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CHICAGO (AP) – Chicago seems to want to blame farm animals for its misfortune. For decades, the Cubs’ failure to qualify for the World Series was the fault of a goat that had already been kicked out of Wrigley Field. And for over a century, a cow owned by Mrs. O’Leary caused the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.
But just as baseball fans know that the Cubs’ shortcomings before 2016 had nothing to do with a curse cast on the team by the angry owner of a goat, historians say there is no evidence that the massive fire that destroyed a huge part of Chicago and displaced about a third of its residents began when Catherine O’Leary’s cow knocked over a lantern.
Indeed, no one puts much importance in this story these days. In 1997, Chicago City Council went so far as to exonerate the cow and its owner.
“The family are still mad at the way they were treated,” O’Leary’s great-great-granddaughter Peggy Knight told The Associated Press on Thursday the day before the 150th anniversary of the debut. of the fire. “She didn’t deserve this.”
How the Irish immigrant was blamed is a familiar story: she was the victim of prejudice and circumstance.
The fire started in or near his home and his family’s barn. And while he destroyed much of the city, he miraculously spared his own home.
More importantly, O’Leary was easy to blame for who she was and what she stood for.
“Irish immigrants were often seen as the scum of American society in the 1870s. They were easy targets,” said John Russick, senior vice-president of the Chicago History Museum. The museum has recently put on its website an interactive exhibition in which visitors can maneuver around a fire panel to, among other things, follow its path.
“In the mainstream Yankee press, it was part of a whole set of existing prejudices,” said Carl Smith, author of “Chicago’s Great Fire: The Destruction and Resurrection of an Iconic American City”. “She was poor, an immigrant from Ireland, Catholic and a woman.”
“The caricatures in the newspapers made her an Irish drunk,” Knight said.
The lousy treatment made life so unbearable that the family moved to the far south of the city, where they lived as Walsh, Knight said.
The blame continued for years, even though the Chicago Fire Department held a hearing a few weeks after the blaze in which it concluded the cause could not be determined.
“She was exonerated and it all continued,” Knight said.
This accelerated when in the 1890s someone added lyrics to the song “Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight” which involved O’Leary and his cow.
“I call her in my book the most enduring victim of the fire,” Smith said.
So how did the fire start?
Smith said it might never be known.
Others, including Knight and Richard Bales, author of “The Great Chicago Fire and the Myth of Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow,” accuse a man named Daniel Sullivan, who was the first to ring the doorbell. alarm about the fire.
Knight believes the one-legged cart driver known to everyone at the time as “Peg Leg” Sullivan was drinking when he accidentally dropped his cigar in the barn.
Bales researched property records and read transcripts from the Chicago Fire Department hearing in which Sullivan and O’Leary testified. Sullivan said he saw the blaze outside a neighbor’s house, but Bales said photographs and housing records showed his view had been blocked.
“I am 100% convinced that Daniel Sullivan started the fire,” he said.
But a mock trial at John Marshall Law School held shortly after O’Leary’s exoneration by city council ended with a jury equally convinced that Sullivan had not lied about the events of that night.
All of this leads Russick to wonder if picking the cow as the culprit has always been the town’s way of admitting that it doesn’t know what happened.
“To a certain extent blaming the cow is a way of saying it was an accident, in some ways it was a benign way of saying nobody was responsible,” Russick said.
Then again, he added: “We don’t know it was an accident.”
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