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In 1871 a fire raged through Chicago,  it burnt down a large section of the city and killed around three hundred people. It was the biggest fire and disasters the city ever suffered but the fire didn’t start itself, so who did it? Well in the article by Richard Bales he explains how the city blamed an old Irish woman named Catherine O’Leary for letting her cow knock over a lantern and start a small fire which would then grow to its full destructive force, even though an investigation found no one guilty.  Bales goes on to explain how unlikely it is for O’Leary to have started the fire and how the more likely suspect is a neighbor named Sullivan who probably accidentally started the fire in O’Leary’s barn. So why did a whole city blame one woman if the courts couldn’t figure out who did it? She was a poor immigrant from Ireland.

The fire took place during the height of the gilded age and as Johnkane described it, “The Gilded Age was a time in American history….when urbanization began to increase throughout the nation.” As urbanization spread poor and rich people were living closer together than they ever did before. From the 1700s to the 1800s urbanization grew and immigrants came to fill the tall buildings scraping America’s skies.  Throughout time rich and poor people were spread far apart and the conflict between the two was limited due to the location. However as we read in the The Great Cat Massacre of the Rue Saint-Severin conflicts between the working class and the rich often presented themselves in  physical acts, rather than just complaints.  In that great fire many rich people lost property and investments and they were looking for a blame, and when the newspapers would print the supposed ‘story’ of what happened they jumped on the bandwagon to blame a foreign born poor person for their misfortune. Urbanization brought the rich, poor, native born, and immigrant closer together than ever before in history, it would lead to a future of diverse and accepting cities, the road there was bumpy and filled with accusations, violence, and unrest.