About a week ago, I went to hear a friend play music with another musician. One song was about a tragedy called the Peshtigo Fire, which I had never heard of.
My excuse is that I'm from the East Coast, but still, that's not really good enough.
On the same night as the Chicago Fire (October 8, 1871), and generally for the some of the same reasons — prolonged drought and sudden extreme winds — the area around Green Bay in Lake Michigan caught on fire.
It's considered the deadliest wildfire in recorded history, with at least 1,500 people killed, and possibly up to 2,500. It killed a lot more people than the Chicago Fire, and if its death toll was at the high end of that range, it also killed more than the Johnstown Flood. About 1.2 to 1.5 million acres were burned in six counties in Wisconsin and Michigan.
Aside from the tinderbox conditions that year, the immediate cause of the fire was the slash-and-burn deforestation method being used by settlers in the area to open land for farming and railroads. Destroying the northern arboreal forest with small fires led to the large fire and loss of life and property.
Today people in the U.S. shake their heads over the loss of the Amazon rain forest and slash and burn methods used there to open land for ranching or farming. The vast majority never think about how the land farmed across the U.S. (possibly by their ancestors) was turned into fields using similar methods.
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