Yeah, see? I always thought it was the cow, too...

The O'Leary Legend

Late one night, when we were all in bed,

Mrs. O'Leary lit a lantern in the shed.

Her cow kicked it over,

Then winked her eye and said,

"There'll be a hot time in the

     old town tonight!"

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 in order to help support the five O'Leary children.  She also owned a horse that pulled the wagon, as well as a calf. She and her husband Patrick had just laid up plenty of coal, wood shavings, and hay for the winter--and to feed the flames when the barn took fire. 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, whose escape from destruction was one of the ironies of the disaster.

 

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.  (The Chicago History Museum has in its collections a few cowbells that were also supposedly discovered on the site of the barn after the fire.)

Buy yourself a present for Christmas...