Title: The Lost City! Drama of the Fire Fiend, or Chicago, as it was, and as it is! and its glorious future! a vivid and truthful picture of all of interest connected with the destruction of Chicago and the terrible fires of the great Northwest by Frank Luzerne and John G. Wells
Location: Internet Archive Date 1872
“When the general alarm sounded, and all the steamers flew through the streets, prolonging the boom of the bell in shrill shrieks, thousands of citizens rushed out to learn the location and progress of the conflagration. Most of the buildings in Dekoven and Taylor streets wore already destroyed, and the great tongues of flame were licking up the wooden structures in that part of the city as though they were the merest tinder boxes, leaving no trace of their form or material to mark the place’where they stood, but a moment before. The crackling of the fire among the dry lumber resembled the regular discharge of musketry by an army corps in retreat ; but there were still worse evidences of panic than are usually displayed by a routed army, in the hundreds of people, men, women and children, already fleeing to a place of safety, and bearing upon their shoulders such articles of household use as seemed to theni valuable at the moment. They were utterly demoralized, and mingled screams of agony, shouts of alarm, prayers and imprecations, with occasional blows right and left, in a jangling noise of words unknown, and gabble without meaning. Eyes blind with blood, and features wildly distorted with terror, people unclad, half-clad, some wrapped in bed-clothing, women dressed in the apparel of the opposite sex, and some protected only by their night-wrappers, carrying beds, babies, tables, tubs, carpets, crockery, cradles, almost every conceivable thing of household use, formed the most noticeable features of this terrific route.”
