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This Chapter by Carl Smith gave new insights to what the people of Chicago were dealing with during the Chicago Fire of 1871. At the beginning people were very optimistic and viewed the fire as a good thing. Fortunate suffering is mentioned as if the fire was a cleanse and they could start all over again. There was a lot of help that tried to get Chicago back on its feet. All around the nation money was being donated to stable their economy, around 5 million dollars of contribution. Food, supplies and other goods were given to them as well. But closer to the end more negative things start to come up. For example, Mary Anne Hubbard writes,” universal thieving propensities let loose…” Then she mentions that her possessions get stolen by her servants most likely(p.151). This starts to depict that there was a lot of crime and violence and there was not a lot of people whom could be trusted. With many delinquents out destroying the little that is left. Inmates were released because they felt bad that they would burn, so many of those were causing much harm.
Helmor mentions in his article that there is no precise reason of how the fire started only myths of a cow kicking a lantern, but as historians we find much interesting in learning all the facts of events from the past. Which is why we continue to study events and think critically to make sense of them based on the knowledge we know today. Just like mgandara mentions in her post of “A Narrative About the Chicago Fire,”For historians, its questions like these that drive meaningful research,” and going back to the natural and un natural, this disaster was an unnatural disaster that was spread throughout because of all the wood objects made humans.
Lastly, Smith uses primary sources to show what everyone was feeling and thinking during that period first hand. We can see anything from poems and newspaper articles everything that was vividly going on. For example, one of the poems by John Greenleaf shows that he had a feeling of optimism. These kinds of sources can be used for historians now and of the future that can go back to study an event like this and still have input on how they thought because people that did not live in that era will not have the same view or insights as someone who was there to witness it.