Description

On October 8, 1871, a tornado of fire more than 1,000 feet high and 5 miles wide ripped through the town of Peshtigo, Wisconsin, destroying over 2,400 square miles of forest and killing more than 2,200 people. On the same day, 262 miles to the south, 300 people died in the highly publicized Chicago fire. Denise Gess and William Lutz rescue the long-forgotten story of this firestorm and the people caught in its path. We meet the ambitious lumber barons Isaac Stephenson and William Ogden, flush with the American dream of building lumber mills and towns to reap the riches of the vast northern forests, never imagining that what they built would disappear in a few horrendous hours. And Father Peter Pernin, who had recently witnessed the construction of two churches, unaware that they and many of the people who worshiped in them would soon be little more than ashes. Reporting on the dry conditions and the many smaller fires in the weeks leading up to the conflagration were Luther Noyes, publisher of the Marinette and Peshtigo Eagle, and Franklin Tilton, publisher of the Green Bay Advocate. Finally, we're introduced to the geologist and meteorologist Increase Lapham - the only person who understood the unusual and dangerous nature of this fire - who was largely ignored. Drawn from survivors' letters, diaries, and interviews and local newspaper accounts, Firestorm at Peshtigo tells the human, political, and scientific story behind America's deadliest fire.