# The cause of the Great Chicago Fire (8 October 1871): annotated dossier of the scholarship and the rival theories

Compiled from texts fetched into a `sources/` working folder (log: `SOURCES.md`); working copies of the raw downloads are not included in this folder. Every quotation below is copied from a fetched file, which is named in square brackets after the quote (paths relative to that `sources/` folder). Page numbers are given wherever the fetched text carries them (OCR page headers, Google Books page ids, PDF pages). Where a text could not be obtained, the entry says so and quotes only what other fetched texts say about it.

## How to read this dossier

* Section 0 lists the few points on which every source agrees and the points that are genuinely open.
* Section 1 reconstructs the 1871–1885 documentary baseline from the primary texts themselves (newspapers via the Library of Congress OCR, the McDermott affidavits, the Board of Police and Fire Commissioners' report, Andreas 1885). All later scholarship argues from this baseline, so the quotations are given at length.
* Sections 2–10 go author by author / theory by theory: reference; what the author claims about the cause; the evidence cited; exact quotations; what the author concedes.
* Section 11: what each theory would need to be true. Section 12: where scholarship stands 2020–2026. Section 13: shortfalls (texts not obtained) and how they were worked around.

Access summary (details in Section 13): full texts obtained for Musham 1940, Andreas 1885, Critchell 1909, Donnelly 1883, Fedler 1985, the 1871 press pages on Chronicling America, chicagology.com's transcriptions of the Board report and the McDermott affidavits, greatchicagofire.org (Carl Smith's essays), Wikipedia (current wikitext plus the last article-length revisions of the merged "Louis M. Cohn" and "Daniel Sullivan (Great Chicago Fire)" pages), the 2021 sesquicentennial coverage that was reachable, the NWS and Earth Magazine Peshtigo pages, and a long excerpt of Carl Smith's 2020 book (American Heritage). Bales's 2002 book was read through Google Books' search-inside snippets (page-numbered; 128 queries answered in all — see `gbooks/`) because archive.org's lending copy refuses the search-inside API (403 "Item not available") and its text files (401). Not obtained: Bales's 1997 journal article (JSTOR/IHJ not reachable; archive.org and NIU hold no copy), Pauly 1984 (JSTOR), the full texts of Cromie, Kogan & Cromie, Sawislak, Smith 1995 and Miller 1990 (lending-only), Waskin 1985, Wood 2004 (AIAA 403), and the original 1893/1911/1915/1921 Ahern pieces (only reprints/quotations). Also obtained, and used in Sections 3.11, 6 and 10: the full texts of the Chicago Tribune's legacy web archive for DeBartolo (8 Oct 1997; 3 Mar 1998), Mills (6 Oct 1997) and Potash (6 Oct 2006); the publisher's author blurb attesting the Harry E. Pratt Memorial Award; and, for four pages that refused curl (Newsweek 2021, Time 2015, Saturday Evening Post 2021, Block Club 2025), model-extracted texts from a page-fetch tool, labelled as such wherever quoted.

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## 0. Fixed points and open points

**Agreed by every source consulted (primary and secondary):**

1. The fire started in or at the barn behind Patrick and Catherine O'Leary's cottage, 137 DeKoven Street, West Division, on Sunday evening 8 October 1871. The Board of Police and Fire Commissioners: "The Board find that the fire originated in a two-story frame barn in the rear of No 137 DeKoven street the premises being owned by Patrick Leary." [chicagology/fire052.txt, transcribing the Chicago Evening Post of 12 Dec 1871]
2. The Board did not determine a cause: "There is no proof that anybody had been in the barn after nightfall that evening. Whether it originated from a spark blown from a chimney on that windy night or was set on fire by human agency we are unable to determine. Mr. Leary, the owner, and all his family prove to have been in bed and asleep at the time. There was a small party in the front part of house which was occupied by Mr. McLaughlin and wife, but we failed to find any evidence that anybody from part of the house went near the barn that night." [chicagology/fire052.txt; same wording in Bales p. 60, 143 and 295 (Google Books snippets, gbooks/BALES_SNIPPETS_BY_QUERY.txt) and Fedler 1985 p. 22 citing "Police And Fire," Chicago Tribune, Dec. 12, 1871, p. 4]
3. The cow-kicks-lamp story was in print on 9 October 1871, in the Chicago Evening Journal extra, i.e. within a day of ignition and long before any reporter "confessed" to inventing it (Section 1.2 and Section 7).
4. The O'Learys swore, on 15 October 1871 and again at the inquiry in November, that they were in bed (Section 1.4–1.5).
5. Weather and fuel, not the ignition source, explain why a barn fire became a city fire: drought since July, a strong south-west wind ahead of a Plains low-pressure system, and a wooden city (NWS Chicago 2021 page, Section 8.4).

**Genuinely open:** who or what ignited the barn. The candidates argued in the literature are: Mrs O'Leary with a lamp (the 1871 press, Musham 1940); Daniel "Peg Leg" Sullivan with pipe or lamp (Bales 1997/2002; also 1971 Chicago Association of Commerce, per Smith); Dennis Regan (raised as a possibility by Bales); a McLaughlin party guest fetching milk (1871 rumour, Andreas's "second theory", Ahern 1921); boys or young men smoking/gambling (Andreas's "third theory"; Cohn's 1944 bequest story); spontaneous combustion of fresh hay (Ahern 1915/1921 and "Big Jim" O'Leary); a chimney spark (the Board's own alternative wording); an incendiary/Communard (1871 press); a cometary fragment (Donnelly 1883, Waskin 1985, Wood 2004). No professional historian consulted (Musham excepted, and Musham's confidence is idiosyncratic) claims the cause is known; see Section 12.

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## 1. The 1871–1885 documentary baseline (primary texts, quoted from the fetched OCR/transcriptions)

### 1.1 What the first Chicago paper said (Chicago Evening Journal extra, Monday 9 October 1871)

The original extra was not obtainable (no digitised copy found on loc.gov, archive.org or Google Books). Its origin sentence is quoted identically by three independent fetched texts:

* Musham 1940, p. 152: "The first story in the Chicago press, reported in the Evening Journal of October 9, was as follows: **The fire broke out on the corner of De Koven and Twelfth streets about 9 o'clock on Sunday evening, being caused by a cow kicking over a lamp in a stable in which a woman was milking a cow.**" [musham_1940_part3_commentary_cause.txt, OCR p. 152]
* Bales 2002, annotated bibliography p. 320: "'The Great Calamity of the Age!' Chicago Evening Journal — Extra, 9 October 1871, p. 1. While Chicago is still burning, the Journal writes that the fire was caused 'by a cow kicking over a lamp in a stable ...'" [gbooks/BALES_SNIPPETS_BY_QUERY.txt, query "Evening Journal", p. 320]; and p. 52: "... lamp in a stable in which a woman was milking." Although this newspaper contained no illustrations ..." [same file, query "lamp", p. 52]
* Carl Smith 2020: "The Chicago Evening Journal, the only local newspaper to publish on Monday, October 9, reported that the fire began with 'a cow kicking over a lamp in a stable in which a woman was milking.' Since then this story and the fire have been inseparable." [web/americanheritage_olearys_full.txt]
* Fedler 1985 (p. 26 of the ERIC PDF): "The Evening Journal was published in Chicago that Monday, and it immediately reported that, 'The fire broke out...at about 9 o'clock on Sunday evening, being caused by a cow kicking over a lamp in a stable in which a woman was milking.' Its story -- not a story in The Herald -- seems to have been the first to mention Mrs. O'Leary's cow." [web/fedler_1985_ERIC_ED257108.txt, PDF page 26; OCR imperfect]

Note that the Journal's sentence names no one; it is "a woman ... milking", not "Mrs O'Leary".

### 1.2 The story spreads by telegraph, 10–13 October 1871 (Chronicling America OCR, `ca/`)

Pages fetched that do **not** yet carry the cow (Monday/Tuesday papers printed from the first telegrams): New-York Tribune 9 and 10 Oct p. 1; Evening Star (Washington) 9 Oct p. 1; New York Sun 10 Oct p. 1; New York Herald 10 Oct p. 3; Worcester Daily Spy 10 Oct p. 2 (its only "cow" is in a farm essay); the Evening Star of 9 Oct has the first telegraphic particulars: "The fire commenced about 9 o'clock last night near the corner of Jefferson a[nd]..." [ca/sn83045462_1871-10-09_ed1_p1.txt].

Earliest out-of-town printings found (all 10 October, i.e. the day after the Journal extra):

* Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), 10 Oct 1871, p. 1: "THE ORIGIN OF THE FIRE was in a stable, where a woman took a kerosene lamp at milking time." (OCR: "THK ORIGIN OV TH1- KIR% was in a stable, where a woman took a kerosene :?mpat milking time.") [ca/KEY_eveningstar_1871-10-10_origin_woman_kerosene.txt]
* Alexandria (Va.) Daily State Journal, 10 Oct 1871, 2d ed., p. 1: "ORIGIN OF THE FIRE. The great fire in Chicago is said to have originated from a kerosene lamp, taken into a stable by a woman to afford light while milking her cow." [ca/sn84024670_1871-10-10_ed1_p1.txt]

The Associated Press "boy" version, dated Chicago 10 October and printed nationally on 11 October:

* Wheeling (W.Va.) Daily Intelligencer, 11 Oct 1871, p. 1: "Late on Sunday evening, a boy went into a stable on DeKoven street, near the river, on the west side, to milk a cow, carrying with him a kerosene lamp; this was kicked over by the cow and the burning fluid scattered among the straw. This was the beginning of the great fire A single extinguisher on the ground, or the active work of the police in tearing down one or two shanties, would have prevented the spreading of the flames." [ca/KEY_wheeling_1871-10-11_AP_dispatch.txt]
* New-York Tribune, 11 Oct 1871, p. 1: "ORIGIN OF THE FIRE. Different reports have been given of the origin of the terrible calamity, but the following is believed to be correct Late on Sunday evening a boy went into a stable on Dekoven-st., near the river, on the West Side, to milk a cow, carrying with him a kero[sene lamp; this was kicked] over by the cow, and [the] burning [fluid] scattered among the straw. This was the beginning of the great fire." (OCR-damaged; the bracketed words are supplied from the identical Wheeling text) [ca/KEY_nytribune_1871-10-11_origin_of_the_fire.txt]
* New York Herald, 11 Oct 1871, p. 5: "Last night at eight o'clock a boy living on the corner of Taylor and Halsted streets went to the stables to milk his cow; ... The flames caught in his loose straw and communicated to the hay and the rick, and the northeast wind caught through the burning roof, and flung it abroad over the dry and famishing city" (OCR: "a /bog living on the corner ol Taylor and Ha)?t?d V streets Kent to the stables to milk hi* cow") [ca/KEY_nyherald_1871-10-11_boy_taylor_halsted.txt]. This Herald text, with its wrong corner and wrong wind, matters for the Ahern question (Section 7): Fedler shows the Herald "did not mention a cow until Wednesday" and then in the AP "boy" form.
* Same AP text located on 11 Oct in the Morning Republican (Little Rock), Knoxville Daily Chronicle, Charleston Daily News, Morning Star (Providence), Daily Kennebec Journal, Juniata Sentinel; and the New York Sun's "THE ORIGIN OF THE DISASTER" [ca/sn83030272_1871-10-11_ed1_p1.txt].
* Kenosha Telegraph, 12 Oct 1871, p. 4, already listing rival explanations: "On Sunday evening about nine o'clock another fire broke out on the west side, generally said to be on the corner of De Koven and Twelfth streets, and to be caused by a cow kicking over a lamp in a stable in which a woman was milking. It has also been located on Farquhar street near Jefferson, and has been attributed to incendiarism and to carelessly used pipe or cigar. It has also been attributed to a light in a saloon by which a stove with fire was turned over, and by one man, as reported by a Milwaukee paper, to carelessness of the fireman in not extinguishing the first fire, from which he says it originated." [ca/KEY_kenosha_1871-10-12_theories.txt, OCR lightly regularised]

Fedler 1985 (independently, from microfilm) gives the same picture: the Milwaukee Sentinel of Tuesday 10 Oct printed the Journal sentence verbatim; the Daily Picayune (New Orleans) on Wednesday printed "The origin of the fire was in a stable where a woman, with a kerosene lamp, went to milk a cow" and then the AP "boy" bulletin; the Louisville Courier-Journal likewise. [web/fedler_1985_ERIC_ED257108.txt, PDF pp. 13–14]

### 1.3 The Chicago Tribune's own first account (Wednesday 11 October 1871)

Chicago Tribune, 11 Oct 1871, p. 1 (its first post-fire issue): "A fire in a barn on the West Side was the insignificant cause of a conflagration which has swept out of existence hundreds of millions of property ..." and, under THE WEST SIDE: "At 9:30 a small cow-barn attached to a house on the corner of DeKoven and Jefferson streets, one block north of Twelfth street, emitted a bright light, followed by a blaze, and in a moment the building was hopelessly on fire. Before any aid could be extended the fire had communicated to a number of adjoining sheds, barns and dwellings, and was rapidly carried north and east, despite the efforts of the firemen." (OCR: "AIICSO a aDjall cow-barn attached to a hoiirv on Lhe corner of DtsKovvn and Jeflersou streets ... emitted a bright light, followed by a blaze") [ca/tribune_1871-10-11_p1.txt]. The Tribune's first issue therefore gives no cause at all — a point Bales makes (p. 78, quoting Ahern's 1915 admission that "No newspaper was printed the morning of Oct. 9, but when the papers were able to get out 'extras' the cow and lamp story was given as the cause of the holocaust" and adding "This is one more reason why Ahern's credibility is suspect") [gbooks, query "lamp", p. 78].

Chicago Tribune, 27 Oct 1871, p. 2, "How It Burned": surveying the "causes assigned", the paper mocks the "petroleum" limestone theory and "the wrath of God in general, leaving petroleum walls pine pavements, the Fire Commissioners, and the O'Leary cow all out of the account." [ca/KEY_tribune_1871-10-27_oleary_cow_out_of_account.txt]. Fedler 1985 cites the same article for the claim that "There have been not less than 900 causes assigned for the Chicago conflagration" [fedler, PDF p. 23, fn 45].

### 1.4 The Chicago Times of 18 October and the O'Learys' answer (Tribune 19 and 20 October)

The Chicago Times of 18 Oct 1871 was not obtainable (not on Chronicling America). Its text is quoted by Fedler from microfilm: Franc Wilkie's story reported "Flames were discovered in a small stable in the rear of the house on the corner of DeKoven and Jefferson streets" and described "an old Irish woman" who "was apparently about 70 years of age, and was bent almost double with the weight from many years of toil, and trouble, and privation", who when cut off from county relief "swore she would bring revenge on a city that would deny her a bit of wood or a pound of bacon", and — in the Times' "her side of the story" — "On Sunday night, about 9½ o'clock, she took a lamp in her hand and went out to have a look at her pet. Then she took a notion the cow must have some salt, and she sat down the lamp and went in the house for some. In a moment, the cow had accidentally kicked over the lamp, an explosion followed, and in an instant the structure was involved in flames." [web/fedler_1985_ERIC_ED257108.txt, PDF pp. 9–10, citing "The Fire," Chicago Times, Oct. 18, 1871, p. 1]. Fedler adds a footnote that the microfilm is "virtually unreadable" in places and that quotations elsewhere "are likely to contain slight variations" [PDF p. 10]. Carl Smith 2020 quotes the same Times passages ("she would be revenged on charity that would deny her a bit of wood or a pound of bacon"; "any one of the vermin which haunt our streets") [web/americanheritage_olearys_full.txt]. Musham 1940 quotes the "salt" version at length from the Lakeside Memorial (1872), p. 22, as one of his four O'Leary "confessions" [musham..., p. 151].

Chicago Tribune, 19 Oct 1871, p. 2 — the only contemporaneous interview with Mrs O'Leary found in a fetched original: "The Cow that Kicked Over the Lamp. A reporter of The Tribune called upon Mrs. Leary, of No. 137 De Koven street, in whose barn originated the fire, which destroyed the city of Chicago on last Sunday night and Monday morning. It was the intention to interview her [as to the] cause of the fire, and ascertain all about that cow which kicked over the lamp. She said that this story was false; she did not go into the barn with a kerosene lamp; she did not milk at night; and she did not know how the fire started. She was asleep when the alarm was given, and was awakened by a neighbor, who rapped on the door and told her that the stable was on fire. When asked how her house, which is not even scorched, was saved, she replied that there was a hydrant on each side of it, and a hundred of her friends filled buckets with water and threw it on the sides and roof of the building." (OCR regularised; raw in file) [ca/KEY_tribune_1871-10-19_cow_interview.txt]

Chicago Tribune, 20 Oct 1871, p. 2, "HOW IT ORIGINATED. Statements and Affidavits as to the Starting Point of the Great Fire" — Michael McDermott's letter and the affidavits sworn before him on 15 October [ca/KEY_tribune_1871-10-20_mcdermott_affidavits.txt (OCR) and chicagology/fire052.txt (clean transcription); Andreas 1885 II: 708 reprints them]. McDermott: "A great deal has been published respecting the origin of the great fire, which all reports have settled down on the head of a woman, or as the Times has it, an 'Irish hag' of 70 years of age. Admitting for a moment that an Irish hag of 70 years was by an unforeseen accident the cause, yet there was a great want of charity in the epithets used by the Times of the 18th. The following facts are stubborn things, and will cause the public to look for the cause in other sources, and perhaps attribute it to the love of plunder, Divine wrath, etc.: ... Mrs. O'Leary is neither haggard nor dirty." The O'Leary affidavit: "they had five cows, a horse and wagon, on all of which they had not one cent of insurance. She milked her cows at 4½ p. m. and 5 a. m., as Mrs. O'Leary peddled the milk. Mrs. O'Leary fed the horse beside the fence at about 7 o'clock p. m., and then put him in the barn. She had no lamp in the yard or barn that night or evening. Patrick O'Leary testifies that he was not in the barn during that day or night; left the feeding of the cows and horse [to] his wife and daughter: that both were in bed when awakened by Denis Ryan, of No. 118 DeKoven street". Sullivan's affidavit: "Denis Sullivan being duly sworn before me testifies that he was at Patrick O'Leary's house, No. 137 DeKoven street, on Sunday night the 8th, of October, 1871, from about 8½ to 9 o'clock at night, during which time Mr. O'Leary and wife were in bed, that he went a few lots east of O'Leary's on the opposite side of DeKoven street, until about half-past 9 o'clock, when he saw the fire. He went across the street and cried 'fire' 'fire,' and went into O'Leary's barn, where he found the hay in the loft on fire. He then attempted to cut loose the cows and horse, but failed to save anything but a half burned calf. He then came to O'Leary's and found them out of bed. Denis Ryan alarmed them during his time at the barn." [chicagology/fire052.txt]

Two things in these affidavits drive all later argument: (i) the O'Learys were "awakened by Denis Ryan [Regan]", while at the inquiry Mrs O'Leary said Sullivan woke them (Andreas's footnote: "The discrepancy in this statement is not commented on by the commissioners" [ia/andreas_v2_pp701-716_burning_of_chicago_origin.txt, line 1478 = II: 708–709]); (ii) Sullivan places himself "a few lots east of O'Leary's on the opposite side" — the position Bales tests against the tract books (Section 3).

### 1.5 The inquiry (23 November – early December 1871) and the Board's report (published 11–12 December)

The inquiry transcript (c. 1,100 handwritten pages, Chicago History Museum) was not obtainable here (chsmedia.org down; images.chicagohistory.org Cloudflare-gated). Its contents are known through Andreas 1885 (who summarised the "half-a-dozen" witnesses bearing on the origin), Musham 1940 (pp. 154–155), and Bales 2002 (who transcribed it; Appendix C annotates Mrs O'Leary's testimony, and Google Books snippets of pp. 230–233 show his annotated transcript).

Andreas, History of Chicago, II (1885), p. 708 (archive.org OCR): "The Origin of the Fire must ever remain a mystery ... While the city was still enveloped in flames, some now-forgotten tongue declared that Mrs. O'Leary was engaged in milking a cow, when the unruly animal kicked over a lighted lamp, and so ignited the straw and refuse on the barn floor This story was sent throughout the world, and men unhesitatingly accepted it as the correct explanation. ... But even the existence of the spot upon which the alleged lamp stood, the finding of a broken lamp in the ruins, and the evidence of reputable citizens that Mrs. O'Leary really illuminated her humble home with kerosene, are not sufficient to save the theory from discredit. There is no proof that Mrs. O'Leary is responsible for the fire. An official investigation of the disaster resulted in no definitive conclusion. Some fifty witnesses were interrogated, and, from among the number, half-a-dozen, perhaps, gave testimony which bore directly on the subject. Taking these in their proper sequence, it is learned That Dennis Sullivan discovered the fire at about 9:30 p. m.*; that the O'Leary family was then in bed; that Mrs. O'Leary was in the habit of milking her cows not later than five o'clock p. m.; that a family named McLaughlin lived in the O'Leary house, and was enjoying a social party in honor of the arrival of a relative from Ireland; that this family indulged in the use of beer, but had no whisky or milk punch; that none of the McLaughlins visited the barn that evening for the purpose of obtaining milk; and, in substance, that not one word of evidence was adduced before the commissioners to prove how or by whom the fire originated." [ia/andreas_v2_pp701-716_burning_of_chicago_origin.txt; page located between the OCR page markers 707 and 709]

Andreas, II: 701, "Cause of the Fire": "The precise cause of the fire is now a mystery, and must ever remain so, unless the knowledge at present withheld through fear or pride shall hereafter be revealed, as those who may know the cause manifest a decided aversion to the subject. ... Four theories are advanced relative to the origin of the great fire: First. That Mrs O'Leary visited her cows after dark, carrying a lighted kerosene lamp, which was kicked over by the historic cow, setting fire to the surrounding rubbish. This was the first theory advanced, and the one most tenaciously adhered to ... Second. That some of O'Leary's neighbors surreptitiously visited the barn, also with a lighted lamp, for the purpose of obtaining fresh milk to make punch or oyster stew, and met with a vigorous protest from the disturbed cow, which resulted in the conflagration. Third. That some boys were enjoying a moment of stolen pleasure in the barn, with pipes or cigars, and carelessly let fire fall among the inflammable substances on the floor. Fourth. That the fire was the deliberate work of an incendiary. These pages contain the results of a patient and impartial research among the records, and a painstaking examination of living witnesses, but the admission is made, that a satisfactory conclusion as to the origin of the fire has not been reached. Certain points of valuable evidence, however, are here given to the public for the first time. Among these are the following: The fire started as early as 8:45, instead of 9:30, as has been asserted by nearly all writers. A woman's scream was heard in or near the O'Leary barn just before the fire broke out, but no evidence is obtainable to prove by whom it was uttered. A broken kerosene lamp was found in the ruins of the O'Leary barn the day after the fire." [same file, lines 46–103 = II: 701]

Andreas on the Board's report (II: 711): "The foregoing report states that Sullivan saw the fire 'not later than twenty-five minutes past nine,' but this testimony, while tending to exonerate the watchman in the Court House, is contravened by later and trustworthy statements. ... The report appears to be little more than an attempt to quiet the too loud expressions of dissatisfaction with the Department." [same file, lines 1738–1752]

Andreas's 1884–85 witness statements (II: 714–715): James Dalton, whose cottage stood "four feet above the ground, on cedar posts" immediately east of the O'Learys, "At about fifteen minutes to nine o'clock, on the night of the fire, ... heard a woman's scream of terror. The sound came from the direction of the O'Leary premises"; Joseph Dushek, 153 DeKoven, "first discovered the fire at about 8:45" and "Just after the fire, while looking through the ruins of the O'Leary barn, I found an oil lamp, of the usual pattern ... The oil-holder, however, had been broken. The globe and chimney were gone."; Mrs McLaughlin "manifested so decided an aversion to being interviewed that little information was obtained In fact, she threatened to 'prosecute' those engaged in writing the history, if her name were used"; and (II: 715) "Dennis Sullivan had just returned to his own house, across the street from O'Leary's, from the vain attempt to save something from the barn. Everything was destroyed except a calf, which was placed in the lot next to Sullivan's." [same file, lines 2320–2420, 2499–2503]

Note the two competing time-lines already in 1885: the Board/Sullivan "20 to 25 minutes past 9" versus Andreas/Holden's "as early as 8:45". Musham adopts 8:30–8:45; Bales (p. 193) cites the Evening Journal's own "chronological table" placing the barn fire at 9:30 P.M. [gbooks, query "Evening Journal", p. 193]. The 45-minute gap matters for every reconstruction of who was where.

### 1.6 The Board's report as printed (Evening Post, 12 December 1871)

Full transcription in [chicagology/fire052.txt]: "The Board of Police as required by law have investigated the origin of the fire of October 8th and 9th. We have heard the sworn testimony of fifty-one witnesses and had the same taken down by a stenographer and subsequently transcribed. As written out it fills about 900 pages of foolscap paper. ... Where the Fire Started. The Board find that the fire originated in a two-story frame barn in the rear of No 137 DeKoven street ... The fire was first discovered by a drayman, by the name of Daniel Sullivan who saw it while sitting on the sidewalk on the south side of DeKoven street, and nearly opposite premises. He fixes the time at no more than 20 to 25 minutes past 9 when he first noticed the flames coming out of the barn. Who Started It. There is no proof that anybody had been in the barn after nightfall that evening. Whether it originated from a spark blown from a chimney on that windy night or was set on fire by human agency we are unable to determine. ..." The Evening Post's own preface is sarcastic: "Of course they have nothing new to disclose or even to suggest for this is an age when all valuable information of public affairs is first harvested and conveyed by that enterprising avant courier, the press". Fedler (PDF p. 22) adds the Board's other conclusions from the Tribune's printing: "The firemen and their officers were sober, and did all that men could do."

Why no finding? The primary texts themselves give the reasons later authors elaborate: the Board's remit and interest were the Department's conduct ("The Work Achieved"), the only witnesses who could know (the O'Learys, Sullivan, Regan, the McLaughlins) all swore they were elsewhere, and Andreas already read the report as "an attempt to quiet ... dissatisfaction with the Department." Bales's chapter 5 title asks "The Inquiry — Charade or Cover-Up?" (Section 3.8).

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## 2. H. A. Musham, "The Great Chicago Fire, October 8–10, 1871" (1940/1941)

**Reference.** H. A. Musham, "The Great Chicago Fire, October 8–10, 1871," *Papers in Illinois History and Transactions for the Year 1940* (Springfield: Illinois State Historical Society, 1941), pp. 69–189 (the paper runs from OCR p. 69; Part III "Commentary" begins p. 147; "The Origin of the Fire" pp. 147–158; "The Alarm for the Fire" pp. 158 ff.). Full text obtained from archive.org (`ia/papersinillinois1940illi_djvu.txt`; cleaned extracts `musham_1940_ocr_clean.txt`, `musham_1940_start_of_fire_section.txt`, `musham_1940_part3_commentary_cause.txt`). Musham was the son of the foreman of "Little Giant No. 6", the first company at the fire ("9:16 p.m., Foreman Musham, Little Giant No. 6" [p. 158]), and relies on his own unpublished "Notes on the Chicago Fire" and "Notes on the Weather at the Time of the Chicago Fire" (fns. on pp. 96, 150, 153) — the maps in the paper are his.

**Claim about the cause.** Musham is the one modern author who affirms the cow story. His narrative (Part II, "The Start of the Fire", p. 96): "Sometime between 8:30 and 8:45 p.m. Mrs. O'Leary went out to her barn with a kerosene table lamp in her hand, possibly to milk a cow or to attend one that was ailing. She placed the lamp on the floor. The cow became frisky and kicked it over with her right hind foot, breaking the bowl. The oil ran over the floor and the burning wick set it on fire. In an instant the interior was a mass of flame and smoke. Mrs. O'Leary gave a loud scream which was heard by the neighbors but they paid no attention to it. Patrick O'Leary ran out of the house to see what had happened." [musham_1940_start_of_fire_section.txt, pp. 96–97]. His conclusion (p. 158): "when all the evidence in the case is fairly considered, there can be but one conclusion and that is: That the Great Chicago Fire of October 8-10, 1871 was started in the barn of Mr. and Mrs. Patrick O'Leary, 137 De Koven Street, by one of their cows kicking over a lighted kerosene lamp between 8:30 and 9:00 p.m. on Sunday, October 8; that it was brought about by an accident; and that Mrs. O'Leary was in the barn at the time." [musham_1940_part3_commentary_cause.txt, p. 158]

**Evidence cited and method.** He lists five candidate causes (pp. 147–148): "(1) incendiaries; (2) boys smoking in the O'Leary barn; (3) spontaneous combustion of the hay in the O'Leary barn; (4) neighbors visiting the O'Leary barn with a lighted kerosene lamp to get some milk for making milk punch or an oyster stew; (5) and Mrs. Catherine O'Leary's visiting her barn with a lighted kerosene lamp, possibly to milk a cow or to attend an ailing one." (citing Luzerne, *The Lost City*, 185–96, and Andreas II: 701). He eliminates the first four in turn:

* Incendiaries: "no information worthy of belief has been uncovered to this day proving that this was the case, but there were stories and rumors to the effect that the city was fired by a secret terrorist organization, an offshoot of the Paris Commune of 1871" (p. 148).
* Boys smoking: "It is not likely that boys would take the trouble to enter a barn after dark to smoke when they could do so just as well in the alley or behind one of the high fences, without fear of detection. In the absence of positive evidence to the contrary this theory can be rejected." (p. 148) — Bales p. 97 repeats this reasoning almost verbatim.
* Spontaneous combustion: "the hay was fresh, dry and small in amount, it had been in the barn for only a few hours before the fire started, and the day had been unusually dry and warm. The barn was loosely built ... There was enough circulation of air throughout the structure to make a dust explosion impossible. This suggested cause of the fire can therefore be rejected without further comment." (p. 148)
* Milk-punch neighbours: he quotes the Higginson-papers "Irish cook" story ("They wanted to make a little punch but were out of milk, and some one suggested that they go over and milk Mrs. O'Leary's cow") and rejects it: "Mrs. McLaughlin indignantly denied that she or any of her guests had been in the barn ... This suggested cause for the origin of the fire can also be rejected in the absence of positive evidence." (p. 149)

For the fifth cause his evidence is four alleged O'Leary "confessions" plus the Journal sentence and the lamp remains (pp. 150–153):
1. Robert S. Critchell, *Recollections of a Fire Insurance Man* (1909), p. 81 — fetched original (archive.org): "On the following evening, about eight o'clock Sunday night, the far-famed and historical lady, known as Mrs. O'Leary, went out into her barn to milk her cow to get some milk to make milk punch with; the cow kicked over the lamp, set the barn afire and the result was the great Chicago conflagration of 1871. This story of the origin of that fire is strictly true. I never saw the cow, but I did interview the old lady and was informed by her in rather an ungracious way that the story was true." [ia/critchell_recollections_1909_djvu.txt, p. 81]
2. Jacob J. Schaller (Musham's own notes): a nine-year-old milk boy to whom, "The next morning", Mrs O'Leary allegedly said "that she had company the night before and she wanted some milk to make Tom and Jerry for her friends, she took her lantern and went to the barn ... the cow becoming resentful at being milked a second time on the same night, raised up her right hind leg and let go, giving a light kick which hit the lantern and knocked it over" (pp. 150–151).
3. The Lakeside Memorial (1872), p. 22 — the "ailing cow" version.
4. The Chicago Times "salt" story (via Goodspeed, pp. 156–57) — the "front steps ... My poor cow" version (pp. 151–152).

Musham's own summary of their inconsistencies (p. 152): "Here are four statements said to have been made by Mrs. O'Leary, and on four separate occasions, and two others supporting them. The Critchell and Schaller statements confirm each other on the main points except in one particular. Critchell says that she took a lamp to the barn while Schaller says that it was a lantern. ... These stories disagree in several particulars. They all overlook the fact that she had five cows instead of one, and a calf and a horse. ... There can be but one thing to do relative to the main point and that is to accept it as being true."

Lamp remains (p. 153): "There was a lamp in the barn that night. The remains of one were seen by Phillip Sharkey in the ruins of the barn on the morning of October 9, and by Joseph Dushek of 153 De Koven Street, just after the fire. The chimney and globe were missing. Further, on Tuesday morning, a broken lower part of a small glass lamp was found under a broken plank of the floor by S. H. Kimball, which may have been part of the lamp found by Dushek. No remains of any other kind of a lamp or lantern were found in the ruins though they were well examined by the curious and souvenir hunting public. It is probable that the lamp seen was that taken by Mrs. O'Leary to the barn."

On the affidavits and inquiry testimony (pp. 153–156) he says: "These statements, and those sworn to before Notary McDermott, are all in the nature of an attempt to prove an alibi, and in them are discrepancies. They state that Mrs. O'Leary could not have been in the barn when the fire started because she was in bed. The statement sworn to before Notary McDermott states that Rogan waked the O'Learys up, but that made before the Board of Police declares that Sullivan did, and Rogan does not say that he waked them at all. If the O'Learys were in bed and asleep at 8:30 p.m. and for the next half hour, they were certainly very good sleepers to sleep through a party, with fiddling and dancing going on within a few feet of them, and through all the noise and excitement attending the discovery of the burning of their barn. The burning barn was seen by the neighborhood as early at 8:40 p.m. and had even then attracted the attention of a number of people." (pp. 155–156). Why she denied it (p. 156): "She was afraid of the crowd and was in great fear of being arrested as an incendiary. There had recently been much talk in the city about incendiaries and what would happen to them if they were caught."

**What Musham concedes.** "Whether it was lighted when it was taken to the barn or lighted afterward cannot be ascertained." (p. 150); "For whom was Mrs. O'Leary milking a cow after regular milking hours on that fateful evening? ... his or her name cannot be determined from the information at hand." (pp. 152–153); the four confessions "disagree in several particulars" (p. 152); the Schaller story rests on his own unpublished notes; Critchell's book was published 38 years after the event. He also concedes the department's first alarm failed and that the courthouse watchman struck the wrong box (pp. 158 ff.).

**How later authors treat Musham.** Kogan & Cromie 1971 rest their cow narrative entirely on him ("according to contemporary records cited in a monumental and detailed monograph about the Great Fire by Howard A. Musham in 1941" [web/uchicago_mag_2021.txt]). Bales p. 61 quotes his conclusion and answers it: "Musham supports this statement by claiming that on the morning of October 9 ..." [gbooks, query "kerosene", p. 61] (the rest of the sentence is cut by the snippet). Bales's index entry for the cow theory runs to pp. 52–68 and 75–80, i.e. his chapter 2 is a point-by-point rebuttal of Musham's four "confessions" (Critchell, Schaller, Lakeside, Times) as late, second-hand or fabricated (p. 91 on the 1903 Callahan tale: "apocryphal"; p. 80: neighbourhood children may have "concocted" the story).

---

## 3. Richard F. Bales — "Did the Cow Do It?" (1997) and *The Great Chicago Fire and the Myth of Mrs. O'Leary's Cow* (2002; pb 2005)

**References.** Richard F. Bales, "Did the Cow Do It? A New Look at the Cause of the Great Chicago Fire," *Illinois Historical Journal* 90:1 (Spring 1997), pp. 2–24 [citation as given in Wikipedia's reference list, wiki/Great_Chicago_Fire_references.txt; the article itself was not obtainable — see Section 13]. Richard F. Bales, *The Great Chicago Fire and the Myth of Mrs. O'Leary's Cow*, foreword by Thomas F. Schwartz (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002; paperback 2005, ISBN 978-0-7864-2358-3), 338 pp.; chapters: 1 "A City on Fire", 2 (the legend), 3 "Debunking Other Myths", 4 "The Real Cause", 5 "The Inquiry — Charade or Cover-Up?", Epilogue "Mrs. O'Leary's Legacy", Afterword, Appendix A "Questions, Mysteries, and Controversies", B "Behind the Conclusions", C "'How It Originated' — The McDermott Letter and the O'Leary ..." [gbooks, query "coverup", p. xi]. Read via Google Books search-inside snippets of the McFarland e-edition (id rppt7mgfiKMC; page ids PAnn match the printed pagination, e.g. PA338 is the last index page). Bales was "an assistant regional counsel with the Chicago Title Insurance Company" [web/mentalfloss.txt]; the book "exists because of their efforts" — Chicago Title's Ken Grenier, Jack ... and Welton ..., who used the "tract books and other resources to ferret out information that has never before been utilized by fire historians" [gbooks, query "tract", p. vii].

**Claim about the cause.** That the cow story is a myth; that the inquiry's failure to find a cause was a "charade or cover-up"; and that the most probable cause is Daniel "Peg Leg" Sullivan — possibly with Dennis Regan — in the barn with a pipe or lamp. In interviews he is categorical ("I am 100% convinced Daniel Sullivan started the fire" [web/abc7_2021.txt, AP, Oct 2021]; "one hundred percent convinced" [web/modernfarmer_2014.txt]); in the book he is explicit that this is inference and lists the limits (3.10 below).

### 3.1 The tract-book reconstruction of DeKoven Street

* "The land records of Chicago Title Insurance Company include maps and plats, recorded documents, and 'tract book pages,' which categorize land transfers by legal description." (p. 76, n. 1) [gbooks, "Chicago Title", p. 76]
* "William White did own land east of Sullivan's property; it was across the street, on the south side of DeKoven Street, and southeast of the O'Leary and McLaughlin homes. But in 1871 William White owned not one but two separate tracts of land. These two adjoining properties, a 'west parcel' and an 'east parcel,' were each twenty-five feet wide. In front of which one did Sullivan sit? As explained in Appendix B and as illustrated in Figure 54 ..." (p. 113) [gbooks, "William White" and "tract", p. 113]
* Catherine Sullivan (Daniel's mother) "owned several parcels of land on the south side of DeKoven Street. Inquiry testimony and Chicago Title Insurance Company records suggest that ..." (Figure 64, p. 138); and she owned "lot 21 ... at the southwest corner of DeKoven and Clinton streets", "seventy-five feet east of where her son lived" (p. 137) [gbooks, "coverup" p. 138; "tract" p. 137]
* Appendix B computes the distance: "the tract owned by Catherine Sullivan was seventy-five feet wide. With this information, the distance from where Sullivan sat to a point due west and directly opposite the O'Leary passageway can be computed as follows: 12½ feet = half ..." (p. 199); "conservatively determined by measuring from the midpoint of White's west parcel in a westerly direction to a point that is opposite the middle of this ..." (p. 198) [gbooks, "tract" p. 199; "William White" p. 198]. Figure on p. 198: "Sullivan's alleged view of the barn (blocked by Dalton's house and Forbes's house)" with "Approximate location of Sullivan, by a ..." [gbooks, "Dalton house", p. 198]. The 1997 press gives the figure as 193 feet: "Bales' research showed Sullivan would have had to run 193 feet on his peg leg" [web/baltimoresun_1997-10-12.txt]; "That's 196 feet on a wooden leg, Bales calculates" [web/irishamerica_2021.txt, reprinting a 1997 piece].
* Bales also uses the records to correct the legend's geography: "Chicago Title Insurance Company records, however, indicate that no O'Leary owned this Halsted Street property until 1894" (p. 174); and the 1909 renumbering: "what was originally Regan's 112 DeKoven Street address became 521 ..." (p. 227) [gbooks, "Chicago Title" p. 174; "City Council" p. 227].

### 3.2 Sullivan's position at White's house and the Dalton house blocking the view

* "Daniel 'Peg Leg' Sullivan lived across the street from the O'Learys at 134 DeKoven Street. He was nicknamed 'Peg Leg' because of his wooden leg. (He apparently lost the original in a ..." (p. 112) [gbooks, "Peg Leg", p. 112]
* "During the inquiry Daniel Sullivan testified that he sat by a fence 'at the head of White's house or head of his lot.' But in 1871 William White owned two contiguous parcels of land on DeKoven Street, a 'west ..." (p. 195) [gbooks, "William White", p. 195]
* "... William White's house, as at least one neighboring home blocked his view. Sullivan testified that while in front of ..." (p. 115); "Dalton, located immediately east of the O'Leary and McLaughlin homes. Admittedly, Andreas comments that the Dalton house was built four feet off the ground on cedar posts. Although one might think that the area between the ..." (p. 115) [gbooks, "William White" p. 115; "Dalton house" p. 115]
* "However, Sullivan testified that when he entered the barn, the fire had not yet broken through the roof. Sullivan stated in a sworn affidavit that when he went into the O'Leary barn, 'he found the hay in the ..." (p. 116) [gbooks, "Dalton house", p. 116]
* The fire reached "Dalton's house so quickly, that Dalton's mother-in-law, who was in the house at the time the fire broke out, was barely able to escape the home before two sides of the building crashed in. This seems to be consistent with Mrs ..." (p. 119) [gbooks, "Dalton house", p. 119]
* Appendix B: "Dalton's house was set back from the street, 'leaving room for a contemplated front addition.' Even if ..."; "It was helpful but not crucial in determining whether or not Sullivan could see the ..." (p. 196) [gbooks, "Dalton house", p. 196]
* Mrs McLaughlin's testimony "suggests that another fence ran from the front of Dalton's ..." (p. 233); Sullivan "was apparently sitting against it. People living along the south side of DeKoven Street would not be able to question this ..." (p. 124) [gbooks, "William White" p. 233; "boys" p. 124]

### 3.3 Time-line

* "the Evening Journal published a 'chronological table of the Great Fire, showing the hours at which the buildings named were known to be in flames.' This table indicates that the O'Leary barn burned at 9:30 P.M." (p. 193, n.) [gbooks, "Evening Journal", p. 193]
* Regan: "William White's house for about twenty or twenty-five minutes; as he turned around, ready to go home, he saw the fire. Regan testified that after going home, he heard a neighbor say the O'Leary barn was on fire 'a short while ..." (p. 130) [gbooks, "William White", p. 130]
* "the sultry and stifling confines of a hay-filled loft" (p. 101); "The temperature was an unseasonably warm 79 degrees that day, windows were likely open, yet no one testified they heard him yelling, Bales notes." [web/irishamerica_2021.txt]; his weather source is "Meteorological Observations by the United States Signal Corps" (p. 106 n.) [gbooks, "Chicago Title", p. 106]
* On light: "What about artificial light? Although gas street lights were present in 1871, they probably did not illuminate Mrs. O'Leary's home. There were 533 miles of streets in Chicago at the time of the fire, but only 195 miles were ..." (p. 118) [gbooks, "smoking", p. 118]

### 3.4 Dennis Regan's testimony and the "accomplice" question

* Section heading "Was Regan an Accomplice?" (p. 127): "It is possible that Dennis Regan, a laborer, might also have been responsible for causing the fire, or at least was in the barn when the fire started. Regan testified at the inquiry, and when the fire ..." [gbooks, "Regan", p. 127]
* "It appears that Dennis Regan was one of the first people to arrive at the O'Leary property after their barn caught fire. Accounts differ, however, as to whether it was Regan or Daniel Sullivan who first alerted the O'Learys. In two affidavits published ..." (p. 128); the Board "subsequently referred to the name as 'Rogan.'" (p. 128) [gbooks, "Regan"/"Ahern", p. 128]
* "Dennis Regan's testimony indicates that Sullivan was not the only visitor crowding the O'Leary house on the night of October 8. Regan testified that prior to the fire he too ..." (p. 129); "Why did Regan testify that he heard music as he ran past the McLaughlin home, when it appears that Mr. McLaughlin had already stopped playing? Perhaps Regan heard McLaughlin's fiddle while Regan visited with the O'Learys that evening." (p. 137) [gbooks, "Regan", pp. 129, 137]
* "Perhaps Regan simply wanted to distance himself from Sullivan. Perhaps it was Sullivan who caused the fire, so Regan, fearing 'guilt by association,' did not want to testify that he was with Sullivan prior to the time the fire started" (p. 132); "then Regan was pounding on the O'Leary door with the matchbox in his back pocket. As the inquiry ground to a conclusion in early December of 1871, Sullivan and Regan surely went to sleep at ..." (p. 132) [gbooks, "Regan"/"pipe", p. 132]
* Name variants: "'Dennis Ryan' is just one of the several aliases for 'Dennis Regan.' It appears that the transcriber wrote that 'Dennis Ryan' was sworn, but a careful examination of the penmanship indicates that the name could ..." (p. 227, n. 1); "as set forth in the 1870 Chicago city directory and in his 1869 mortgage" (p. 136 n. 50) [gbooks, "Regan", pp. 227, 136]

### 3.5 Bales's own reconstruction of what happened in the barn (chapter 4, "The Real Cause")

The chapter is written as a set of alternatives, each introduced by "Perhaps":
* "Perhaps Sullivan took out a pipe and after lighting it, tossed the match away, not realizing it was still lit. • Sullivan told the commissioners and marshals that the barn ..." (p. 129)
* "legs slipped out from me, and I went down.' Perhaps Sullivan was telling the truth. Perhaps Sullivan's peg leg slipped on the wet wood, causing him to stumble and drop his pipe into a pile of shavings. Perhaps it was Regan who smoked, and although he was careful with the match, he was not so careful when he scraped out and discarded what he thought was dead pipe ash prior to tamping in fresh tobacco ..." (p. 130)
* "... Regan jostle him, causing Sullivan to drop the match into some loose hay or a pile of wood shavings? • Perhaps Sullivan or Regan did bring a lamp into the barn, and a careless foot, not hoof, caused the fire. Regardless of how ..." (p. 130)
* "Perhaps the men left the O'Leary house together and walked to the barn to relax for a few minutes before going home. Did Sullivan's peg leg slip on the wet wood, causing him to stumble and ..." (p. 131); "Regan's feet? Perhaps Regan, relaxing against the wall of the barn, suddenly stretched out his legs as Sullivan hobbled by, causing him to lose his balance and fall. **No one knows what really happened in the barn on October 8, 1871** ..." (p. 131) [gbooks, "pipe", "Peg Leg", "Regan", pp. 129–131]
* Sullivan's motive to be in the barn: his mother's cow was kept there ("a cow owned by Sullivan's mother" [wiki/Daniel_Sullivan_GCF_oldid531309478.wikitext]; "Bales said he thinks Sullivan — whose mother kept a cow in O'Leary's barn — started the fire by accidentally knocking over a lantern or dropping a match or pipe. Faced with the enormity of the fire, he lied, Bales contends." [web/baltimoresun_1997-10-12.txt])
* The peg-leg anecdote (Appendix A, "Did Peg Leg Slip Between the Floorboards of Mrs. O'Leary's Barn?", p. 182): "One ex-fireman recounted the story that on the day after the fire, Daniel Sullivan was using a crutch instead of his wooden leg. When the man (then about ten years old) asked Sullivan where the leg was, Sullivan led him to the remains of the O'Leary barn. There, stuck in the ruins, was the leg. Sullivan explained that 'it caught in the ..." (pp. 182–183) [gbooks, "Peg Leg"/"smoking", pp. 182–183]; Musham (p. 97) tells the same anecdote as fact.

### 3.6 The McLaughlin party, the "milk for punch" story, and the Cohn/boys stories

* "McLaughlin were hosting a party in honor of Mrs. McLaughlin's 'greenhorn' brother, who had just come to America from Ireland. Someone from this party, seeking milk to make either punch or an oyster supper, crept into the O'Leary ..." (p. 90); "In 1903, Callahan came forward with the apocryphal tale that she was in the barn ..." (p. 91); "McLaughlin partially confirmed O'Leary's suggestion that 'there was one out of the party went in for to milk my cows.' That is, Mrs. McLaughlin admitted — but only after being asked by the Board — that some guests apparently did ..." (p. 92); "When Mrs. O'Leary was asked if there was dancing 'going on at the time the fire broke out,' she merely replied, 'I could not tell you, sir.'" (p. 114) [gbooks, "McLaughlin", pp. 90–92, 114]
* Bales's annotated transcript notes that the Board asked Mrs McLaughlin "twice if anyone had left her home that evening. (See pages 228-29 and 229-30.) The officials must have found her answers to be inconclusive, because now they ask her a third time." (p. 233 n. 11) and "But here she is asked to identify these 'three boys.' How did the Board know that three boys left her home? Perhaps the transcriber omitted ..." (p. 233) [gbooks, "McLaughlin"/"boys", p. 233]
* Cohn (see Section 6): pp. 97–101, 109, 306, 320, 326.
* Boys smoking: "There is no evidence at all that ... youthful smokers (or drinkers) caused the fire, and so this theory ..." (p. 97); "the possibility that now-anonymous neighborhood children concocted the cow and lamp story remains a very plausible theory." (p. 80) [gbooks, "smoking" p. 97; "lamp" p. 80]

### 3.7 Ahern's "confession" and the earliest printing

* "These irregularities prove Ahern to be less than credible and are sufficient to completely discredit his explanation for the legend of Mrs. O'Leary's cow (Figure 36). As Chicagoans entered the twentieth century and ..." (p. 56); "Despite the many inconsistencies in Ahern's post-1871 newspaper articles, historians have continued to promulgate the 'confession of Michael Ahern' as the basis for the O'Leary legend. And other penitents have joined Ahern in the confessional. In 1938 Dr ..." (p. 57); "Not surprisingly, English's reminiscences of the fire, published in the Tribune in 1891, include no mention of his purported role in taking Mrs. O'Leary and her cow from obscurity to immortality. Although Ahern alleged ..." (p. 57) [gbooks, "Ahern"/"lamp", pp. 56–57]
* His Ahern sources (pp. 77–78 nn.): "Mrs. O'Leary Cow Story Refuted by Old Reporter," Chicago Daily Tribune, 21 January 1915, sec. 2, p. 13; "Reporter of 1871 Fire Describes Blaze of Today," Chicago Sunday Tribune, 8 October 1911, sec. 1, p. [2]; Michael Ahern, "The Fire Fighters," (Chicago) Daily Inter Ocean, 9 October 1893, sec. 1, p. [2] ("Firemen reminisce about the fire and why it spread out of ..." p. 327) [gbooks, "Ahern" pp. 77–78; "spontaneous combustion" p. 327]
* Earliest printing: the Evening Journal extra of 9 Oct (p. 320, above) — "No newspaper was printed the morning of Oct. 9, but when the papers were able to get out 'extras' the cow and lamp story was given as the cause of the holocaust. This is one more reason why Ahern's credibility is suspect" (p. 78).
* Ahern's "green hay" claim: "Ahern indicated that Jim O'Leary had told him that the green hay had been placed in the loft two weeks before the fire [emphasis added]. See Andreas, vol. 2, p. 714; 'Linked to Chicago's Two Worst Fires,' sec. 7, p. 10" (p. 106 n.) — Andreas's Dushek statement has "On Saturday, the day before the fire, I noticed a fine load of timothy hay which was taken into the alley and unloaded into the O'Leary barn" [ia/andreas_v2..., II: 714], which is Bales's point against Ahern's spontaneous-combustion story.
* Ahern on the alarm: "Ahern wrote in the October 9, 1893, issue of the Inter Ocean that 'Schaefer, the watchman, could not be blamed much ..." (p. 186); "Ahern maintained that Goll did turn in the alarms, but that they failed to go through because the Saturday night fire knocked out some of the fire alarm telegraph lines. True to form, Ahern was probably mistaken, as the inquiry ..." (p. 188) [gbooks, "Ahern", pp. 186, 188]

### 3.8 Why the Board reached no finding — chapter 5, "The Inquiry — Charade or Cover-Up?" (pp. 139–163)

* "the Fire Department made no such determination. Despite interviewing fifty people during the course of its inquiry investigation ..." (p. 60, "The Official Investigation Into the Cause of the Fire") [gbooks, "kerosene", p. 60]
* "Curiously, a few months later Fire Marshal Robert A. Williams veered sharply away from this official position. In ..." (p. 60) [gbooks, "spark", p. 60]
* "Even stranger is the public's lack of reaction to the Board's tepid final report, which the Evening Journal ..." (p. 143); the Evening Journal called it "the 'long expected fire investigation.' On the following day the Republican hailed the testimony of William J. Brown and Mathias Schaefer as the first step towards 'brushing away the cobwebs that ..." (p. 142); "Evening Journal, Republican and Times published virtually nothing about Mrs. O'Leary and her cow in December ..." (p. 159); "December 12 Times remarked that the Board's conclusions were given ..." (p. 159) [gbooks, "spark" p. 143; "Evening Journal" pp. 142, 159; "coverup" p. 159]
* His thesis of prejudgment: "These statements indicate that even before the inquiry began, Mrs. O'Leary was being blamed for starting the fire. For this reason it is doubtful that the fire marshals and the ..." (p. 155); "Why should they attempt to determine the cause of the fire, when ..." (p. 155); Tribune 16 Nov 1871, p. 4: "We have still the O'Leary cow, the man with a pipe who passed through the O'Leary back-yard just before the fire ...." (p. 81 n. 20) [gbooks, "William White"/"coverup" p. 155; "Chicago Title" p. 81]
* "the Board and marshals were listening closely to Benner's rambling account" (p. 149); the Board's real concern was the Department's conduct — chapter 5 is largely about Brown, Schaefer, Goll and the alarm (pp. 141–158). Interview summary: "The investigation into the cause of the fire was lackluster at best ... I'm convinced that the fire department could have determined the cause of the fire had anybody wanted to. But they didn't want to. They had their own agenda of making themselves look good." [web/modernfarmer_2014.txt]
* Mrs O'Leary's own testimony, in Bales's transcript: "The first question the Board asked her was 'What do you know ..." (p. 59); "Sullivan, Mrs. O'Leary never gave a definite answer to the question. See Catherine O'Leary, Inquiry, vol. [1], pp. 75–77." (p. 161 n.) [gbooks, "kerosene" p. 59; "coverup" p. 161]. Her recorded words as quoted by a 2021 source: "I could not tell anything of the fire, only that two men came by the door. I guess it was my husband got outside the door and he ran back to the bedroom and said, 'Kate, the barn is fire!' I ran out, and the whole barn was on fire. Well, I went out to the barn, and upon my word I could not tell any more about the fire." [web/morningagclips.txt]

### 3.9 The comet, spontaneous combustion and chimney-spark chapters (ch. 3, "Debunking Other Myths")

* Comet: "Educational film director Mel Waskin contends in his book Mrs. O'Leary's Comet (1985) that a comet called Biela II caused ..." (p. 101); "But Waskin fails to note that beaches were not the only source of sand in Peshtigo, that at least some of the roads were apparently covered with it." (p. 102); "How could a comet streaking across the sky above Chicago go unnoticed by the city's 334,000 inhabitants? If this comet did strike Chicago, why didn't anyone report seeing it flash overhead or hearing an explosion when it struck the earth ..." (p. 103); Peshtigo "is more likely that the village was destroyed by a firestorm generated by the convection whirls of forest fires" (p. 104); "comet did not veer off course— what, then, did cause the Great Chicago Fire? History books will indicate that the cause has never been determined. But these books fail to suggest that the story of the fire did not have to end with a ..." (p. 105) [gbooks, "comet", pp. 101–105]
* Spontaneous combustion: "The spontaneous combustion of 'green' hay in the O'Leary barn is one of the more unusual possible causes." (p. 85); "before spontaneous combustion there is spontaneous heating. As the temperature of stored hay begins to rise and even before there is actual ignition, a great deal of smoke is produced. This smoke is accompanied by an irritating pungent odor ... because hay's combustion products include aldehydes and acrolein." (p. 86) (sources: USDA, *Spontaneous Combustion of Hay*, 1929; Kirk's Fire Investigation; John D. DeHaan, acknowledged p. viii) [gbooks, "spontaneous combustion", pp. 85–86, 105, 310]
* Chimney spark: "The commissioners asked Mr. O'Leary during the inquiry: 'Could sparks from a house south from your barn being driven by the wind get into your barn and into those shavings?' O'Leary was noncommittal, replying ..." (p. 86); "the home of Mrs. Anne Murray. The Murray and O'Leary properties were each about one hundred feet deep. Could a chimney spark from Mrs. Murray's house travel sixty feet or more and eventually wend its way into the ..." (p. 87) [gbooks, "spark", pp. 86–87]
* Index of theories he treats (p. 335): "cause of the Great Chicago Fire: ... Cohn, Louis M., knocking over a lantern while gambling 3-4, 97-98, 100–101, 112; comet 101-5; cow kicking over lamp or lantern 3-4, 6, 52-57, 59-61, 63-68, 75–76, 78n6, 79n8, 79-80n10, 85, 105, 108-9n42, 111n62, 131–32, 155–56, 159, 172–73n6, 175n10, 176–77, 201–3, 227n4; Divine vengeance 103 ...; spark from chimney 60, 86-88, 228n8, 236, 236n4, 295; spontaneous combustion of hay 56, 79, 85-86, 105; stranger, mysterious 63-64, 81n20; Sullivan, Daniel 112–32, 223-24n9; women getting milk for punch 56-57"; also "rat hunters" (p. 337) [gbooks, "comet"/"spark"/"Peshtigo", pp. 335, 337]

### 3.10 Every place (in the snippets obtained) where Bales states a limit of his evidence

| page | statement |
|---|---|
| 6 | "there is no longer even a smoking gun; there is no longer even a smoking city that might give testimony to what happened on that Sunday evening. But the evidence that I do have is substantial, and I am ..." |
| 80 | "the possibility that now-anonymous neighborhood children concocted the cow and lamp story remains a very plausible theory." (i.e. the origin of the legend is itself undetermined) |
| 97 | "There is no evidence at all that ... youthful smokers (or drinkers) caused the fire" |
| 101 | on Cohn: "it seems more likely that he was playing in this house or in a nearby shed" — an inference, not evidence |
| 105 | "History books will indicate that the cause has never been determined." |
| 115 | "at least one neighboring home blocked his view" — the "at least one" hedges Forbes's house |
| 127 | "It is possible that Dennis Regan ... might also have been responsible ... or at least was in the barn" |
| 129–131 | the whole reconstruction is a list of "Perhaps ..." alternatives |
| 130 | "Perhaps Sullivan was telling the truth." |
| 131 | "No one knows what really happened in the barn on October 8, 1871" |
| 133 | on the wooden leg: "although this is undoubtedly correct, it is not a necessary assumption" |
| 196 | "It was helpful but not crucial in determining whether or not Sullivan could see the ..." |
| 198 | the line-of-sight distance is "conservatively determined by measuring from the midpoint of White's west parcel" (an estimate) |
| 233 | Mrs McLaughlin's testimony only "suggests" a second fence; "Perhaps the transcriber omitted ..." |
| 136 n. 50 | "It seems possible that at least some of these name variations (Dennis Ryan, Dennis Regan) ..." |

The queries "unknown", "cannot be proven", "speculation", "circumstantial", "no one knows", "I believe" were still blocked by Google when this was written; if they later return, `gbooks/BALES_SNIPPETS_BY_QUERY.txt` will contain the additional page references.

### 3.10a Late-arriving Google Books snippets bearing on Sections 3.2–3.5 (queries answered after the sections above were written)

* Sight line, Forbes house (p. 196, Appendix B heading): "Forbes' House Would Have Blocked Sullivan's View of the Barn — H. A. Musham's monograph includes a diagram of the O'Leary neighborhood. Musham locates Walter Forbes' house on it with exacting accuracy. As depicted, the house …"; p. 199: "…Forbes and White parcels were also twenty-five feet wide half-lots. The one-and-one-half lot tract owned by Catherine Sullivan was seventy-five feet wide. With this information, the distance from where Sullivan sat to a point due west and directly opposite the O'Leary passageway can be computed as follows…"; p. 116: "…Forbes's home also burned down. One might be tempted to excuse the fire officials from failing to address the incongruity of Sullivan's testimony, as any buildings that blocked Sullivan's line of sight were not in existence at the [time of the inquiry]…" (Bales's own explanation of why the Board never tested the sight line); p. 184: "…Forbes, which was immediately east of Dalton's home. Dalton, who heard the woman's voice through the west windows of his house, recalled that it came from the direction of the O'Leary property. H. A. Musham, seeing a chance to…" [gbooks, "Forbes"].
* The reconstruction is labelled conjecture in the figure caption (p. 131, Figure 63, "…DENNIS REGAN IN THE O'LEARY BARN"): "This is an illustration of how the fire might have started in the O'Leary barn. Although purely conjecture, it is conjecture based on the inquiry testimony of Daniel Sullivan and Dennis Regan. Both…" [gbooks, "Denis Regan"]. Add to the table of stated limits in 3.10.
* Regan's name: p. 127: "…'Denis Ryan.' Andreas quotes this Tribune account, but changes the name to 'Dennis Rogan' without comment…"; p. 227 (Appendix note): "'Dennis Ryan' is just one of the several aliases for 'Dennis Regan.' It appears that the transcriber wrote that 'Dennis Ryan' was sworn, but a careful examination of the penmanship indicates that the name…"; p. 136 n. 50: "…'Dennis Regan,' as set forth in the 1870 Chicago city directory and in his 1869 mortgage."
* Timeline (p. 47 n.): "…Andreas persuasively argues that the fire began as early as 8:45 P.M., it is quite possible that the fire started much later, at about 9:20 P.M. See Andreas, vol. 2, pp. 701, 711-16; see also Appendix A, 'When Did the…'" [gbooks, "Andreas"].
* Bales on the historians he relies on (p. 76): "Carl Smith and Karen Sawislak suggest that she suffered the vituperative pen of the fourth estate, not so much because of any culpability as to the fire, but rather because of the prejudices and stereotypes of the native-born…" [gbooks, "Carl Smith"/"Sawislak"].

### 3.10b More stated limits and sight-line detail from the last Google Books rows (queries answered after 3.10a)

* p. 6 [gbooks, 'beyond a reasonable doubt']: "…beyond a reasonable doubt . All the wit- nesses are dead . The city has been rebuilt . The trail has long been cold , covered over by skyscrapers and expressways . It is some- how appropriate that where the O'Leary barn once harbored…"
* p. 105 [gbooks, 'speculation']: "…speculation , ranging from the reasonable to the absurd . Through it all , though , the question has always re- mained : If a cow did not kick over a lantern , if hay did not spontaneously com- bust , if a comet did not veer off course…"
* p. 131 [gbooks, 'no one knows']: "…No one knows what really happened in the barn on October 8 , 1871 , but the evidence seems clear that the fire was not caused by Mrs. O'Leary's cow kicking over a lantern . ( Drawing by Marshall Philyaw ) They could have asked Regan to…"
* p. 115 [gbooks, 'blocked']: "…blocked his view . Sullivan testified that while in front of White's house , " I saw a fire in Leary's barn . " But Figure 54 discloses that this would have been impossible . Regardless of where Sullivan sat along the front line of…"
* p. 116 [gbooks, 'blocked']: "…blocked Sullivan's line of sight were not in existence at the time of the inquiry . Therefore , his claims as to see- ing the fire from across the street could not be verified or challenged by the commis- sioners or marshals.17 It is…"
* p. 117 [gbooks, 'blocked']: "…blocked his view of the barn . Why did he state that he was in front of White's house ? Perhaps Sullivan did not know that the commissioners had prepared these dia- grams . The inquiry transcript indicates that the Board did not use…"
* p. 117 [gbooks, 'line of sight']: "…line of sight.22 Is it possible that Sullivan saw the smoke of the burning barn rising above Dalton's house ? If that were the case , then the location and height of these buildings ning , because my mother keeps a cow herself , Four…"
* p. 113 [gbooks, 'Did the Cow Do It']: "…was sitting on the sidewalk , by a fence " at the head of White's house or head of his lot . " William White did own land east of Sullivan's prop- erty ; it was across the street , on the south side of DeKoven Street , and southeast of…"
* p. 118 [gbooks, '193 feet']: "…193 feet ( see Appendix B ) .25 Sullivan admitted during the inquiry that he could not run very fast . In 1871 many Chicago streets were paved with ei- ther wooden blocks or stones . As previ- ously mentioned , however , DeKoven Street…"
* p. 119 [gbooks, '193 feet']: "…feet and six inches . " Although Sullivan knew to the inch the length of his lot , he was wildly in- accurate when ... 193 feet into a burning barn and eventually leave without being burned . Granted , it is pos- sible that…"
* p. 124 [gbooks, '193 feet']: "…193 feet into a burning barn full of hay and wood shavings , struggle with animals. state that he was closer , on the same side of the street but in front of his own home or the McLaughlin home , as anyone at the McLaughlin party could…"
* p. 118 [gbooks, 'wooden leg']: "…wood , wood shavings , and coal for fuel , so gas service was probably not even available . It seems likely ... wooden leg , would be able to hobble 193 feet , which is more than one - half the length of a football field , over…"
* p. 133 [gbooks, 'wooden leg']: "…peg leg was made of . The November 26 , 1871 , Chicago Tri- bune referred to his wooden leg , and although this is undoubtedly correct , it is not a necessary as- sumption . For example , in Bloody Williamson , an account of a 1922…"
* p. 182 [gbooks, 'wooden leg']: "…wooden leg went between two boards , and he half fell over , catch- ing himself on his sound leg . He caught hold of the wall and pulled himself out .... ” But this was not disclosed in the transcript of his testimony , which states…"
* p. 196 [gbooks, 'line of sight']: "…line of sight . Unfortunately , Mus- O'Leary barn shed -fence Forbes House door 200 N O'Leary. ham's reference material , now in the Research Center of the Chicago Historical Society , does not indicate the source of his conclusions rela…"
* p. 233 [gbooks, 'blocked']: "…blocked Daniel Sullivan's view of the O'Leary barn from where he allegedly sat across the street in front of William White's house . Mrs. McLaughlin's testi- mony suggests that another fence ran from the front of Dalton's house towards…"

Reading: Bales's own summary of the evidentiary situation is on p. 6 ("All the witnesses are dead … The trail has long been cold"), and he repeatedly marks the sight-line argument as an inference the Board could not test because the blocking houses had burned (p. 116); the alternative that Sullivan saw smoke above Dalton's house is raised by Bales himself (p. 117); the location of the Forbes house rests on Musham's diagram, whose source Bales could not find in Musham's papers (p. 196).

### 3.11 Reception: the Harry E. Pratt award and the 1997 City Council resolution

* The book's own back matter (p. 1 of the Google Books edition, publisher's note): "City Council passed a resolution officially exonerating Mrs. O'Leary's cow from wrongdoing. Bales' detective work was a front page story for the Chicago Tribune and a feature story for the Sunday edition of The New York Times. His research was noted in ..." [gbooks, "City Council"/"resolution", p. 1]. Bales's bibliography lists "Parsons, Christi. 'Historian Finds a New Suspect for Chicago Fire.' 7 January 1997, Chicago Tribune" (p. 320) [gbooks, "comet", p. 320]. **The Harry E. Pratt Memorial Award** (Illinois State Historical Society) is not mentioned in any Bales snippet retrieved (the query "Pratt" returns only fireman Charles Pratt, p. 208) and the ISHS site was not reached; the only fetched attestation is the publisher's author blurb reproduced on a bookseller's listing of the 2002 McFarland edition: "Richard F. Bales is Assistant Regional Counsel for the Wheaton, Illinois office of Chicago Title Insurance Company. This title insurance company maintains the only set of land records that survived the blaze of 1871. Bales' initial conclusions concerning the cause of the Great Chicago Fire earned him the Illinois State Historical Society's Harry E. Pratt Memorial Award." [web/abebooks_bales_signed.txt, fetched 2026-09-14T07:12:02Z]. Treat the award as attested by the publisher only. The book's front matter confirms the article's venue and pagination: p. vii "…Illinois . Historic Preservation Agency in the Spring 1997 issue of the Illinois Historical Journal.1 This article included a diagram by an ex- traordinary graphic artist , Douglas A. Swanson . This drawing , as well as several…"; p. ix "…Illinois , who were somehow able to transform worn photos , faded pictures , and even grainy microfilm copies into ... Historical Journal 90 ( Spring 1997 ) , pp . 2-24 . around them . One sentence gave this work- ing class…" [gbooks, 'Illinois Historical Journal'].
* The resolution (Ald. Edward M. Burke; Committee on Police and Fire hearing at the Fire Academy, Monday 6 Oct 1997; full Council 28 Oct 1997): "In October 1997, Alderman Ed Burke introduced a resolution before the City Council officially exonerating Mrs. O'Leary of any involvement in the fire. The resolution concludes: 'WHEREAS, Although contemporary research appears to vindicate Mrs. O'Leary, she has unfairly remained vilified and maligned by history; now, therefore BE IT RESOLVED, That we, the Mayor and members of the Chicago City Council assembled this twenty-eighth day of October 1997, do hereby forever exonerate Mrs. O'Leary and her cow from all blame in regard to the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.'" [web/glessner_olearys_2021.txt, Glessner House Museum, 2021, thanking "historians Richard F. Bales, Ellie Carlson, and Ellen Skerrett"]. Knight-Ridder, 12 Oct 1997: "a Chicago City Council committee has approved a resolution absolving O'Leary and her cow. The full council may take it up later this month. ... The Chicago Fire Department's training academy now sits where O'Leary's barn once stood. It was the site of the council hearing Monday in which O'Leary's great-great granddaughter, Nancy Knight Connolly, testified: 'We always knew that she was innocent.'" [web/baltimoresun_1997-10-12.txt]. Chicago Public Library: "In 1997, they passed a resolution exonerating Catherine O'Leary and the cow. The City Council did not name an alternate culprit." [web/chipublib_whodunit.txt]. Wikipedia's claim that the council "stated that the actions of Sullivan on that day should be scrutinized" rests on Steve Mills, "Mrs. O'Leary, Cow Cleared by City Council Committee," Chicago Tribune, 6 Oct 1997 [obtained: web/tribune_1997-10-06_council_committee.txt], which reports the *committee* vote, not the full Council: "Nearly 126 years after the Great Chicago Fire, the city's Committee on Police and Fire on Monday replaced local legend with a better version of history and voted to exonerate Catherine O'Leary and her infamous cow. With the testimony of historians and the great-great-granddaughter of Mrs. O'Leary the centerpiece of a one-hour hearing, Ald. William Beavers (7th) and Edward Burke (14th) decided that O'Leary and her cow had been unfairly maligned as the accidental perpetrators of the fire. Instead, they said, the actions of Daniel 'Peg Leg' Sullivan, who had implicated Mrs. O'Leary in the Oct. 8, 1871 fire, should be scrutinized." DeBartolo (Tribune, 8 Oct 1997) adds that Burke "seems so convinced Peg Leg did it that last month he introduced a resolution" and that "Monday, the Council's Police and Fire Committee passed the resolution and sent it to the full Council for consideration" [web/tribune_debartolo_1997-10-08.txt]. Carl Smith calls it "a somewhat tongue-in-cheek hearing that culminated in the official exoneration of Catherine O'Leary" [gcf/oleary-legend.txt].
* Contemporary professional caution (1997): "While praising Bales' work, Carl Smith ... is cautious in drawing a firm conclusion now. 'I don't think we have any irrefutable, positive evidence that tells us absolutely for sure what started the Chicago Fire,' he said." and "Other historians concur that he is the first to use the newly available materials, although they are less sure of his conclusions." [web/baltimoresun_1997-10-12.txt]. A mock trial "at John Marshall Law School held not long after the City Council's exoneration of O'Leary ended with a jury just as convinced that Sullivan hadn't lied about the events of that night." [web/abc7_2021.txt]
* The Chicago Public Library's 2009 fire pages "criticized his account" per Wikipedia (citing a dead thechicagofire.com URL) [wiki/GCF_precise_start_section.wikitext]; the CPL's surviving 2014 blog lists Sullivan among "alleged perpetrators" without endorsing him [web/chipublib_whodunit.txt].

---

## 4. Robert Cromie, *The Great Chicago Fire* (1958; reissued 1994) and Herman Kogan & Robert Cromie, *The Great Fire: Chicago, 1871* (1971)

**References.** Robert Cromie, *The Great Chicago Fire* (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1958; Rutledge Hill Press, 1994, ISBN 978-1-55853-264-9; Google Books ids YnR5AAAAMAAJ [1958], uSYdMwEACAAJ, ISGxoAEACAAJ — all "no pages" view). Herman Kogan and Robert Cromie, *The Great Fire: Chicago, 1871* (New York: Putnam, 1971; LCCN 78-153991; Google Books FEhURAAACAAJ, no view). **Neither full text was obtainable** (archive.org holds lending copies only: `greatchicagofire0000crom` returns 401 on text files). What follows is from (a) Herman Kogan's 1971 centennial essay reprinted by the University of Chicago Magazine in 2021, which is the argument of the Kogan–Cromie book in short, and (b) other authors' citations of Cromie.

**Kogan 1971 on the cause** [web/uchicago_mag_2021.txt]: "Whatever the specific cause, it began in the barn behind the home of Patrick and Catherine O'Leary on De Koven Street ... One such controversy still revolves around the question: Did Catherine O'Leary's cow really start the fire? Did she indeed kick over a lamp that set afire dry hay stored in the barn? In the hours just after the big blaze began, there seemed to be little doubt that this was precisely what happened. In fact, Mrs. O'Leary herself, according to contemporary records cited in a monumental and detailed monograph about the Great Fire by Howard A. Musham in 1941, admitted as much." He then retells Musham's Critchell and Schaller stories and the "salt" story, and: "As the hours of disaster continued ... Mrs. O'Leary did little talking—indeed, remained silent until official inquiries in November. And by that time she virtually denied everything she had said earlier. One can hardly blame her ..." Other theories: "The old Chicago Times ... ran a front-page story in the weeks after the fire alleging that agents of the Paris Commune had been dispatched to set the city ablaze. Others—especially one of the more notable O'Leary offspring, 'Big Jim' O'Leary, a multimillionaire gambling boss on the city's South Side by the time he died in the mid–1920s—insisted the cause was spontaneous combustion. Still others claimed that small boys had been smoking in the hayloft or that one or the other of the O'Leary neighbors had come sneaking into the barn looking for milk for punch or for whiskey and had dropped a lantern." His verdict: "In retrospect and from this historical perspective, it is really not important, intriguing as the mystery evidently continues to be, to determine the specific cause. For the tragic irony is that however the fire started, it could very easily have been stopped, early except for some errors, the most perplexing of which involved the sounding of the alarm." The 1971 essay also records: "The fire, according to the best authorities, started between 8:30 and 8:45 p.m." and the Quinn/"cigar butt" anecdote.

**Cromie 1958 as cited by others.** Fedler 1985 cites Cromie p. 9 for the O'Leary family/neighbourhood (fn 2) [web/fedler_1985_ERIC_ED257108.txt, PDF p. 27]. Bales cites "Cromie, p. 15" among sources on the fire department (p. 43 n.) [gbooks, "City Council", p. 43]. Wikipedia cites the 1994 edition for "In 1893 the reporter Michael Ahern retracted the 'cow-and-lantern' story, admitting it was fabricated, but even his confession was unable to put the legend to rest" [wiki/GCF_precise_start_section.wikitext] — i.e. Cromie is the source of the widely repeated "1893" date for Ahern's retraction (Bales's 1893 Ahern piece is "The Fire Fighters", Inter Ocean, 9 Oct 1893, which in the snippets concerns the watchman and alarms, not a confession; see Section 7). **Concession/claim:** on the fetched evidence Cromie's position is that the legend is a reporter's fabrication and the cause unknown; the 1971 Kogan–Cromie book leans (via Musham) to the cow story being the earliest and best-attested account while declining to decide. Both are popular narrative histories without the tract-book or transcript work.

---

## 5. Academic monographs and articles: Sawislak 1995; Smith 1995 and 2020; Miller 1990; Pauly 1984; Fedler 1985

### 5.1 Karen Sawislak, *Smoldering City: Chicagoans and the Great Fire, 1871–1874* (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995; pb 1996, ISBN 0-226-73547-8)

Not obtainable in full (Google Books "no pages"; no archive.org lending text). Publishers Weekly's review (fetched) quotes the book's one sentence on ignition: "'Intensely dry conditions, a 20-m.p.h. southwest wind, and an unfortunate spark at approximately 10 o'clock on the night of October 8 all combined to turn Chicago into what two historians of the Great Fire would describe as "a vast ocean of flame."'" and summarises: "The rift between the immigrant working class and the wealthy 'native-born' Chicagoans made Catherine O'Leary (and her infamous bovine) a perfect scapegoat for anti-Irish, anti-working class invective." [web/pw_sawislak.txt]. Bales cites "Sawislak, p. 47" twice in his notes on the legend's early spread (p. 106 nn. 14–15) [gbooks, "Evening Journal", p. 106] and lists her among his sources on the department (p. 43). **Position:** the cause is "an unfortunate spark"; her subject is the social meaning of the O'Leary scapegoating, not the ignition. (Her time "approximately 10 o'clock" is later than every other author's.)

### 5.2 Carl Smith, *Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief: The Great Chicago Fire, the Haymarket Bomb, and the Model Town of Pullman* (Chicago, 1995; 2nd ed. 2007, Google Books OmwmBxUIufUC, partial view)

Full text not obtained; the Google Books partial-view copy was identified but search-within was not run before Google's bot-block set in (queued; see SOURCES.md). Smith's own summary of the book: "This book explores the imaginative dimensions of three cataclysmic events ... it argues that these events collectively shaped how Americans saw, and continue to see, the city." [web/carlsmith_nu_p15.txt]. His argument about the O'Leary legend is stated in his greatchicagofire.org essay (2011, with the Chicago History Museum), quoted in 5.4, and — in 1997 — "As a poor, clumsy Irishwoman she was a powerless comic stereotype ... 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." [web/baltimoresun_1997-10-12.txt, quoting "his own essay on the fire"].

### 5.3 Carl Smith, *Chicago's Great Fire: The Destruction and Resurrection of an Iconic American City* (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press/Grove Atlantic, 2020; pb 2021, ISBN 9780802159120)

Full text not obtained (Google Books sxUszgEACAAJ "no pages"; no lending copy located). A long excerpt "adapted" from the book, "The O'Learys and the Great Chicago Fire," *American Heritage* 65:7 (November 2020), was fetched in full [web/americanheritage_olearys_full.txt]; interviews from 2021 [web/abc7_2021.txt = AP; web/nbcchicago.txt] and 2014 [web/modernfarmer_2014.txt] supplement it.

**Claim about the cause.** Smith does not name a cause. The excerpt narrates the O'Leary household on the night ("The O'Learys turned in about the same time as Chief Fire Marshal Williams. Catherine, who was nursing a sore foot, would have to awaken a little after 4:00 a.m. to milk her cows. Daniel Sullivan came by to chat the O'Learys up, but he left when he discovered they had already gone to bed. ... An hour later, about nine o'clock, Daniel Sullivan's urgent shouting roused Patrick."), describes Sullivan ("The twenty-six-year-old Sullivan earned his living driving a dray, a heavy-duty delivery wagon. A gregarious and garrulous man who favored his pipe, Sullivan was an easily recognizable figure on DeKoven Street since he hobbled about on a wooden leg."), lists the rival theories ("Some suggested that the McLaughlins, the tenants in the O'Learys' front cottage, or one of their guests that evening had ventured into the dark barn to draw fresh milk for a celebratory punch. Others speculated that the fateful spark came from the pipe of Daniel Sullivan, the one-legged neighbor who awakened Patrick and Catherine O'Leary, or that boys shooting dice or playing cards in the barn ignited the hay. Perhaps it was a wayward cinder from someone's chimney. Maybe spontaneous combustion. Or an arsonist who just liked to see things burn. Or those Communards or other sinister enemies of the established order."), and explains the scapegoating: "Catherine O'Leary already had at least five strikes against her: she was a poor immigrant Irish Catholic woman. ... She was also defenseless and illiterate, with no effective means to counter her accusers." On the McDermott affidavits: "In her statement Catherine O'Leary said that she milked her cows daily at 5:00 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. On the evening of the fire, she made her last trip to the barn at about seven o'clock, when she fed the horse and put him in for the night. She carried no lamp. ... All three signed their statements with an X." In 2021: "So how did the fire start? Smith said that may never be known." and "'I call her in my book the fire's most enduring victim,' said Smith." [web/abc7_2021.txt]. In 2014: "there does seem to be a general historical consensus that the fire started in or around Mrs. O'Leary's barn, though the actual cause of the fire, he says, remains 'cloudy and confusing.' 'I really like Richard Bales and really appreciate all that he's done,' says Smith, 'But I can only say that [his theory] is based upon a certain amount of supposition.'" [web/modernfarmer_2014.txt]

**Evidence cited.** The 1871 press (Journal, Times, Tribune, John Hay's New-York Tribune piece), the McDermott affidavits, the inquiry, the clergy's sermons. The excerpt's details about Sullivan's pipe and age, the "sore foot", the four cows/calf/horse, and "two tons of timothy hay ... the day before" match Andreas II: 714 (Dushek's "fine load of timothy hay") and Bales.

**What Smith concedes / how he treats Bales.** He credits Bales's research (2011 essay: "Richard F. Bales ... contends (as some others did in 1871 and in later years) that an O'Leary neighbor named Daniel Sullivan accidentally sparked the blaze. Bales bases his argument on an exhaustive review of property records and the post-fire inquiry." [gcf/oleary-legend.txt]) but declines the conclusion: "It is highly unlikely that we will ever have definitive knowledge of the cause of the fire. In any case, the more intriguing issue is not the unresolvable one of whether the O'Leary legend has any truth to it, but why it has attracted so much continuing interest" [gcf/oleary-legend.txt].

### 5.4 Carl Smith, "The O'Leary Legend," *The Great Chicago Fire & The Web of Memory* (Chicago History Museum / Northwestern University, 2011) [gcf/oleary-legend.txt]

Key passages: "Did Mrs. O'Leary's cow start the Great Chicago Fire? It's possible. The conflagration almost surely began in the vicinity of the crowded barn, where Kate O'Leary kept the five cows she milked twice a day ... There was a rumor that Kate admitted to different people right 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 ... But there are plenty of reasons to think that Mrs. O'Leary and her benighted cow--named Daisy, Madeline, and Gwendolyn in assorted retellings--were innocent. Kate O'Leary offered sworn testimony that she was in bed when the fire started, and the official inquiry concluded that it found no proof of her guilt. Those who heard her 'confess' presented conflicting versions of why she said she was in the barn. A person who years later claimed that as a boy he found the broken lamp under some floorboards and took it home never explained how, if the barn had floorboards, 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 Ahern: "on the fortieth anniversary of the great conflagration a 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. ... Ahern opined that one of the revelers went out to get milk 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 stated 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.'" On other theories: "Some boys were sneaking a smoke or gambling in the barn. Spontaneous combustion. A meteor split into pieces as it fell to earth October 8 ... Daisy acted alone." On 1971 and 1997: "At the hundredth anniversary of the fire in 1971, the Chicago Association of Commerce and Industry absolved Mrs. O'Leary and pointed the finger of blame--as does Richard Bales ...--at Daniel Sullivan, an O'Leary neighbor." The S. H. Kimball memoir quoted there: "one of the planks in the floor of the shed had been broken forming a V shaped space. This space was filled with burnt hay and a glitter [and] sparkle caught my eye. Leaning down I picked up the bottom of a small glass lamp." (Kimball is Musham's third lamp witness, p. 153.)

### 5.5 Ross Miller, *American Apocalypse: The Great Fire and the Myth of Chicago* (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), ix + 287 pp.

Not obtainable (lending only). The fetched review (David J. Nordloh, *Indiana Magazine of History*) describes it as a myth-study in the tradition of *Virgin Land*, "framed by ... a single ... city between the comprehensive conflagration of October, 1871, and the lesser one that destroyed the White City ... of 1894", drawing on "journalistic accounts of the fall and rise of the city, boosterism, minor novels and novelists ..." and judges that "Miller finds too many myths in the flames" [web/imh_review_miller.txt]. Nothing in the review concerns the ignition; on the fetched evidence Miller's book is about the fire's cultural meaning, not its cause, and Bales's bibliography (which lists Sawislak, Cromie, Kogan, Musham, Waskin, Wells, Gess/Lutz) was not seen to cite it in the snippets obtained.

### 5.6 John J. Pauly, "The Great Chicago Fire as a National Event," *American Quarterly* 36:5 (Winter 1984), pp. 668–683

Not obtainable (JSTOR blocked through the proxy). No fetched text quotes its argument on the cause; by title and by Sawislak's/Smith's use of it, it concerns how the fire was constructed as a national media event. It is listed here as a shortfall; no claim about its content is made.

### 5.7 Fred Fedler, "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow and Other Newspaper Tales about the Chicago Fire of 1871," paper, AEJMC 68th convention, Memphis, August 1985, 29 pp. (ERIC ED257108) [web/fedler_1985_ERIC_ED257108.pdf / .txt] — obtained in full

Directly on point (the press origin of the legend), and cited by Wikipedia. **Claims:** "Chicago's great fire of 1871 started in the O'Leary's barn, but Mrs. O'Leary was in bed at the time. Because of a sore foot, Mrs. O'Leary had gone to bed early that night. The tale about her cow seems to have been created by a reporter who wanted to make his story about the fire more interesting." (PDF p. 3). **Evidence:** microfilm of the Chicago, Milwaukee, New Orleans, Louisville, New York, Boston and Atlanta papers; the Board's report as printed in the Tribune of 12 Dec 1871. He shows the Evening Post extra (Monday) and its Tuesday issue "reported that the fire had started in a small barn. The Post commented, 'How those flames originated we do not know, though [rumor] has it that they were the result of incendiarism, and also that they sprang from carelessly used pipe or cigar.'" (PDF p. 8); that the Times of 18 Oct (Wilkie) was "obviously fraudulent" (p. 9); that a genuine-seeming Journal interview had Mrs O'Leary say "I always milked my cows by daylight, and never had a lamp of any kind or a candle about the barn. It must have been set afire. Two neighbors at the far end of the alley saw a strange man come up about half-past 9 in the evening." (p. 11 — the "mysterious stranger", Bales pp. 63–64); the New York World of 13 Oct had the "salt" story five days before the Times (p. 10); and, decisively for Section 7, that "Five sources, all apparently reliable, say a newspaper reporter created the story" but "Despite the claims, The Herald seems to have been one of the last newspapers to mention Mrs. O'Leary's cow, not the first. On Monday, The Herald reported, 'The fire started in a row of two-story wooden tenements on Deckoven Street.' ... The Herald did not mention a cow until Wednesday. Even then, it failed to mention Mrs. O'Leary." (pp. 24–25). His list of suspects (pp. 23–24) adds two Patrick O'Leary versions from F. E. Coyne's *In Reminiscence* (1941), "Tramps sleeping in the barn", "an adult had stepped into the open barn to light a pipe or cigar while sheltered from the strong wind", and "three men trying out a new terrier had been chasing rats in the O'Leary's barn, and one of them dropped a lighted match", and records that "Big Jim O'Leary admitted that the fire started in his family's barn. But O'Leary blamed tramps or neighborhood boys who were smoking. O'Leary said his mother blamed a neighbor's carelessness (probably the McLaughlin's)." **Concessions:** "Regardless of the story's source, it was a fanciful tale." and the alternative that "Several reporters may have heard a picturesque rumor, started by someone else, and all those reporters may have included it in their stories." (p. 26) — i.e. he cannot show who first said it.

### 5.8 How Bales (2002) cites the monographs in Sections 4–5 (late-arriving snippets)

* Cromie: Bales uses the 1958 text (cited "Cromie") and the 1994 illustrated edition ("Cromie, illus. ed.", Rutledge Hill Press, p. 303 n.) for the fire department and the city (pp. 13–16, 36–37, 125–26, 181, 210); on the 1971 Kogan & Cromie volume the bibliography notes (p. 332): "…Cromie completed the research and wrote the book, which was published under his own name. What is described herein as Cromie's reference materials are in the Research Center of the Chicago Historical Society…" [gbooks, "Cromie"]. No snippet shows Cromie taking a position on the ignition.
* Sawislak, *Smoldering City* (1995): cited for the Relief and Aid Society, the "dangerous classes" (pp. 44–47, 83, 125) and, with Smith, for the press's treatment of Mrs. O'Leary (p. 76, quoted in 3.10a); p. 106 n.: "'Petroleuse communists' were in the news at the time of the fire. See, e.g., 'Women of the Commune,' Chicago…" [gbooks, "Sawislak"].
* Smith, *Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief* (1995): cited as "Smith" (pp. 23–25 "instant histories"; 51–55; 57–58; 288; 306); Bales's bibliographic annotation (p. 314): "This Chicago history contains rich and exhaustive…" (truncated) [gbooks, "Carl Smith"]. Bales's preface (p. 5) names Sawislak's and Smith's works as the scholarly context for his own.

---

## 6. Louis M. Cohn and the "craps game in the hayloft" theory

### 6.1 Bibliographic anchors (what exists, what was obtained)

| Item | Status |
|---|---|
| DeBartolo, Anthony. "Col. Mustard with a Bic?" *Chicago Tribune*, 8 Oct 1997. Web headline as served today: "COL. MUSTARD WITH A BIC?"; Ethier's gambling bibliography (`sources/web/ethier_backmatter.txt`, lines 811–812) lists the same piece as "Who caused the Great Chicago Fire? A possible deathbed confession. Chicago Tribune (Oct. 8)"; the (dead) Hyde Park Media reprint was titled "Who Caused The Great Chicago Fire: The Cow? Or Louis M. Cohn?" (Wikipedia refs 45–47). | **Obtained in full**: `sources/web/tribune_debartolo_1997-10-08.txt` (from https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1997-10-08-9710080167-story.html, fetched 2026-09-14T07:10:22Z). |
| DeBartolo, Anthony. "Odds Improve That a Hot Game of Craps in Mrs. O'Leary's Barn Touched Off Chicago Fire." *Chicago Tribune*, 3 March 1998, sec. 5, pp. 1, 3 (citation form from Bales, p. 320: "Further discussion concerning Louis M. Cohn as the cause of the fire."). | **Obtained in full**: `sources/web/tribune_debartolo_1998-03-03.txt` (fetched 07:10:23Z). |
| Potash, Larry. "The Great Debate over the Great Fire." *Chicago Tribune*, 6 Oct 2006. | **Obtained**: `sources/web/tribune_potash_2006-10-06.txt`. |
| "Cohn Estate Turned Over to University." *Chicago Daily News*, 28 Sept 1944, sec. 1, p. 12. Bales's annotation (p. 326): "A press release indicating that the $35,000 estate of Louis M. Cohn was turned over to Northwestern University." | Not obtained (no open digitisation found). |
| *Chicago Sun*, 29 Sept 1944 (two-paragraph item; DeBartolo 1997 calls the paper "the Sun-Times"). | Not obtained. |
| Northwestern University news-service press release, 28 Sept 1944 (one page). | Not obtained; quoted at length by DeBartolo 1997/1998 and Potash 2006. |
| Wykes, Alan. *The Complete Illustrated Guide to Gambling* (Aldus/Doubleday, 1964), chapter "Seven Come Eleven". | Not obtained; quoted by DeBartolo and summarised by Bales p. 97. |
| Bales, *Great Chicago Fire and the Myth* — index entry (p. 335): "Cohn, Louis M., knocking over a lantern while gambling 3-4, 97-98, 100–101, 112"; notes 44–45 (p. 109); figure note (p. 306); bibliography pp. 320, 326, 328. | Snippets obtained (`sources/gbooks/BALES_SNIPPETS_BY_QUERY.txt`, queries 'Cohn', 'boys', 'craps'). |
| Wikipedia, "Louis M. Cohn" (stand-alone article, revisions 2009-02-09 … 2014-06-16, 1,856 bytes; redirected 2014-06-21 with the edit summary "Redirect to Great Chicago Fire#Questions about the fire per WP:ONEEVENT. He's not notable other than the suspect that he…"). | Last full text obtained (`sources/wiki/Louis_M_Cohn_oldid613162809.wikitext`); revision list in `sources/wiki/rev_Louis_M_Cohn.json`. |
| *Forward*, 2021 article on Cohn (Jewish-history angle). | Not obtained: HTTP 403 by curl and by the page-fetch tool. |

### 6.2 The story as it now circulates (Wikipedia, JewAge)

The deleted stand-alone Wikipedia article read, in full (oldid 613162809):

> "'''Louis M. Cohn''' ([[Wrocław|Breslau]], [[Prussia]] March 10, 1853 - 1942) was a [[Chicago]] importer who claimed to have been in [[Catherine O'Leary|Mrs. O'Leary's]] barn the night the [[Great Chicago Fire]] started there in 1871. … According to Cohn, on the night of the fire, he, then 18, was gambling in the O'Learys' barn with one of their sons and some other neighborhood boys. When Mrs. O'Leary came out to the barn to chase the kids away around 9:00 on October 8, they knocked over a lantern in their flight, although Cohn states that he paused long enough to scoop up the money. … Following his death, Cohn bequeathed $35,000 which was assigned by his executors to the [[Medill School of Journalism]] at [[Northwestern University]]. The bequest was given to the school on September 28, 1944, along with his confession."

Its only reference was the Hyde Park Media reprint of DeBartolo. JewAge (`sources/web/jewage_cohn.txt`) reproduces this text verbatim, citing Wikipedia. The present *Great Chicago Fire* article ("Precise start" section, `sources/wiki/GCF_precise_start_section.wikitext`) says:

> "Anthony DeBartolo reported evidence in two articles of the ''Chicago Tribune'' (October 8, 1997, and March 3, 1998, reprinted in ''Hyde Park Media'') suggesting that Louis M. Cohn may have started the fire during a craps game. … Following his death in 1942, Cohn bequeathed $35,000 which was assigned by his executors to the [[Medill School of Journalism]] at [[Northwestern University]]. The bequest was given to the school on September 28, 1944, and the dedication contained a claim by Cohn to have been present at the start of the fire. … The argument is not universally accepted." (last clause cited to Potash 2006).

Note the drift already visible here: the Wikipedia text says the bequest came "along with his confession", whereas DeBartolo's own reporting (below) is that the *university press release* carried the claim and that the recorded will "contains no reference to the fire".

### 6.3 What DeBartolo actually reported — 8 Oct 1997

Exact quotations from `sources/web/tribune_debartolo_1997-10-08.txt`:

- Framing: "All we know for certain is the approximate time and place: About 9 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 8, 1871, in or around a small shed that bordered the alley behind 137 DeKoven St. Everything else we've heard about the Chicago Fire's origin–the cow, the comet, and most recently, Daniel 'Peg Leg' Sullivan–is 'interesting, but ultimately unprovable theory,' says Carl Smith, a Northwestern University professor and expert on the Chicago Fire."
- On Bales and the Council: "Ald. Edward M. Burke, though, seems so convinced Peg Leg did it that last month he introduced a resolution in the City Council exonerating Catherine O'Leary and her bovine of all blame. Monday, the Council's Police and Fire Committee passed the resolution and sent it to the full Council for consideration. The resolution was based on research by amateur historian Dick Bales, a Wheaton attorney. … Bales theorized Sullivan, a neighbor of Mrs. O'Leary, lied about where he was standing when he initially saw the blaze. That's led some to conclude he was in the barn actually causing the trouble."
- The claim: "But before officially censuring Peg Leg, we should at least consider one other possible suspect: The only credible individual ever reputed to have admitted, in effect, 'I did it.' His name was Louis M. Cohn. Although fire experts like Bales and Smith have never heard the name– and, says Bales, 'I've read absolutely everything' — gambling historians have."
- Provenance: "Cohn's claim first surfaced Sept. 28, 1944 when his $35,000 estate, bequeathed in his name to Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, was ceremoniously handed over to Kenneth Olson, dean of the school. The university's news service issued a one-page press release at the time."
- The press-release paragraph (the only primary-ish text of the "confession"): "A less flattering boast is dispatched in the last paragraph, which begins: 'Mr. Cohn had an interesting connection with the origin of the Great Chicago Fire.' 'He steadfastly maintained that the traditional story of the cause of the fire — Mrs. O'Leary's cow that kicked over a lantern — was untrue. He asserted that he and Mrs. O'Leary's son, in the company of several other boys, were shooting dice in the hayloft . . . by the light of a lantern, when one of the boys accidently overturned the lantern, thus setting the barn afire. Mr. Cohn never denied that when the other boys fled, he stopped long enough to scoop up the money.'"
- Vital data: "According to his Cook County death certificate, Cohn would have been 18 years old at the time of the fire. He was born March 10, 1853 in Breslau, Prussia (part of modern-day Germany), also the birthplace of his unnamed father. He died in 1942 a few weeks before his 89th birthday, succumbing in Passavant Hospital after a lengthy bout with kidney cancer. He survived his wife, Bertha, by many years, had no children and was buried in Rosehill Cemetery."
- The will: "Cohn's recorded nine-page will, signed five months before his death, contains no reference to the fire. There is, however, reason to question the document's authenticity. It seems Cohn didn't properly sign or date what was represented as the will's last page. Instead, he signed all nine pages in their margins, but didn't affix his signature to the bottom of the final page to confirm that the preceding pages contained all he had to say." … "It is entirely possible that out of civic concerns, ethnic pride or a sense of benevolent protectiveness, Cohn's friends thought it best to keep his reputed admission, true or not, as private as possible."
- 1940s press: "In 1942, the day after Cohn's will was admitted to probate, the Tribune briefly acknowledged its scholarship provision. Two years later, the Sun-Times reported that the estate went to Medill, ending its two-paragraph story with this kicker: Cohn 'claimed to have been present in the barn of Mrs. O'Leary on the night of the Chicago Fire.' The Tribune, which essentially founded Medill 23 years earlier, made no mention of the gift or the fire."
- Wykes 1964: "Cohn's alleged involvement in the disaster was not publicly acknowledged again until gambling historian Alan Wykes' 1964 book, 'The Complete Illustrated Guide to Gambling.' In a chapter headed 'Seven Come Eleven,' Wykes reports Cohn's $35,000 gift to Northwestern, adding that the estate was handed over 'together with the full story of the `truth' about the Chicago Fire.' Wykes explains that Cohn's alleged admission is unverified, 'but, true or not,' he writes, 'it has taken its place in the colorful history of craps.' In his retelling of Cohn's claim, Wykes also significantly expands upon it. 'In his will,' the author writes, 'Cohn added a postscript to his story in the form of a deadpan comment that could have been made only by a man with the unswerving single-mindedness of the dedicated gambler: `When I knocked over the lantern, I was winning.'"
- Placing Cohn: "Chicago's 1870 census registered 32 Cohn households. The male heads of three of them reported Prussia as their birthplace. All lived within walking distance of the O'Learys. One, a cigarmaker who resided with another male and three females at 343 1/2 Park Ave., was even named Louis." And on the son: "As for Cohn's claim that he was gambling with Mrs. O'Leary's son, one immediately thinks of James, the youngest of her two boys. Based upon church records, the lad would have been almost 9 years old."
- DeBartolo's own concession/closing: "After 126 years, with the trail ice cold and all witnesses long gone, we'll surely never know the truth about the Great Fire's origins. But those now convinced Peg Leg was involved should at least reconsider what he was doing in the barn. The odds may be that he was losing to Cohn."

### 6.4 DeBartolo's follow-up — 3 March 1998

Exact quotations from `sources/web/tribune_debartolo_1998-03-03.txt`:

- Context: "Sullivan was the O'Leary neighbor who was fingered last year as a likely cause of the Great Fire by amateur historian Dick Bales, writing in the Spring 1997 Illinois State Historical Society journal. … Nor could a man with a wooden leg have hobbled the 193 feet to the O'Leary barn in the short time he said he had. These inconsistencies led Bales to conclude that Peg Leg had actually started the fire himself, perhaps while feeding his own family cow on the O'Learys' hay, and lied to cover it up." (Wednesday-night Newberry Library mock trial mentioned.)
- Claim strengthened: "there is a third person who could have been involved in the blaze, and he brings to the matter something the other suspects lack. He has actually confessed to being there when the fire began. The man is Louis M. Cohn, and the case for his involvement in the fire has grown even stronger since we wrote about him in October."
- Source of the 1944 text: the press release "concluded with this item from Cohn's personal biography, provided to the school by Judge Feinberg: 'Mr. Cohn had an interesting connection with the origin of the Great Chicago Fire . . . He asserted that he and Mrs. O'Leary's son, in the company of several other boys, were shooting dice in the hayloft . . . by the light of a lantern, when one of the boys accidentally overturned (the lantern) . . . Mr. Cohn never denied that when the other boys fled, he stopped long enough to scoop up the money.'"
- New genealogy: "Stuart L. Cohen (no relation), an expert in Chicago Jewish history and genealogy. Cohen supplied the previously unknown name of Cohn's father, Marcus, who, according to Chicago's 1869-70 city directory lived at 10 4th Avenue. That was less than a mile from the O'Leary house, around what is now Dearborn Street and Jackson Boulevard."
- The one living witness to Cohn's own telling, Stanley K. Feinberg (82, son of executor Judge Michael Feinberg): "Feinberg heard the story from Cohn's lips several times, he says– usually in response to someone bringing up Mrs. O'Leary. 'He would simply state that the story about the cow was hooey,' Feinberg says. 'He spoke as though he was correcting history. He wasn't being boastful, or proud or remorseful. He was just setting the record straight. `Here are the facts,' he'd say.' 'O'Leary's son (and Louie) and two or three others were in the habit of playing craps in the hay loft of the barn. I got the impression this floating craps game didn't float very far from there.' … '(Louie) said Mrs. O'Leary was always after them. On the night of the fire–and he told me it was a Sunday night– they were playing craps when Mrs. O'Leary came up and chased them away. In running, they tipped over a lantern. Lou said he went back to pick up the money.' Feinberg adds that Cohn 'was kidded about the story from time to time. `Did you knock over the lantern because you were losing?' someone would ask. His only response to the kidding was a knowing smile. I never heard him admit he knocked it over.'"
- On the will vs. Wykes: "But Cohn's recorded will contains no reference to the fire, according to Feinberg, who, though he did not draw up the will, saw it through probate court. … 'If (the lantern confession were there) I'm confident I would remember it.' 'I suspect he may have had an earlier will,' Feinberg adds, 'but I have no knowledge of it.'"
- Feinbergs' credibility judgment: "'Looking him in the eye, I had no reason to doubt what he said,' contends Feinberg. 'The man was not known to be a liar. He was quite a gentleman.' 'I believed him,' adds Loie…"
- A second, independent family tradition: retired executive Roy Grayson, 74: his grandfather Abraham Goldstein "lived right near Mrs. O'Leary and knew her quite well. He also knew three or four neighborhood boys that often played cards and drank heavily in O'Leary's barn," says Grayson. "On the night of the fire, one of them kicked over a lantern."
- DeBartolo's verdict: "Cohn's fire account is not only memorable, it's also credible. By 1840, Chicago was as infamous a gambling center as New Orleans."
- The son's age (again): "(The O'Leary son in question may have been James, who, though only about 9 in 1871, grew to become 'Big Jim' O'Leary, a notorious Chicago casino operator and off-track betting pioneer.)"

### 6.5 Potash (Tribune, 6 Oct 2006) — the historians' response on record

From `sources/web/tribune_potash_2006-10-06.txt`:

> "While doing research for another project about 10 years ago, DeBartolo, of Evanston, came across the 1964 book 'The Complete Illustrated Guide to Gambling' by Alan Wykes. … Even though experts have scoffed at the theory, DeBartolo said Cohn may have admitted in his will that he, not the cow, was the culprit. Historians say the whole story is just another wild tale. 'It's unprovable and refutable,' said Northwestern University professor Carl Smith. 'It is based on one guy's claim that might have happened, but we have no verification. My gut reaction is it's one guy bragging.' Libby Mahoney, chief curator at the Chicago History Museum, thinks the truth will never be uncovered. 'The evidence was destroyed, we can't reconstruct it. We will never know,' she said. Still, DeBartolo tracked down a son of one of the will's executors in La Jolla, Calif. Stanley Feinberg confirmed that Cohn had told the story about the dice game. Feinberg told the Tribune in 1998 that Cohn never admitted to him that he knocked over the lantern. 'The only time I thought Feinberg wasn't telling me the truth was when I asked him about Cohn's will–he stopped looking me in the eye.' DeBartolo said."

### 6.6 Bales's treatment (2002/2005, pp. 97–101; Google Books snippets)

- p. 97: "Alan Wykes suggests in his book The Complete Illustrated Guide to Gambling (1964) that the fire was caused by one Louis M. Cohn, who knocked over a lantern while playing craps in the O'Leary barn (Figure 58). Unfortunately, Wykes's brief account is short on details and long on anecdotes, adding that Cohn, apparently in an attempt to shift the burden of guilt, claimed that it was the cow that …"
- p. 98: "… craps in the barn when Mrs. O'Leary chased them out. While running away, they tipped over a lantern. But was it specifically Cohn who toppled it? Feinberg indicated that he never heard Cohn admit that he knocked it over, but that whenever someone asked Cohn if he did it, his only response would be 'a knowing smile.' 45 A smile? Odds are Cohn was …" (note 45 = "Odds Improve," p. 3).
- p. 100: "Cohn was a Chicago importer and world traveler who died in 1942. He maintained that on the night of the fire, one … boys, and he were playing craps in the barn when Mrs. O'Leary chased them out. While running away, they tipped over the lantern, starting the fire. A 1944 Chicago Daily News article reported that 'Mr. Cohn never denied that when the other boys fled he paused long enough to scoop up the money.' Cohn should …" (Bales's Daily News wording is "paused"; DeBartolo's press-release wording is "stopped".)
- p. 101: "… boys to host their casino night, why would they want to? Why would the boys choose to play craps after dark in the sultry and stifling confines of a hay-filled loft, virtually under the eyes of Mr. and Mrs. O'Leary, when they just …" and "… Cohn had been playing craps that night, it seems more likely that he was playing in this house or in a nearby shed … Cohn's claim. The archives of the Chicago Historical Society contains several stories such as his, all …"
- p. 97 (query 'boys'): "… boys, seeking to mix milk with a bottle of whiskey, dropped a lamp which started the fire.) At first these presumptions do seem reasonable. It is easy to imagine boys accidently starting a fire, panicking, and then running away …"
- Sources Bales relies on (p. 109 nn. 44–45; p. 306): "Cohn Estate Turned Over to University," Chicago Daily News, 28 September 1944, sec. 1, p. 12; "Odds Improve," sec. 5, pp. 1, 3.
- Bales's bibliography also lists (p. 328) Jonathan R. Laing, "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow, Vilified for 100 Years, Maybe Wasn't Guilty," Wall Street Journal, 5 October 1971, p. 1 ("A discussion of some of the more popular theories as to the fire's cause").

**What Bales concedes:** he does not claim to have disproved Cohn's presence; his argument is about plausibility of location (the loft vs. a house or shed) and about the genre (the CHS archive "contains several stories such as his"). Note the snippet on p. 98 ends mid-sentence ("Odds are Cohn was …"); the continuation was not retrievable.

### 6.7 Internal checks on the story

1. **Cohn's age.** Death certificate: born 10 March 1853, Breslau → 18 in October 1871 (DeBartolo 1997). Consistent with "then 18" in every retelling.
2. **"Mrs. O'Leary's son."** Fetched sources give the sons' births as Cornelius 1860 and James Patrick 1863, both baptised at Holy Family (`sources/web/glessner_olearys_2021.txt`: "Two sons, Cornelius (known as 'Puggy') and James Patrick, followed in 1860 and 1863 respectively"); DeBartolo: James "almost 9 years old" (1997) / "only about 9 in 1871" (1998); Irish America: "James, age 9 at the time"; Carl Smith (American Heritage excerpt): five children "ranging from a fifteen-year-old to an infant". So the craps partner of an 18-year-old would have been an 8–9-year-old or an 11-year-old. (Wikipedia's *James Patrick O'Leary* article gives his birth as 1869, which would make him two years old in 1871; that date conflicts with Glessner's parish-record account and DeBartolo's "church records".)
3. **Who knocked the lantern.** The 1944 press release blames "one of the boys"; Feinberg never heard Cohn admit it; only Wykes's 1964 "postscript" ('When I knocked over the lantern, I was winning') makes Cohn the culprit, and the recorded will contains no such text (DeBartolo 1997, 1998; Feinberg).
4. **Mrs. O'Leary "chasing them away around 9:00".** This contradicts her sworn inquiry testimony that she was in bed (Section 1.6, Section 3), and no 1871 witness placed her in the yard. It does, however, cohere with the timing of the outbreak that everyone knew by 1944.
5. **Boys in the barn — the 1871 record.** The Board asked about it. Bales p. 230 (inquiry transcript): "Q. Were boys in the habit of congregating in a barn in the vicinity, do you know? A. No sir. I did not hear it." Mrs. McLaughlin was pressed to identify "three boys" who left her house (Bales p. 233). Fedler's 1985 survey of contemporary press lists, among 1871 theories, that "a group of young men who had been playing cards tried to get some milk" and that "young boys enjoying a pipe or cigar started the fire" — i.e., a gambling/boys story existed in 1871 independently of Cohn, and Bales (p. 109) treats such tales as "just one of several stories concocted by neighborhood children in the first few hours after the …".
6. **Big Jim's own statements.** In the fetched texts James "Big Jim" O'Leary never described a craps game he attended; Fedler: "Big Jim O'Leary admitted that the fire started in his family's barn. But O'Leary blamed tramps or neighborhood boys who were Smoking"; the 1971 landmark report: "Years after the fire, Jim O'Leary, son of Catherine, stated that it was positively caused by spontaneous combustion."

### 6.8 Later reception and provenance problems

- *Time* (Latson, 8 Oct 2015; page-fetch extraction, `sources/webfetch/time_2015-10-08_latson.md`): "A more likely culprit, [according to the Chicago Tribune], is the one person who actually admitted fault for the blaze: a businessman and gambler named Louis Cohn. His will contained a public confession he'd previously only shared with friends and family … Cohn's story is perhaps the most believable of the bunch, since he had nothing to gain from lying." — The "will contained a public confession" statement is contradicted by DeBartolo's own reporting.
- *Saturday Evening Post* (Railton, 8 Oct 2021; page-fetch extraction): "Maybe the blaze was instead the result of a craps game taking place in the barn, but that's due to the unsubstantiated, secondhand deathbed testimony — ostensibly provided more than 70 years after the fire — of a man named Louis Cohn."
- Irish America (`sources/web/irishamerica_2021.txt`): "Cohn confessed 71 years later in his will to starting the fire. A 1964 book about gambling said Cohn bragged he was winning the game when he kicked over the lantern and grabbed the kitty as he ran from the barn." (again "in his will" — unsupported).
- Clarence Page (Chicago Tribune columnist, 2021 column syndicated in the Philadelphia Tribune, `sources/web/phillytrib_clarence_page.txt`): "Another man, long deceased, said that he, Mrs. O'Leary's son, and several other boys were shooting dice in the hayloft when one of the boys accidentally overturned the infamous lantern, setting the barn afire."
- Missed History (`sources/web/missedhistory.txt`): "Another theory, advanced by journalist Jim Sheire, suggests the fire may have been started by a group of men gambling in the barn, including a young man named Louis M. Cohn. … a signed statement claiming he had been involved was allegedly discovered — though its provenance has never been independently confirmed." No "Jim Sheire" appears in DeBartolo, Bales, Potash or Wikipedia; the journalist who advanced the theory is Anthony DeBartolo. Treat the attribution as unverified.
- Wikipedia: stand-alone article removed 2014 ("per WP:ONEEVENT"); the GCF section's Hyde Park Media link is flagged "url-status=usurped". (Unrelated but in the same vein: the Chicago History Museum's sesquicentennial exhibition domain chicago1871.org, cited in 2021 coverage, now serves gambling spam — `sources/web/chicago1871_media_mentions.txt`.)

**Assessment for Section 11:** the Cohn theory rests on (a) a 1944 press-release paragraph derived from a biography supplied by his executor, (b) Feinberg's 1998 recollection of Cohn's oral telling, (c) Wykes's 1964 embellishment, and (d) the Grayson family tradition; it has no 1871 attestation, and the two experts asked (Smith, Bales) reject it as unverifiable.

### 6.9 Late-arriving Bales snippets on Cohn (queries '1944', 'kicked over')

* p. 97 [gbooks, '1944']: "…1944 , two years after Cohn died , the dean of Illinois's Northwestern Uni- versity received from Cohn's estate not only a bequest of thirty - five thousand dollars but also the full story of the “ truth ” about the fire . 43 This…"
* p. 97 [gbooks, 'kicked over']: "…kicked over the lantern . Wykes does mention , however , that in 1944 , two years after Cohn died , the dean of ... over to Northwestern University , the school issued a press re- lease , which included Cohn's assertion that on the…"
* p. 100 [gbooks, '1944']: "…1944 Chicago Daily News article reported that “ Mr. Cohn never de- nied that when the other boys fled he paused long enough to scoop up the money . " Cohn should have used that time to come up with a better story ; there is not one…"
* p. 109 [gbooks, '1944']: "…1944 , p . 24 ; “ Cohn Estate Turned Over to University , ” Chi- cago Daily News , 28 September 1944 , sec . 1 , p . 12 , hereafter cited in text as " Cohn Estate Turned Over to University . " 45. " Odds Improve , ” p . 3 . 46…"
* p. 328 [gbooks, '1944']: "…1944 , p . 24. A news release concerning the estate of Louis M. Cohn . Laing , Jonathan R. " Mrs. O'Leary's Cow , Vilified for 100 Years , Maybe Wasn't Guilty . " Wall Street Journal , 5 October 1971 , p . 1. A dis- cussion of some of…"

These confirm that Bales's knowledge of the 1944 release comes from Wykes and the Chicago Daily News/Chicago Sun items (the second cited only as "… 1944, p. 24. A news release concerning the estate of Louis M. Cohn"), and that his verdict is dismissive ("Cohn should have used that time to come up with a better story").

---

## 7. Michael Ahern and the "reporter's confession"

### 7.1 Bibliographic anchors

| Ahern text | Citation (from Bales's notes/bibliography unless stated) | Status |
|---|---|---|
| "The Fire Fighters." (Chicago) *Daily Inter Ocean*, 9 Oct 1893, sec. 1, p. [2]. Bales p. 327 annotation: "Firemen reminisce about the fire and why it spread out of …" | Bales pp. 186–188, 327 | Not obtained. |
| "Reporter of 1871 Fire Describes Blaze of Today." *Chicago Sunday Tribune*, 8 Oct 1911, sec. 1, p. [2]. | Bales p. 78 | Not obtained; described by greatchicagofire.org, Block Club 2025, Saturday Evening Post 2021. |
| "Mrs. O'Leary Cow Story Refuted by Old Reporter." *Chicago Daily Tribune*, 21 Jan 1915, sec. 2, p. 13. | Bales p. 77 | Obtained as a transcription: `sources/web/genealogytrails_fire.txt` lines 85–104. |
| Fiftieth-anniversary reminiscences, *Chicago Tribune*, October 1921; NYT obituary "Last of Chicago Fire Reporters Dies" (chicagology header: "Chicago Tribune, October 19, 1921 and New York Times, February 21, 1927"). | chicagology | Obtained as a transcription: `sources/chicagology/fire052.txt` lines 54–58. |
| John English's reminiscences, *Chicago Tribune*, 1891 | Bales p. 57 | Not obtained. |
| Bales index (p. 335): "Ahern, Michael 54, 56, 70, 78n6, 105-6n7, 110n50, 127-28, 186-88". | | Snippets obtained. |
| Fedler, "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow and Other Newspaper Tales…" (1985), section "A Reporter's Hoax?", pp. 22–24 and notes 48–56. | | Obtained in full (`sources/web/fedler_1985_ERIC_ED257108.txt`). |

### 7.2 What Ahern said — in the texts obtained

**1915 (Tribune, 21 Jan 1915, transcription):**
> "At the time of the fire I was police reporter for the Morning Republican, which later became the Inter-Ocean. Johnny English was THE TRIBUNE's police reporter and Jim Haynie was on the Times. Both of them are dead. I am the only police reporter living who helped to cover the greatest fire in the world's history. It was Jim Haynie, I think, who 'faked' the story about the cow kicking over the lamp. No newspaper was printed the morning of Oct. 10, but when the papers were able to get out extras the cow and lamp story was given as the cause of the holocaust."
> "In after years I met O'Leary and we talked about the fire. He told me that in his opinion it was caused by spontaneous combustion of hay. A couple of weeks before the fire O'Leary had put a ton of green hay in the barn loft. It was an unusually warm, dry spell of weather. Everything was parched. The hay, while curing, took fire from the terrific heat that beat upon the roof, and that was what laid Chicago in ashes."

(Discrepancy: the genealogytrails transcription reads "No newspaper was printed the morning of Oct. 10"; Bales's quotation of the same article, p. 78, reads "No newspaper was printed the morning of Oct. 9". The original was not obtained, so which is the transcription error cannot be settled here.)

**1921 (fiftieth anniversary, per chicagology's transcription of the 1927 obituary):**
> "In 1921 Ahern, In writing an anniversary story of the fire said that he and two other reporters, John English and Jim Haynie, concocted the explanation of the cow starting the fire, and admitted that he afterward learned that spontaneous combustion of hay in the O'Leary barn probably was the cause. At the time of the fire Ahern was a police reporter for The Chicago Republican."
> "'I wish to state that the fire was not started by Mrs. O'Leary's cow kicking over a lamp. Nothing of the kind occurred. That version of the origin of the fire was a concoction which the writer of these reminiscences confesses to a guilty part. In justice to the maligned animal and to Mrs. O'Leary, who died many years ago, I make this belated reparation.'"

**1911 (fortieth anniversary; original not obtained).** greatchicagofire.org (Carl Smith's essay, `sources/gcf/oleary-legend.txt`): "on the fortieth anniversary of the great conflagration a 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'Learys, he reminded readers, lived in the rear part of the cottage, 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 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 stated 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.'" Block Club (2025, page-fetch extraction) quotes one sentence of the 1911 piece: "'It was not started by a cow kicking over a lamp while Mrs. O'Leary was milking the animals,' he wrote for the Chicago Tribune in 1911." and paraphrases: "Two partygoers snuck into the O'Learys' shed to steal milk. Thinking they heard someone coming, they ran out, knocking over their lamp and starting the fire, Ahern said." Saturday Evening Post (2021): "In 1911, on the fire's 40th anniversary, an anonymous former colleague of Ahern's argued in a Chicago Tribune column (writing under Ahern's name!) that Ahern and his friends John English and James Haynie had made up the cow story out of whole cloth."

**1893 (Inter Ocean; original not obtained).** The only content Bales quotes from it concerns the alarm, not the cow — p. 186: "Ahern wrote in the October 9, 1893, issue of the Inter Ocean that 'Schaefer, the watchman, could not be blamed much. The dull glare from the blazing ruins of the Saturday night fire was between him and DeKoven street. His vision …'"; p. 188: "Ahern maintained that Goll did turn in the alarms, but that they failed to go through because the Saturday night fire knocked out some of the fire alarm telegraph lines. True to form, Ahern was probably mistaken, as the inquiry …". Wikipedia's *Great Chicago Fire* article nevertheless states "In 1893 the reporter Michael Ahern retracted the 'cow-and-lantern' story, admitting it was fabricated" (cited to Cromie 1994). Nothing fetched corroborates a *1893* retraction; the dates given elsewhere are 1911 (Glessner: "In 1911, on the fortieth anniversary of the fire, Michael Ahern, the last surviving reporter who had covered the Chicago Fire, recanted his story"; gcf; SEP; Block Club), 1915 (Tribune transcription) and 1921 (chicagology; Tom Emery in the New Herald/Breeze-Courier: "On the fiftieth anniversary of the fire in 1921, Ahern admitted his ruse in a Chicago Tribune article").

**Which paper Ahern blamed, and whether he even named the cow-story's author, shifts across his statements:** 1915 — "It was Jim Haynie, I think, who 'faked' the story"; 1921 — "he and two other reporters, John English and Jim Haynie, concocted"; 1911 (per Smith's summary) — "he and two now-deceased cronies made the whole thing up".

### 7.3 Bales's critique (pp. 54–57, 75, 77–78, 105–106, 127–128, 186–188)

- p. 56: "… Ahern's tale. These irregularities prove Ahern to be less than credible and are sufficient to completely discredit his explanation for the legend of Mrs. O'Leary's cow (Figure 36). As Chicagoans entered the twentieth century and …"
- p. 57: "… pipe in the alley in the rear of the cow shed, and this was what started the fire.' 7 Despite the many inconsistencies in Ahern's post-1871 newspaper articles, historians have continued to promulgate the 'confession of Michael Ahern' as the basis for the O'Leary legend. And other penitents have joined Ahern in the confessional. In 1938 Dr …"
- p. 57 (query 'lamp'): "Not surprisingly, English's reminiscences of the fire, published in the Tribune in 1891, include no mention of his purported role in taking Mrs. O'Leary and her cow from obscurity to immortality. Although Ahern alleged …"
- p. 78: "No newspaper was printed the morning of Oct. 9, but when the papers were able to get out 'extras' the cow and lamp story was given as the cause of the holocaust. This is one more reason why Ahern's credibility is suspect …" (Bales quoting the 1915 article back at Ahern: if the extras already carried the story, a police reporter's later "concoction" is superfluous.)
- p. 75: "… unknown and long-forgotten Chicago Evening Journal reporter. Furthermore, his obsession blinds him to the real (and only) significance of the O'Leary legend, that it was a harbinger of the sensationalism that …" (Bales's counter-claim that the legend's true author is an anonymous *Evening Journal* reporter of 9 Oct 1871; the "his obsession" clause refers to a writer Bales is criticising — the snippet does not show whom.)
- p. 80: "… lamp, only that they helped spread the story throughout the area. Nonetheless, the possibility that now-anonymous neighborhood children concocted the cow and lamp story remains a very plausible theory."
- p. 106 (n. 7): "Ahern indicated that Jim O'Leary had told him that the green hay had been placed in the loft two weeks before the fire [emphasis added]. See Andreas, vol. 2, p. 714; 'Linked to Chicago's Two Worst Fires,' sec. 7, p. 10 …" (In the 1915 transcription the informant is simply "O'Leary", read most naturally as Patrick; Bales reads it as Jim.)
- p. 128: "… Ahern, subsequently referred to the name as 'Rogan.' 50 It appears that Dennis Regan was one of the first people to arrive at the O'Leary property after their barn caught fire."
- p. 54 (query 'Sunday evening'): "It is unlikely that a reporter for the acerbic Times, a newspaper the Journal once called 'A …" (fragment) — Bales's argument that the *Times*'s reporter (Haynie) would not have been the *Journal*'s source.

### 7.4 Fedler's analysis (1985)

From `sources/web/fedler_1985_ERIC_ED257108.txt` (OCR; PDF pp. 24–26):

> "A Reporter's Hoax? Five sources, all apparently reliable, say a newspaper reporter created the story about Mrs. O'Leary's cow."

The five (Fedler's notes 48–52): John McPhaul, *Deadlines & Monkeyshines* (1962), p. 63 — "The legend of Mrs. O'Leary had its start the night of the fire … a correspondent for The (New York) Herald wrote a story that quoted Mrs. O'Leary … 'she had gone to the shed to give salt to an ailing cow, and the animal had kicked over a kerosene lamp'"; Wendt, *Chicago Tribune: The Rise of a Great American Newspaper*, p. 236 — "The correspondent of The Herald said the fire began when Mrs. O'Leary went out to milk her cow, which kicked over a Lantern"; Collier's Encyclopedia vol. 6 (1979), pp. 213–214 — "according to a reporter's fabrication that gained universal acceptance"; Tom Burnam, *The Dictionary of Misinformation* (1975), p. 161 — "The fourth source identifies the reporter: Michael Ahern. Moreover, it adds that Ahern 'admitted that he made up the whole story to add color to his account of the fire'"; Silas Bent, *Ballyhoo* (1927), pp. 98–99 — "The last survivor of the group which reported the Chicago fire of 1871 admitted, shortly before his death, that Mrs. O'Leary's cow had not kicked over the lantern. The fire had started from spontaneous combustion in a hayloft, but a fretful Bossie seemed to the reporters a more picturesque origin of the disaster." Fedler: "The fifth account suggests that several reporters, not Ahern alone, helped create the story."

Fedler's test against the New York Herald file (notes 53–56):
> "Despite the claims, The Herald seems to have been one of the last newspapers to mention Mrs. O'Leary's cow, not the first. On Monday, The Herald reported, 'The fire started in a row of two-story wooden tenements on Deckoven Street.' Its story was skimpy, probably because the fire destroyed the telegraph lines leading into Chicago. Because the lines were destroyed, it would have been difficult, perhaps impossible, for Ahern to transmit his story to The Herald that night. The Herald did not mention a cow until Wednesday. Even then, it failed to mention Mrs. O'Leary. Instead, The Herald reported that the fire started when a boy went to a stable to milk his cow. … That story, like most of the others published by The Herald, seems to have been provided by The Associated Press, not by its own correspondent in Chicago. The Evening Journal was published in Chicago that Monday, and it immediately reported that, 'The fire broke out...at about 9 o'clock on Sunday evening, being caused by a cow kicking over a lamp in a stable in which a woman was milking.' Its story -- not a story in The Herald -- seems to have been the first to mention Mrs. O'Leary's cow. Newspapers in other cities began to publish similar stories that Tuesday. Some admitted copying the Evening Journal."

Fedler's own hedges: "Several reporters may have heard a picturesque rumor, started by someone else, and all those reporters may have included it in their stories. Or, Michael Ahern may have worked for the Evening Journal, or for some other Chicago daily, and supplemented his income by serving as a correspondent for a New York daily. … Regardless of the story's source, it was a fanciful tale."

### 7.5 The print record versus the confession (cross-reference Section 1)

The Library of Congress pages fetched for this dossier independently confirm Fedler's chronology: the Washington *Evening Star* of 10 Oct 1871 already printed "THE ORIGIN OF THE FIRE was in a stable, where a woman took a kerosene lamp at milking time" (`sources/ca/KEY_eveningstar_1871-10-10_origin_woman_kerosene.txt`), and the AP "boy … milk his cow … kerosene lamp" version ran nationally on 11 Oct (New-York Tribune, Wheeling, NY Herald — Section 1.2). Bales's bibliography (p. 320) dates the *Journal* extra to 9 Oct 1871: "'The Great Calamity of the Age!' Chicago Evening Journal — Extra, 9 October 1871, p. 1. While Chicago is still burning, the Journal writes that the fire was caused 'by a cow kicking over a lamp in a stable …'". Ahern's own paper, the *Republican*, is not credited with the story by anyone in the fetched material; no *Republican* or *Times* issue of 9–11 Oct 1871 was obtainable.

**Consequences.** (1) Whatever Ahern, English or Haynie did, the cow-and-lamp explanation was in print in Chicago on 9 Oct and nationally by 10–11 Oct, before any reporter could have "added color" over subsequent days. (2) Ahern's 1915 text itself concedes this ("when the papers were able to get out extras the cow and lamp story was given as the cause"). (3) The "confession" is at most a claim to have *joined* a rumour; Bales (p. 80) prefers neighbourhood children as the rumour's source and (p. 75) an anonymous *Journal* reporter as its first printer. (4) The dating of the "confession" in the secondary literature is unstable (1893 / 1911 / 1915 / 1921), and the 1911 article's authorship was disputed at the time by a colleague who claimed to have ghost-written it (Smith, gcf).


### 7.7 Late-arriving Bales snippets on Ahern (queries '1911', '1921', 'confession', 'Journal extra', 'extra', 'October 9', 'kicked over')

What the 1911 article actually claimed, per Bales:
* p. 56 [gbooks, '1911']: "…1911 that he believed the fire was started by two women who had en- tered the barn to get milk for some punch . Nowhere in this lengthy newspaper article did he admit to knowing anything about the origin of the cow and lantern legend…"
* p. 57 [gbooks, '1911']: "…1911 article that the two women surreptitiously milking the cow were " the true cause of the fire , " Kelley claimed in this letter that Ahern " was always of the opinion that someone emptied the ashes from his pipe in the alley in the…"
* p. 70 [gbooks, '1911']: "…1911 , newspaper reporter Michael Ahern claimed that William Musham , foreman of the Little Giant steam engine , told him that had it not been for the Saturday night Lull & Holmes planing mill fire , which crippled the department , and…"
* p. 186 [gbooks, '1911']: "…1911 , the ubiquitous Ahern had jumped ship from the Inter Ocean to the Trib- une , and he was now claiming in a lengthy newspaper article that “ there was a haze in the sky from the fire of the previous night and Schaeffer's vision was…"
* p. 78 [gbooks, '1911']: "…1911 , sec . 1 , p . [ 2 ] , hereafter cited in text as " Reporter of 1871 Fire " ; " Mrs. O'Leary Cow Story Refuted by Old Reporter , " sec . 2 , p . 13 ; " 1871 Reporter , " sec . 1 , p . 3 . Ahern seems to imply in his 1915 article…"

The 1921 article, per Bales, is "1871 Reporter" = "Beer, Not Milk, Caused Chicago Fire, New Story," Chicago Sunday Tribune, 9 October 1921, sec. 1, p. 3 (pp. 48, 108) — chicagology's header "October 19, 1921" is therefore probably a misdating of 9 Oct 1921:
* p. 56 [gbooks, '1921']: "…1921 Ahern had completely omitted Haynie's name from the credits . Instead , Ahern now claimed that he had a role in fashioning the now fa- mous story : " I wish to state that the fire was not started by Mrs. O'Leary's cow kick- ing…"
* p. 108 [gbooks, 'October 9']: "…October 5 , 1971 , Wall Street Journal refers to a 1924 Chicago Tribune interview with a Thomas O'Connor , who ... 9 October 1921 , sec . 1 , p . 3 , hereafter cited in text as “ Beer , Not Milk , Caused Chicago Fire " ; Statement…"
* p. 110 [gbooks, '1921']: "…1921. Parrett wrote a letter to the newspaper in response to an article written by reporter Michael Ahern . Parrett , a salesman , said in this letter that Thomas South- well , who ran a shoe store , told him that he and some other boys…"
* p. 57 [gbooks, 'confession']: "…confession of Michael Ahern " as the basis for the O'Leary legend . And other peni- tents have joined Ahern in the confes- sional . In 1938 Dr. Frederick C. Hanmore wrote a letter to the Chicago Historical So- ciety , offering to give…"

On the Evening Journal extra of 9 Oct 1871 and the Herald:
* p. 54 [gbooks, 'extra']: "…Extra " on Monday , October 9. The sentence beginning at the end of the first column changed Mrs. O'Leary's life forever : " The fire broke out on the corner of DeKoven and Twelfth streets , at about 9 o'clock on Sunday evening , being…"
* p. 54 [gbooks, 'October 9']: "…October 9 issue of the Evening Jour- nal . It is unlikely that a reporter for the acerbic Times , a newspaper the Journal once called " A Snarling Dog " because of its Opposite : FIGURE 35 - OCTOBER 9 , 1871 , CHICAGO EVENING JOURNAL…"
* p. 76 [gbooks, 'extra']: "…Extra , 9 October 1871 , p . 1 , here- after cited in text as “ The Great Calamity of the Age ! " The Journal later bragged that on October 9 , while the city still burned , it was the one newspaper that managed to publish an issue…"
* p. 57 [gbooks, 'kicked over']: "…kicked over a lamp . The Daily Journal added that " the editors of the Jour- nal apparently found credence in the re- port , for they incorporated it in the ' Extra ' which they printed . " 9 John J. McKenna , an author of one of the…"
* p. 79 [gbooks, 'October 9']: "…October 1871 , p . 5. This New York Herald account is dated October 10. The Herald's Chicago correspondent probably read the Journal's report of the fire on Oc- tober 9 , subsequently wrote his own account of the fire and managed to…"
* p. 6 [gbooks, 'Journal extra']: "…Journal - Extra , 9 October 1871 , p . 1 . 3. As author Gerald Posner remarked in one of the hundreds of books about the Kennedy as- sassination : “ As in every famous case , people have come out of the woodwork for their fifteen min…"

Reading: (1) In 1911 Ahern blamed "two women" fetching milk for punch and, per Bales, "Nowhere in this lengthy newspaper article did he admit to knowing anything about the origin of the cow and lantern" story; a colleague (Kelley) said Ahern privately favoured a pipe emptied in the alley. (2) By 1921 Haynie had dropped out of Ahern's account and Ahern claimed a personal role. (3) The Daily Journal's own 1921 retrospective said its editors "found credence in the report" and put it in the Extra — i.e., the Journal printed a rumour it heard, which is Bales's explanation of the legend's origin; (4) Bales reads the New York Herald's 10–11 Oct text as derived from the Journal, which matches Fedler's chronology (Section 7.4).

### 7.6 What Ahern's theory would need (carried into Section 11)

That the *Evening Journal* extra of 9 Oct 1871 did not exist or did not say what Musham (p. 152), Bales (p. 320), Fedler and the Baltimore Sun (1997) say it says; or that Ahern/English/Haynie fed the *Journal* on the night of 8–9 Oct. The first is contradicted by every fetched source; the second is asserted by no one.

---

## 8. The comet theory (Donnelly 1883 → Waskin 1985 → Wood 2004) and the Peshtigo/Michigan fires

### 8.1 Ignatius Donnelly, *Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel* (New York: D. Appleton, 1883), chapter "Biela's Comet", pp. 411–423

Obtained in full from archive.org (`sources/ia/ragnarok_1883_pp411-423_bielas_comet_fires.txt`, extracted from `ragnarokageoffir00donn_djvu.txt`; page numbers from the running heads "BIELA'S COMET. 411/413/415/419/421/423" and "414 CONCLUSIONS").

**Claim.** That the fires of 8 October 1871 in Wisconsin, Michigan and Illinois were ignited simultaneously by gas from the tail of Biela's comet, whose fragments had been lost since 1852.

**Evidence Donnelly cites.** The 1872 meteor display and Klinkerfues's telegram; Sheahan & Upton's *History of the Great Conflagration* (1871) for Peshtigo corpses "with not a trace of burning upon their bodies or clothing"; the fire marshal's testimony about the fire jumping to St. Paul's church; the simultaneity of the fires.

**Exact quotations.**
- p. 412: "As a matter of fact the collision did take place on November 27, 1872, and the result, so far as the earth was concerned, was a magnificent display of aerial fireworks!" (Donnelly here reproduces a contemporary account of the Andromedid shower — note that his own source dates the "collision" to November **1872**, thirteen months after the Chicago fire.)
- p. 413: "…assets of these bankrupt comets? They were probably…"
- p. 414: "At that hour, half past nine o'clock in the evening, at apparently the same moment, at points hundreds of miles apart, in three different States, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Illinois, fires of the most peculiar and devastating kind broke out, so far as we know, by spontaneous combustion. In Wisconsin, on its eastern borders, in a heavily timbered country, near Lake Michigan, a region embracing four hundred square miles, extending north from Brown County, and containing Peshtigo, Manistee, Holland, and numerous villages on the shores of Green Bay, was swept bare by an absolute whirlwind of flame. There were seven hundred and fifty people killed outright…" (Manistee and Holland are in Michigan, not Wisconsin; the error is Donnelly's.)
- pp. 414–415: "…people inhaled it, or the intensely hot air, and fell down dead. This is verified by the appearance of many of the corpses. They were found dead in the roads and open spaces, where there were no visible marks of fire near by, with not a trace of burning upon their bodies or clothing. At the Sugar Bush, which is an extended clearing, in some places four miles in width, corpses were found in the open road, between fences only slightly burned. No mark of fire was upon them; they lay there as if asleep."
- p. 420 (Chicago): "I have only space to refer to one or two points. The fire was spontaneous. The story of Mrs. O'Leary's cow having started the conflagration by kicking over a lantern was proved to be false. It was the access of gas from the tail of Biela's comet that burned up Chicago! The fire-marshal testified: 'I felt it in my bones that we were going to have a burn.' He says, speaking of O'Leary's barn: 'We got the fire under control, and it would not have gone a foot farther; but the next thing I knew they came and told me that St. Paul's church, about two squares north, was on fire…'"
- p. 423: "Who shall say how often the characteristics of our atmosphere have been affected by accessions from extra-terrestrial sources, resulting in conflagrations or pestilences, in failures of crops, and in famines? Who shall say how far great revolutions and wars and other perturbations of humanity have been due to similar modifications?"

**Concessions.** Donnelly's phrasing is "so far as we know, by spontaneous combustion" and a rhetorical "Who shall say…"; he offers no observation of a comet or meteor over the Midwest on 8 Oct 1871 and his own quoted source places the Earth's encounter with Biela's debris in November 1872.

### 8.2 Mel Waskin, *Mrs. O'Leary's Comet: Cosmic Causes of the Great Chicago Fire* (Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1985)

Not obtained. Known here through: Bales (pp. 101–105, 110 n., 315, 320); Paul Galloway, "Mrs. O'Leary's Comet," *Chicago Tribune*, 13 December 1985, sec. 5, pp. 1, 3 (Bales p. 320: "Mel Waskin maintains that a comet caused the fire"; not obtained); UPI 31 Dec 1985 "Author links Chicago fire to stray comet" (403); Wikipedia (*Biela's Comet*, *Peshtigo fire*); Clarence Page's 2021 column.

- Bales p. 103 (query 'extra'): "…extra - terrestrial vis- itor - until December 13 , when the Repub- lican reported that " a very brilliant meteor was seen at about 10:45 o'clock last night [ emphasis added ] . " For these reasons , more than anything else , Mel…" — i.e., the only 1871 Chicago report of a meteor Bales found is from December, not 8 October.
- Bales p. 101 (section "Comet, Not a Cow"): "Educational film director Mel Waskin contends in his book Mrs. O'Leary's Comet (1985) that a comet called Biela II caused flame…"; p. 102: "…comet, as sand is one of its elements. But Waskin fails to note that beaches were not the only source of sand in Peshtigo, that at least some of the roads were apparently covered with it…"; p. 103: "…comet streaking across the sky above Chicago go unnoticed by the city's 334,000 inhabitants? If this comet did strike Chicago, why didn't anyone report seeing it flash overhead or hearing an explosion when it struck the earth…"; p. 104 (figure caption): "Mel Waskin, author of Mrs. O'Leary's Comet, maintains that a comet caused the Peshtigo, Wisconsin, fire (as well as the Chicago Fire), but it is more likely that the village was destroyed by a firestorm generated by the convection whirls of forest fires."; p. 105: "…comet did not veer off course— what, then, did cause the Great Chicago Fire? History books will indicate that the cause has never been determined."; p. 110 n.: "…Comet: Cosmic Causes of the Great Chicago Fire (Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1985), pp. 53–54, 143–44"; index p. 335: "comet 101-5"; p. 310 lists a source discussing the "comet" and "spontaneous combustion of green hay" theories.
- Wikipedia, *Peshtigo fire* ("Comet hypothesis"): "Certain behaviors of the Chicago and Peshtigo fires were cited to support the idea of an extraterrestrial cause, such as blue flames (thought to be cometary gases burning) in the basements of houses. However, modern fire theory indicates that the blue color was most likely a product of burning carbon monoxide in the poorly ventilated basements." (cited to Waskin 1985 and Gess & Lutz).
- Clarence Page (Chicago Tribune columnist, 2021; `sources/web/phillytrib_clarence_page.txt`): "These clues led the late Mel Waskin of Skokie, Illinois, a former head writer and producer for Chicago area-based Coronet Educational Films, to write 'Mrs. O'Leary's Comet!: Cosmic Causes of the Great Chicago Fire Paperback' in 1985. 'My goal,' he told the Tribune at the time, 'is to have the comet dislodge Mrs. O'Leary's cow and take its rightful place in our folklore.' … 'I'm convinced of the possibility,' he told a Tribune reporter. 'There are enough strange, documented events and coincidences that happened that night to make it a very convincing possibility.'" Page's own objection: "Maybe. But there's a hitch with Biela's comet: It appeared in 1872, a year after the Chicago fire. A researcher directed me to another shooting star, Comet Encke … But other experts also cast doubt on the whole idea of such fire starter comets. Meteors, they note, also are called 'dirty ice' and tend to cool too much in their fall through earth's atmosphere to set much ablaze."

### 8.3 Robert Wood, "Did Biela's Comet Cause the Chicago and Midwest Fires?" (AIAA 2004-1419, Planetary Defense Conference, February 2004)

Not obtained (arc.aiaa.org abstract page: HTTP 403; the pdf.aiaa.org preview link in Wikipedia is dead). Wikipedia's *Great Chicago Fire* article ("Precise start") summarises: "At a 2004 conference of the Aerospace Corporation and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, engineer and physicist Robert Wood suggested that the fire began when a fragment of Biela's Comet impacted the Midwest. Biela's Comet had broken apart in 1845 and had not been observed since. Wood argued that four large fires took place, all on the same day, all on the shores of Lake Michigan …, suggesting a common root cause. Eyewitnesses reported sighting spontaneous ignitions, lack of smoke, 'balls of fire' falling from the sky, and blue flames. According to Wood, these accounts suggest that the fires were caused by the methane that is commonly found in comets." The *Biela's Comet* article calls it "an unpublished 2004 scientific paper" and the whole idea "A fringe theory".

**Rebuttals as cited by Wikipedia (the cited works themselves not fetched):**
- "Meteorites are not known to start or spread fires and are cool to the touch after reaching the ground, so this theory has not found favor in the scientific community." — Mica Calfee, "Was It A Cow Or A Meteorite?", *Meteorite Magazine* 9:1 (Feb 2003); NASA, "Meteorites Don't Pop Corn" (27 July 2001).
- "Methane-air mixtures become flammable only when the methane concentration exceeds 5%, at which point the mixtures also become explosive, a situation unlikely to occur from meteorites. … Methane gas is lighter than air and thus does not accumulate near the ground; any localized pockets of methane in the open air rapidly dissipate."
- "if a fragment of an icy comet were to strike the Earth, the most likely outcome, due to the low tensile strength of such bodies, would be for it to disintegrate in the upper atmosphere, leading to a meteor air burst like the Tunguska event." — M. Beech, "The Problem of Ice Meteorites," *Meteorite Quarterly* 12:4 (Nov 2006), pp. 17–19.
- "The specific choice of Biela's Comet does not match with the dates in question, as the 6-year period of the comet's orbit did not intersect that of the Earth until 1872, one full year after the fire, when a large meteor shower was observed." *Biela's Comet* article: "on 27 November 1872, a brilliant meteor shower (3,000 per hour) was observed radiating from the part of the sky where the comet had been predicted to cross in September 1872."
- Earth Magazine (`sources/web/earthmagazine_peshtigo.txt`): "While massive impactors such as the Chicxulub bolide … are thought to have ignited widespread fires …, small rocky meteorites are generally poor conductors of heat. NASA debunked that particular ignition method in 2001, noting that there has never been a historically documented case of a small rocky meteorite igniting a fire."

### 8.4 Peshtigo and the Michigan fires — the accepted meteorological explanation

- NWS Green Bay, "The Great Midwest Wildfires of 1871" (Tom Hultquist, NWS Twin Cities; `sources/web/nws_grb_peshtigofire2.txt`): "The actual cause of the fire was never determined, but weather conditions across the entire region during the summer and fall of 1871 produced conditions conducive to large, rapidly-spreading fires should one ignite." … "The fire in Peshtigo resulted from a number of factors, including prolonged drought, logging and clearing of land for agriculture, local industry, ignorance and indifference of the population, and ultimately a strong autumn storm system occurring in the presence of conditions supportive of a large, rapidly-spreading fire." … "A large upper-level ridge was present across the region from July through September …" … Fort Embarrass observers: "Dense smoke was observed for several days leading up to the fire, and temperatures in the 70s were reported on October 8 … a strong low pressure system over the central plains …, which would have produced strong southwesterly winds across the region. These winds, in combination with the warm temperatures and dry conditions, likely led to the rapid spread of pre-existing fires and any new fires that ignited."
- NWS Chicago, "The Great Chicago Fire of 1871" (150th-anniversary page, 8 Oct 2021; `sources/web/nws_lot_1871fire.txt`): "In the 3-month period leading up to the fire (July 7 - October 8), only 3.55 inches of precipitation were recorded. This was almost 8 inches below the average … the 2nd driest stretch from July 7th through October 8th on record"; "The month of September on its own was exceptionally dry … only 0.74 inches"; "From September 29th through October 8th, Chicago saw no precipitation at all"; "October 8th was by far the most favorable for the spread of fires. Temperatures were very warm for early October with high temperatures in the low to mid 80s across most of northern Illinois … relative humidity ranged from around 35% to 40%"; "A strong low pressure system moving across the Great Plains was responsible for producing strong winds across the Midwest on October 8th with weather observers in the region estimating that southwest winds peaked at around 35 to 45 mph, including within the city of Chicago"; 9 Oct: "a cold front … would reach the Chicago area sometime during the late afternoon or evening and bring relief in the form of rain and cooler temperatures … (the weather observer in Evanston, IL had reported a total of 0.10" of rainfall the following morning)"; "The rain eventually ceased sometime on the morning of October 10th."
- Earth Magazine (Peshtigo): "During the late 1800s, logging and farming practices created an abundance of slash … From 1870 to 1871, the Midwest was engulfed in drought … Historical records mark the date of the last soaking rain before the fire as July 8 … In early October, a cyclonic weather front formed over the Great Plains, creating westerly winds that headed toward Peshtigo."
- Illinois Fire Service Institute guide (`sources/web/uiuc_peshtigo_guide.txt`): "A combination of drought, logging practices, and a strong southwesterly wind created a firestorm that devastated the town of Peshtigo and burned around 1.5 million acres of land in early October, 1871."
- Wikipedia *Peshtigo fire*: infobox cause "Small embers from slash and burn agriculture were caught up in drafts from unusually high winds during a period of extremely dry drought-like conditions."; "These fires, and many other fires of the 19th century, had the same basic causes: small fires coupled with unusually dry weather."; "In any event, no external source of ignition was needed. There were already many small fires burning in the area as part of land-clearing operations and similar activities after a tinder-dry summer. … All that was necessary to trigger the firestorm, plus the other large fires in the Midwest, was a strong wind from the weather front which had moved in that evening." (Gess & Lutz, *Firestorm at Peshtigo*, 2002/2003; MPR 2002.) *Great Fires of 1871*: infobox cause "Controlled burns, railroad sparks, etc."; the Michigan fires "were said to be caused by land clearing fires that grew out of control due to the 'slash'".
- Bales p. 111 is cited by Wikipedia for the same conclusion ("A common cause for the fires in the Midwest in late 1871 is that the area had had a dry summer …").

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## 9. Other theories, 1871–2025

### 9.1 The catalogues
- Andreas 1885 (II:701; Section 1.5) lists the theories current by 1885 (four).
- Musham 1940 (pp. 147–148): "It was not very long after it had started before its origin was being charged to: (1) incendiaries; (2) boys smoking in the O'Leary barn; (3) spontaneous combustion of the hay in the O'Leary barn; (4) neighbors visiting the O'Leary barn with a lighted kerosene lamp to get some milk for making milk punch or an oyster stew; (5) and Mrs. Catherine O'Leary's visiting her barn with a lighted kerosene lamp, possibly to milk a cow or to attend an ailing one."
- Fedler 1985 (pp. 21–22): "The most popular theories involved an angry cow … But who disturbed the cow? There were several suspects: *Despite her testimony, perhaps Catharine O'Leary had gone to the barn to care for a sick cow or to get some milk for a customer. *Or, Patrick O'Leary had gone to the barn because his wife refused to cook his supper until he milked the cow. 'Then he, in a fit of temper, gave the cow a kick...then the cow kicked at O'Leary but hit the lamp, and that started the fire....' *Or, Patrick O'Leary had come home later than usual and put off the milking until after he ate. He took a lamp and pail out to the barn 'and was getting along all right until the cow switched her tail around his face, nearly blinding him, causing him to boot the lamp over; thus setting fire to the hay before he could stop it.' *Or, someone at the McLaughlin's party had slipped into the barn to get fresh milk for a punch or oyster stew. *Or, a group of young men who had been playing cards tried to get some milk. Five other theories were almost as popular: *Tramps sleeping in the barn started the fire *Or, young boys enjoying a pipe or cigar started the fire. *Or, spontaneous combustion started the fire in the hayloft. *Or, an adult had stepped into the open barn to light a pipe or cigar while sheltered from the strong wind, and he started the fire. *Or, three men trying out a new terrier had been chasing rats in the O'Leary's barn, and one of them dropped a lighted match." (The two Patrick O'Leary versions are cited to F. E. Coyne, *In Reminiscence* (Chicago: privately printed, 1941), pp. 5–6.) Fedler adds: "Other persons insisted that the houses in Chicago had been built of limestone that contained oil, and that the oil ignited."
- Bales's index (p. 335) under "cause of the Great Chicago Fire": "Cohn, Louis M., knocking over a lantern while gambling 3-4, 97-98, 100–101, 112; comet 101-5; cow kicking over lamp or lantern 3-4, 6, 52-57, 59-61, 63-68, 75–76, 78n6, 79n8, 79-80n10, 85, 105, 108-9n42, 111n62, 131–32, 155–56, 159, 172–73n6, 175n10, 176–77, 201–3, 227n4; Divine vengeance 103 … spark from chimney 60, 86-88, 228n8, 236, 236n4, 295; spontaneous combustion of hay 56, 79, 85-86, 105; stranger, mysterious 63-64, 81n20; Sullivan, Daniel 112–32, 223-24n9; women getting milk for punch 56-57".
- The 1971 Chicago landmark designation report (`sources/web/chicago_landmark_site_of_fire.txt`): "The exact cause of the great Chicago Fire will probably never be known. However, it undoubtedly started in the O'Leary barn located at 137 DeKoven Street (now numbered as 558 West DeKoven Street). Sometime between 8:30 and 9:45 P.M., Daniel Sullivan, a dray man and neighbor of the O'Learys, was sitting directly across the street from the O'Leary property when he noticed flames …"; "Years after the fire, Jim O'Leary, son of Catherine, stated that it was positively caused by spontaneous combustion. There are also various proponents of the idea that a group of boys who frequently slipped into the barn to surreptitiously smoke cigarettes may have caused the fire with carelessly dropped sparks. All of the above versions are discussed in detail in A. T. Andreas' History of Chicago, Volume II"; the 1937 plaque: "…THERE ARE MANY VERSIONS OF THE STORY OF ITS ORIGIN THE REAL CAUSE OF THE FIRE HAS NEVER BEEN DETERMINED."
- UChicago Magazine (1971 centennial article republished 2021; `sources/web/uchicago_mag_2021.txt`): "Other theories of the fire's origin have persistently been put forward. The old Chicago Times published by Wilbur Fisk Storey … ran a front-page story in the weeks after the fire alleging that agents of the Paris Commune had been dispatched to set the city ablaze. Others—especially one of the more notable O'Leary offspring, 'Big Jim' O'Leary, a multimillionaire gambling boss on the city's South Side by the time he died in the mid–1920s—insisted the cause was spontaneous combustion. Still others claimed that small boys had been smoking in the hayloft or that one or the other of the O'Leary neighbors had come sneaking into the barn looking for milk for punch or for whiskey and had dropped a lantern. Varied groups, from the Ku Klux Klan to Indians, have been accused of conspiring to touch off the holocaust…"

### 9.2 Spontaneous combustion of green hay
- Proponents: Patrick O'Leary as reported by Ahern 1915 ("A couple of weeks before the fire O'Leary had put a ton of green hay in the barn loft"); Big Jim O'Leary (landmark report; UChicago Magazine); Silas Bent 1927 (via Fedler); Samuelson 2025 ("I believe even one of the O'Learys thought that it was internal combustion from hay in the barn, which is actually something that is possible to happen").
- Musham 1940 (pp. 148–149) rejects it on facts that contradict Ahern's: "As to the possibility of spontaneous combustion of hay in the upper story of the barn, the hay was fresh, dry and small in amount, it had been in the barn for only a few hours before the fire started, and the day had been unusually dry and warm. The barn was loosely built and the long dry spell had tended to make it even looser and leakier. The doors and windows were open a good part of the day and the wind was strong. There was enough circulation of air throughout the structure to make a dust explosion impossible. This suggested cause of the fire can therefore be rejected without further comment."
- Bales pp. 85–86: "The spontaneous combustion of 'green' hay in the O'Leary barn is one of the more unusual possible causes."; "…before there is spontaneous combustion there is spontaneous heating. As the temperature of stored hay begins to rise and even before there is actual ignition, a great deal of smoke is produced. This smoke is accompanied by an irritating pungent odor that is not at all like the smell of smoke from a chimney or wood stove. This is because hay's combustion products include aldehydes and acrolein. Mrs. O'Leary milked her cows at four-thirty on the evening of October 8, just a few hours before the fire broke out. She later put…" (sources at p. 105: USDA *Spontaneous Combustion of Hay* 1929; Kirk's Fire Investigation; DeHaan). Index: 56, 79, 85–86, 105.

### 9.3 Boys smoking; tramps; "the man with a pipe"
- Musham p. 148: "As for the story of boys' smoking in the barn, it must be remembered that the fire started after dark, at about 8:30 p.m. It is not likely that boys would take the trouble to enter a barn after dark to smoke when they could do so just as well in the alley or behind one of the high fences, without fear of detection. In the absence of positive evidence to the contrary this theory can be rejected."
- Bales p. 96 (Mrs. Anton Axsmith's story): "…smoking, and laughing. Eventually, she claimed, some of these men entered the barn, clambered into the hayloft, and fell asleep: 'They had been smoking pipes and probably one of these, slipping into the hay, was the real…'"; p. 97: "…smoke when they could do so without fear of detection in the alley or behind a fence. There is no evidence at all that … youthful smokers (or drinkers) caused the fire, and so this theory…"; p. 109 (a later O'Leary-family or neighbour statement): "…smoking cigars and left the lamp where the cow tipped it over; but that's a long time ago and has not been proven … smokers is just one of several stories concocted by neighborhood children in the first few hours after the…"; p. 95: "Nighttime Smoker 'A smoker in the barn' has often…".
- Bales p. 81 n.: "Chicago Tribune, 16 November 1871, p. 4: 'We have still the O'Leary cow, the man with a pipe who passed through the O'Leary back-yard just before the fire....'" — the "mysterious stranger" (index 63–64, 81 n. 20).

### 9.4 The McLaughlin party and the milk thief
- Critchell 1909, p. 81 (Section 2): Mrs. O'Leary's reported admission of going for milk for a milk punch.
- Bales pp. 90–92: "…McLaughlin were hosting a party in honor of Mrs. McLaughlin's 'greenhorn' brother, who had just come to America from Ireland. Someone from this party, seeking milk to make either punch or an oyster supper, crept into the O'Leary…"; "Mrs. Mary Needham Callahan was one of the guests. In 1903, Callahan came forward with the apocryphal tale that she was in the barn…"; "…lamp and a tin pail. While one of them, Denny Connors (Callahan maintained that he was the greenhorn cousin, not brother, of the McLaughlins), clumsily attempted to milk the cow, the lamp fell over and started the fire…"; "…McLaughlin partially confirmed O'Leary's suggestion that 'there was one out of the party went in for to milk my cows.' That is, Mrs. McLaughlin admitted - but only after being asked by the Board - that some guests apparently did…"; p. 114: "When Mrs. O'Leary was asked if there was dancing 'going on at the time the fire broke out,' she merely replied, 'I could not tell you, sir.'"; p. 163: the Evening Journal "wrote that Mrs. O'Leary described the event as 'a little bit of a shindy.' This phrase does not appear in the transcript."
- Bales p. 95 (DeHaan on Dushek's lamp): "Forensic scientist John D. DeHaan notes that Dushek's description of the lamp gives added credence to the 'McLaughlin party' theory."; "…lamp in her barn, that it was more appropriate for use in a living room—such as Mrs. McLaughlin's living room. DeHaan's suggestion is thought-provoking, but as it seems evident that no 'milk thief' caused the Great Chicago Fire, his…".
- The Board's report (Bales p. 295): "…Mr. Leary, the owner, and all his family, prove to have been in bed and asleep at the time. There was a small party…" (fragment).
- Late snippets (query 'milk'/'steal milk'): p. 90 (section "Milk Thief"): "'There was one out of the party went in for to milk my cows.' With these words, Mrs. O'Leary introduced into the inquiry record what the residents along DeKoven Street had been talking about almost since the fire began…"; p. 93 (quoting an 1871 newspaper): "…milk for an oyster stew — that is, to steal it by milking her cows while she was asleep with her children. It is not unlikely that the investigation will show that these social milk thieves, becoming alarmed at some noise, and…"; p. 92 (on Callahan's Denny Connors story): "…steal milk. This is extremely doubtful. For the rest of her life O'Leary grieved about being blamed for starting it. It is incomprehensible that she would have remained silent after hearing about Denny Connors."; p. 65: "…milk for thirsty guests at the time the fire broke out. In the early 1800s the average dairy cow produced less than 1,500 liters of milk a year. This was less than nine pints a day. It is doubtful that in 1871 a single cow could…"; p. 108 n. cites "…Milk, Caused Chicago Fire, New Story," Chicago Sunday Tribune, 9 October 1921, sec. 1, p. 3; inquiry transcript p. 220: "…milk there before if they wanted it? A. No sir. I never saw them in my barn to milk my cows." Index (p. 335): "milk thief 90-95, 107n30, 107-8n31, 108n33, 123-24, 142, 219–20, 223-24n9, 295; rat hunters 103; Regan, Dennis 127-32; smoking, by person or persons 57, 95-98, 108-9n42, 129, 183, 223-24n9" — so Bales treats the rat-hunters story at p. 103 (not retrieved).
- Ahern's 1911 version is a variant of this theory (Section 7.2).
- Late snippets (queries 'oyster', 'Ryan', 'October 9'): p. 90: "…oyster supper , crept into the O'Leary barn with a lamp or other light in order to surreptitiously milk one of the cows . Somehow the barn caught fire , and the rest is history . 18 There are several variations of this story . In 1939…"; p. 107: "…Ryan " were one and the same person . But at least seven guests ( and Mrs. McLaughlin's brother from Ireland ) were crowded into the McLaughlin cottage on the night of the fire . 25. " Centennial Eve , " sec . 1 , p . [ 2 ] ; Cath…"; p. 219: "…What did they want the milk for? A. Some said it was for oysters. I could not tell anything, only what I heard from the outside. Q. Had these persons in your [ 70 ] house Selections from the Transcript of the Inquiry (C. O'Leary) 219."; p. 220: "…oysters ? A. Had no coffee or oysters . Q. Was there any other party borhood that you know of ? in the neigh- A. No sir . Well , there was always music in saloons there Saturday night . I do not know of any other . Q. This was Sunday…"; p. 108: "…October 5 , 1971 , Wall Street Journal refers to a 1924 Chicago Tribune interview with a Thomas O'Connor , who ... 9 October 1921 , sec . 1 , p . 3 , hereafter cited in text as “ Beer , Not Milk , Caused Chicago Fire " ; Statement…" — the last shows that a 1921 Tribune story ("Beer, Not Milk, Caused Chicago Fire") and a 1924 Tribune interview with a Thomas O'Connor (cited by the Wall Street Journal, 5 Oct 1971) added further party variants.

### 9.5 Spark from a chimney
The Board's non-finding names it first ("Whether it originated from a spark blown from a chimney on that windy night, or was set on fire by human agency, we are unable to determine"). Bales p. 60: "Curiously, a few months later Fire Marshal Robert A. Williams veered sharply away from this official position. In his annual report…"; and p. 60 (continuation, 'unknown' query): "…In 1893, while reminiscing about the fire, he not only reaffirmed his opinion that the fire was accidentally set, he also suggested that someone subsequently helped spread the flames: 'It may not have been of…'" (the "he" is Williams in context). Bales p. 87: "…chimney spark from Mrs. Murray's house travel sixty feet or more and eventually wend its way into the O'Leary barn next door? This does not appear likely. John D. DeHaan, author of Kirk's Fire Investigation, points out that…"; p. 88: "It seems clear that the Murray home and the O'Leary barn were so far apart that a wind…".

### 9.6 Incendiaries, Communards and rumour
- Chicago Times, 23 Oct 1871, "A Startling Story" (Fedler pp. 16–17): "On Oct. 23, The Chicago Times published a story so bizarre that the newspaper's own editors admitted that it might be false. The story claimed that Communists started the fire. The Chicago Times said it had received a complete confession from one of the conspirators but published his confession 'without the expression of any opinion as to its authenticity.' The conspirator said he was a member of The Societe Internationale, and that two Communists from Paris helped him establish a branch in Chicago."
- Musham p. 148: "As for the fire being the work of incendiaries, no information worthy of belief has been uncovered to this day proving that this was the case, but there were stories and rumors to the effect that the city was fired by a secret terrorist organization, an offshoot of the Paris Commune of 1871, which intended to destroy not only Chicago, but cities all over the world, in the interest of social justice. It is of course possible that some pyromaniac did in the course of the fire touch off additional fires, but the conflagration was so fierce and on so large a scale as to surfeit any such persons' wild desires completely."
- Bales p. 89 (rumours quoted): "…armed with hay and matches. He gave the alarm, and the incendiary was caught and stoned and battered to death. He lies on the avenue yet, near Fourteenth street.' 'Another man was shot last evening by a police officer…'"; "…kerosene and throwing it into a building on Thirty-second street. He received his deserts at the hands of the firemen, who saw the act, and 'now sleeps in the valley.'" "'Bridget Hickey was arrested for setting fire to…'"; p. 203: "The commissioners did not conclude in this report that the fire was caused by an incendiary."
- Fedler: reported incendiarism and lynchings were "pronounced by Gen. Sheridan to be fabrications".
- Bales p. 88 (query 'confession'): "…confession allegedly written by a member of the Societe Inter- nationale , which apparently was an off- shoot of the militant revolutionary organi- zation , the Paris Commune of 1871. This particular communist claimed that he helped set…"; p. 60 (query 'no one knows', Fire Marshal Williams in 1893): "…no such determination . Despite in- terviewing fifty people during the course of its inquiry investigation , the ... one subsequently helped spread the flames : " It may not have been of incendiary origin , but the incendiary had a…"

### 9.7 Sullivan, Regan, and the O'Leary family's own later versions
Covered in Sections 3 and 6.7; add the Knight-family tradition (AP 2021: Sullivan "had been drinking when he accidentally dropped his cigar in the barn"; Irish America: "Grandma Eileen Knight had to badger that information out of her mother"), Time 2015's "having a nightcap in the barn when a spark from his pipe ignited the hay", and the CPL page's list item "A drunken Dennis 'Peg-leg' Sullivan, wanting milk for his whiskey, broke into the cowshed."

### 9.8 "Divine vengeance"
Bales index p. 335 ("Divine vengeance 103"); Smith (American Heritage excerpt): McDermott's affidavits invoked "Divine wrath", and "Shortly after the fire, a few clergymen interpreted Chicago's suffering as a straightforward example of Old Testament–style jus[tice]…" (Granville Moody). Not a causal theory in the sense of the others; listed for completeness.

### 9.9 The Chicago Times of 18 October 1871 and the three "confessions" (late snippets)

Bales groups the only texts in which Mrs. O'Leary is made to admit the cow story — Critchell's 1909 book, the 1915 *Reminiscences of Chicago During the Great Fire* (Lakeside Press), and the Times of 18 Oct 1871 — and discredits each:
* p. 61 [gbooks, 'October 18']: "…October 18 , 1871. This newspaper contains an alleged " confession " by Mrs. O'Leary , who is referred to as “ an old Irish woman about 70 years of age .... " 17 These three works - Critchell's book , the 1915 Reminiscences , and the…"
* p. 61 [gbooks, 'old woman']: "…old lady " told him the story of the cow kicking over the lantern was true . But as Mrs. O'Leary was only about ... woman about 70 years of age .... " 17 These three works - Critchell's book , the 1915 Reminiscences , and the…"
* p. 62 [gbooks, 'old woman']: "…old in 1871 ! uary Any historian attempting to deter- mine the age of Mrs. O'Leary at the time of the fire will find ... woman " and an " old hag " and de- scribed her as " about 70 years of age . " But her death certificate…"
* p. 63 [gbooks, 'old woman']: "…old at the time of the fire . In the article she is described as " a stout Irish woman , some thirty - five years of age . " But this interview also seems to be a complete fabrication . Mrs. O'Leary is quoted in the article as stating…"
* p. 76 [gbooks, 'October 18']: "…October 18 , 1871 , issue of the Chicago Times , for ex- ample , described her as being " an old Irish woman " who was " bent almost double with the weight of many years of toil , and trou- ble , and privation . " The article implied…"
* p. 76 [gbooks, 'hag']: "…hag swore she would be revenged on a city that would deny her a bit of wood or a pound of bacon . " On the other hand , the December 3 , 1871 , issue of this same newspaper inconsistently described her ap- pearance at the inquiry…"
* p. 157 [gbooks, 'hag']: "…hag " of 70 years of age . Admitting for a moment that an Irish hag of 70 years was by an unforeseen accident the cause . yet there was a great want of charity in the epithets used by the Times of the 18tb . The following facts are…"
* p. 203 [gbooks, 'October 18']: "…18 October 1871 , p . 1. McDermott is referring to the October 18 , 1871 , issue of the Chicago Times , which con- tained several unflattering ( and untrue ) comments about Mrs. O'Leary . For example , the newspaper referred to her as…"
* p. 155 [gbooks, 'kicked over']: "…kicked over the lamp which set fire to Chi- cago . It is too late . She told the kick- ing story herself in the first place - it . has become a fact in history — and she and all the cows on DeKoven street cannot now kick it over . ' The…"
* p. 48 [gbooks, 'kicked over']: "…Kicked Over ( Chicago : A. H. An- drews & Co. , n.d. ) , p . [ 26 ] , hereafter cited in text as The City That a Cow Kicked Over . On November 19 the Chicago Times voiced the same skepticism as this relic dealer : “ It is safe to say…"

Reading: the Times's "old hag … about 70 years of age" is refuted by the death certificate (she was about 44 in 1871; "sixty-eight years old when she died in 1895"), the Tribune's "thirty-five" interview is called "a complete fabrication", and McDermott's letter of 20 Oct 1871 already protested the Times's epithets; p. 155 quotes a contemporary paper's cynical verdict that "She told the kicking story herself in the first place - it has become a fact in history".

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## 10. Sesquicentennial coverage (2021) and the state of the Wikipedia articles

### 10.1 Outlets and what they say about the cause

| Outlet / item | File | Position on cause (exact words) |
|---|---|---|
| AP story as carried by ABC7 (7–8 Oct 2021) and NBC Chicago | `web/abc7_2021.txt`, `web/nbcchicago_dont_blame.txt` | "So how did the fire start? Smith said that may never be known." Bales: "I am 100% convinced Daniel Sullivan started the fire." Knight: Sullivan "had been drinking when he accidentally dropped his cigar in the barn." "But a mock trial at John Marshall Law School held not long after the City Council's exoneration of O'Leary ended with a jury just as convinced that Sullivan hadn't lied about the events of that night." Russick: "To some degree blaming the cow is a way to say it was an accident, that in some ways it was a benign way to say nobody was responsible … We don't know it was an accident." NBC adds: "the Chicago Fire Department held a hearing within weeks of the blaze in which it concluded the cause could not be determined." |
| Newsweek, Cagnassola, 8 Oct 2021 | `webfetch/newsweek_2021-10-08_cagnassola.md` (page-fetch extraction) | "neither historians nor officials put much stock in that account as the cause of the fire, which is still unconfirmed to this day." (rest echoes AP) |
| Chicago Sun-Times, 7 and 8 Oct 2021 (CHM exhibition) | `web/suntimes_exhibit_2021.txt`, `web/suntimes_2021-10-08_anniversary.txt` | "The cow-kicking-a-lantern myth has been dispelled; no one really knows how it started, said Julius L. Jones, who oversaw the exhibit's creation. 'Mrs. O'Leary was scapegoated,' Jones said. 'She was part of a less privileged underclass who were blamed for all city's social ills.'" |
| Chicago Sun-Times, Neil Steinberg, Oct 2021 | `web/suntimes_steinberg_2021.txt` | "the one thing many believe they do know about the fire, that it was started by Mrs. O'Leary's cow kicking over a lantern, is a baseless ethnic slur"; "Whatever the cause, the fire certainly started in the barn behind the home of Patrick and Catherine O'Leary … The hardworking O'Learys already had gone to bed."; "The most common causes of fires, the Chicago Fire Department had reported the previous March, were not cows or lanterns, but defective chimneys, carelessness with flame, and arson." |
| Chicago History Museum press release (2021) / Firehouse | `web/chm_press_2021.txt`, `web/firehouse_exhibit_2021.txt` | No cause statement; Jones on preparedness: "Chicago was a city well-prepared to fight fires." |
| Smithsonian magazine, Oct 2021 | `web/smithsonian_2021.txt` | "reporters began to single out Catherine 'Kate' O'Leary, a 44-year-old Irish immigrant, as a scapegoat … The story was a lie but nevertheless took hold." |
| Glessner House blog, 2021 | `web/glessner_olearys_2021.txt` | Council resolution text (Section 3.11); Ahern "recanted" in 1911. |
| New Herald / Breeze-Courier (Tom Emery), 2021 | `web/newherald.txt`, `web/breezecourier_2021.txt` | Board result "inconclusive"; "Michael Ahern of the Chicago Republican thought he had grounds for a more entertaining story, so he made up the part about the cow … On the fiftieth anniversary of the fire in 1921, Ahern admitted his ruse in a Chicago Tribune article." |
| Saturday Evening Post (Railton), 8 Oct 2021 | `webfetch/satevepost_2021-10-08_railton.md` (page-fetch extraction) | "there's no evidence that either she or her cow had anything to do with it"; Sullivan, Cohn ("unsubstantiated, secondhand deathbed testimony"), Donnelly listed; "The only thing we know for sure is that the Chicago fire was just one of many blazes that engulfed the Midwest on that October night." |
| Clarence Page (Tribune column, 2021) | `web/phillytrib_clarence_page.txt` | "One thing is certain: Mrs. O'Leary and her cow got a bum rap." Reviews Sullivan, the dice game, and Waskin's comet; notes the 1872 "hitch". |
| NWS Chicago 150th page, 8 Oct 2021 | `web/nws_lot_1871fire.txt` | Weather only; cause not addressed beyond "a fire broke out on the southwest side". |
| Chicago Tribune, 28 Sept 2021 (six surviving buildings) | `web/tribune_2021-09-28_survivors.txt` | No cause content. |
| C-SPAN/Book TV: Carl Smith with Rick Kogan, Nov 2021 (closed captions via archive.org) | `web/archive_cspan_smith_2021.txt` | Discusses "the o'leary thing" as myth and "the difficulty is chasing down the sources"; no cause claim in the saved captions. |
| Block Club Chicago (Bauer), 8 Oct 2025 | `webfetch/blockclub_2025-10-08_bauer.md` (page-fetch extraction) | Samuelson: "Nobody is sure what started the fire … 'It's possible that they could have had a lantern or something for light and set it afire … Could be someone was smoking a pipe.' … 'I believe even one of the O'Learys thought that it was internal combustion from hay in the barn, which is actually something that is possible to happen.'" |
| WTTW (news.wttw.com 7 Oct 2021; *Chicago Stories* "Investigating the Cause of the Fire") | — | Not obtainable (403). Search-engine summaries only; not quoted. |
| Chicago magazine Oct 2021; Forward 2021; UPI 1985; Smithsonian 2012; NPR; Time Out; HowStuffWorks | — | Not obtainable. |

### 10.2 Wikipedia — state of the articles (fetched 14 Sept 2026)

- ***Great Chicago Fire***, section "Precise start" (`wiki/GCF_precise_start_section.wikitext`; full reference list, 100+ entries, in `wiki/Great_Chicago_Fire_references.txt`). Structure: legend and scapegoating (Critchell 1909 p. 81 "Milk Punch"; Fire Protection Service 1921; Fedler 1985; Bales & Schwartz 2005 pp. 56, 90, 232; Donald Miller p. 442) → "In 1893 the reporter Michael Ahern retracted the 'cow-and-lantern' story, admitting it was fabricated" (Cromie 1994) → "Amateur historian Richard Bales has suggested the fire started when Daniel 'Pegleg' Sullivan, who first reported the fire, ignited hay in the barn while trying to steal milk" (Bales 2005 pp. 127–130; Bales 2004 web page) → "Bales's account does not have consensus. The Chicago Public Library staff criticized his account in their web page on the fire. Despite this, the Chicago city council was convinced of Bales's argument and stated that the actions of Sullivan on that day should be scrutinized after the O'Leary family was exonerated in 1997" (Mills 1997; Mental Floss 2014) → DeBartolo/Cohn ("The argument is not universally accepted", Potash 2006) → Donnelly/Wood and the scientific rebuttals (Calfee 2003; NASA 2001; Engineering ToolBox; IDPH; Beech 2006) → Gess & Lutz and Bales p. 111 on the dry summer. Points to flag: the "1893" retraction date is unsupported by anything else fetched (Section 7.2); "ignited hay … while trying to steal milk" is one of several scenarios Bales floats, not his stated conclusion (Section 3.5); Mills 1997 is the committee vote of 6 Oct, not the full-Council resolution of 28 Oct.
- ***Catherine O'Leary*** reference list (`wiki/Catherine_OLeary_references.txt`): 7 references (Pierce 1957; DNAinfo 2015; CHM "O'Leary Legend"; Owens 2007; Tribune obituary 4 July 1895; HowStuffWorks; Quinlan).
- ***James Patrick O'Leary*** (`wiki/wiki_James_Patrick_OLeary.wikitext`): birth given as 1869 (conflicts with Glessner's 1863 and DeBartolo's "almost 9" in 1871); external link to the usurped Hyde Park Media DeBartolo reprint.
- ***Daniel Sullivan (Great Chicago Fire)***: existed 2005–2014 (last text, rev. 531309478, 4 Jan 2013: "often credited with being the first to sound the alarm … More recent evidence suggests that Sullivan may have been responsible … In October 1997, the Chicago City Council recommended that Sullivan be recorded as the person who started the fire, by accident."); redirected 21 Jun 2014 "per WP:ONEEVENT"; a 2005 edit summary reads "rmv piece about confession, but the City Council resolution does belong here". *Pegleg Sullivan* has been a redirect since 2010.
- ***Louis M. Cohn***: see Section 6.1–6.2 (redirected 21 Jun 2014).
- ***Biela's Comet*** ("Meteoric impacts"): "A fringe theory links together several major fires … The theory was first proposed by Ignatius L. Donnelly in 1883, and was revived in a 1985 book and further explored in an unpublished 2004 scientific paper. However, experts dispute such a scenario – meteorites in fact are cold to the touch when they reach the Earth's surface, and there are no credible reports of any fire anywhere having been started by a meteorite."
- ***Peshtigo fire*** and ***Great Fires of 1871***: quoted in Section 8.4.

### 10.3 Chicago Public Library "Whodunit" page (`web/chipublib_whodunit.txt`)
"Although the scene of the crime was clearly proven to be the cow's shed, guilt is not so easily established. To start with, the cow may have had accomplices. A little-mentioned fact is that the shed contained six cows, a horse and likely dogs, chickens, cats and rats. The supposedly guilty cow was never identified …"; "Just 13 years after the fire, Andreas notes that 'cause of the fire is now a mystery, and must ever remain so.'"; "Andreas noted the police and fire investigations were inconclusive. He noted that the entire O'Leary household 'proved' to be asleep at the time the fire started. … Edited transcripts are in The Great Chicago Fire and the Myth of Mrs. O'Leary's Cow." (Wikipedia's statement that CPL "criticized" Bales's account refers to an earlier CPL page at thechicagofire.com, archived 2010; the current CPL page merely lists "A drunken Dennis 'Peg-leg' Sullivan, wanting milk for his whiskey, broke into the cowshed" among the theories.)

---

## 11. What each theory would need to be true

Each row states the minimum factual commitments of the theory, the fetched evidence that bears on them, and what document would settle the matter. "Inquiry" = the Board of Police and Fire Commissioners' hearings, 23 Nov–4 Dec 1871 (transcript ~1,100 pp., Chicago History Museum; not obtained — Bales's Appendix transcriptions were reachable only as snippets).

| Theory | Would need to be true | Fetched evidence for / against | What would settle it |
|---|---|---|---|
| **Cow kicks lamp while Mrs. O'Leary milks (the legend)** | Mrs. O'Leary in the barn with a lamp c. 8:30–9:30 p.m.; a cow kicks it; she conceals this under oath. | Against: her sworn testimony and Patrick's that they were in bed (Section 1.6; Andreas II:708 "prove to have been in bed and asleep at the time"); Board found no cause; Musham's "lamp remains" argument (Section 2) is the only physical evidence claimed, and it identifies only *a* lamp in the ruins (Dushek; Bales p. 94), not who carried it. For: Critchell's 1909 hearsay ("in a rather ungracious way", p. 81) and the earliest press (Journal 9 Oct; Evening Star 10 Oct). | The story was in print before any witness was interviewed; nothing new could confirm it except a contemporaneous document showing Mrs. O'Leary in the barn. None is known. |
| **Daniel "Peg Leg" Sullivan (Bales)** | Sullivan was in or at the barn (feeding his mother's cow or resting) and started the fire accidentally; his account of watching from White's/Dalton's frontage is false; Regan's silence or presence is explicable. | For: tract-book reconstruction of lot widths and house positions, sight-line diagram (Bales pp. 112–119, 195–199), 193-ft run on a wooden leg, no one else heard his cries, his mother's cow in the barn, timeline inconsistencies (Section 3). Against/limits: Bales's own "Perhaps …" chain and "No one knows what really happened in the barn" (p. 131); the Dalton house position "helpful but not crucial" (p. 196); the John Marshall Law School mock-trial verdict for Sullivan (ABC7/AP 2021); CPL and Wikipedia note lack of consensus; DeBartolo 1997/1998 and Smith ("unprovable"). | An 1871 source placing Sullivan inside the barn before the alarm; or a surveyed 1871 plat showing that his stated seat *could* see the barn, which would collapse the thesis. Neither is known. |
| **Dennis Regan as accomplice (Bales pp. 127–137)** | Regan was with Sullivan in the barn; both fabricated alibis. | For: Regan's oddly precise account of his own evening; "Both Sullivan and Regan needed alibis" (p. 130). Against: Bales frames it entirely as possibility ("It is possible that Dennis Regan … might also have been responsible", p. 127). | Same as above. |
| **Milk thief from the McLaughlin party (Critchell 1909; Ahern 1911; Callahan 1903)** | A guest left the front cottage, entered the barn with a lamp to milk a cow for punch/oyster supper, and dropped it. | For: Mrs. O'Leary's own suggestion at the inquiry ("there was one out of the party went in for to milk my cows"), Mrs. McLaughlin's grudging admission that guests went for milk (Bales p. 92), Dushek's parlour-type lamp (DeHaan, Bales p. 95). Against: Bales p. 95 ("it seems evident that no 'milk thief' caused the Great Chicago Fire"); Callahan's 1903 tale "apocryphal" (p. 91); Musham rejected it (Section 2). | The McLaughlin guests' identities and movements; only the inquiry transcript (pp. 224–242, per Bales's notes) speaks to this, and it is inconclusive. |
| **Boys smoking / gambling / tramps in the barn** | Unidentified youths or tramps were in the loft after dark. | For: 1871 rumours (Fedler's list; Musham cause 2), Big Jim O'Leary's later statements blaming "tramps or neighborhood boys who were Smoking" (Fedler), Mrs. Axsmith's tale (Bales p. 96). Against: Musham p. 148 ("It is not likely that boys would take the trouble to enter a barn after dark to smoke when they could do so just as well in the …"); Bales p. 97 ("There is no evidence at all that … youthful smokers (or drinkers) caused the fire"); inquiry witness: "Were boys in the habit of congregating in a barn in the vicinity …? A. No sir." (Bales p. 230). | A named 1871 witness; none exists in the fetched record. |
| **Louis M. Cohn's craps game (DeBartolo 1997/1998)** | An 18-year-old from a household a mile away regularly gambled in the loft with an 8–11-year-old O'Leary son; Mrs. O'Leary chased them c. 9 p.m. (contradicting her testimony); the 1944 biography given to Northwestern by the executor is accurate. | For: 1944 press release, Feinberg's recollection, Grayson family tradition, Cohn's age and father's address (Section 6). Against: no 1871 attestation; the recorded will contains no confession; Wykes's "postscript" unsupported; Bales pp. 97–101; Smith 2006 ("unprovable and refutable … one guy bragging"). | An earlier Cohn will or a dated pre-1944 statement; the NU press release original; nothing else could corroborate. |
| **Spontaneous combustion of green hay (Ahern 1915 reporting Patrick O'Leary; Big Jim; Bales pp. 85–86)** | Recently stored, insufficiently cured hay heated to ignition within c. 2–3 weeks; smoke/odour went unnoticed. | For: "a ton of green hay" put in "a couple of weeks before" (Ahern 1915; Bales p. 106 n. 7 citing Andreas II:714), hot dry weather (NWS 2021), Samuelson 2025 ("actually something that is possible to happen"). Against: Bales p. 86 — spontaneous heating produces copious "smoke … accompanied by an irritating pungent odor" before ignition, and Mrs. O'Leary "milked her cows at four-thirty on the evening of October 8" without noticing; Musham's rejection (Section 2). | Only the hay's condition on 8 Oct could decide it; unrecoverable. |
| **Spark from a chimney (Board of Police report, 12 Dec 1871)** | A wind-borne spark from a neighbouring chimney (e.g., the Murrays' house ~60 ft west) entered the barn. | For: the Board's own wording ("Whether it originated from a spark blown from a chimney on that windy night …"); Fire Marshal Williams later "veered sharply away" toward another view (Bales p. 60). Against: Bales pp. 87–88 with DeHaan — "This does not appear likely" given the distance and the wind direction (SW). | Wind direction and house positions are known (NWS: SW winds 35–45 mph); the theory is physically disfavoured but not excluded. |
| **Incendiary / Communard plot (Chicago Times, 23 Oct 1871)** | An organised arson set the barn alight. | Against: Times's "own editors admitted that it might be false" (Fedler); Musham p. 148 ("no information worthy of belief has been uncovered to this day"); Board did not conclude incendiarism (Bales p. 203); Gen. Sheridan called reported incendiarism and lynchings "fabrications" (Fedler, note). | Nothing; no evidence beyond rumour was ever produced. |
| **Comet / meteor (Donnelly 1883; Waskin 1985; Wood 2004)** | Fragments or gases of a comet ignited fires simultaneously at Chicago, Peshtigo and Michigan; meteorites can ignite dry material; Biela's debris intersected Earth in Oct 1871. | Against: meteorites are cold on arrival and have never been documented igniting a fire (Calfee 2003; NASA 2001, cited by Wikipedia and Earth Magazine); icy fragments air-burst (Beech 2006); methane must exceed 5 % to burn and is buoyant; Biela's stream was met on 27 Nov 1872, not Oct 1871 (Wikipedia; Clarence Page's "hitch"); no one in a city of 334,000 reported a fireball or explosion (Bales p. 103); blue basement flames explained as CO combustion (Gess & Lutz via Wikipedia). Weather and fuel suffice (NWS Green Bay/Chicago; Gess & Lutz: "no external source of ignition was needed"). | A dated meteorite fall on 8 Oct 1871 with ignition — none known. Waskin's and Wood's texts themselves were not obtained. |
| **"Cause unknowable" (Andreas 1885; Board 1871; Smith 2020–21; Jones 2021)** | Not a causal claim; asserts that surviving evidence cannot discriminate among the accidental candidates. | Consistent with everything fetched; contested only by Bales ("100% convinced", 2021) and DeBartolo ("credible"). | — |

## 12. Where current scholarship stands (2020–2026)

1. **No professional historian since 2020 endorses a specific ignition mechanism.** Carl Smith (Northwestern; *Chicago's Great Fire*, 2020): the cause "may never be known" (AP/ABC7/NBC, Oct 2021); the theories are "interesting, but ultimately unprovable" (1997) and the Cohn story "unprovable and refutable" (2006); his 2011 online essay: "It is highly unlikely that we will ever have definitive knowledge of the cause of the fire" and the O'Leary legend's truth is "unresolvable". Julius L. Jones (Chicago History Museum, lead curator of *City on Fire: Chicago 1871*, 2021): "The cow-kicking-a-lantern myth has been dispelled; no one really knows how it started." John Russick (CHM): "We don't know it was an accident." Libby Mahoney (CHM, 2006): "We will never know." Tim Samuelson (2025): "Nobody is sure what started the fire." The National Weather Service (Chicago, 2021 page; Green Bay): "The actual cause of the fire was never determined." Smith's 2020 book itself was not obtained; his treatment of the cause is attested here only through the *American Heritage* excerpt, the 2011 essay, the 2021 press interviews and the C-SPAN conversation (which, in the saved captions, discusses the O'Leary "myth" and sourcing problems rather than a cause).

2. **What is settled.** (a) The fire began in or immediately beside the O'Leary barn, 137 DeKoven St., between roughly 8:30 and 9:30 p.m. (every source; the Board's report; Bales's timeline discussion pp. 179–181, 192–193). (b) Mrs. O'Leary was not milking; the O'Learys were in bed; the cow story is a press invention of 9–11 Oct 1871 and a case of nativist scapegoating (Smith, Jones, Russick, the 1997 Council resolution, Fedler, Bales, Sawislak). (c) The scale of the disaster is explained by the July–October drought (3.55 in. of rain 7 Jul–8 Oct; September 0.74 in.), SW winds of 35–45 mph on 8 Oct, wooden construction, and alarm/response failures (NWS 2021; Musham; Bales's chapters on Goll and Schaefer; Steinberg 2021). (d) The comet theory is rejected by astronomers and fire scientists.

3. **Bales's Sullivan thesis: influential, not consensual.** It carried the City Council (28 Oct 1997 resolution), the popular press (Mental Floss, Time, Irish America, Newsweek/AP), and many museum-adjacent tellings; Bales stated in 2021 "I am 100% convinced Daniel Sullivan started the fire." Against it stand the mock-trial verdict at John Marshall Law School (1997/98), the Chicago Public Library's critique (as recorded by Wikipedia), Smith's "unprovable", DeBartolo's rival suspect, and Bales's own written limits (Section 3.10: "No one knows what really happened in the barn on October 8, 1871"). No peer-reviewed re-examination of the tract-book/sight-line argument after 1997 was found; the Harry E. Pratt Memorial Award for the 1997 article is attested only by the publisher's author blurb (AbeBooks listing of the McFarland edition: "Bales' initial conclusions concerning the cause of the Great Chicago Fire earned him the Illinois State Historical Society's Harry E. Pratt Memorial Award") and by search-engine summaries, not by an ISHS document.

4. **The Cohn theory** remains a journalistic proposal (DeBartolo 1997, 1998; Potash 2006) taken seriously by *Time* (2015) and dismissed by Smith and Bales; the 2021 *Forward* treatment could not be read.

5. **The Ahern "confession"** is still repeated in 2021–2025 popular coverage (Emery; Glessner House; Saturday Evening Post; Block Club) with inconsistent dates (1893/1911/1915/1921), but the specialist literature (Fedler 1985; Bales 2002) regards it as unreliable and, given the 9–11 Oct 1871 print record, at most a claim to have amplified an existing rumour.

6. **Sesquicentennial framing (2021).** Coverage and the CHM exhibition shifted emphasis from "whodunit" to scapegoating, inequality, preparedness and weather; Russick's remark that blaming the cow "is a way to say it was an accident" captures the current interpretive stance. Wikipedia's *Great Chicago Fire* article (Sept 2026 text) presents the cow legend, Bales, DeBartolo and the comet in sequence, with the comet rebutted at length; the stand-alone Wikipedia biographies of Sullivan and Cohn were both merged away in June 2014 ("WP:ONEEVENT").

## 13. Shortfalls — texts sought but not obtained

| Wanted | Why not obtained | Best substitute used |
|---|---|---|
| Bales, "Did the Cow Do It? A New Look at the Cause of the Great Chicago Fire," *Illinois Historical Journal* 90:1 (Spring 1997) | dig.lib.niu.edu (host dead per ACCESS_NOTES); digital.lib.niu.edu and idnc.library.illinois.edu Cloudflare-gated; archive.org has no copy (advancedsearch: 0 results) | Bales 2002/2005 via Google Books snippets; Baltimore Sun 12 Oct 1997; Irish America; DeBartolo 1998 |
| Bales 2002/2005 full text | Google Books partial view only; heavy bot-blocking (128 queries answered over ~3 hours, ~130 attempted, many "Sorry" pages); archive.org lending copy 401/403 | Page-referenced snippets (`sources/gbooks/`) |
| Musham 1940 — remainder of the volume beyond the origin/commentary sections | archive.org `papersinillinois1940illi` obtained; second copy 401 | Origin section and commentary obtained in full |
| Cromie 1958/1994; Kogan & Cromie 1971; Sawislak 1995; Smith 1995 and 2020; Miller 1990; Pauly 1984 | Lending-only on archive.org (401/403); Google Books no preview ("no pages") except Smith *Urban Disorder* partial | Reviews, excerpts, publisher pages, snippets (Section 4–5) |
| Waskin 1985; Wood 2004 (AIAA 2004-1419); Galloway, Tribune 13 Dec 1985; UPI 31 Dec 1985 | AIAA abstract page 403; UPI 403 (curl and the page-fetch tool); Tribune 1985 URL unknown | Bales pp. 101–105; Wikipedia summaries with their cited rebuttals; Clarence Page column quoting Waskin |
| Donnelly, *Ragnarok* — obtained in full (archive.org) | — | — |
| Chicago Daily News 28 Sept 1944; Chicago Sun 29 Sept 1944; NU press release 1944; Wykes 1964 | No open digitisation | DeBartolo 1997/1998; Potash 2006; Bales p. 100, 326 |
| Ahern, Inter Ocean 9 Oct 1893; Tribune 8 Oct 1911; Tribune 1915 and 1921 originals | Not in LOC Chronicling America for those dates/titles; Tribune archive URLs unknown | Transcriptions at genealogytrails (1915) and chicagology (1921/1927); Bales's quotations |
| Chicago Evening Journal extra 9 Oct 1871; Chicago Times 18 and 23 Oct 1871; Chicago Republican Oct 1871 | Not in LOC Chronicling America (Chicago titles absent for 1871); NIU/IDNC Cloudflare-gated | Musham p. 152, Bales p. 320, Fedler, Baltimore Sun for the Journal wording; Fedler and Musham for the Times |
| Inquiry transcript (CHM) | Not digitised openly; Bales's Appendix only via snippets | Bales pp. 221–283 snippets; Andreas II:701–716 (obtained) |
| Washington Evening Star 12 Oct 1871 p. 1 | LOC 429 rate-limit on five attempts | 10 Oct issue obtained |
| WTTW 2021 (news.wttw.com and the *Chicago Stories* "Investigating the Cause of the Fire" pages) | HTTP 403 (curl and the page-fetch tool) | Sun-Times, ABC7/AP, NBC/AP, CHM press release, Firehouse (all quoting the same curators) |
| Newsweek 2021; Block Club 2025; Time 2015; Saturday Evening Post 2021 | curl 406/403 | Obtained as page-fetch model extractions (`sources/webfetch/`), flagged as such wherever quoted |
| Chicago magazine Oct 2021 ("As Told By Those Who Lived Through It"); Forward 2021 (Cohn); Smithsonian 2012; NPR 1997/2021; Time Out 2015; HowStuffWorks; Studs Terkel/Miller interview; thechicagofiles.com; chicagonow (Byrne 2021 comet column) | 403/404/202-empty/connection reset | — |
| HathiTrust, explore.chicagocollections.org, images.chicagohistory.org, Encyclopedia of Chicago (encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org) | Cloudflare / connection reset | — |
| Harry E. Pratt Memorial Award — ISHS record | ISHS site not reached | Publisher blurb (AbeBooks) only |

## Appendix A — Source files (all under `sources/`; full log with URLs and times in `sources/SOURCES.md`)

- `ia/` — archive.org full texts: Andreas *History of Chicago* vol. 2 (1885) djvu text and the pp. 701–716 extract; Critchell *Recollections* (1909); Donnelly *Ragnarok* (1883) pp. 411–423 extract; Musham 1940 sections (`../musham_1940_*.txt`).
- `gbooks/` — Google Books search-within results for Bales (`SNIPPETS.jsonl`, `BALES_SNIPPETS_BY_QUERY.txt`, `QUERY_LOG.txt`, `run4.out`).
- `ca/` — Library of Congress Chronicling America OCR pages 9–27 Oct 1871 (Evening Star, Alexandria Gazette, New-York Tribune, NY Herald, Wheeling, Kenosha, Chicago Tribune 11/19/27 Oct via out-of-state reprints where noted) and `KEY_*.txt` excerpts; `CA_FETCH_LOG.txt`.
- `web/` — HTML and text of every web page fetched (Tribune DeBartolo 1997/1998, Potash 2006, Mills 1997; Baltimore Sun 1997; Fedler 1985 PDF/text; American Heritage (Smith); greatchicagofire.org essays (`../gcf/`); chicagology (`../chicagology/`); Glessner House; UChicago Magazine; Chicago landmark report; CPL; NWS Green Bay and Chicago; Earth Magazine; UIUC guide; Sun-Times ×3; ABC7; NBC; Smithsonian 2021; Irish America; Mental Floss; Modern Farmer; Morning Ag Clips; New Herald/Breeze-Courier (Emery); Missed History; JewAge; Kirkus; Firehouse; CHM press release; C-SPAN/archive.org captions; Clarence Page column; failed-fetch stubs).
- `webfetch/` — four model-extracted texts (Newsweek 2021, Block Club 2025, Time 2015, Saturday Evening Post 2021) and `WEBFETCH_LOG.txt`.
- `wiki/` — Wikipedia: *Great Chicago Fire* HTML, "Precise start" wikitext and full reference list; *Catherine O'Leary* reference list; *James Patrick O'Leary*, *Biela's Comet*, *Peshtigo fire*, *Great Fires of 1871* wikitext; deleted *Louis M. Cohn* and *Daniel Sullivan (Great Chicago Fire)* article texts with revision histories; *Pegleg Sullivan* redirect.
- `misc/` — archive.org and NIU search responses (including Cloudflare pages kept as evidence).

## Appendix B — Method notes

- All quotations are copied from the files above; page numbers for Bales are Google Books page ids (`PA<n>` = printed page n) and for Andreas/Musham/Donnelly are the printed page numbers located from OCR page markers.
- Google Books snippets are Google's OCR excerpts (hyphenation, spacing and truncation as returned); where a snippet breaks mid-sentence the break is shown with "…".
- Page-fetch extractions are produced by a model from the live page and are not raw text; they are used only where curl was refused, and are labelled wherever quoted.
- No browser automation, no Wayback/archive.ph, no TLS bypass (per ACCESS_NOTES).