What's the deal with Mrs. O'Leary's Cow?
-Here's something from what's known as "The O'Leary Legend"
Late one night, when we were all in bed,
Mrs. O'Leary lit a lantern in the shed.
Her cow kicked it over,
Then winked her eye and said,
"There'll be a hot time in the old town tonight!"
Did Mrs. O'Leary's cow start the Great Chicago Fire?
There's evidence that suggests she did. The conflagration almost surely began in the vicinity of the crowded family barn, where in addition to a horse, a calf, and a wagon, Kate O'Leary kept the five cows she milked twice a day for her local dairy business.
The O'Leary's had just laid up plenty of coal, wood shavings, and hay to see them and their livestock through the winter - and to feed any fire once it got going. Kate supposedly revealed to different people the morning after the blaze began that she was in the barn when one of her cows kicked over a lantern. A few curiosity-seekers claimed to find the broken pieces of such a lantern while snooping behind her cottage, whose survival was one of the great ironies of the disaster.
But one can find good reason to think that poor Mrs. O'Leary and her benighted cow - named Daisy, Madeline, and Gwendolyn in assorted retellings - were innocent?
There's testimony to corroborate Kate's contention that she was in bed early that evening, and the official inquiry found no proof of her guilt. Those who heard her "confess" offered different reasons why she said she was in the barn, and a person who years later said that as a boy he found the broken lamp under some floorboards and took it home never explained why the barn had floorboards at all or how they made it through the inferno. As for the lamp itself, he said that he couldn't produce it because an Irish servant, as part of a cover-up, "borrowed" it and then disappeared.
On top of this, on the fortieth anniversary of the great conflagration a police reporter named Michael Ahern, who was working for the Chicago Republican at the time of the fire, boasted in the Tribune that he and two now-deceased cronies made the whole thing up.
The O'Leary's, he reminded readers, lived in the rear of 137 DeKoven, renting the front to a family named McLaughlin, who were hosting a party that evening.
Ahern opined that one of the revelers went out to get milk for some punch and ended up burning Chicago down. To make the mystery murkier, the invention of the cow story has also been attributed to others, and after Ahern's revelation appeared a long-time colleague wrote to members of the O'Leary family telling them that he had ghost-written the Tribune story under Ahern's byline. As for Ahern himself, this other reporter confided, "The booze got him many years ago, and he has not been able to do any newspaper work."
Several additional theories surfaced then and since. Some boys were sneaking a smoke. Spontaneous combustion. A fiery meteor that split into pieces as it fell to earth October 8, which explains the simultaneous catastrophes in Chicago and Peshtigo, Wisconsin, plus a lesser fire in Michigan.
Or...Daisy acted alone.
Recently a researcher working from property records and the post-fire inquiry, has argued that an O'Leary neighbor may have accidentally sparked the blaze.
Like the several cowbells that different people have sworn were the one the four-legged perpetrator (who herself perished in the fire) wore around her neck that fateful night, it is possible that any one of these theories has the truth behind it, but all of them are open to question.
In any case, the more intriguing issue is not the irresolvable one of whether the legend has any basis in fact, but why it has had so much continuing interest, why to the present day the story of Mrs. O'Leary's cow is above all others the one "fact" that almost everyone near and far recalls about the Great Fire, and, for that matter, about the history of Chicago.
The O'Leary story, true or not, has had such appeal because it offers a clear and specific cause for this otherwise overwhelming event, an imaginative handle by which people can take hold of it.
Regardless of the inconclusiveness of the official investigation, at the time it also enabled people to blame someone in particular for what was a matter of collective responsibility and misfortune. In this respect it is noteworthy that the O'Leary legend found brief competition with a rumor that the fire was set by an unnamed member of a world-wide terrorist organization with direct ties to the 1871 Paris Commune. A local paper even published his "confession," and a poem that appeared in the New York Evening Post wondered out loud:
Did out of Paris' ashes arise
This bird with a flaming crest,
That over the ocean unhindered flies,
With a scourge for the Queen of the West?
But Mrs. O'Leary offered a far better scapegoat. While as a specific person she may or may not have been at fault, what she represented was a more plausible and acceptable cause for the fire.
Unlike the Communard, she was a familiar and recognizable type who could readily be made to stand for careless building, sloppy conduct, and a shiftless immigrant underclass. Blaming her simply involved adapting existing anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant sentiments to the terrible calamity at hand.
As a poor clumsy Irishwoman and not a sworn enemy of the social order, she was a disempowered comic stereotype, the damage she caused the result of accident, not conspiracy. Given that the catastrophe could not be undone, there was even something imaginatively satisfying in the tale that this epic fire had such a humble beginning.
The lasting nature of the O'Leary legend is attributable to the fact that she also was such a malleable figure, who could be used to discover and express different and even conflicting meanings.
From the outset, people were interested not in knowing the real Catherine O'Leary, but in turning her into a repository for their presuppositions. She was in her early forties at the time of the fire, sober and hard-working. In some popular anecdotes and illustrations she was depicted as an aged crone and a drunkard.
The Chicago Times, while not naming her specifically nor accusing her of setting the fire deliberately, described her as a welfare cheat who, "when cut off, vowed revenge." But as it became clear that the city had fully triumphed over catastrophe and was hurtling on to an even grander destiny, she became increasingly quaint and benign.
In 1881 the Chicago Historical Society installed a marble plaque marking the spot on the much more solid home that had been built at 137 DeKoven. The alley behind the house became a kind of sacred site for local residents, who protested when the city finally filled it in and paved it two decades after the great conflagration. And when Chicago constructed a new fire academy in the early 1960s, it selected as the location the block where the calamity began.
Perhaps the most remarkable and fanciful reworking of the O'Leary legend was the 1938 movie, In Old Chicago. Kate O'Leary (played by Alice Brady, who won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress) is aged a decade or two and divested of her husband, as she is transformed into the spirited widow Molly O'Leary, who runs a successful hand laundry that caters to Chicago's fancy set.
To her dismay, her son Deon (Tyrone Power) becomes an unprincipled saloon owner, but his brother Jack (Don Ameche) is an idealistic lawyer who is elected mayor on a reform platform. The centerpiece of his program is to level the firetrap neighborhoods in "the Patch" (evidently based on Conley's Patch) controlled by gamblers and political operators like his brother. Jack sacrifices his life for the city when, while he is trying to stop the fire, he is first shot by a corrupt political opponent and then crushed by a collapsing building.
Hearing this sad news from a now morally awakened Deon as they find refuge in the lake, Molly proudly rededicates the family to the building of a new and better Chicago. The unsinkable Molly is reconciled to Jack's death by her faith in a still greater future to come. For his part, Deon exultantly declares, "Nothing can lick Chicago." In this narrative with plot conventions shared with a long list of disaster stories (including Roe's Barriers Burned Away and MGM's disaster epic, San Francisco) Hollywood thus turned once-despised immigrants like the O'Learys into upwardly mobile middle-class champions of the Chicago booster dream.
One glancing coincidence between actual events and this narrative that takes such vast liberties is that the O'Leary's did have a son named Jim, who well after the fire was a politically connected saloon keeper and gambler in the stockyards district.
Old Chicago does pin the fire's origin on Daisy, who does her dirty work when she is left alone for a moment by a distracted Molly. But this is almost incidental to the main plot, and there's no particular blame assigned. By this time the legend was a charming mainstay of American folklore, the subject of a Norman Rockwell painting. Various local parades, commemorations, and promotions would feature a woman dressed up as Mrs. O'Leary leading Daisy.
The winner of the National Trophy in the 1960 Rose Bowl Parade, whose grand marshal was Vice President Richard Nixon, was the City of Chicago float depicting Mrs. O'Leary's barn, complete with a lantern, simulated fire, genuine smoke, and a carnation-and-chrysanthemum cow. The theme of the parade was "Tall Tales and True."
Kate O'Leary, unfortunately, never got to enjoy any of this. She bemoaned her own losses by the fire, which included all the animals in the barn except the calf, but otherwise she tried to avoid the unwanted attention, including offers from promoters. She and her family moved to a series of homes around 50th and Halsted, where journalists would seek her out for interviews in early October. She would ignore them or chase them away, and they in turn would make up stories that revived the old stereotypes about the unwashed poor.
In 1886, for example, a Daily News reporter whom she supposedly rebuffed described her home as follows: "The house has no front door, and in lieu of glass, clothing is stuffed into two or three windows, and long before a stranger reaches the place the pungent odor of distillery swill and the effluvium of cows proclaim that old habits are strong with Mrs. O'Leary and that she is still in the milk business."
Patrick O'Leary died in September of 1894, and Catherine passed away the following Fourth of July.
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