Fires
in the West
The
Great Denver Fire of 1863
Photo
Credit: Denver Public Library, Western History Collection
X-23463
It
was early morning on April 19th, 1863. Spring
was just beginning, the snow was gone and the streets
were dry and barren. There were no trees and the sidewalks
were made of wooden planks. Denver was barely five
years old and its 5,000 residents were mostly fast asleep
in their beds, anticipating another day of work. A
handful of men had spent the night with friends at one
of the city's many saloons, the Cherokee House. Suddenly,
fire broke out in the rear of the saloon. Almost before
anyone knew what was happening, the fire had whipped
through four blocks, destroying dozens of buildings,
including ten groceries and three bakeries. By the
time most Denverites woke up, all that was left of the
city’s central business district were black and smoking
ruins.
Your
Turn:
Denver’s
newspaper reporters wrote detailed descriptions
of the Great Fire. They documented how quickly
the flames spread and the incredible destruction
the fire caused. Read the description of the
Great Fire below. Using clippings from modern
newspapers and magazines create a collage that
represents the details described by the Rocky
Mountain News reporter.
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“There seemed to be no world beyond the little curls
lighted up by the flames; all
around and above
was the blackness of darkness. In the center was a
towering
mass of flames shooting
up in lofty columns, sweeping away to the right and
left,
leaping from building
to building, sweeping them away like chaff, licking
up the
vast piles of goods that
had been piled in the street, seething, and surging,
and
rolling, in immense billows
like a storm-tossed ocean, while upward and away on
the breeze rolled the
dense columns of smoke, uniting the lurid flames below
with the pitchy darkness
above.” Rocky Mountain News
The
Threat of Fire
Fire
is always a dangerous threat, but it was especially
disastrous for young cities growing on the Great
Plains and in the mountains of the western United
States . The devastation caused by the fire
of 1863 in Denver was not uncommon. A massive
inferno devastated Chicago in 1871 and all of
Colorado ’s largest mining towns experienced significant
blazes in their early years, including Cripple
Creek , Victor and Central City, all west of Denver
.
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Your
Turn:
Read
the quotation below, taken from Robert Perkins’
book, The First Hundred Years .
In your Passport, list three reasons fire
was such a common threat for a new western
city like Denver
.
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Excerpt
from The First Hundred Years by Robert Perkin
“A few of the “business blocks” towered to two
stories. A lot more pretended to
such architectural
glory with false fronts. In the commercial district,
the
structures stood
cheek by jowl without room for a yellow cat to
squeeze between
them. Most of
the homes still were log cabins. A few were
frame, and some of
these were prettied
up with wooden fretwork lace at the eaves. As
gestures to
gentility the interior
walls and ceilings of more pretentious homes often
were
hung with cheesecloth
or sheeting in lieu of wallpaper. Roofs were
of wooden
shingles or rough-slit
shakes.”
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Fires
in the West
Stopping the Flames
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