Hello and welcome to conflicted, the history podcast where we talk about the struggles that shaped us, the tough questions that they pose, and why we should care about any of it.

I'm your host, Zach Cornwell, and this is episode 11, I Must Not Burn. You know, In October of 1871, near the small town of Pesh Tigo, Wisconsin, there was a fire.

No one knows exactly where it began.

Some historians say that it originated with a group of railway workers who were moving some

brush or timber.

Others insist that dairy farmers clearing land for grazing had been the catalyst.

But whatever happened, flames crackled to life deep within the woods of rural Wisconsin.

And within minutes, they began to spread.

The fall of 1871 was an unseasonably dry one for the Midwest.

The grass was brittle like straw, the trees were parched and bone dry,

and once this little fire took hold, it fed and fed and fed off of these accelerants.

But perhaps most crucially, a cold front had just come through the region,

bringing with it heavy gusts of wind and chilly air that breathed life into the flames.

What happened next can only be described as a fluke of nature,

a perfectly calibrated freak accident of biblical proportions.

Years later, it would be described as, quote,

nature's nuclear explosion.

This forest fire grows and grows,

sucking up all that cold air

and combining with other smaller brushfires across the region

to create a titanic

conflagration, a literal wall of flame that raced across the prairie at 90 miles an hour.

...