October 8, 1871: The Great Chicago & Peshtigo Fires

October 8, 1871: The Great Chicago Fire breaks out at 10:00 in the evening, and burns down about 2/3rds of the city, including the Union Base-Ball Grounds, home of the Chicago White Stockings of the National Association. It is estimated that 300 people died.

The White Stockings are forced to play the rest of the season on the road, in borrowed uniforms and equipment. This likely costs them the 1st Pennant of a baseball league that could be (but, in retrospect, is not always) called "major league."

Up Lake Michigan, 260 miles to the north, a forest fire breaks out in Peshtigo, Wisconsin. It becomes the deadliest wildfire in American history, killing 2,500 people. It burns so many trees that it's been credited with forcing Wisconsans to leave the timber industry and start dairy farms, making Wisconsin the Dairy State.

That day, there were also fires in Port Huron, Holland and Manistee, all in Michigan. There is a theory that, rather than Mrs. O'Leary's cow kicking over a lantern -- or, much more likely, Mr. O'Leary or one of his poker-playing buddies dropping cigar ash -- onto straw in the family barn, the fires all over the Great Lakes were caused by the breakup of a meteorite.

Most likely of all, though, the forest fires in Wisconsin and Michigan were the result of a very dry Summer, and it was simply a coincidence that they all happened on the same day.

Baseball historian Richard Hershberger, who specializes in the early professional era, has argued that the fire set baseball not just in Chicago, but in the Western U.S. in general, back several years. Baseball had been played in St. Louis since before the American Civil War, but with a weakened Chicago team, the rivalry that should have developed between the 2 big cities at opposite ends of Illinois -- St. Louis across the Mississippi River in Missouri -- took a bit longer to do so.

St. Louis didn't get its 1st true professional baseball team until the 1875 Brown Stockings. Another team with that name was founded in the American Association in 1882, played the Chicago White Stockings in postseason series in 1885 and 1886, and began the rivalry that has kept going to the present day, under the names of the Chicago Cubs and the St. Louis Cardinals.

There are 4 6-pointed stars on Chicago's city flag, and 1 represents the Great Fire. The others represent the founding of Fort Dearborn in 1803, the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, and the Century of Progress Fair of 1933-34.

The top blue bar represents Lake Michigan and the North Branch of the Chicago River, and the bottom blue bar represents the South Branch of the River and the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal. The 3 white background areas represent the North, South and West Sides.

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October 8, 1871 was a Sunday. As a result, there were no scores on that historic day, because the National Association wouldn't play games on Sunday. Indeed, professional sports was still illegal in a lot of places on Sunday. The NA's successor, the National League, also prohibited it until 1892.