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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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