Ragnarok : the age of fire and gravel

BIELA’S COMET. 421

It must not be forgotten that the fall of 1871 was marked by extraordinary conflagrations in regions widely separated. On the 8th of October, the same day the Wisconsin, Michigan, and Chicago fires broke out, the States of Iowa, Minnesota, Indiana, and Illinois were severely devastated by prairie-fires; while terrible fires raged on the Alleghanies, the Sierras of the Pacific coast, and the Rocky Mountains, and in the region of the Red River of the North.

“The Annual Record of Science and Industry” for 1876, page 84, says:

“For weeks before and after the great fire in Chicago

in 1872, great areas of forest and prairie-land, both in the United States and the British Provinces, were on fire.”

The flames that consumed a great part of Chicago were of an unusual character and produced extraordinary effects. They absolutely melted the hardest buildingstone, which had previously been considered fire-proof. Tron, glass, granite, were fused and run together into grotesque conglomerates, as if they had been put through a blast-furnace. No kind of material could stand its breath for a moment.

I quote again from Sheahan & Upton’s work :

“The huge stone and brick structures melted before the fierceness of the flames as a snow-flake melts and disappears in water, and almost as quickly. Six-story buildings would take fire and desappear for ever from sight in Jive minutes by the watch, . . . The tire also doubled on its track at the great Union Depot and burned half a mile southward in the very teeth of the gale—a gale which blew a perfect tornado, and in which no vessel could have lived on the lake. . . . Strange, fantastic Jires of blue, red, and green played along the cornices of buildings.” *

* “ Vistory of the Chicago Fire,” pp. 85, 86,