CHICAGO -- Some dandy theories are floating around about who or what started the Great Chicago Fire.
Mrs. O'Leary's cow, of course, who supposedly kicked over a lantern.A milk thief.
Arson.
Kids smoking in the O'Leary barn.
A passing comet.
Damp hay.
Whatever the cause on that drought-stricken evening of Oct. 7, 1871, Chicago's biggest, fiercest, hottest fire exploded out the northeast corner of the 16-by-20-foot barn behind the O'Leary house on DeKoven Street.
Daniel (Pegleg) Sullivan spotted it first from across the street. He pounded on the O'Learys' back door, yelled something about the fire and tried to save the cows in the barn.
Lee Sullivan, no relation to Pegleg, who lived around the corner on Clinton Street, saw a reflection of the flames in his window. He sprinted a block down the street to Goll's Drugstore at Roosevelt and Clinton to pull the alarm. The store is now Gingiss Formal Wear.
But the drugstore manager refused to give Sullivan the key to the alarm box. Why? He'd just seen a fire truck drive by, going who knows where.
As a result, the alarm went out 20 to 25 minutes later than it should have and no one knows how much of the city might have been saved if fire fighters had been given that head start.
The fire raged for 30 hours. Then a surprise -- many say miraculous -- rain storm stopped it at Diversey Street.
The blaze, leaping from house to house, ultimately turned 4 1/2 square miles of Chicago into cinders, including some 17,500 buildings.
A darn good yarn spinner, Herman Schell, 58, passes along these and other fascinating bits of information as he guides a bus tour about the Great Chicago Fire. His is just one of 18 tours run by the 2-year-old Chicago Neighborhood Tours through the Chicago Office of Tourism.
Fanned to ferocity, the blaze jumped and scorched its way north and east, a terrifying monster, eating everything in its ever-widening path. Wooden houses and buildings exploded in flame, streets paved with wooden blocks turned into corridors of fire.
Curiously, the O'Learys' house was virtually untouched. Even their barn, where the fire started, had only the northeast corner burned out. Today the house and barn are gone and ironically, the Chicago Fire Academy now stands in their place.
To commemorate the Great Fire, a tall, graceful sculpture of a flame stands in front of the red brick academy. The location of the O'Learys' house is marked with a plaque in a hallway.
No marker shows where the barn stood. The spot is out back in the walled-in parking lot, probably underneath a big-shouldered fire truck awaiting a call.
In 1871, the fire roared off as people helplessly watched.
The city was depending on the Water Tower and the 2-year-old Pump House, still an oddly pale, castle-like landmark on Michigan Avenue.
But early on the morning of Oct. 8, the pump house roof caught fire and collapsed onto the pumps. From then on, firefighters were without water.
So what caused the fire?
To this day, no one is sure.
The cow tale seems unlikely, Schell says. Mrs. O'Leary was asleep at the time, he says, "and anyone who knows anything about dairies knows that you don't milk cows at 8:30 at night."
Also, he notes that in 1997, the Chicago City Council passed a resolution officially exonerating Mrs. O'Leary of blame.
The O'Learys had leased the front of their house to the McLaughlin family, who that night were celebrating a visit by a brother from Ireland. Some have speculated that one of the people at the party sneaked into the barn to steal milk and accidentally set off the blaze.
A local teenage girl, Schell says, admitted that her friends used to hide in the barn to smoke cigarettes. That could have done it.
Another possibility was arson. The O'Learys, who had five cows, were in competition with other local dairies.
Some think the fire might have been caused by Baele's Comet (pronounced like Bailey's). The comet was first spotted in 1857 and was supposed to return in 1872, the year after the fire. But some speculated that it broke in two and a portion of it fell on the barn -- and whoof.
As it turns out, no comet was spotted in the sky on that day. Or even in 1872 when it was supposed to show up.
Finally, reports were that two tons of damp hay were delivered to the O'Learys' barn on the morning of the fire.
That led to speculation that the fire was caused not by a cow, an arsonist or a even kid with a cigarette, but by spontaneous combustion.