1871
“Children get up it's comin' it's comin’!” I yelled. I rushed to the boys’ room and yanked them out of bed. Patrick, the eldest, sprung out of bed right away.
“Go get yr sister. ye're mother is already outside.” With all of the rush and commotion, Fergus, the youngest (and laziest) managed to get up.
“Hurry, hurry!” I screamed.
“Papa what's happenin'?” asked Sarah.
“Sirens, sirens have been goin' off all night. We need to leave and we need to do it now.”
My wife, children, and I ran. We ran until we couldn’t run anymore. Even then, we didn’t stop runnin'. After many miles of runnin', we finally made it to the Chicago River. When we got there, there weren’t many people. Only the crippled and old had arrived before us.
“Go, ye need to keep goin',” he
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I don’t believe ye,” Patrick argued “A cow did start the fire. Apparently, a lady left a lantern on in the shed and a cow kicked it,” “Now that's a waste of steak,” said Patrick tryin' to make light of the situation. “Olaf, Patricia!” a familiar voice was yellin' out. “Mama, papa!” I cheered. “Grandmother, Grandfather!” the kids shrieked.
Everyone was together again and huggin’. We were luckily one of the families that were cheerful as we all embraced.
Authors note: The great Chicago Fire took place from Sunday, October 8th, 1871 until Tuesday, October 10th 1871. It is estimated that around 300 people died. The cost of the whole ordeal was about 222 million dollars, about 4 billion dollars today. They never figured out the exact cause of the fire but it was thought to be started by a cow that kicked over a lamp. Chicago in 1871 had wooden roads, wooden buildin's, wooden pretty much everythin' and that is what allowed this fire to burn so easily. Olaf and his family faced the same thing that a family back then would face. People would try runnin' to the Chicago River but the river was too small and it didn’t stop the fire. So families had to go all the way to Lake Michigan until they found