. Besides that, eyewitness testimony is only as reliable as the eyewitness is. Some people misinterpret what they see, some exaggerate, and some simply make things up for effect. So how much of the eyewitness accounts can I use in my middle-grade historical novel on the Great Chicago Fire?

Take this story:

One little girl, in particular, I saw, whose golden hair was loose down her back and caught afire. She ran screaming past me, and somebody threw a glass of liquor upon her, which flared up and covered her with a blue flame.

At first glance, the story looks pretty improbable. Not because the girl’s hair caught fire—that was common. But would somebody really be mean enough to throw alcohol on her? Still, maybe it wasn’t meanness and the person was so intoxicated that he thought his drink would put out the fire like water would. Besides, the eyewitness was Alexander Frear, a visitor who was a member of the New York State Assembly and a New York City commissioner. Surely we can believe someone like that.

Maybe yes, and maybe no. I can hear you saying, “Never believe a politician.” But for me, the biggest problem with Mr. Frear’s is that it is filled with similarly dramatic events. One or two such instances might simply mean that Mr. Frear was observant and knew how to use vivid language to describe what he saw, but the entire account seems over the top.

So even if it’s true, I won’t be using the story of the girl catching fire from a liquor bath. And that’s okay, because I don’t need it. There are plenty of better documented yet still dramatic incidents scattered among the many eyewitness accounts.

It’s all a matter of sifting through the rubble.

Getting History Right

You’ve probably heard that the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 was started by a cow. Mrs. O’Leary’s cow, to be exact.

The rumor was apparently begun by a reporter who wanted a colorful story to tell in his newspaper. It spread as quickly as the fire and had equally disastrous results—at least for the O’Leary family. Mrs. O’Leary never lived it down, even after the rumors were shown to be false. After all, people thought, every rumor has some truth to it.

And there was a germ of truth in this one. The fire did start in Mrs. O’Leary’s barn. But it started long after Mrs. O’Leary had finished her milking, taken away the lamp, and retired to bed in the nearby house.

One plausible theory is that a careless neighbor was smoking in the hay-filled barn. Another report speculated that men were gambling there and one of them knocked over a lamp. While the cause is still unknown, it is unlikely that Mrs. O’Leary’s cow did it.

I have started researching my next middle-grade historical novel, which takes place during the Great Chicago Fire. So how historically accurate do I need to be? Should I include the story of Mrs. O’Leary’s cow?

Personally, I believe that historical fiction should be as accurate as possible. That doesn’t require me to ignore the story, but I need to place it after the fact and treat it as the rumor it was. I’m not far enough along to know whether I’ll even use it, but it can be done without portraying the contents of the rumor as fact.

With her back against the church wall, Julia pulled her legs up and hugged them. To her left, a woman held a squirming toddler and watched an older child rock back and forth.

“One of those Irish immigrants started it,” the woman told Julia. “She was milking a cow and left the lantern too close to his hoofs.” The mother moaned. “One kick, and now my children are homeless and the entire city is gone.”

“Did you see the cow do it?” Julia asked.

“No, but everybody’s saying it, so it must be true.”

The rumor of Mrs. O’Leary’s cow started within a day or two after the fire, and the existence of the rumor is factual even if the contents aren’t. The trick in writing historical fiction is to find a way to incorporate them without validating them.

Because false rumors have their role in history, too.

What Would You Grab?

I just finished reading a book about the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. It made me think of that age-old question: What would you grab if your house caught on fire?

None of us really knows until it happens. But I know what I took in 2008 when our house flooded from the remnants of Hurricane Ike. I had an hour or so warning, so I packed clothes, toothbrushes, and similar items for Roland and me. I also made sure to grab my laptop case and my camera backpack—with laptop and camera, of course. My manuscripts were backed up and in a safe deposit box, but I needed the laptop to keep writing.

Shouldn't I have grabbed my Bible? If I lived in some countries, I would have. But we had a Bible on the boat and I was heading there. Also, Bibles are easy to replace in this country. Not the ones marked up with my notes, of course. But it is God's words that matter, and they are easy to find.

Unfortunately, I didn’t think about the family pictures in a bottom file drawer in my office. Some were of our children, some came from Roland’s and my growing up years, and some were pictures of ancestors. All were valuable parts of our history.

When we returned home and started cleaning up, the biggest heartaches were all the books we had in the family room on the lower level and those family pictures.

To keep from crying, Roland joked that he filled a dumpster just with books. Most were replaceable, but several came from Roland’s or my childhood and had sentimental value.

I was ready to throw out the family pictures, too. My heart would have broken, but I didn’t know what else to do. Then friends from church came to help us clean up, and they convinced me to try and save those photographs. We separated them carefully if we could and set them out to dry. A few pictures were irredeemable. Others have streaks or white spots where the paper tore away, but most were salvageable. And I have since scanned the more important ones and backed them up against a future disaster.

But my first thought at the time was for my laptop and my camera.

What would you grab?

__________

The picture at the head of this post shows the aftermath of the Great Chicago Fire. Unfortunately, I don’t know who the photographer was. The picture is in the public domain because of its age.