Oct 8, 1871. The Great Chicago Fire starts, and so does a bigger one nobody remembers. Two hundred and fifty miles north, Peshtigo, Wisconsin burns down in about an hour and kills somewhere between 1,...
The night was bigger than Peshtigo. Same drought, same wind: the Great Michigan Fire burned ~2.5 million acres that same Oct 8 and probably killed 500+ more, across Holland, Manistee and Port Huron. The Midwest lost three towns' worth of people in one night, and history kept the one city that still had a telegraph. No wire, no song.
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