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"Lest We Forget": Chicago's Awful Theater Horror

by Marshall Everett · English · Gutenberg #39280 · 548,876 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: "Lest We Forget": Chicago's Awful Theater Horror

Author: Marshall Everett

Author of introduction, etc.: Samuel Fallows


        
Release date: March 27, 2012 [eBook #39280]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/39280

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK "LEST WE FORGET": CHICAGO'S AWFUL THEATER HORROR ***




Produced by The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images
generously made available by The Internet Archive/American
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[Illustration: IN FRONT OF THE THEATER AT THE TIME OF THE FIRE, December
30th, 1903, 4 P.M.]




  "LEST WE FORGET"


  Chicago's Awful Theater Horror


  By THE SURVIVORS AND RESCUERS


  WITH INTRODUCTION BY
  BISHOP FALLOWS


  Presenting a Vivid Picture, both by Pen and Camera,
  of One of the Greatest Fire Horrors of Modern Times.


  Embracing a Flash-Light Sketch of the Holocaust,
  Detailed Narratives by Participants in the Horror,
  Heroic Work of Rescuers, Reports of the Building
  Experts as to the Responsibility for the Wholesale
  Slaughter of Women and Children, Memorable Fires
  of the Past, etc., etc.


  PROFUSELY ILLUSTRATED WITH VIEWS OF THE SCENE OF
  DEATH BEFORE, DURING AND AFTER THE FIRE


  MEMORIAL PUBLISHING CO.




  Copyright, 1904, by
  D. B. McCURDY




[Illustration: HON. CARTER H. HARRISON, Mayor of Chicago.]

[Illustration: LEADING ACTRESS IN THE "BLUEBEARD, JR.," COMPANY. MISS
BONNIE MAGINN.]

[Illustration: DOOR TO THE FIRE ESCAPE THAT COULD NOT BE OPENED; MANY DIED
HERE.]

[Illustration: FRONT VIEW OF THE IROQUOIS THEATER.]

[Illustration: MEASURING THE EXIT WHERE HUNDREDS WERE KILLED AND BURNED.]

[Illustration: FIREMEN RESCUING THE LIVING.]

[Illustration: JEWELRY AND CLOTHING OF THE VICTIMS OF THE FIRE.]

[Illustration: IN FRONT OF THE THEATER; LAYING DEAD ON THE SIDEWALK.]

[Illustration: FRONT ROWS OF SEATS AND FRONT OF STAGE.]

[Illustration: RUINS ON THE STAGE.]

[Illustration: SKYLIGHT ON ROOF OF THEATER, WHICH WAS NAILED DOWN DURING
THE FIRE.]

[Illustration: BACK PART OF THE THEATER WHILE THE FIRE RAGED.]




INTRODUCTION.

By the RT. REV. SAMUEL FALLOWS, D.D., LL.D.


When Chicago was burning, a little girl in a christian home in a
neighboring city stamped her foot indignantly on the floor and said: "Why
doesn't God put out the fire?"

The cry of many an agonized heart, beating in children of a larger growth,
has been: "Why doesn't a God of wisdom and love prevent such an awful
occurrence as the Iroquois fire?" "I have lost all faith in God," said a
dear friend of mine, as its full meaning began to break upon him.

When we were carrying out the dying and the dead from that horrible
darkness and choking smoke to the outer air, those of us who were wont to
pray could only say, "O God have mercy! O God have mercy!"

But there must be no panic in our faculties. Reason must not desert her
rightful throne. Blinded by tears, we must not in our consuming passion of
resentment against the sickening catastrophe, attempt with our puny arms
to strike against God. He did not cause the calamity. No responsibility
for it can be rolled upon Him. God is law; and his laws had been palpably
broken by human negligence and incompetency. God is love; and human greed
and selfishness had violated every principle of love which "worketh no ill
to his neighbor."

God cannot coerce man, as one by sheer brute force can another. The savage
father may break both the body and soul of his child. Not so God, those of
his children. Man must render a voluntary obedience to the Divine command.
By pains and crosses and sorrows and shame he may be led to that
surrender. But he must say with a free, princely spirit at last, "I will
to do thy will O God."

It is the old problem of evil with which this terrible tragedy has brought
us face to face. The generic evil, out of which all evils spring, every
giant intellect of the ages has grappled with, and it has thrown them all.
The question is not "Why should God permit this special evil to come to
us, which has well nigh paralyzed our city and thrilled the civilized
world both with horror and sympathy, but why did he create the world at
all and put man upon it?" The finite cannot measure the Infinite.
Imperfection belongs to the one; perfection to the other. Where there is
imperfection there is always the possibility of evil.

A reverent faith will bow before the mystery and yet master it with an
undaunted courage. Evil must exist if the Universe is to be. The Universe
is, and it is the best possible Universe God can create. If he could have
given us a better one he would not be the God we revere.

Evil is the vast, dark background against which He brings out the
brightest pictures of beauty and life. From a "Paradise Lost" comes forth
a "Paradise Regained" with its transcendent glory of progress, and
allegiance to law and love.

  "Calvary and Easter Day,
    Earth's saddest day and gladdest day,
    Were but one day apart."

God did not forsake his son in that supreme hour of anguish upon the
Cross, when he cried out "My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?" He
has never forsaken his world, nor the sinning and suffering souls that are
in it. "God in history," is faith's jubilant assertion. He is in its
minutest incidents and in its mightiest events, "in the rocking of a
baby's cradle and the shaking of a monarch's throne," in the fiery furnace
of the Iroquois Theater and in the most joyous assembly of his adoring
saints.

God permitted this great evil in harmony with man's free will; he did not
cause it. The evidence is overwhelming that human law, as well as divine
law, had been consciously or unconsciously defied. Two thousand lives or
more were brought together in a building professedly fire-proof, and
warranted as the best, because the latest of its kind, in the city if not
of the continent. It was not fire proof. The law forbade the crowding of
aisles; they were filled from end to end, until almost every inch of
standing room was taken up. The unusual number of exits was boasted of.
Most of them were unseen or actually bolted and locked. The alleged fire
proof curtain was a flimsy sham, and was resolved in almost a moment of
time, into scattered fragments by the surging flames. The scenery was of
the most combustible material, loaded down with paint and oil. Not a
bucket of water was on the stage, and only one water stand-pipe without
any hose. There never had been a fire apparatus of any kind in the balcony
or the gallery. There was none in the auditorium except one small water
stand pipe. There was not a fireman to answer the call for help. At no
time had there been a fire drill by the employes of the theater. There
were no notices posted to tell what to do in case of fire. There was no
fire alarm box anywhere in the structure. Common prudence and common sense
were completely set aside. Coroner Traeger in advance of the final finding
of the jury, is reported to have said: "Sufficient proof has been already
found to show that there was gross mismanagement and carelessness. There
is no need of denial. Instead of being the safest theater in Chicago, the
Iroquois was the unsafest."

But He who "maketh the wrath of man to praise him," who is ever bringing
good out of evil, will overrule and is already overruling this dire
calamity for the well being of mankind.

As I looked upon the charred and mangled and bruised bodies of tender
women and little children and once strong men; as I listened to the moans
of agony, and the cry of the living, tortured ones for help and for loved
friends whom they had left behind or been separated from as the fiery
blast swept them onward and outward, I said in my haste, "you all are
'martyrs by the pang without the palm'." I do not say it now. Martyrs
indeed they were, by the criminal neglect of recreant men. But the palm is
theirs. They have saved others, themselves they could not save. Thousands,
perhaps millions, will in the future be secure in their places of resort,
because these went on that fateful day to their inevitable doom. Mayors,
architects, fire-inspectors, managers, stage carpenters, electricians,
ushers and chiefs of police in every city have had their duty burned into
their inmost consciousness by this consuming fire.

Human law, which has been so flagrantly set at naught, demands punishment.
The public conscience will be outraged if the guilty parties do not meet
stern, inexorable justice. It is not vengeance that is sought, for
"Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord."

But those who are immediately responsible, have not been the only
transgressors, although they must suffer for their own guilt, and also
vicariously for the sins of omission by others. For we have all sinned and
come short of our duty. A common blame rests upon the whole community.
Many a minister has been preaching upon the fire, but has his own church,
perhaps crowded to the door, been safe while his eager congregation has
listened to his impassioned utterances? Suppose the unexpected had
happened, and the cry of fire had been heard and bursting flames been
seen, would his hearers have escaped unhurt? Not if the church doors swung
inward instead of outward; not if the means of escape were not abundant;
not if camp chairs blocked the passages to the street. Who then would have
been responsible? The clergymen, the church officers, the janitor, with
the municipal or legal authorities would have had to share the blame.

Nearly two score of our city school teachers perished in the theater. How
many school buildings are in such an imperfect condition today that
thousands of young lives are in constant danger? Suppose again the
unexpected should happen and tragedies be enacted which might even surpass
the Iroquois disaster, would the Mayor, and his subordinates and the Board
of Education and the teachers be held guiltless? Yet that fearful
contingency might have taken place.

It is a question seriously to be considered whether or not the great
majority of the apartment buildings in Chicago have the doors of the main
entrance swinging outwards. I have climbed to the fourth and fifth stories
of some of these edifices in which there are dark, narrow stair cases, and
all the doors swing inwards. There is not a single element of fire
proofing in them. I have gone up, in open elevators, in manufactories and
office buildings where scores and hundreds of persons are employed, and
have never felt safe a moment while remaining in them. They are fire traps
of the worst description.

There are hotels whose very construction invites the devouring flames.
There are stores crowded literally with thousands of persons on special
occasions, where the consequences in case of fire would eclipse by far the
Iroquois holocaust. No coaxing, or pleading, or grafting, or business
considerations should stand in the way both of speedy condemnation and
renovation in all these cases by our city officers.

Man is greater than Mammon. The sanctity of human life must be held
supreme. The body is more than raiment and the soul than the body. A new
civic spirit must pervade the people as the saltness the sea. Duty must
tower infinitely above self-indulgence. Law must take the place of luck.

The plain lesson for our whole country and the world is to be alert to
meet the dangers which may menace human life in the home, the workshop,
the manufactory, the hotel, the theater, the church. Let ample means of
exit be provided and always known to audiences. The tendency to a panic is
always increased when people are apprehensive of danger and believe that
they are hemmed in. Fear is contagious. A crowd feels and does not reason.
Self-preservation, the first law of nature, asserts itself the more
vehemently when the way of escape is uncertain. Panics may not always be
prevented, but their dangers will be greatly diminished if every
individual knows that he may with comparative leisure get out when he
wishes so to do.

In the theater let it be known that every modern contrivance has been
employed to secure safety. Let the curtain be of steel and so arranged
that it will have full play to work in its grooves. Let automatic
sprinklers be provided. Let the firemen in costume be in plain sight. Let
the policemen be in full evidence. Let the aisles always be clear. Let
there be ample room between the seats, and let the seats be easily raised
to afford rapid departure. Let the ushers be drilled like soldiers to keep
their places and allay confusion. All these and other things of like
character appeal forcibly to the reasoning powers and tend to give an
audience self command.

In many of our public schools the pupils are occasionally called from
their rooms, during recitation hours, and promptly assembling are marched
in an orderly way out of the building. This is an excellent plan.

Two marked instances of superb self-control among children in the panic at
the Iroquois theater have been brought to my notice. Two little daughters
of a highly esteemed friend slid down the balusters from the upper balcony
and reached the main floor unhurt. One of my Sunday School teachers met a
young lad she knew, leading by the hand a girl younger than himself to her
home. They were sitting together when the stampede took place. "Jump on my
shoulders," said the boy. Then holding her fast by her feet, he said: "Now
use your fists and fight for all you're worth." Bending his head he forced
his way with his conquering heroine to life. Let every safeguard that
human ingenuity can devise be furnished and yet there always remains the
personal element to be taken into the account. Habitual practice of
self-control in daily life will help give coolness and calmness in times
of peril. Keeping one's head in the ordinary things prevents its losing
when the extraordinary occurs.

Samuel Fallows.




TABLE OF CONTENTS


                                                            Page

  CHAPTER I.

  THE STORY OF THE FIRE                                       33

  WAVE OF FLAME GREETS AUDIENCE--FEW REALIZE APPALLING
  RESULT--DROP WHERE THEY STAND--MANY HEROES ARE
  DEVELOPED--DEAD PILED IN HEAPS--EXITS WERE CHOKED
  WITH BODIES--SURVEY SCENE WITH HORROR--FIND BUSHELS
  OF PURSES.


  CHAPTER II.

  FIRST AID TO THE INJURED AND CARE FOR THE DEAD              51

  GREAT PILES OF CHARRED BODIES FOUND EVERYWHERE IN THE
  THEATER--MOAN INSPIRES WORKERS IN MAD EFFORT TO
  SAVE--NONE LEFT ALIVE IN GALLERY--DEAD AND DYING
  CARRIED INTO NEARBY RESTAURANT BY SCORES--TERRIBLE
  REALITY COMES TO AWESTRICKEN CROWD--ONE LIFE BROUGHT
  BACK FROM DEATH--ONE HUNDRED FEET IN AIR, POLICE
  CARRY INJURED ACROSS ALLEY--CROWDS OF ANXIOUS
  FRIENDS--BALCONY AND GALLERY CLEARED--FINANCE
  COMMITTEE OF CITY COUNCIL ACTS PROMPTLY.


  CHAPTER III.

  TAKING AWAY AND IDENTIFYING THE DEAD                        67

  HEARTRENDING SCENES WITNESSED AT THE UNDERTAKING
  ESTABLISHMENTS--FRIENDS AND RELATIVES EAGERLY SEARCH
  FOR LOVED ONES MISSING AFTER THEATER HOLOCAUST.


  CHAPTER IV.

  SCENES OF HORROR AS VIEWED FROM THE STAGE                   77

  STORY OF HOW A SMALL BLAZE TERMINATED IN TERRIBLE
  LOSS--ORCHESTRA PLAYS IN FACE OF DEATH--CLOWN PROVES
  A HERO--ALL HOPE LOST FOR GALLERY.


  CHAPTER V.

  EXCITING EXPERIENCES IN THE FIRE                            86

  EXPERIENCE OF CHICAGO UNIVERSITY MEN--BISHOP BRAVES
  DANGER IN HEROIC WORK OF RESCUE--WOMEN AND FOUR
  CHILDREN SUFFER--LEARNS CHILDREN HAVE ESCAPED--FINDS
  HIS DAUGHTER--MR. FIELD'S NARRATIVE--NARROW ESCAPES
  OF YOUNG AND OLD--PULLS WOMEN FROM MASS ON FLOOR.


  CHAPTER VI.

  HEROES OF THE FIRE                                          94

  PILES OF DEAD IN THE GALLERY--EDDIE FOY'S HEROISM--AN
  ELEVATOR BOY HERO--TWO BALCONY HEROES--THE MUSICAL
  DIRECTOR'S STORY--CHILD SAVES HIS BROTHER.


  CHAPTER VII.

  THE ORIGIN OF THE FIRE--THE ASBESTOS CURTAIN AND THE
  LIGHTS                                                     105

  ACCOUNT OF THE FIRE'S ORIGIN--WERE ELECTRIC LIGHTS
  TURNED OUT?--STATEMENT OF MESSRS. DAVIS AND POWERS,
  MANAGERS OF THE THEATER--FIRST RELIABLE STATEMENT AS
  TO WHY THE CURTAIN DID NOT COME DOWN--ANOTHER STORY
  AS TO WHY THE CURTAIN DID NOT LOWER--THE THEATER
  FIREMAN'S NARRATIVE--THE STAGE CARPENTER--THE CHIEF
  ELECTRICAL INSPECTOR'S TALE--ONE OF THE COMEDIANS
  SPEAKS--ABOUT THE LIGHTS.


  CHAPTER VIII.

  SUGGESTIONS OF ARCHITECTS AND OTHER EXPERTS AS TO
  AVOIDING LIKE CALAMITIES                                   116

  ROBERT S. LINDSTROM'S SUGGESTIONS--THE ARCHITECT
  SPEAKS--EXAMINATION BY ARCHITECTURAL EDITOR--PROPOSED
  PRECAUTIONS FOR NEW YORK THEATERS.


  CHAPTER IX.

  THIRTY EXITS, YET HUNDREDS PERISH IN AWFUL BLAST           123

  HORRIBLE SIGHT MET THE FIREMEN UPON ENTERING
  AUDITORIUM--THE GALLERY HORROR--GIRL'S MIRACULOUS
  ESCAPE--AN ACCOUNT FROM THE BOXES--INSPECTION AFTER
  THE FIRE--A YOUNG HEROINE--A NARROW ESCAPE--FINDS
  WIFE IN HOSPITAL--A MIRACULOUS AND UNCONSCIOUS
  ESCAPE--LITTLE GIRL'S MARVELOUS ESCAPE--FOUR
  GENERATIONS REPRESENTED--DAUGHTERS AND
  GRANDDAUGHTERS GONE.


  CHAPTER X.

  HOW THE NEW YEAR WAS USHERED IN                            137

  MOURNING IN EVERY STREET--NOISE SEEMS A SACRILEGE--
  MAYOR ASKS FOR SILENCE--MERRIMENT IS SUBDUED--CITY
  OF MOURNING--BUSINESS WORLD IN MOURNING.


  CHAPTER XI.

  A SABBATH OF WOE                                           143

  SEVEN TURNER VICTIMS--SAD SCENES AT WOLFF HOME--
  PATHETIC SCENE AT CHURCH--BURY CHILDREN AND
  GRAND-CHILDREN--FIVE DEAD IN ONE HOUSE--ENTIRE FAMILY
  IS BURIED--MRS. FOX AND THREE CHILDREN--MRS. ARTHUR
  E. HULL AND CHILDREN--HERBERT AND AGNES LANGE--
  SWEETHEARTS BURIED AT THE SAME TIME--FIVE BURIED IN
  ONE GRAVE--BOYS AS PALLBEARERS--WINNETKA SADDENED--
  MOTHER AND DAUGHTERS BURIED TOGETHER--HOLD TRIPLE
  FUNERAL--WOMEN FAINT IN CHURCH--LIFE-LONG FRIENDS
  MEET IN DEATH--EDWARD AND MARGARET DEE--MISS E. D.
  MANN AND NIECE--ELLA AND EDITH FRECKELTON--MISS
  FRANCES LEHMAN.


  CHAPTER XII.

  WHAT OF THE PLAYERS?                                       152

  THE CHORUS GIRL--THE MUSICAL DIRECTOR--THE JOY OF
  THE OPENING--SPENDTHRIFT HABITS--GAMBLING, PURE AND
  SIMPLE--THE SHOW ON THE ROAD--THE ONE-NIGHT STAND--
  THE "MR. BLUEBEARD" COMPANY.


  CHAPTER XIII.

  OTHER HOLOCAUSTS                                           181


  CHAPTER XIV.

  STORIES AND NARRATIVES OF THE HOLOCAUST                    193

  MRS. SCHWEITZLER'S STORY OF THE BURNING OF THE
  CURTAIN--ESCAPE OF MOTHER AND TWO SMALL CHILDREN--
  EXPRESSION OF THE DEAD--ONLY SURVIVOR OF LARGE
  THEATER PARTY--ALL HIS FAMILY GONE--A FAMILY PARTY
  BURNED--CARRIES DAUGHTER'S BODY HOME IN HIS ARMS--SAD
  ERROR IN IDENTIFICATION--THE HANGER OF THE ASBESTOS
  CURTAIN--KEEPSAKES OF THE DEAD--THE SCENE AT
  THOMPSON'S RESTAURANT--LIKE A FIELD OF BATTLE--WOMEN
  EAGER TO HELP--STEADY STREAM OF BODIES--CLOTHING TORN
  TO SHREDS--PRAYERS FOR THE DYING--CHILD SAVED FROM
  DEATH BY BALLET GIRL--PRIEST GIVES ABSOLUTION TO
  DYING FIRE VICTIMS--LITTLE BOY THANKS GOD FOR
  CHANGING HIS LUCK--USE PLACER MINER METHODS--DAUGHTER
  OF A. H. REVELL ESCAPES--PHILADELPHIA PARTNER IN
  THEATER HORRIFIED--ALL KENOSHA IN MOURNING--FIVE OF
  ONE FAMILY DEAD--COOPER BROTHERS DEEPLY MOURNED.


  CHAPTER XV.

  SOCIETY WOMEN AND GIRLS' CLUBS                             214

  MISS CHARLOTTE PLAMONDON'S ACCOUNT OF THE FIRE--
  SCREAMS OF TERROR HEARD--CHORUS GIRLS ESCAPE, PARTLY
  CLAD--FOY TRIES TO PREVENT PANIC--ESCAPE OF ANOTHER
  SOCIETY WOMAN--MINNEAPOLIS WOMAN'S STORY OF THE
  FIRE--GIRLS' CLUBS SORELY STRICKEN.


  CHAPTER XVI.                                               220

  EDDIE FOY'S SWORN TESTIMONY--DESCRIBES STAGE
  BOX--CURTAIN WOULD NOT COME DOWN--LIGHT NEAR THE
  FIRE--SAW NO EXTINGUISHERS--TALKS OF APPARATUS--ONLY
  ONE EXIT OPEN--WIRE ACROSS AUDITORIUM.


  CHAPTER XVII.

  EFFECT OF THE FIRE NEAR AND FAR                            230

  NEW YORK THEATERS AND SCHOOLS--CRUSADE IN PITTSBURG--
  WASHINGTON THEATER OWNERS ARRESTED--MASSACHUSETTS
  THEATERS INVESTIGATED--ACTION IN MILWAUKEE--
  PRECAUTIONS AT ST. LOUIS--ORDERS AFFECTING OMAHA
  THEATERS--EFFECT ABROAD--HORROR FELT IN LONDON--
  LONDON THEATER PRECAUTIONS--PRESENT RULES FOR LONDON
  THEATERS--CURTAIN OFTEN TESTED--CLOSE WATCH FOR
  FIRE--TREE TELLS OF RUSE--FORTUNE FOR SAFETY--W. C.
  ZIMMERMAN ON EUROPEAN THEATERS--THE EFFECT ON GAY
  PARIS--UPHEAVAL OF BERLIN THEATRICAL WORLD--MR.
  SHAVER ON BERLIN THEATERS--VIENNA RECALLS A HORROR
  OF ITS OWN--THE NETHERLANDS AND SCANDINAVIA.


  CHAPTER XVIII.

  SUGGESTIONS FOR SAFE THEATERS                              243

  FRANCIS WILSON SAYS "NO STEPS"--STAIRCASES WITH
  RAILINGS--PRECAUTIONS ENFORCED IN LONDON--WHAT THE
  CHICAGO CITY ENGINEER SAYS--OPINION OF A FIREPROOF
  EXPERT--ILLUMINATED EXIT SIGNS.


  CHAPTER XIX.

  THE SWORN TESTIMONY OF THE SURVIVORS                       251

  THE FIRST WITNESS--MARLOWE'S EXPERIENCE--MUSICAL
  DIRECTOR'S SWORN STATEMENT--MRS. PETRY'S ESCAPE--UP
  AGAINST LOCKED DOORS--BLOWN INTO THE ALLEY--JUST OUT
  IN TIME--SPORTING MEN TESTIFY--AN ELGIN PHYSICIAN'S
  TALE--MR. MENHARD'S DIFFICULT EXIT--THE THEATER
  ENGINEER--A SCHOOL GIRL'S ACCOUNT.


  CHAPTER XX.

  LACK OF FIRE SAFEGUARDS                                    271

  A UNIVERSITY STUDENT'S STORY--A CLERGYMAN'S STORY--
  THE FLY MAN'S STORY--SCHOOL TEACHER'S THRILLING
  EXPERIENCE--GLEN VIEW MAN'S EXPERIENCE--THE LIGHT
  OPERATOR--THE JAMMED THEATER--GAS EXPLOSION HOURS
  BEFORE THE FIRE--PANIC AMONG THEATER EMPLOYEES--AN
  EX-USHER'S WORDS.


  CHAPTER XXI.

  IRON GATES, DEATH'S ALLY                                   300

  EVIDENCE OF GEORGE M. DUSENBERRY, SUPERINTENDENT OF
  THE THEATER--PURPOSE OF THE TWO IRON GATES--NEVER
  ANY FIRE DRILLS--GATES WERE BATTERED--DIDN'T BOTHER
  ABOUT LOCKED DOORS.


  CHAPTER XXII.

  DANCED IN PRESENCE OF DEATH                                306


  CHAPTER XXIII.

  JOIN TO AVENGE SLAUGHTER OF INNOCENTS                      312

  ATTORNEY T. D. KNIGHT SPEAKS--CORONER'S WORK
  THROUGH--REMARKS BY ELIZABETH HALEY.


  CHAPTER XXIV.

  AWFUL PROPHECY FULFILLED                                   317

  MOURNING AND INDIGNATION--NOTHING ELSE SO
  HORRIBLE--UNFORTUNATE VICTIMS--FIRE! FIRE!--BEFORE
  THE DISASTER--THE HOLOCAUST--THE STAMPEDE BEGINS--
  ONE OF STUPENDOUS HORRORS--CURSED AND BLASPHEMED--
  DEAD BODIES FOUND--SUDDENLY AND FOREVER PARTED--THE
  FRENZY OF FRIENDS--TOO HORRIBLE TO DWELL UPON--HOW
  THE THEATERS SHOULD BE BUILT.


  CHAPTER XXV.

  LIST OF THE DEAD                                           325


  CHAPTER XXVI.

  THE STORY OF THE BURNING OF BALTIMORE                      357




MEMORIAL PRAYER.

The Rt. Rev. Samuel Fallows wrote this prayer for Chicago on its appointed
day of mourning. It is a prayer for all mourners of all creeds:

    "O God, our Heavenly Father, we pray for an unshaken faith in Thy
    goodness as our hearts are bowed in anguish before Thee.

    Come with Thy touch of healing to those who are suffering fiery pain.

    Open wide the gates of Paradise to the dying.

    Comfort with the infinite riches of Thy grace the bereaved and
    mourning ones.

    Forgive and counteract all our sins of omission and commission.

    All this we ask for Thy dear name and mercy's sake. Amen."




MEMORIAL HYMN.

Bishop Muldoon selected as the one familiar hymn most deeply expressive of
the city's mourning, "Lead, Kindly Light," which he declared should be the
united song of all Chicagoans on Memorial Day.

  "Lead, kindly Light, amid th' encircling gloom,
              Lead Thou me on;
  The night is dark, and I am far from home,
              Lead Thou me on.
  Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see
  The distant scene; one step enough for me.

  I was not ever thus, nor prayed that Thou
              Shouldst lead me on;
  I loved to choose and see my path; but now
              Lead Thou me on.
  I loved the garish day, and, spite of fears,
  Pride ruled my will: remember not past years.

  So long Thy power hath blessed me, sure it still
              Will lead me on
  O'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent, till
              The night is gone,
  And with the morn those angel faces smile,
  Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile."




POEM BY A CHILD VICTIM.

The following poem, written by Walter Bissinger, a boy victim of the
Iroquois Theater fire, fifteen years old, was composed two years ago, in
honor of the tenth anniversary of the youthful poet's uncle and aunt, Mr.
and Mrs. Max Pottlitzer, of Lafayette, Ind., whose son Jack, aged ten,
perished with his cousin in the terrible disaster:

  HAVE A THOUGHT.

  I.

  Have a thought for the days that are long gone by
      To the country of What-has-been,
  And a thought for the ones that unseen lie
          'Neath the mystic veil
          Of the future pale,
      As the years roll out and in.


  II.

  Have a thought for the host and hostess here,
      Aunt Emily and Uncle Max,
  And a thought for our friends to our hearts so dear
          That around us tonight
          In the joyous light
      Of pleasure their souls relax


  III.

  Have a thought for the happy two tonight
      Who have passed their tenth wedded year,
  And the best of wishes, kind and bright,
          Which we impart
          With a loving heart
      That is faithful and sincere.




VERDICT OF CORONER'S JURY.

From the testimony presented to us we, the jury, find the following were
the causes of said fire:

Grand drapery coming in contact with electric flood or arc light, situated
on iron platform on the right hand of stage, facing the auditorium.

City laws were not complied with relating to building ordinances
regulating fire-alarm boxes, fire apparatus, damper or flues on and over
the stage and fly galleries.

We also find a distinct violation of ordinance governing fireproofing of
scenery and all woodwork on or about the stage.

Asbestos curtain totally destroyed; wholly inadequate, considering the
highly inflammable nature of all stage fittings, and owing to the fact
that the same was hung on wooden bottoms.

Building ordinances violated inclosing aisles on each side of lower boxes
and not having any fire apparatus, dampers or signs designating exits on
balcony.


LACK OF FIRE APPARATUS.

Building ordinances violated regulating fire apparatus and signs
designating exits on dress circle.

Building ordinances violated regulating fire apparatus and signs
designating exits on balcony.

Generally the building is constructed of the best material and well
planned, with the exception of the top balcony, which was built too steep
and therefore difficult for people to get out of especially in case of an
emergency.

We also note a serious defect in the wide stairs in extreme top east
entrance leading to ladies' lavatory and gallery promenade, same being
misleading, as many people mistook this for a regular exit, and, going as
far as they could, were confronted with a locked door which led to a
private stairway preventing many from escape and causing the loss of
fifty to sixty lives.


HOLDING OF DAVIS AND HARRISON.

We hold Will J. Davis, as president and general manager, principally
responsible for the foregoing violations in the failure to see that the
Iroquois theater was properly equipped as required by city ordinances, and
that his employes were not sufficiently instructed and drilled for any and
all emergencies; and we, the jury, recommend that the said Will J. Davis
be held to the grand jury until discharged by due course of law.

We hold Carter H. Harrison, mayor of the city of Chicago, responsible, as
he has shown a lamentable lack of force in his efforts to shirk
responsibility, evidenced by testimony of Building Commissioner George
Williams and Fire Marshal William H. Musham as heads of departments under
the said Carter H. Harrison; following this weak course has given Chicago
inefficient service, which makes such calamities as the Iroquois theater
horror a menace until the public service is purged of incompetents; and
we, the jury, recommend that the said Carter H. Harrison be held to the
grand jury until discharged by due course of law.


RESPONSIBILITY OF WILLIAMS.

We hold the said George Williams, as building commissioner, responsible
for gross neglect of his duty in allowing the Iroquois Theater to open its
doors to the public when the said theater was incomplete, and did not
comply with the requirements of the building ordinances of the city of
Chicago; and we, the jury, recommend that the said George Williams be held
to the grand jury until discharged by due process of law.

We hold Edward Loughlin, as building inspector, responsible for gross
neglect of duty and glaring incompetency in reporting the Iroquois theater
"O. K." on a most superficial inspection; and we, the jury, recommend
that the said Edward Loughlin be held to the grand jury until discharged
by due course of law.

We hold William H. Musham, fire marshal, responsible for gross neglect of
duty in not enforcing the city ordinances as they relate to his
department, and failure to have his subordinate, William Sallers, fireman
at the Iroquois Theater, report the lack of fire apparatus and appliances
as required by law; and we, the jury, recommend that the said William H.
Musham be held to the grand jury until discharged by due course of law.


NEGLECT OF DUTY BY SALLERS.

We hold the said William Sallers, as fireman of Iroquois Theater, for
gross neglect of duty in not reporting the lack of proper fire apparatus
and appliances; and we, the jury, recommend that the said William Sallers
be held to the grand jury until discharged by due course of law.

We hold William McMullen, electric-light operator, for gross neglect and
carelessness in performance of duty; and we, the jury, recommend that the
said William McMullen be held to the grand jury until discharged by due
process of law.

We hold James E. Cummings, as stage carpenter and general superintendent
of stage, responsible for gross carelessness and neglect of duty in not
equipping the stage with proper fire apparatus and appliances; and we, the
jury, recommend that the said James E. Cummings be held to the grand jury
until discharged by due course of law.

From testimony presented to this jury, same shows a laxity and
carelessness in city officials and their routine in transacting business,
which calls for revision by the mayor and city council; and we, the jury
demand immediate action on the following:


BUILDING DEPARTMENT.

Should have classified printed lists, to be filled out by an inspector,
then signed by head of department, before any public building can secure
amusement license, and record kept thereof in duplicate carbon book.

All fire escapes should have separate passageways to the ground, without
passing any openings in the walls.

All scenery and paraphernalia of any kind kept on the stage should be
absolutely fireproof.

Asbestos curtains should be reinforced by steel curtains and held by steel
cables.

There should be two electric mains entering all places of amusement, one
from the front, with switchboard in box office, controlling entire
auditorium and exits, and one on stage, to be used for theatrical
purposes.

All city officials and employes should familiarize themselves with city
ordinances as they relate to their respective departments, and pass a
rigid and signed examination on same before they are given positions. This
same rule should be made to apply to those holding office.


FIRE DEPARTMENT.

All theaters and public places should be supplied with at least two city
firemen, who shall be under the direction of the fire department and paid
by the proprietors of said places.

We recommend that the office and detail work of the fire department, as
imposed on the fire marshal, be made a separate and distinct work from
fire fighting, as it is hardly to be expected of any fire marshal to give
good and efficient service in both of these branches.

Also a police officer in full uniform detailed in and about said place at
each and every performance.

In testimony wherof, the said coroner and jury of this inquest have
hereunto set their hands the day and year aforesaid.

  L. H. MEYER, Foreman,      PETER BYRNES,
  J. A. CUMMINGS,            WALTER D. CLINGMAN,
  JOHN E. FINN,              GEORGE W. ATKIN.
        JOHN E. TRAEGER, Coroner.




CHAPTER I.

THE STORY OF THE FIRE.


No disaster, by flood, volcano, wreck or convulsion of nature has in
recent times aroused such horror as swept over the civilized world when on
December 30, 1903, a death-dealing blast of flame hurtled through the
packed auditorium of the Iroquois theater, Chicago, causing the loss of
nearly 600 lives of men, women and children, and injuries to unknown
scores.

Strong words pale and appear meaningless when used in describing the full
enormity of this disaster, which has no recent parallel save in the
outbreaks of nature's irresistible forces. There have been greater losses
of life by volcanoes, earthquakes and floods, but no fire horror of modern
times has equaled this one, which in a brief half-hour turned a beautiful
million-dollar theater into an oven piled high with corpses, some burned
and mutilated and others almost unmarked in death.

Coming, as it did, in the midst of a holiday season, when the second
greatest city in the United States was reveling in the gaiety of Christmas
week, this sudden transformation of a playhouse filled with a
pleasure-seeking throng into an inferno filled with shrieking living and
mutilated dead, came as a thunderbolt from a clear sky.

It was a typical holiday matinee crowd, composed mostly of women and
children, with here and there a few men. The production was the gorgeous
scenic extravaganza "_Mr. Bluebeard_," with which the handsome new theater
had been opened not a month before. "Don't fail to have the children see
'_Mr. Bluebeard_,'" was the advertisement spread broadcast throughout the
city, and the children were there in force when the scorching sheet of
flame leaped from the stage into the balcony and gallery where a thousand
were packed.

The building had been heralded abroad as a "fireproof structure," with
more than enough exits. Ushers and five men in city uniform were in the
aisles. All was apparently safety, mirth and good cheer.

Then came the transformation scene!

The auditorium and the stage were darkened for the popular song "The Pale
Moonlight." Eight dashing chorus girls and eight stalwart men in showy
costume strolled through the measures of the piece, bathed in a flood of
dazzling light. Up in the scenes a stage electrician was directing the
"spot-light" which threw the pale moonlight effect on the stage.

Suddenly there was a startled cry. Far overhead where the "spot" was
shooting forth its brilliant ray of concentrated light a tiny serpentine
tongue of flame crept over the inside of the proscenium drape. It was an
insignificant thing, yet the horrible possibilities it entailed flashed
over all in an instant. A spark from the light had communicated to the
rough edge of the heavy cloth drape. Like a flash it stole across the
proscenium and high up into the gridiron above.

Accustomed as they were to insignificant fire scares and trying ordeals
that are seldom the lot of those who lead a less strenuous life, the
people of the stage hurried silently to the task of stamping out the
blaze. In the orchestra pit it could readily be seen that something was
radically wrong, but the trained musicians played on.

Members of the octette cast their eyes above and saw the tiny tongue of
flame growing into a whirling maelstrom of fire. But it was a sight they
had seen before. Surely something would happen to extinguish it. America's
newest and most modern fireproof playhouse was not going to disappear
before an insignificant fire in the rigging loft. So they continued to
sway in sinuous steps to the rhythm of the throbbing orchestra. Their
presence stilled the nervousness of the vast audience, which knew that
something was wrong, but had no means of realizing what that something
was.

So the gorgeously attired men and dashing, voluptuous young women danced
on. The throng feasted its eyes on the moving scene of life and color,
little knowing that for them it was the last dance--the dance of death!

That dance was not the only one in progress. Far above the element of
death danced from curtain to curtain. The fire fiend, red and glowing with
exultation, snapping and crackling in anticipation of the feast before it,
grew beyond all bounds. Glowing embers and blazing sparks--crumbs from its
table--began to shower upon the merry dancers, and they fell back with
blanched faces and trembling limbs. Eddie Foy rushed to the front of the
stage to reassure the spectators, who now realized the peril at hand and
rose in their seats struggling against the impulse to fly. Others joined
the comedian in his plea for calmness.

Suddenly their voices were drowned in a volley of sounds like the booming
of great guns. The manila lines by which the carloads of scenery in the
loft above was suspended gave way before the fire like so much paper and
the great wooden batons fell like thunder bolts upon the now deserted
stage.

Still the audience stood, terror bound.

"Lower the fire curtain!" came a hoarse cry.

Something shot down over the proscenium, then stopped before the great
opening was closed, leaving a yawning space of many feet beneath. With
the dropping of the curtain a door in the rear had been opened by the
performers, fleeing for their lives and battling to escape from the
devouring element fast hemming them in on every side. The draft thus
caused transformed the stage in one second from a dark, gloomy, smoke
concealed scene of chaos into a seething volcano. With a great puff the
mass of flame swept out over the auditorium, a withering blast of death.
Before it the vast throng broke and fled.

Doors, windows, hallways, fire escapes--all were jammed in a moment with
struggling humanity, fighting for life. Some of the doors were jammed
almost instantly so that no human power could make egress possible. Behind
those in front pushed the frenzied mass of humanity, Chicago's elect, the
wives and children of its most prosperous business men and the flower of
local society, fighting like demons incarnate. Purses, wraps, costly furs
were cast aside in that mad rush. Mothers were torn from their children,
husbands from their wives. No hold, however strong, could last against
that awful, indescribable crush. Strong men who sought to the last to
sustain their feminine companions were swept away like straws, thrown to
the floor and trampled into unconsciousness in the twinkling of an eye.
Women to whom the safety of their children was more than their own lives
had their little ones torn from them and buried under the mighty sweep of
humanity, moving onward by intuition rather than through exercise of
thought to the various exits. They in turn were swept on before their
wails died on their lips--some to safety, others to an unspeakably
horrible death.

While some exits were jammed by fallen refugees so as to become useless,
others refused to open. In the darkness that fell upon the doomed theater
a struggle ensued such as was never pictured in the mind of Dante in his
visions of Inferno. With prayers, curses and meaningless shrieks of terror
all faced their fate like rats in a trap. The darkness was illumined by a
fearful light that burst from the sea of flame pouring out from the
proscenium, making Dore's representations of Inferno shrink into the
commonplace. Like a horizontal volcano the furnace on the stage belched
forth its blast of fire, smoke, gas and withering, blighting heat. Like a
wave it rolled over every portion of the vast house, dancing.

Dancing! Yes, the pillars of flame danced! To the multitude swept into
eternity before the hurricane of flame and the few who were dragged out
hideously disfigured and burned almost beyond all semblance of human
beings it seemed indeed a dance of death.

Withering, crushing, consuming all in its path, forced on as though by the
power of some mighty blow pipe, impelled by the fearful drafts that
directed the fiery furnace outward into the auditorium instead of upward
into the great flues constructed to meet just such an emergency, the sea
of fire burned itself out. There was little or nothing in the construction
of the building itself for it to feed upon, and it fell back of its own
weight to the stage, where it roared and raged like some angry demon.

And those great flues that supposedly gave the palatial Iroquois increased
safety! Barred and grated, battened down with heavy timbers they resisted
the terrific force of the blast itself. There they remained intact the
next day. Anxiety to throw open the palace of pleasure to the public
before the builders had time to complete in detail their Herculean task
had resulted in converting it into a veritable slaughter pen.

"Mr. Bluebeard's" chamber of horrors, lightly depicted in satire to
settings of gold and color, wit and music, had evolved within a few
minutes into an actuality. Chamber of horrors indeed--grim, silent,
smoldering and sending upon high the fearful odor of burning flesh.

Policemen and firemen, hardened to terrible sights, crept into the
smoldering sepulchre only to turn back sickened by the sight that met
their eyes. Tears and groans fell from them and they were unnerved as they
gazed upon the scene of carnage. Some gave way and were themselves the
subjects of deep concern. It was a scene to wring tears from the very
stones. No words can adequately describe it.

Perhaps the best description of that quarter hour of carnage and the sense
of horror when the seared, scorched sepulchre was entered for the removal
of the dead and dying is found in the words of the veteran descriptive
writer, Mr. Ben H. Atwell, who was present from the beginning to the end
of the holocaust, and after visiting the deadly spot in the gray dawn of
the following day wrote his impressions as follows:

"Where at 3:15 yesterday beauty and fashion and the happy amusement seeker
thronged the palatial playhouse to fall a few moments later before a
deadly blast of smoke and flame sweeping over all with irresistible force,
the dawn of the last day of the passing year found confusion, chaos and an
all-pervading sense of the awful. It seemed to radiate the chilling,
depressing volume from the streaked, grime-covered walls and the
flame-licked ceilings overhead. Against this fearful background the few
grim firemen or police, moving silently about the ruins, searching for
overlooked dead or abandoned property, loomed up like fitful ghosts.


WAVE OF FLAME GREETS AUDIENCE.

"The progress of their noiseless and ghastly quest proved one circumstance
survivors are too unsettled to realize. With the opening of the stage
door to permit the escape of the members of the 'Mr. Bluebeard' company
and the breaking of the skylight above the flue-like scene loft that tops
the stage, the latter was converted into a furnace through which a
tremendous draft poured like a blow pipe, driving billows of flame into
the faces of the terrified audience. With exits above the parquet floor
simply choked up with the crushed bodies of struggling victims, who made
the first rush for safety, the packed hundreds in balcony and gallery
faced fire that moved them up in waves.

"With a swirl that sounded death, the thin bright sheet of fire rolled on
from stage to rear wall. It fed on the rich box curtains, seized upon the
sparse veneer of subdued red and green decorations spread upon wall,
ceiling and balcony facings. It licked the fireproof materials below clean
and rolled on with a roar. Over seat tops and plush rail cushions it sped.
Then it snuffed out, having practically nothing to feed upon save the
tangled mass of wood scene frames, batons and paint-soaked canvas on the
stage.


FEW REALIZED APPALLING RESULT.

"There firemen were directing streams of water that poured over the
premises in great cascades in volume, aggregating many tons. A few streams
were directed about the body of the house, where vagrant tongues of flame
still found material on which to feed. Silence reigned--the silence of
death, but none realized the appalling story behind the awful calm.

"The stampede that followed the first alarm, a struggle in which most
contestants were women and children, fighting with the desperation of
death, terminated with the sudden sweep of the sea of flames across the
body of the house. The awful battle ended before the irresistible hand of
death, which fell upon contestants and those behind alike. Somehow those
on the main floor managed to force their way out. Above, where the
presence of narrower exits, stairways that precipitated the masses of
humanity upon each other and the natural air current for the billows of
flame to follow, spelled death to the occupants of the two balconies, the
wave of flame, smoke and gas smote the multitude.


DROP WHERE THEY STAND.

"Dropping where they stood, most of the victims were consumed beyond
recognition. Some who were protected from contact with the flames by
masses of humanity piled upon them escaped death and were dragged out
later by rescuers, suffering all manner of injury. The majority, however,
who beheld the indescribably terrifying spectacle of the wave of death
moving upon them through the air died then and there without a moment for
preparation. Few survived to tell the tale. The blood-curdling cry of
mingled prayers and curses, of pleas for help and meaningless shrieks of
despair died away before the roar of the fire and the silence fell that
greeted the firemen upon their entry.

"Survivors describe the situation as a parallel of the condition at
Martinique when a wave of gas and fire rolled down the mountain side and
destroyed everything in its path. Here, however, one circumstance was
reversed, for the wave of death leaped from below and smote its victims,
springing from the very air beneath them.


MANY HEROES ARE DEVELOPED.

"In a few minutes it was all over--all but the weeping. In those few
minutes obscure people had evolved into heroes; staid business men drove
out patrons to convert their stores into temporary hospitals and morgues;
others converted their trucks and delivery wagons into improvised
ambulances; stocks of drugs, oils and blankets were showered upon the
police to aid in relief work and a corps of physicians and surgeons
sufficient to the needs of an army had organized.

"Rescues little short of miraculous were accomplished and life and limb
were risked by public servants and citizens with no thought of personal
consequences. Public sympathy was thoroughly aroused long before the
extent of the horror was known and before the sickening report spread
throughout the city that the greatest holocaust ever known in the history
of theatricals had fallen upon Chicago.

"While the streets began to crowd for blocks around with weeping and
heartbroken persons in mortal terror because of knowledge that loved ones
had attended the performance, patrol wagons, ambulances and open wagons
hurried the injured to hospitals. Before long they were called upon to
perform the more grewsome task of removing the dead. In wagon loads the
latter were carted away. Undertaking establishments both north, south and
west of the river threw open their doors.


DEAD PILED IN HEAPS.

"Piled in windows in the angle of the stairway where the second balcony
refugees were brought face to face and in a death struggle with the
occupants of the first balcony, the dead covered a space fifteen or twenty
feet square and nearly seven feet in depth. All were absolutely safe from
the fire itself when they met death, having emerged from the theater
proper into the separate building containing the foyer. In this great
court there was absolutely nothing to burn and the doors were only a few
feet away. There the ghastly pile lay, a mute monument to the powers of
terror. Above and about towered shimmering columns and facades in polished
marble, whose cold and unharmed surfaces seemed to bespeak contempt for
human folly. In that portion of the Iroquois structure the only physical
evidences of damages were a few windows broken during the excitement.


EXITS WERE CHOKED WITH BODIES.

"To that pile of dead is attributed the great loss of life within. The
bodies choked up the entrance, barring the egress of those behind. Neither
age nor youth, sex, quality or condition were sacred in the awful battle
in the doorway. The gray and aged, rich, poor, young and those obviously
invalids in life lay in a tangled mass all on an awful footing of equality
in silent annihilation.

"Within and above equal terrors were encountered in what at first seemed
countless victims. Lights, patience and hard work brought about some
semblance of system and at last word was given that the last body had been
removed from the charnel house. A large police detail surrounded the place
all night and with the break of day search of the premises was renewed,
none being admitted save by presentation of a written order from Chief of
Police O'Neill. Fire engines pumped away removing the lake of water that
flooded the basement to the depth of ten feet. As the flood was lowered it
began to be apparent that the basement was free of dead.


SURVEY SCENE WITH HORROR.

"Searchers gazing down from the heights of the upper balcony surveyed the
scene of death below with horror stamped upon their faces. Fire had left
its terrifying blight in a colorless, garish monotony that suggests the
burned-out crater of an extinct volcano. In the wreckage, the scattered
garments and purses, fragments of charred bodies and other debris strewn
within thousands of bits of brilliantly colored glass, lay as they fell
shattered in the fight against the flames. A few skulls were seen.


FIND BUSHELS OF PURSES.

"Five bushel baskets were filled with women's purses gathered by the
police. A huge pile of garments was removed to a near-by saloon, where an
officer guards them pending removal to some more appropriate place. The
shoes and overshoes picked up among the seats fill two barrels to
overflowing.

"The fire manifested itself in the flies above the stage during the second
act. The double octette was singing 'In the Pale Moonlight' when the
tragedy swept mirth and music aside, to give way to a more somber and
frightful performance. Confusion on the stage, panic in the auditorium,
phenomenal spread of the incipient blaze, failure of the asbestos fire
curtain to fall in place when lowered followed in rapid progress, with the
holocaust as the climax."

But to return to the narrative of what happened immediately after the
first alarm, as gathered by the collaborators of this work. There was a
wild, futile dash--futile because few of the terrified participants
succeeded in reaching the outer air. Persons in the rear of the theater
building knew full well that a holocaust was in progress. There fire
escapes and stage doors thronged with refugees, half clad and hysterical
chorus girls flocking into the alley, and crackling flames leaping higher
and higher from the flimsy stage and bursting from windows, told only too
plainly what was in progress within. At the front, half a block distant,
in Randolph street, ominous silence maintained. A mere handful of people
burst out, those who had occupied rear seats and pushed by the ushers who
sought to restrain them and quiet their fears. Loiterers about the ornate
lobby scarcely sniffed a suggestion of impending disaster before the fire
apparatus began to arrive with clanging bells.

Those ushers who held back the straining, anxious spectators who sought
escape at the first mild suggestion of danger--for what widespread woe are
they responsible!

Mere boys of tender years and meager experience, what knew they of the
awful possibilities behind the spell of excitement upon the stage? Only
two weeks before there had been an incipient blaze there that had been
extinguished without the knowledge of the audience.

Like all the rest of the world that now stands in shuddering wonderment,
these boys scoffed at the thought of real danger in the massive pile of
steel, stone and terra cotta, with its brave and shimmering veneer of
glistening marble, stained glass of many hues, rich tapestries and
drapings, and cold, aristocratic tints of red and old gold. And so with
uplifted hands they turned back those whose sense of caution prompted them
to leave at the outset. Surely disaster could not overtake the regal
Iroquois in its first flush of pomp, pride and superiority. It was their
sacred duty to see that no unseemly break marred the decorum established
for the guidance of audiences at the Iroquois, and that duty was fully
discharged.

Thus it was that the wild hegira did not begin from the front until the
arrival of the fire department. Then pandemonium itself broke loose. All
restraining influences from the stage had ceased. At the appearance of the
all-consuming wave of flame sweeping across the auditorium the boy ushers
abandoned their posts and fled for their lives, leaving the packed
audience to do the same unhampered.

Unhampered--not quite! Darkness descending upon the scene, doors locked
against the frightened multitude, fire escapes cut off by tongues of flame
and exits and stairways choked with the bodies of those who died fighting
to reach safety hampered many--at least the six hundred carried out later
mangled and roasted, their features and limbs twisted and distorted until
little semblance to humanity remained. After the first wild dash, in which
a large portion of those on the main floor escaped, the blackness of night
settled upon the long marble foyer leading from Randolph street to the
auditorium. It settled in a cloud of black, fire laden smoke--death in
nebulous forms defying fire fighter and rescuer alike to enter the great
corridor. None entered, and, more pitiful still, none came forth.

While this situation maintained in front a vastly different scene unfolded
in the rear. The theater formed a great L, extending north from Randolph
street to an alley and, in the rear, west to Dearborn street. This last
projection, the toe of the L, was occupied by the stage, theoretically the
finest in America, if not in the world. Thus the auditorium and stage
occupied the extreme northern part of the structure, paralleling an alley
extending on a line with Randolph street from State street to Dearborn
street. This alley wall was pierced by many windows and emergency exits
and was studded with fire escapes built in the form of iron galleries, and
stairways hugging close to the wall leading to the alley.

To these exits and the long, grim galleries of fire escapes the herded,
fire-hunted audience surged. Those who reached doors that responded to
their efforts found themselves pushed along the galleries by the
resistless crush behind. As was the case in front, half way to safety
another stream of humanity was encountered pouring out at right angles
from another portion of the house. Coming together with the impact of
opposing armies the two hosts of refugees gave unwilling and terrible
answer to the time worn problem as to the outcome of an irresistible force
encountering an immovable body. Both in front and rear great mounds of
dead spelled annihilation as the answer. In front over 200 corpses piled
in a twenty-foot angle of a stairway where two balcony exits merged told
the terrible tale, and rendered both passages useless for egress, the dead
being piled up in wall-like formation ten feet high.

In the rear an alley strewn with mangled men, women and children writhing
in agony on the icy pavement, or relieved of their sufferings by death,
lent eloquent corroboration to the solution of the problem.

It was in the rear that the true horror of the fire was most fully
disclosed. There no towering mosaic studded walls or kindly mantle of
smoke shut out the horrid sight. From its opening scene to its silent,
ghastly denouement the successive details of this greatest of modern
tragedies was forced upon the view to be stamped upon the memory of the
unwilling beholder with an impressiveness that only death will blot out.

After the first great impact had hurled the overflow of the fire-escape
gallery into the alley yawning far below, the crush of humanity swept
onward, downward to where safety beckoned. When the advance guard had all
but reached the precious goal, with only a few feet of iron gallery and
one more stairway to traverse, the crowning horror of the day unfolded
itself. Right in the path of the advancing horde a steel window shutter
flew back, impelled by the terrific energy of an immeasurable volume of
pent up superheated air.

The clang of the steel shutter swinging back on its hinges against the
brick wall sounded the death knell of another host of victims, for in its
wake came a huge tongue of lurid flame, leaping on high in the ecstasy of
release from its stifling furnace. Fiercely in the faces of the refugees
beat this agency of death. Before its withering blast the victims fell
like prairie grass before an autumn blaze. Those further back waited for
no more, but precipitated themselves headlong into the alley rather than
face the fiery furnace that loomed up barring the way to hope.

It would be well to draw the curtain upon this awful scene of suffering
and death in the gloomy alley were it not for one circumstance that stands
forth a glorious example of the heights that may be attained by the modest
hero who moves about unsuspected in his daily life until calamity affords
opportunity to show the stuff he is made of. High up in the building
occupied by the law, dental and pharmacy schools of the Northwestern
University, directly across the alley from the burning theater, a number
of such men were at work. They were horny handed sons of toil--painters,
paper hangers and cleaners repairing minor damage caused by an
insignificant fire in the university building a few weeks before. One
glance at the seething vortex of death below transformed them into heroes
whose deeds would put many a man to shame whose memory is kept alive by
stately column or flattering memorial tablet.

Trailing heavy planks used by them in the erection of working scaffolds,
they rushed to a window in the lecture room of the law school directly
opposite the exit and fire escape platform leading from the topmost
balcony of the theater. By almost superhuman effort and ingenuity they
raised aloft the planks, scarce long enough to span the abyss, and dropped
them. The prayers of thousands below and a multitude stifling in the
aperture opposite were raised that the planks might fall true. All eyes
followed their course as they poised in mid-air, then descended. Slow
seemed their fall, a veritable period of torture, and awed silence reigned
as they dropped.

Then there arose a glad cry. With a crash the great planks landed true,
the free ends squarely upon the edge of the platform of the useless fire
escape, the others resting firmly upon the narrow window ledge where the
painters stood defying flame, smoke and torrents of burning embers and
blazing sparks hurled upon them as from the crater of a volcano.

Death alley had been bridged! Across the narrow span came a volume of
bedraggled humanity as though shot from a gun. A mad, screaming stream,
pushed on by those behind, simply whirled across the frail support, direct
from the very jaws of death, the blistering gates of hell.

Only for a moment, a brief second it seemed, the wild procession moved.
Yet in that limited period scores, perhaps hundreds, poured from the
seething inferno--practically all that escaped from the lofty balcony that
was a moment later transformed into the death chamber of helpless
hundreds. Then the wave of flame, previously described, swept over the
interior of the theater, greedily searching every nook and corner as
though hungry for the last victim within reach.

The last refugees to cross the narrow span, the dizzy line sharply drawn
between life and death in its most terrifying aspect, staggered over with
their clothing in flames, gasping, fainting with pain and terror. The
workmen, students and policemen who had rushed to their assistance dashed
across into the heat and smoke and dragged forth many more who had reached
the platform only to fall before the deadly blast. Then the rescuers were
beaten back and the fire fiend was left to claim its own.

And claim them it did, searching them out with ruminating tongues of
flame. Over every inch of paint and decoration, every tapestry, curtain
and seat top it licked its way with insinuating eagerness. It pursued its
victims beyond the confines of the theater walls, grasping in its deadly
embrace those who lay across windows or prostrate on galleries and
platforms. Thousands gazed on in helpless horror, watching the flames
bestow a fatal caress upon many who had crept far, far from the blaze and
almost into a zone of safety. With a gliding, caressing movement that made
beholders' blood run cold it crept upon such victims, hovered a moment and
glided on with sinuous motion and what approached a suggestion of
intelligence in searching out those who fled before it. A shriek, a
spasmodic movement and the victims lay still, their earthly troubles over
forever.

A few minutes later, possibly not more than half an hour after the
discovery of the fire, when the firemen had beaten back the flames to the
raging stage another procession moved across that same plank again. It
moved in silence, for it was a procession of death. The great tragedy
began and ended in fifteen minutes. Its echoes may roll down as many
centuries, compelling the proper safeguarding of all places of amusement,
in America at least. If so, the Iroquois victims did not give up their
lives in vain.

When the removal of the victims across the improvised bridge over death
alley ended the tireless official in charge of that work, James Markham,
secretary to Chief of Police O'Neill, had checked off 102 corpses. No
attempt was made to keep count of the dead as they were removed from other
portions of the theater and by other exits. The counting was done when the
patrol wagons, ambulances, trucks and delivery wagons used in removing the
dead deposited their ghastly loads at the morgues.

The instance cited was not an isolated example of heroism, but rather
merely a striking instance among scores. Police, firemen and citizens vied
with each other in the work of humanity. Merchants drove out customers and
threw open their business houses as temporary hospitals and morgues.
Others donated great wagon loads of blankets and supplies of all kinds and
the municipal government was embarrassed by the unsolicited relief funds
that poured in. All manner of vehicles were given freely for the removal
of dead and injured. So informal was the removal of the latter that many
may have reached their homes unreported. For that reason a complete list
of the injured may never be secured.

An illustration of the possibilities in that direction is found in the
case of one man who wrapped the dead body of his wife in his overcoat and
carried it to Evanston, many miles away, where the circumstances became
known days later when a burial permit was sought. Another is the case of
an injured man who revived on a dead wagon en route to a morgue and was
removed by friends.

All these and other details are elaborated upon elsewhere, together with
the touching story of the scores of young women employed in the
production, "Mr. Bluebeard," who would have been stranded penniless in a
strange city a thousand miles from home but for the prompt and noble
relief afforded by Mrs. Ogden Armour.




CHAPTER II.

FIRST AID TO THE INJURED AND CARE FOR THE DEAD.


On the heels of the firemen came the police, intent on the work of rescue.
Chief O'Neill and Assistant Chief Schuettler ordered captains from a dozen
stations to bring their men, and then they rushed to the theater and led
the police up the stairs to the landing outside the east entrance to the
first balcony.

The firemen, rushing blindly up the stairs in the dense pall of smoke, had
found their path suddenly blocked by a wall of dead eight or ten feet
high. They discovered many persons alive and carried them to safety. Other
firemen crawled over the mass of dead and dragged their hose into the
theater to fight back the flames that seemed to be crawling nearer to turn
the fatal landing into a funeral pyre.

O'Neill and Schuettler immediately began carrying the dead from the
balcony, while other policemen went to the gallery to begin the work
there.

In the great mass of dead at the entrance to the first balcony the bodies
were so terribly interwoven that it was impossible at first to take any
one out.

"Look out for the living!" shouted the chief to his men. "Try to find
those who are alive."

From somewhere came a faint moaning cry.

"Some one alive there, boys," came the cry. "Lively, now!"

The firemen and police long struggled in vain to move the bodies.

The raging tide of humanity pouring out of the east entrance of the
balcony during the panic had met the fighting, struggling crowd coming
down the stairs from the third balcony at right angles. The two streams
formed a whirlpool which ceased its onward progress and remained there on
the landing where people stamped each other under foot in that mad circle
of death.

In a short time the blockade in the fatal angle must have been complete.
Then into this awful heap still plunged the contrary tides of humanity
from each direction. Many tried to crawl over the top of the heap, but
were drawn down to the grinding mill of death underneath. The smoke was
heavy at the fatal angle, for the majority of those taken out at that
point bore no marks of bruises.

Many, and especially the children, were trampled to death, but others were
held as in a vise until the smoke had choked the life from their bodies.

It was toward this that the firemen directed O'Neill and Schuettler as
they rushed into the theater. The smoke was still heavy and the great
gilded marble foyer of the "handsomest theater in America" was somber and
dark and still as a tomb, except for the whistling of the engines outside
and now and then the shouting of the firemen. Water was dripping
everywhere and stood inches deep on the floor and stairs.

Two flickering lanterns shed the only light by which the policemen worked,
and this very fact, perhaps, made their task more horrible and gruesome,
if such a thing were possible.


GREAT PILE OF CHARRED BODIES FOUND EVERYWHERE IN THEATER.

All through the gallery the bodies were found. Some were those of persons
who had decided to stay in their seats and not to join in the mad rush for
the doors and run the risk of being trampled to death. Many of them no
doubt had trusted to the cries, "There is no danger; keep your seats!"

They had stuck to their seats until, choked by the heavy smoke, they had
been unable to move.

Some bodies were in a sitting position, while others had fallen forward,
with the head resting on the seat in front, as though in prayer. Almost
all were terribly burned.

In the aisles lay women and children who had staid in their seats until
they finally were convinced that the danger was real. Then they had
attempted to get to the door.

The smoke was so heavy the firemen worked with difficulty, but finally it
cleared and workmen who were hastily sent by the Edison company equipped
forty arc lights, which shone bravely through the smoke. With this help
the firemen searched to better effect, and found bodies that in the
blackness they had missed.

"Give that girl to some one else and get back there," shouted Chief Musham
to a fireman. The fireman never answered but kept on with his burden.

"Hand that girl to some one else," shouted the battalion chief.

The fireman looked up. Even in the flickering light of the lantern the
chief carried one could see the tears coming from the red eyes and falling
down the man's blackened cheeks.

"Chief," said the fireman, "I've got a girl like this at home. I want to
carry this one out."

"Go ahead," said the chief. The little group working at the head of the
stairs broke apart while the fireman, holding the body tightly, made his
way slowly down the stairs.

One by one the dead were taken from the pile in the angle. The majority of
them were women. On some faces was an expression of terrible agony, but on
others was a look of calmness and serenity, and firemen sometimes found it
hard to believe they were dead. Three firemen carried the body of a young
woman down the stairs in a rubber blanket. She appeared alive. Her hands
were clasped and held flowers. Her eyes were closed and she seemed almost
to smile. She looked as though she was asleep, but it was the sleep of
death.

In the dark and smoke, with the dripping water and the dead piled in heaps
everywhere, the Iroquois theater had been turned into a tomb by the time
the rescue parties had begun their work.


MOAN INSPIRES WORKERS IN MAD EFFORT TO SAVE.

The moan that the frantic workers heard as they struggled to untangle the
mass of bodies gave the police hope that many in the heap might be alive.

"We can't do it, chief," shouted one of the policemen. "We can't untangle
them."

"We must take these bodies out of the way to get down to those who are
alive," replied the chief. "This man here is dead; lay hold, now, boys,
and pull him out."

Two big firemen caught the body by the shoulders and struggled and pulled
until they had it free. Then another body was taken out, and then again
the workers seemed unable to unloose the dead. Again came that terrible
moan through the mass.

"For God's sake, get down to that one who's alive," implored O'Neill,
almost in despair.

The policemen pulled off their heavy overcoats and worked frantically at
the heap. Often a body could not be moved except when the firemen and
police dragged with a "yo, heave," like sailors hauling on a rope. As fast
as the bodies were freed one policeman, or sometimes two or three, would
stagger down the stairs with their burdens.

Over the heap of bodies crawled a fireman carrying something in his arms.

"Out of the way, men, let me out! The kid's alive."

The workers fell back and the fireman crawled over the heap and was helped
out. He ran down the stairs three steps at a time to get the child to a
place where help might be given before it was too late. Then other firemen
from inside the theater passed out more bodies, which were handed from one
policeman to another until some on the outside of the heap could take the
dead and carry them downstairs.

Suddenly a policeman pulling at the heap gave a shout.

"I've got her, chief!" he said. "She's alive, all right!"

"Easy there, men, easy," cried Schuettler; "but hurry and get that woman
to a doctor!"

A girl, apparently 18 years old, was moaning faintly. The policeman
released her from the tangled heap, and a big fireman, lifting her
tenderly in his arms, hurried with her to the outside of the building.

"There must be more alive," said the chief. "Work hard, boys."

There was hardly any need to ask the men to work harder, for they were
pulling and hauling as though their own lives depended on their efforts.
Everybody worked.

The reporters, the only ones in the theater besides the police and
firemen, laid aside their pencils and note books and struggled down the
wet, slippery stairs, carrying the dead. Newspaper artists threw their
sketch books on the floor to jump forward and pick up the feet or head of
a body that a fireman or policeman found too heavy to carry alone.
Constantly now a stream of workers was passing slowly down the stairs.
Usually two men supported each body, but often some giant policeman or
fireman strode along with a body swung over his shoulders. Coming down the
stairs was a fireman with a girl of 16 clasped in his arms.

"Isn't that girl alive?" asked the chief.

"No," shouted two or three men, who had jumped to see. "She's dead, poor
thing, rest her soul," said the fireman reverently, and then he picked his
way down the stairs. Half-way down the marble steps two arms suddenly
clasped the fireman's neck.

He started so he missed his footing and would have fallen had not a
policeman steadied him.

"She's alive, she's alive!" shouted the fireman. "Git out of the way,
there, out of the way, men," and he went dashing headlong out into the
open air and through the crowd to a drug store.

One child after another was taken from the heap and passed out to be
carried downstairs. Some were little boys in new suits, sadly torn, and
with their poor little faces wreathed in agony. On their foreheads was the
seal of death.

A big fireman came crawling from the heavy smoke of the inner balcony. He
carried a girl of 10 years in his arms. Her long, flaxen hair half covered
the pure white face.

A gray haired man with a gash on his head apparently had fallen down the
stairs. A woman's face bore the mark of a boot heel. A woman with a little
boy clasped tight in her arms was wedged into a corner. Her clothes were
almost torn from her, and her face was bruised. The child was unmarked, as
she had thrown her own body over his to protect him.

Out of the mass of bodies when the police began their work protruded one
slender little white hand, clinching a pair of pearl opera glasses, which
the little owner had tried to save, in spite of the fact that her own life
was being crushed out of her. Watches, pocketbooks and chatelaine bags
were scattered all through the pile. One man was detailed to make a bag
out of a rubber coat and take care of the property that was handed to him.

While the police were working so desperately at the fatal angle, another
detail of police and firemen were working on the third floor. At the main
entrance of the gallery lay another heap of bodies, and there was still
another at the angle of the head of the stairs leading to the floor below.
Here the sight was even worse than the terrible scene presented at the
landing of the first balcony.

The bodies on the landing were not burned. A jam had come there, and many
had been stamped under foot and either killed outright or left to
suffocate. Many of the bodies were almost stripped of clothing and bore
the marks of remorseless heels.

After these had been carried out, the firemen returned again and again
from the pitchy blackness of the smoke-filled galleries, dragging bodies,
burned sometimes beyond recognition.


NONE LEFT ALIVE IN GALLERY.

While now and then some one had been found alive in the other fatal angle,
no one was rescued by searchers in the top gallery. The bodies had to be
laid along the hall until the merchants in State street began sending
over blankets. Men from the streets came rushing up the stairs, bending
under the weight of the blankets they carried on their shoulders. Soon
they went back to the street again, this time carrying their blankets
weighed down with a charred body.


DEAD AND DYING CARRIED INTO NEARBY RESTAURANT BY SCORES.

The scenes in John R. Thompson's restaurant in Randolph street, adjoining
the theater, were ghastly beyond words.

Few half hours in battle bring more of horror than the half hour that
turned the cafe into a charnel house, with its tumbled heaps of corpses,
its shrieks of agony from the dying, and the confusion of doctors and
nurses working madly over bodies all about as they strove to bring back
the spark of life.

Bodies were everywhere--piled along the walls, laid across tables, and
flung down here and there--some charred beyond recognition, some only
scorched, and others black from suffocation; some crushed in the rush of
the panic, others but the poor, broken remains of those who leaped into
death. And most of them--almost all of them--were the forms of women and
children. It is estimated that more than 150 bodies were accounted for in
Thompson's alone.

The continuous tramp of the detachments of police bearing in more bodies,
the efforts of the doctors to restore life, and the madness of those who
surged in through the police lines to ransack piles of bodies for
relatives and friends, made up a scene of pandemonium of which it is hard
to form a conception. There was organization of the fifty physicians and
nurses who fought back death in the dying; there was organization of the
police and firemen; but still the restaurant was a chaos that left the
head bewildered and the heart sick.

The work was too much for even the big force of doctors that had flocked
there to volunteer their services. Everybody in which there was the
slightest semblance of life was given over to the physicians, who with
oxygen tanks and resuscitative movements sought to revive the heart beats.
As soon as death was certain the body was drawn from the table and laid
beneath, to give place to another. But systematic as was this effort,
heaps of bodies remained which the doctors had not touched.

In a dozen instances, even when the end of the work was in sight, a hand
or foot was seen to move in this or that heap. Instantly three or four
doctors were bending over rolling away the dead bodies to drag forth one
still warm with life. In a thrice the body was on a table and the oxygen
turned on while the doctors worked with might and main to force
respiration. Almost always it was in vain--life went out. Two or three
were resuscitated, though it is uncertain with what chances of ultimate
recovery. One of these was a Mrs. Harbaugh, who had been brought in for
dead and her body tossed among the lifeless forms that ranged the walls.

When the first rush of people from the theater gave notice of the fire to
persons in the street there were less than a score of patrons in the
restaurant. These rushed into the street, too, while a panic spread among
the waitresses and kitchen force. By this time fire company 13 was on the
ground in the alley side of the theater and the police were at the front
attempting to lead the audience from its peril with some semblance of
order. In another minute women and children with blistered faces were
dashing screaming into the street, taking refuge in the first doorways at
hand.

Another minute, and every policeman knew in his heart the horror that was
at hand. A patrolman dashed into Thompson's and ordered the tables
cleared and arranged to care for the injured. Captain Gibbons dispatched
another policeman to issue a general call for physicians and a detachment
to take charge of the restaurant and the first aid to be administered
there. Within five minutes the first of the injured were being laid on the
marble topped dining tables where the police ambulance corps were getting
at work.

These steps scarcely had been taken when word came from the burning
theater that the fire was under control, but that the loss of life would
be appalling. Chief O'Neill hurried to the scene, sending back word as he
ran that Secretary James Markham should summon doctors and ambulances from
every place available. The west side district of the medical schools and
hospitals was called upon to send all the volunteers possible, together
with hospital equipment. One hundred students from Rush Medical College
were soon on their way by street car and patrol wagon to the scene.


TERRIBLE REALITY COMES TO AWESTRICKEN CROWD.

It was only fifteen minutes after the first tongue of flame shot out from
behind the scenes that a lull came in the awful drama of death within the
theater. The firemen had quenched the fire and all the living had escaped.
All that remained were dead. But now the scenes within the improvised
hospital and morgue rose to the height of their horror.

But for a narrow lane the length of the cafe the floor was covered with
bodies or the tumbled bundles of clothing that told where a body was
concealed. And over the scene of the dead rose the groans of the tortured
beings who writhed upon the tables in the throes of their passing. And
over the cries of the suffering rose the shouts of command of the Red
Cross corps--now the directions of Dr. Lydston as to attempts at
resuscitation, now the megaphone shouts of Senator Clark ordering the
disposition of bodies and the organization of the constantly arriving
volunteer nurses.

In the narrow lane of the dead surged the policemen, bringing ever more
and more forms to cord up beneath the tables. Then came the press of
people, who, frantic with anxiety, had beaten back the police guard to
look for loved ones in the charnel house. There was Louis Wolff, Jr.,
searching for two nephews and his sister. There was Postmaster Coyne, who
had hurried from a meeting of the crime committee to lend his aid. There
were Aldermen Minwegen and Alderman Badenoch, and besides them scores of
men and women anxiously looking and looking, and nerving themselves to
fear the worst.

"Have you found Miss Helen McCaughan?" shrieked a hysterical woman. "She's
from the Yale apartments, and----"

"I'm looking for a Miss Errett--she's a nurse," cried another.

"My little boy--Charles Hennings--have you found him, doctor?" came from
another.

From every side came the heartrending appeals, while the din was so great
that no single plaint rose above the volume of sounds. And all the time
the doorway was a place of frightful sights.

"O, please go back for my little girl," gasped a woman whose face and
hands were a blister and whose clothing was burned to the skin. She
staggered across the threshold and fell prone. Her last breath had gone
out of her when two policemen snatched up the body and bore it to an
operating table.

"O, where's my Annie?" screamed another woman, horribly burned, whom two
policemen supported between them into the restaurant. But at the word she
collapsed, and, though three physicians worked over her for ten minutes,
she never breathed again.


ONE LIFE BROUGHT BACK FROM DEATH.

Of a sudden Dr. E. E. Vaughan saw a finger move in a mass of the dead
against the far wall of the restaurant.

"Men, there's a live one in there," he cried, and, while others came
running, the physician flung aside the bodies till he had uncovered a
woman of middle age, terribly burned about the face, and with her outer
garments a mass of charred shreds.

In a second the woman was undergoing resuscitative treatment on a table,
while the oxygen streamed into her lungs. Two doctors worked her arms like
pumps, while a nurse manipulated the region of the heart. At length there
was a flutter of a respiration, while a doctor bending over with his
stethoscope announced a heart beat just perceptible. Another minute passed
and the eyelids moved, while a groan escaped the lips.

"She lives!" simply said Dr. Vaughan, as he ordered the oxygen tube
removed and brandy forced between the lips. In five minutes the woman was
saved from immediate death, at least, though suffering terribly from
burns. She was just able to murmur that her name was Mrs. Harbaugh, but
that was all that could be learned of her identity before she was taken
away to a hospital.


ONE HUNDRED FEET IN AIR, POLICE CARRY INJURED ACROSS ALLEY.

Over a narrow, ice covered bridge made of scaffold planks, more than 100
feet above the ground the police carried more than 100 bodies from the
rear stage and balcony exits of the Iroquois theater to the Northwestern
University building, formerly the Tremont house. The planks rested on the
fire escape of the theater and on the ledge of a window in the Tremont
building.

Two men who first ventured on this dangerous passageway in their efforts
to reach safety, blinded by the fire and smoke, lost their footing and
fell to the alley below. They were dead when picked up.

The bridge led directly into the dental school of the university, and at
one time there were more than a score of charred bodies lying under
blankets in the room. The dead were carried from the pile of bodies at the
theater exits faster than the police could take them away in the
ambulances and patrol wagons.

As soon as the police began to take the injured into the university
building the classrooms were drawn upon for physicians, and in a few
minutes professors and dental students gathered in the offices and stores
to lend their assistance. Wounds were dressed, and in cases of less
serious injury the unfortunates were sent to their homes. In other cases
they were sent to hospitals.

When the smoke had cleared away the rescuers first realized the extent of
the horror. From the bridge could be seen the rows of balcony and gallery
seats, many occupied by a human form. Incited by the sight, the police
redoubled their efforts, and heedless of the dangers of the narrow,
slippery bridge, pressed close to each other as they worked.

While a dozen policemen were removing the dead from the theater, twice as
many were engaged in carrying them to the patrol wagons and ambulances at
the doors of the university building. All the afternoon the elevators
carried down police in twos and fours carrying their burdens of dead in
blankets. So fast were they carried down that many of the patrol wagons
held five and more bodies when they were driven away.


CROWDS OF ANXIOUS FRIENDS.

Behind the lines of police that guarded the passage of the dead, hundreds
of anxious men and women crowded with eager questions. The rotunda of the
building between 3 and 7 p. m. was thronged by those seeking knowledge of
friend or relative who had been in the play. Some made their way to the
third floor and looked hopelessly at the charred bodies lying there. In
one corner lay the bodies of husband and wife, clasped in each other's
arms. From under one sheltering blanket protruded the dainty high heeled
shoes of some woman, and from the next blanket the rubber boots of a
newsboy.

A Roman Catholic priest made his way into the room. He was looking for a
little girl, the daughter of a parishioner.

"Have you the name of Lillian Doerr in your list?" he asked James Markham,
Chief O'Neill's secretary, who was in charge of the police. Markham shook
his head.

"She and another little girl named Weiskopp were with three other girls,"
continued the priest. "Three of the girls in the party have got home, but
Lillian and the Weiskopp girl are missing. I suppose we must wait until
all the bodies are identified before we can find her."

The priest's mission and its futile results were duplicated scores of
times by anxious inquirers.


BALCONY AND GALLERY CLEARED.

The rescue work went on until the balcony and gallery had been cleared of
the dead, and then the police were called away. The exits were barred and
the hotel building cleared of visitors. While the work of rescue was
going on inside the building, the streets about the entrances were
thronged with thousands of curious spectators. As soon as an ambulance
backed up to the entrance the crowd pressed forward to get a view of the
bundles placed in the wagon. Even after this work had ended the crowds
remained in the cold and darkness.

Many of the small shops and offices in the University building threw open
their doors to the injured and those who had been separated from their
friends. When those who had escaped by the alley exits reached Dearborn
street they found the doors of the Hallwood Cash Register offices, 41
Dearborn street, open to them. L. A. Weismann, Harry Snow, Harry Dewitt,
and C. J. Burnett of the office force at once prepared to care for the
injured. More than fifty persons were cared for.

While these men were caring for strangers they themselves were haunted by
the dread that Manager H. Ludwig of the company with his wife and two
daughters were among the dead. The Ludwig family lives in Norwood Park,
and the father had left the office with them early in the afternoon. At 6
o'clock he had not returned for his overcoat.


FINANCE COMMITTEE OF CITY COUNCIL ACTS PROMPTLY.

"Spare no expense," was the order given by the finance committee of the
council which was in session when the extent of the disaster became known
at the city hall. First to grasp the import of the news was Ald. Raynier,
whose wife and four children had left him at noon to attend the matinee.
With a gasp he hurried from the room to go to the scene.

"You are instructed," said Chairman Mavor to Acting Mayor McGann, "to
direct the fire marshal, the chief of police, and the commissioner of
public works to proceed in this emergency without any restrictions as to
expense. Do everything needful, spend all the money needed, and look to
the council for your warrant. We will be your authority."

A telegram at once was sent to Mayor Harrison informing him of the fire
and the executive returned from Oklahoma on the first train.

Acting Commissioner of Public Works Brennan sent word to Chief O'Neill and
Fire Marshal Musham that the public works department was at their service.

"We want men and lanterns," Chief Musham answered.

Supt. Solon was sent to a store near the theater with an order for as many
lanterns as might be needed. Supt. Doherty assembled 150 men in Randolph
street and seventy wagons employed on First ward streets. They were placed
at the disposal of the two chiefs.

Chief O'Neill was in the council chamber when the news arrived, hearing
charges against a police officer. Lieut. Beaubien came from his office and
whispered to him. The chief hurried to the fire. The trial board continued
its work.

On the ground floor of the city hall the fire trial board was in executive
session trying six firemen on a charge of carrying tales to insurance men
against the chief.

At 3:33 o'clock the alarm rang. Chief, assistant chiefs, and accused
firemen listened. Then the news of the magnitude of the fire reached
headquarters. The board hurriedly adjourned and Chief Musham led accusers
and accused to fight the fire.




CHAPTER III.

TAKING AWAY AND IDENTIFYING THE DEAD.


In drays and delivery wagons they carried the dead away from the Iroquois
theater ruins. The sidewalk in front of the playhouse and Thompson's
restaurant was completely filled with dead bodies, when it was realized
that the patrol wagons and ambulances could not remove the bodies.

Then Chief O'Neill and Coroner Traeger sent out men to stop drays and
press them into service. Transfer companies were called up on telephone
and asked to send wagons. Retail stores in State street sent delivery
wagons.

Into these drays and wagons were piled the bodies. They lay outstretched
on the sidewalk, covered with blankets. Much care in the handling was
impossible. As soon as a space on the walk was made by the removal of a
body two were brought down to fill it.

One of the wagons of the Dixon Transfer Company was so heavily loaded with
the dead that the two big horses drawing it were unable to start the
truck. Policemen and spectators put their shoulders to the wheels.

When the drays were filled and started there was a struggle to get them
through the crowds, densely packed, even within the fire lines which the
police had established across Randolph street at State and Dearborn
streets.

Policemen with clubs preceded many of the wagons. The crowds through
which they forced their way were composed mostly of men who had sent wives
and children to the theater and had reason to believe that one of the
drays might carry members of their own families.

Eight and ten wagons at a time, half of them trucks and delivery wagons,
were backed up to the curb waiting for their loads of dead.

Two policemen would seize a blanket at the corners and swing it, with its
contents, up to two other men in the wagon. This would be continued until
a wagonload of bodies had been handled. Then the police forced a way
through the crowd and another wagon took the place.

Occasionally a body would be identified, and then efforts were made to
remove it direct to the residence. Coroner Traeger discovered the wife of
Patrick P. O'Donnell, president of the O'Donnell & Duer Brewing Company.

"Telephone to some undertaking establishment and have them take Mrs.
O'Donnell's body home," he ordered one of his assistants. It was taken to
the residence, at 4629 Woodlawn avenue.

Friends of another woman who were positive they identified the body among
the dead in Thompson's were allowed by the coroner to remove it to Ford's
undertaking establishment, in Thirty-fifth street.


HEARTRENDING SCENES WITNESSED AT THE UNDERTAKING ESTABLISHMENTS.

The bodies of the fire victims were distributed among the undertaking
rooms and morgues most convenient. By 8:30 o'clock 135 bodies lay on the
floors in the establishment of C. H. Jordan, 14-16 East Madison street,
and in the temporary annex across the alley. The first were brought in
ambulances and in police patrol wagons. Later all sorts of conveyances
were pressed into service, and during more than two hours there was a
procession of two-horse trucks, delivery wagons, and cabs, all bringing
dead. It soon became evident that the capacity of the place would be
exhausted and the men, who sat drinking and talking at the tables in the
big ante-room in a saloon across the alley were driven out, and this also
was arranged for use as a temporary morgue.

Two policemen were in charge of each load of the dead, and as soon as the
first few bodies were received, they began searching for possible marks of
identification. All jewelry and valuables, as well as letters, cards, and
other papers were put in sealed envelopes, marked with a number
corresponding with that on the tag attached to the body. When this work
was completed all the envelopes were sent to police headquarters, and all
inquirers after missing friends and relatives were referred to the city
hall to inspect the envelopes.

The scenes in the two long rooms of the morgue in the saloon annex across
the alley were so overpowering that they appeared to lose their effect.
Many of the bodies last brought from the theater were sadly burned and
disfigured and almost all of the faces were discolored and the clothing
rumpled and wet.

The condition of many of the bodies evidenced a vain battle for life.
Almost all of them were women or children, and the majority had been well
dressed. Among them were several old women. The men were few. In many
cases the hands were torn, as if violent efforts had been made to wrench
away some obstruction.

As quickly as the work of searching the bodies was completed, the
attendants stretched strips of muslin over the forms, partly hiding the
pitiful horror of the sight.

Persons were slow in coming to the undertakers in search of friends. Many
had their first suspicion of the catastrophe when members of theater
parties failed to return at the usual hour.

Among the first to arrive at Jordan's were George E. McCaughan, attorney
for the Chicago & Rock Island railroad, 6565 Yale avenue, who came in
search of his daughter, Helen, who had attended a theater party with other
young women. A friend had been in Dearborn street when the fire started
and soon after had discovered in Thompson's restaurant the body of Miss
McCaughan. He attached a card bearing her name to the body, and, leaving
it in the custody of a physician, went to the telephone to notify the
father. When he returned to the restaurant the body already had been
removed and the friend and the father searched last night without finding
it.

As it grew later the crowd around the doors increased, but almost every
one was turned away. It would have been impossible for persons to have
passed through the long rooms for the purpose of inspecting the bodies,
they were so close together. Women came weeping to the doors of the
undertaking shop and beat upon the glass, only to be referred to the city
hall or told "to come back in the morning."

Later it was learned that physicians would be admitted for the purpose of
inspecting and identifying the dead, and many persons came accompanied by
their family doctors for that purpose. Two women, who pressed by the
officer at the door, sank half fainting into chairs in the outer office.
They were looking for Miss Hazel J. Brown, of 94 Thirty-first street, and
Miss Eloise G. Swayze, of Fifty-sixth street and Normal avenue. A single
glance at the long lines of bodies stretched on the floor was enough to
satisfy them. They were told to return in the morning or to send their
family physician to make the identification.

"The poor girls had come from the convent to spend the holiday vacation,"
sobbed one of the women.

During the evening the telephone bell constantly was ringing, and persons
whose relatives had failed to return on time were asked for information.

"Have you found a small heart-shaped locket set with a blue stone?" would
come a call over the wire, and the answer would be, "We can tell nothing
about that until morning."

At Rolston's undertaking rooms were 182 bodies, lying four rows deep in
the rear of 18 Adams street and three rows deep in the rear of 22 Adams
street.

On the floors, tagged with the numerals of the coroner's scheme for
identification, were bodies of men, women, and children awaiting
identification. One was that of a little girl with yellow hair in a tangle
of curls around her face. She appeared as if she slept. A silk dress of
blue was spread over her and the sash of white ribbon scarcely was soiled.

Over the long lines of the dead the police hovered in the search for
identifying marks and for valuables. Most of the bodies were partly
covered with blankets.

Outside a big crowd surged and struggled with the police. Not till 10
o'clock were the doors opened. Then Coroner Traeger arrived, and in groups
of twelve or fifteen the crowd was permitted to pass through the doors.

There was a pathetic scene at Rolston's morgue when the body of John Van
Ingen, 18 years old, of Kenosha, Wis., was identified. Friends of the Van
Ingen family had spent the entire evening searching at the request of Mr.
and Mrs. Van Ingen, who were injured. At midnight four of the Van Ingen
children, who were believed to have perished in the fire, had not been
accounted for. They were: Grace, 2 years old; Dottie, 5 years old; Mary,
13 years old; and Edward, 20 years old.

In the undertaking rooms of J. C. Gavin, 226 North Clark street, and
Carroll Bros., 203 Wells street, forty-five bodies swathed in blankets
were awaiting identification at midnight. Of the fifty-four brought to
these places only nine had been identified by the hundreds of relatives
and friends who filed through the rooms, and in several cases the
recognition was doubtful.

An atmosphere of awe appeared to pervade the places, and no hysterical
scenes followed the pointing out of the bodies. The morbid crowds usually
attendant on a smaller calamity were absent, and few except those seeking
missing relatives sought admission. Only one of the men, James D. Maloney,
wept as he stood over the body of his dead wife.

"I can't go any further," he said. "Her sister, Tennie Peterson, who lived
in Fargo, N. D., was with her, and her body probably is there," motioning
to the row of blanket-covered forms, "but I can't look. I must go back to
the little ones at home, now motherless."

In Inspector Campbell's office at the Chicago avenue station Sergeant Finn
monotonously repeated the descriptions, as the scores of frantic seekers
filled and refilled the little office. Several times he was interrupted by
hysterical shrieks of women or the broken voices of men.

"Read it again, please," would be the call, and, as the description again
was read off, the number of the body was taken and the relatives hurried
to the undertaking rooms. The bodies of Walter B. Zeisler, 12 years old,
Lee Haviland and Walter A. Austrian were partly identified from the police
descriptions.

The list of hospital patients also was posted in the station and aided
friends in the search for injured.

Sheldon's undertaking rooms at 230 West Madison street were the scene of
pathetic incidents. Forty-seven bodies, some of them with the clothing
entirely burned away, and with few exceptions with features charred beyond
recognition, had been taken there. Late in the night only four had been
identified. The first body recognized was that of Mrs. Brindsley, of 909
Jackson boulevard, who had attended the matinee with Miss Edna Torney,
daughter of Mr. and Mrs. P. Torney, 1292 Adams street. Mr. Torney could
find no trace of the young woman.

Of the forty-seven bodies thirty-six were of matured women and five of
men. There were bodies of six children, three boys and three girls.

Dr. J. H. Bates, of 3256 South Park avenue, was searching for the bodies
of Myrtle Shabad and Ruth Elken, numbered among the missing.

There were similar scenes at all of the undertaking rooms to which bodies
were taken.

"When the fire broke out I was taking tickets at the door," said E.
Lovett, one of the ushers. "The crowd began to move toward the exits on
the ground floor, and I rushed to the big entrance doors and threw three
of them open. From there I hurried to the cigar store and called up the
police and fire departments.

"When I returned I tried to get more of the doors open, but was shoved
aside and told that I was crazy. The crowd acted in a most frenzied manner
and no one could have held them in check. Conditions on the balconies must
have been appalling. They were well filled, but the exits, had they been
opened, would have proved ample for all."

Michael Ohle, who was ushering on the first balcony, noticed the fire
shortly after it started. He hurried to the entrances and cleared the way
for the people to get out. Then, he says, he started downstairs to find
out how serious the fire was. Before he could return the panic was on and
he fled to the street for safety.

"Mrs. Phillipson, Phillipson--is Mrs. Phillipson here?"

That cry sounded in drug stores, cigar stores, and hotels until three
little girls, Adeline, Frances, and Teresa, had found their mother, from
whom they were separated in the panic. At last at the Continental hotel
the call was weakly answered by a woman who lay upon a couch, more
frightened than hurt. In another moment three little girls were sobbing in
their mother's lap.


FRIENDS AND RELATIVES EAGERLY SEARCH FOR LOVED ONES MISSING AFTER THEATER
HOLOCAUST.

Friends sought for information of friends; husbands asked for word of
wives; fathers and mothers sought news of sons and daughters; men and
women begged to be told if there was any knowledge of their sweethearts;
parents asked for children; and children fearfully told the names of
missing playmates.

The early hours of the evening were marked by many sad scenes. Men would
rush to the desk where the names of the missing were being compiled and
asked if anything had been heard of some member of their families, then
turn away and hurry out, barely waiting to be told that there would be no
definite news until nearly midnight.

"Just think!" said one gray headed man, leaning on the arm of a younger
man who was leading him down the stairs, "I bought the matinee tickets
for the children as a treat, and insisted that they take their little
cousin with them."

"Have you heard anything of my daughter?" asked a woman.

"What was her name?"

"Lily. She had seats in the first balcony with some girl friends. You
would know her by her brown hair. She wore a white silk shirt waist and a
diamond ring I gave her for Christmas. I went to the theater, but I
couldn't get near it, and they said they were still carrying out bodies."

"And her name? Who was she?"

"She was my daughter--my only one!"

The woman walked away, weeping, without giving the name, and the only
response she would make to questions from those who followed her was:

"My daughter!"

Two men, with two little boys, came in. "Our wives," they said, "came to
the matinee with some neighbors. They have not yet come home."

Before they could give their names a third man ran up and cried:

"I just got word the folks have been taken home in ambulances. They are
alive."

The men gave a shout and were gone in an instant.

Men with children in their arms came to ask for others of the family who
had become separated from them in the panic at the theater. Women, tears
dampening their cheeks, hushed the chatter of their little ones while they
gave the names of husbands and brothers, or told of other children who had
been lost.

One man yielded to his fears at the last minute and went away without
asking for information or giving any name. He said:

"I went to the theater with my wife. We have only been married a year.
When the rush came I was torn away from her, and the last thing I remember
is of hearing her call my name. Then I was lifted off my feet and can
recall nothing more except that I found myself in the street. I have been
to all the hospitals and morgues, and now I am going back to the theater
again."

So it went until the last dreaded news began coming in. Identifications
were being made and hearts were being broken. After that time the
inquiries were not for information; they were pleas to be told that a
mistake had been made or that one was possible.




CHAPTER IV.

SCENE OF HORROR AS VIEWED FROM THE STAGE.


All but one of the 348 members of the "Bluebeard" company escaped,
although many had close calls for their lives. Some of the chorus girls
displayed great coolness in the face of grave peril. Eddie Foy, who had a
thrilling experience, said:

"I was up in my dressing room preparing to come on for my turn in the
middle of the second act when I heard an unusual commotion on the stage
that I knew could not be caused by anything that was a part of the show. I
hurried out of my dressing room, and as I looked I saw that the big drop
curtain was on fire.

"The fire had caught from the calcium and the paint and muslin on the drop
caused the flames to travel with great rapidity Everything was excitement.
Everybody was running from the stage. My 6 year old son, Bryan, stood in
the first entrance to the stage and my first thought naturally was to get
him out. They would not let me go out over the footlights, so I picked up
the boy and gave him to a man and told him to rush the boy out into the
alley.

"I then rushed out to the footlights and called out to the audience, 'Keep
very quiet. It is all right. Don't get excited and don't stampede. It is
all right.'

"I then shouted an order into the flies, 'Drop the curtain,' and called
out to the leader of the orchestra to 'play an overture. Some of the
musicians had left, but those that remained began to play. The leader sat
there, white as a ghost, but beating his baton in the air.

"As the music started I shouted out to the audience, 'Go out slowly. Leave
the theater slowly.' The audience had not yet become panic stricken, and
as I shouted to them they applauded me. The next minute the whole stage
seemed to be afire, and what wood there was began to crackle with a sound
like a series of explosions.

"When I first came out to the footlights about 300 persons had left the
theater or were leaving it. They were those who were nearest the door.
Then the policemen came rushing in and tried to stem the tide towards the
door.

"All this happened in fifteen seconds. Up in the flies were the young
women who compose the aerial ballet. They were up there waiting to do
their turn, and as I stood at the front of the stage they came rushing
out. I think they all got out safely.

"The fire seemed to spread with a series of explosions. The paint on the
curtains and scenery came in touch with the flames and in a second the
scenery was sputtering and blazing up on all sides. The smoke was fearful
and it was a case of run quickly or be smothered."

Stage Director William Carleton, who was one of the last to leave the
stage when the flames and smoke drove the members of the company out,
said:

"I was on the stage when the flames shot out from the switchboard on the
left side. It seemed that some part of the scenery must have touched the
sparks and set the fire. Soon the octette which was singing "In the Pale
Moonlight," discovered the fire over their heads and in a few moments we
had the curtain run down. It would not go down the full length, however,
leaving an opening of about five feet from the floor. Then the crowd out
in front began to stampede and the lights went out. Eddie Foy, who was in
his dressing room, heard the commotion, and, rushing to the front of the
stage, shouted to the spectators to be calm. The warning was useless and
the panic was under way before any one realized what was going on.

"Only sixteen members of the company were on the stage at the time. They
remained until the flames were all about them and several had their hair
singed and faces burned. Almost every one of these went out through the
stage entrance on Dearborn street. In the meantime all of those who were
in the dressing room had been warned and rushed out through the front
entrance on Randolph street. There was no panic among the members of the
company, every one seeming to know that care would result in the saving of
life. Most of the members were preparing for the next number in their
dressing rooms when the fire broke out, and they hurriedly secured what
wraps they could and all dashed up to the stage, making their exit in
safety.

"The elevator which has been used for the members of the company, in going
from the upper dressing rooms to the stage, was one of the first things to
go wrong, and attempts to use it were futile.

"It seems that the panic could not be averted, as the great crowd which
filled the theater was unable to control itself. Two of the women
fainted."

"When the fire broke out," said Lou Shean, a member of the chorus, "I was
in the dressing room underneath the stage. When I reached the top of the
stairs the scenery nearby was all in flames and the heat was so fierce
that I could not reach the stage door leading toward Dearborn street. I
returned to the basement and ran down the long corridor leading toward
the engine room, near which doors led to the smoking room and buffet. Both
doors were locked. I began to break down the doors, assisted by other
members of the company, while about seventy or eighty other members
crowded against us. I succeeded in bursting open the door to the smoking
room, when all made a wild rush. I was knocked down and trampled on and
received painful bruises all over my body."

"I was just straightening up things in our dressing room upstairs," said
Harry Meehan, a member of the chorus, who also acted as dresser for Eddie
Foy and Harry Gilfoil, "when the fire started. Both Mr. Foy and Mr.
Gilfoil were on the stage at the time. I opened Mr. Foy's trunk and took
out his watch and chain and rushed out, leaving my own clothes behind. I
was so scantily dressed that I had to borrow clothes to get back to the
hotel. Mr. Gilfoil saved nothing but his overcoat."

Herbert Cawthorn, the Irish comedian who took the part of Pat Shaw in the
play "Bluebeard," assisted many of the chorus girls from the stage exits
in the panic.

"While the stage fireman was working in an endeavor to use the chemicals
the flames suddenly swooped down and out, Eddie Foy shouted something
about the asbestos curtain and the fireman attempted to use it, and the
stage hands ran to his assistance, but the curtain refused to work.

"In my opinion the stage fireman might have averted the whole terrible
affair if he had not become so excited. The chorus girls and everybody, to
my mind, were less excited than he. There were at least 500 people behind
the scenes when the fire started. I assisted many of the chorus girls from
the theater."

Said C. W. Northrop, who took the part of one of Bluebeard's old wives:
"Many of us certainly had narrow escapes. Those who were in the dressing
rooms underneath the stage at the time had more difficulty in getting out.
I was in the dressing room under the stage when the fire broke out, and
when I found that I could not reach the stage I tried to get out through
the door connecting the extreme north end of the C shaped corridor with
the smoking room. I joined other members of the company in their rush for
safety, but when we reached the door we found it closed. Some of the
members crawled out through a coal hole, while others broke down the
locked door, through which the others made their way out."

Lolla Quinlan, one of Bluebeard's eight dancers, saved the life of one of
her companions, Violet Sidney, at the peril of her own. The two girls,
with five others, were in a dressing room on the fifth floor when the
alarm was raised. In their haste Miss Sidney caught her foot and sank to
the floor with a cry of pain. She had sprained her ankle. The others, with
the exception of Miss Quinlan, fled down the stairs.

Grasping her companion around the waist Miss Quinlan dragged her down the
stairs to the stage and crossed the boards during a rain of fiery brands.
These two were the last to leave the stage. Miss Quinlan's right arm and
hand were painfully burned and her face was scorched. Miss Sidney's face
was slightly burned. Both were taken to the Continental hotel.

Herbert Dillon, musical director, at the height of the panic broke through
the stage door from the orchestra side, hastily cleared away obstructions
with an ax, and assisted in the escape of about eighty chorus girls who
occupied ten dressing rooms under the stage.

"We were getting ready for the honey and fan scene," said Miss Nina Wood,
"talking and laughing, and not thinking of danger. We were so far back of
the orchestra that we did not hear sounds of the panic for several
moments. Then the tramping of feet came to our ears. We made our way
through the smoking room and one of the narrow exits of the theater."

Miss Adele Rafter, a member of the company, was in her dressing room when
the fire broke out.

"I did not wait an instant," said Miss Rafter. "I caught up a muff and boa
and rushed down the stairs in my stage costume and was the first of the
company to get out the back entrance. Some man kindly loaned me his
overcoat and I hurried to my apartments at the Sherman house. Several of
the girls followed, and we had a good crying spell together."

Miss Rafter's mother called at the hotel and spent the evening with her.
Telegrams were sent to her father, who is rector of a church at Dunkirk,
N. Y.

Edwin H. Price, manager of the "Mr. Bluebeard" company, was not in the
building when the fire started. He said:

"I stepped out of the theater for a minute, and when I got back I saw the
people rushing out and knew the stage was on fire. I helped some of the
girls out of the rear entrance. With but one or two exceptions all left in
stage costume.

"One young woman in the chorus, Miss McDonald, displayed unusual coolness.
She remained in her dressing room and donned her entire street costume,
and also carried out as much of her stage clothing as she could carry."

Quite a number of the chorus girls live in Chicago, and Mr. Price
furnished cabs and sent them all to their homes.

Through some mistake it was reported that Miss Anabel Whitford, the fairy
queen of the company, was dying at one of the hospitals. She was not even
injured, having safely made her way out through the stage door.

Miss Nellie Reed, the principal of the flying ballet, which was in place
for its appearance near the top part of the stage, was so badly burned by
the flames before she was able to escape that she afterward died at the
county hospital. The other members of the flying ballet were not injured.

Robert Evans, one of the principals of the Bluebeard company, was in his
dressing room on the fourth floor. He dived through a mass of flame and
landed three stairways below. He helped a number of chorus girls to escape
through the lower basement. His hands and face are burned severely. He
lost all his wardrobe and personal effects.


STORY OF HOW A SMALL BLAZE TERMINATED IN TERRIBLE LOSS.

The fire started while the double octet was singing "In the Pale
Moonlight." Eddie Foy, off the stage, was making up for his "elephant"
specialty.

On the audience's left--the stage right--a line of fire flashed straight
up. It was followed by a noise as of an explosion. According to nearly all
accounts, however, there was no real explosion, the sound being that of
the fuse of the "spot" light, the light which is turned on a pivot to
follow and illuminate the progress of the star across the stage.

This light caused the fire. On this all reports of the stage folk agree.
As to manner, accounts differ widely. R. M. Cummings, the boy in charge of
the light, said that it was short circuited.

Stage hands, as they fled from the scene, however, were heard to question
one another, "Who kicked over the light?" The light belonged to the
"Bluebeard" company.

The beginning of the disaster was leisurely. The stage hands had been
fighting the line of wavering flame along the muslin fly border for some
seconds before the audience knew anything was the matter.

The fly border, made of muslin and saturated with paint, was tinder to the
flames.

The stage hands grasped the long sticks used in their work. They forgot
the hand grenades that are supposed to be on every stage.

"Hit it with the sticks!" was the cry. "Beat it out!" "Beat it out!"

The men struck savagely. A few yards of the border fell upon the stage and
was stamped to charred fragments.

That sight was the first warning the audience had. For a second there was
a hush. The singers halted in their lines; the musicians ceased to play.

Then a murmur of fear ran through the audience. There were cries from a
few, followed by the breaking, rumbling sound of the first step toward the
flight of panic.

At that moment a strange, grotesque figure appeared upon the stage. It
wore tights, a loose upper garment, and the face was one-half made up. The
man was Eddie Foy, chief comedian of the company, the clown, but the only
man who kept his head.

Before he reached the center of the stage he had called out to a stage
hand: "Take my boy, Bryan, there! Get him out! There by the stage way!"

The stage hand grabbed the little chap. Foy saw him dart with him to
safety as he turned his head.

Freed of parental anxiety, he faced the audience.

"Keep quiet!" he shouted. "Quiet."

"Go out in order!" he shouted. "Don't get excited!"

Between exclamations he bent over toward the orchestra leader.


ORCHESTRA PLAYS IN FACE OF DEATH.

"Start an overture!" he commanded. "Start anything. For God's sake play,
play, play, and keep on playing."

The brave words were as bravely answered. Gillea raised his wand, and the
musicians began to play. Better than any one in the theater they knew
their peril. They could look slantingly up and see that the 300 sets of
the "Bluebeard" scenery all were ablaze. Their faces were white, their
hands trembled, but they played, and played.

Foy still stood there, alternately urging the frightened people to avoid a
panic and spurring the orchestra on. One by one the musicians dropped
fiddle, horn, and other instruments and stole away.


"CLOWN" PROVES A HERO.

Finally the leader and Foy were left alone. Foy gave one glance upward and
saw the scenery all aflame. Dropping brands fell around him, and then he
fled--just in time to save his own life. The "clown" had proved himself a
hero.

The curtain started to come down. It stopped, it swayed as from a heavy
wind, and then it "buckled" near the center.


ALL HOPE LOST FOR GALLERY.

From that moment no power short of omnipotent could have saved the
occupants of the upper gallery.

The coolness of Foy, of the orchestra leader and of other players, who
begged the audience to hold itself in check, however, probably saved many
lives on the parquet floor. Tumultuous panic prevailed, but the maddest of
it--save in the doomed gallery--was at the outskirts of the ground floor
crowd.




CHAPTER V.

EXCITING EXPERIENCES IN THE FIRE.


"If you ever saw a field of timothy grass blown flat by the wind and rain
of a summer storm, that was the position of the dead at the exits of the
second balcony," said Chief of Police O'Neill.

"In the rush for the stairs they had jammed in the doorway and piled ten
deep; lying almost like shingles. When we got up the stairs in the dark to
the front rows of the victims, some of them were alive and struggling, but
so pinned down by the great weight of the dead and dying piled upon them
that three strong men could not pull the unfortunate ones free.

"It was necessary first to take the dead from the top of the pile, then
the rest of the bodies were lifted easily and regularly from their
positions, save as their arms had intertwined and clutched.

"Nothing in my experience has ever approached the awfulness of the
situation and it may be said that from the point of physical exertion, the
police department has never been taxed as it has been taxed tonight. Men
have been worn out simply with the carrying out of dead bodies, to say
nothing of the awfulness of their burdens."

The strong hand of the chief was called into play when the dead had been
removed and when the theater management appeared at the exit of the second
balcony, seeking to pass the uniformed police who guarded the heaps of
sealskins, purses, and tangled valuables behind them. A spokesman for the
management, backed up by a negro special policeman of the house, stood
before the half dozen city police on guard, asking to be admitted that
these valuables might be removed to the checkrooms of the theater.

"But these things are the property of the coroner," replied the chief,
coming up behind the delegation.

"But the theater management wishes to make sure of the safety of these
valuables," insisted the spokesman.

"The department of police is responsible," replied Chief O'Neill.


EXPERIENCE OF CHICAGO UNIVERSITY MEN.

Clyde A. Blair, captain of the University of Chicago track team, and
Victor S. Rice, 615 Yale avenue, a member of the team, accompanied Miss
Majorie Mason, 5733 Monroe avenue, and Miss Anne Hough, 361 East
Fifty-eighth street, to the matinee. They were sitting in the middle of
the seventh row from the rear of the first floor. When the first flames
broke through from the stage Miss Mason became alarmed. Seizing the girl,
and leaving his overcoat and hat, Blair dragged her through the crush
toward the door, closely followed by Rice and Miss Hough.

"The crush at the door," said Blair, "was terrific. Half of the double
doors opening into the vestibule were fastened. People dashed against the
glass, breaking it and forcing their way through. One woman fell down in
the crowd directly in front of me. She looked up and said, 'For God's
sake, don't trample on me.' I stepped around her, unable to help her up,
and the crowd forced me past. I could not learn whether she was trampled
over or not."


BISHOP BRAVES DANGER IN HEROIC WORK OF RESCUE.

"I was passing the theater when the panic began," said Bishop Samuel
Fallows of the St. Paul's Reformed Episcopal church. "I heard the cry for
volunteers and joined the men who went into the place to carry out the
dead and injured. I had no idea of the extent of the disaster until I
became actively engaged in the work.

"The sight when I reached the balconies was pitiful beyond description. It
grew in horror as I looked over the seats. The bodies were in piles. Women
had their hands over their faces as if to shield off a blow. Children lay
crushed beneath their parents, as if they had been hurled to the marble
floors.

"I saw the great battlefields of the civil war, but they were as nothing
to this. When we began to take out the bodies we found that many of the
audience had been unable to get even near the exits. Women were bent over
the seats, their fingers clinched on the iron sides so strongly that they
were torn and bleeding. Their faces and clothes were burned, and they must
have suffered intensely.

"I ministered to all I could and some of them seemed to welcome the
presence of a clergyman as it were a gift from God. There appeared to be
little system in the work of rescue, but that was due, I believe, to the
intense excitement."


WOMEN AND FOUR CHILDREN SUFFER.

Mrs. Anna B. Milliken, who is staying at Thompson's hotel, had four
children in her charge, Felix, Jessie, Tony, and Jennie Guerrier, of 135
North Sangamon street, their ages ranging from 11 to 17 years. She and her
charges were in the balcony, standing against the wall, when the fire
started.

"Something told me to be calm," said Mrs. Milliken. "I had passed through
one dreadful experience in the Chicago fire, and, though there was a great
deal of confusion, I kept the children together, telling them not to be
frightened. Men and women hurried past me, shouting like wild beasts, and
if I had joined them the children and I would have been trampled under
foot. It was minutes before I could leave with the two younger children.
The two elder are lost. What shall I tell their folks," and the poor woman
began to weep. Her face, as she stood in the lobby of the Northwestern
building, was blistered and swollen. The back of her dress was burned
through.

"What are the names of the missing children?" inquired a physician. "They
are in here," and he led the distracted woman into one of the "first aid
hospitals." There Mrs. Milliken saw her two charges so swathed in bandages
that they could not be recognized.


LEARNS CHILDREN HAVE ESCAPED.

"I'm looking for two little girls--Berien is the name," shouted H. E.
Osborne. "They live in Aurora."

"They've been here," answered Mr. Weisman. "They are all right and have
been sent to their home in Aurora."

With a glad shout Osborne ran back to the office of the National Cash
Register company, 50 State street, to inform Miss Mary Stevenson, whom the
children had been visiting.

The Berien children were among the first to reach the offices of the
Hallwood company after the fire broke out. By some chance they had made
their way out uninjured. The story of their plight touched a stranger, who
took them to a railway station and bought them tickets to their home in
Aurora. One was about 14 and the other about 9 years old.


FINDS HIS DAUGHTER.

One young woman, terrified but uninjured, had found her way to this office
and was sitting in a frightened stupor, when an elderly man hurried in
from the street.

"Have you seen--" he started to ask, and then, catching sight of the
forlorn little figure, he stopped. With a glad cry, father and daughter
rushed into each other's arms, and the father bore his child away. Their
names were not learned.

James Sullivan of Woodstock was probably the last man who got out of the
parquet uninjured. With him was George Field, also of Woodstock, and the
two fought their way out together.


MR. FIELD'S NARRATIVE.

"We were seated in the twelfth row," said Mr. Field, "when we saw fire at
the top of the proscenium arch. At the same time some sparks fell on the
stage.

"Eddie Foy came out and told the audience not to be afraid, to avoid a
panic, and there would be no trouble. While he was speaking, however, a
burning brand fell alongside of him, and then came what looked like a huge
globe of fire. The moment it struck the stage fire spread everywhere.

"The panic started at once and everybody rushed for the doors. Sullivan
and I were in the rear of the fleeing mass and made our way out as best we
could without getting mixed up in the panic. As long as the women and
children were struggling through the straight aisles there was not so much
trouble except that some of the fugitives fell to the floor and had to be
helped on their feet again. At times the women and children would be
lying four deep on the floor of the aisles, and in several instances we
had to set them on their feet before we could go further. There was not
much smoke and had the aisles been straight to the entrances every one
could have got out practically unhurt.

"But when it came to the turns where they focus into the lobby the poor
women and children were piled up into indiscriminate heaps. The screams
and cries they uttered were something terrible. It was an impossibility to
allay the panic and the frightened people simply trampled on those in
front of them.

"Some of the people in the orchestra chairs immediately in front of the
stage must have been burned by the fire. The fire darted directly among
them and the chairs began burning at once. Those on this floor far enough
in the rear to escape these flames would have been all right except for
the crush of the panic.

"Sullivan, who was with me, was the last man out of the orchestra chairs
who was not injured. Whoever was behind us must have been suffocated or
burned to death. How many there were I have no means of knowing."


NARROW ESCAPES OF YOUNG AND OLD.

One of the narrow escapes in the first rush for the open air was that of
Winnie Gallagher, 11 years old, 4925 Michigan avenue. The child, who was
with her mother in the third row, was left behind in the rush for safety.
She climbed to the top of the seat and, stepping from one chair to
another, finally reached the door. There she was nearly crushed in the
crowd. At the Central police station the child was restored to her mother.

Miss Lila Hazel Coulter, of 4760 Champlain avenue, was sitting with Mr.
Kenneth Collins and Miss Helen Dickinson, 3637 Michigan avenue, in the
eighth row in the parquet. She escaped in safety.

"I was sitting in the fifth seat from the aisle," said Miss Coulter, "but
the fire, which was bursting out from both sides of the stage, had such a
fascination for me."

D. W. Dimmick, of Apple River, Ill., an old man of 70, with a long, white
beard, was standing in the upper gallery when the fire broke out.

"I was with a party of four," said Mr. Dimmick. "I saw small pieces of
what looked like burning paper dropping down from above at the left of the
curtain. At the same time small puffs of smoke seemed to shoot out into
the house. A boy in the gallery near me called 'fire,' but there were
plenty of people to stop him.

"'Keep quiet!' I told him. 'If you don't look out, you'll start a panic.'

"Then all of a sudden the whole front of the stage seemed to burst out in
one mass of flame. Then everybody seemed to get up and start to get out of
the place at once. From all over the house came shrieks and cries of
'fire,' I started at once, hugging the wall on the outside of the stairway
as we went down.

"When we got down to the platform where the first balcony opens it seemed
to me that people were stacked up like cordwood. There were men, women,
and children in the lot. At the same time there were some people whom I
thought must be actors, who came running out from somewhere in the
interior of the house, and whose wigs and clothes were on fire. We tried
to beat out the flames as we went along. By crowding out to the wall we
managed to squeeze past the mass of people who were writhing on the floor,
and practically blocking the entrance so far as the people still in the
gallery were concerned.


PULLS WOMEN FROM MASS ON FLOOR.

"As we got by the mass on the floor I turned and caught hold of the arms
of a woman who was lying near the bottom pinned down by the weight resting
on her feet. I managed to pull her out, and I think she got down in
safety. One of the men with me also pulled out another woman from the
heap. I tried to rescue a man who was also caught by the feet, but,
although I braced myself against the stairs, I was unable to move him.

"I came in from Apple River to see the sights in Chicago, and I have seen
all I can stand."

Six little girls from Evanston, in a party occupying seats in the parquet,
escaped by the side entrance. In the crush they lost most of their
clothing. Four of the children stayed together, the other two being for
the time lost in the street. The four were Hannah Gregg, 12 years old,
1038 Sheridan road; Florence and May Lang, 14 and 13 years old, Buena
Park; Beatrice Moore, 12 years old, Buena Park.




CHAPTER VI.

HEROES OF THE FIRE.


One of the heroes of the Iroquois theater fire was Peter Quinn, chief
special agent of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe railroad system, who
assisted in saving the lives of 100 or more of the performers. But for the
prompt service of Quinn and two citizens who assisted him it is believed
that most of the performers would have met the fate of the victims in the
theater proper.

Mr. Quinn had attended a trial in the Criminal court and in the middle of
the afternoon started for the downtown district, intending to proceed to
his office. Reaching Randolph and Dearborn streets the railroad official
had his attention attracted to a man who rushed from the theater
bare-headed and without his coat. What followed Quinn describes as
follows:

"The actions of the man and the fact that he was without coat and hat
attracted my attention and I watched him through curiosity. He ran so
swiftly that he collided with several pedestrians, and I saw him rush
toward a policeman on the street crossing. He said something to the
policeman and then I saw the bluecoat rush excitedly away. My curiosity
was then aroused to such an extent that I followed the young man who ran
into the alley in the rear of the theater. He disappeared there and I was
about to go on my way when my attention was attracted to the door leading
upon the stage.

"As I passed I heard a commotion and saw the door was slightly open, and,
peeping into the opening, I asked what was the trouble. Then, for the
first time, I learned that the theater was on fire. A number of strangers
arrived at the door about the same time.

"The players, men, women, and children, had rushed to this small trap-door
for escape, got caught in a solid mass, and were so firmly wedged together
that they could not move. They were banked solidly against the little
door, and it could not be opened. Nearly all of the players were in their
stage costumes.

"The women screamed and begged us to rescue them, and the cries of the
children could be heard above the hoarse shouts of the men. I did not
realize it at that moment, but it develops that the players were in the
same position as the unfortunates who met death in the front end of the
house.

"Had we been unable to get that trap-door open when we did every member of
that struggling crowd of men, women and children, would have perished
where they stood, too tightly wedged together to permit even a slight
struggle against death.

"Nobody at that time had the slightest idea of the serious state of
affairs. We tried to force the door open, but the crowd was banked up too
tightly against it. I shouted through the opening and commanded those in
the rear to step back far enough to permit the door to be opened. It was
like talking to empty space, however, and for a few moments we stood there
helpless and without any means to assist those in distress.

"Then came a volume of smoke, and far in the rear of the crowd we could
see the illumination from the flames. I had a number of small tools in my
pocket, and immediately proceeded to remove the metal attachments which
held the door in place. This was accomplished with some difficulty, and
then we managed to force the crowd back probably an inch, but that was
sufficient. The door was then permitted to drop from its place, and one by
one the imprisoned players were assisted into the alley.

"They were then in scanty costumes, but were quickly assisted to places of
shelter. Even when the last player and stage hand had reached the alley we
could not realize the awfulness of what had happened. I walked in upon the
stage and found it a seething furnace. The players had been rescued just
in time. A minute later and the flames and smoke would have reached the
imperiled ones, and they would have been suffocated or burned where they
stood."


THE PILES OF DEAD IN THE GALLERY.

William ("Smiling") Corbett was one of the first to penetrate the smoke
and reach the balcony and gallery of the theater where the most fearful
loss of life occurred. Charley Dexter, the Boston National league player,
and Frank Houseman, the old Chicago second baseman, went to his
assistance.

Corbett was stopped by a fear-frenzied little woman, who begged him to
save her two children.

"They're up in the gallery," she cried.

Corbett made a dash for the balcony entrance on the right.

"Don't go up there," admonished some of the firemen about; "you'll get
hemmed in."

Corbett groped his way onward and upward, stumbling over bodies lying
prostrate on the staircase, and finally reached the gallery entrance.

"There they were," said Corbett afterward. "Positively the most sickening
spectacle I ever saw. They were piled up in bunches, in all manner of
disarray. I grabbed for the topmost body, a girl about 6 years old.
Catching her by the wrist I felt the flesh curl up under my grasp. I
hurried down with the little one, then back again, each time with the body
of a child.

"I then realized that no good could come of any further effort. Everybody
was stark dead. I turned away and fled. I never again want to go near the
place."


EDDIE FOY'S HEROISM.

Eddie Foy, leading comedian in "Mr. Bluebeard," said:

"I was in my dressing room, one tier up off the stage, when I smelled
smoke. The 'Moonlight ballet' was on, and it was three minutes before the
time for my entrance on the first scene of the second act.

"I looked up and immediately over me, in the left first entrance, I saw
sparks and a small cloud of smoke. The members of the company and of the
chorus had already started off the stage. My eldest boy, Bryan, was
standing under the light bridge in the first entrance, and, taking him by
the hand, I turned him over to one of the stage hands with orders to get
him out of the theater. In less time than it takes to tell it, the little
wreath of smoke and the tiny sparks had grown in volume. The smoke and
some of the sparks had already made their way into the main part of the
house, curling down and around the lower edge of the proscenium arch.

"I looked at the house through an opening, and that was enough. I tried to
appear as calm as possible under the conditions, realizing what a stampede
would mean. Just what I said I cannot for the life of me now recall. In
effect, though, this is about it:

"'Ladies and gentlemen, there is no danger. Don't get excited. Walk out
calmly.'

"Between each breath, and these were coming in short, sharp gasps, I kept
yelling out from the corner of my lips: 'Lower that iron curtain; drop the
fire curtain!'

"The balcony and gallery were packed with women and children, and fully
aware of what was in store for these hapless ones, my heart sank.

"The cracking of the timbers above increased. The smoke was growing more
dense. I knew the material aloft--flimsy, dry linens, parched canvas, and
paint-coated tapestries and drops.

"Without raising my voice to a pitch calculated to alarm, and yet
unmistakably urgent in its appeal, I repeated: 'Get out--get out slowly.'

"The northeast corner of the fly gallery was now a furnace. Just as I made
the last appeal to the balcony and the gallery a fiercely blazing ember
dropped at my feet. Another, a smaller one, was caught in the draft and
forced out into the theater proper.

"'Drop the fire curtain,' I shouted again, looking in vain for it to come
down. I know that not a soul in the theater proper would be in danger if
this was done. The switchboard was there--but no one to work it. I cried
out for Carleton, our stage manager. He was gone. I called for 'Pete,' one
of the electricians. He, too, was gone.

"'Does any one know how this iron curtain is worked?' I yelled at the mob
of fleeing stage hands, members of the company, property men, and
musicians. Not an answer.

"At the first sign of danger, after reaching the footlights, I said to
Dillea, our orchestra leader:

"'An overture, Herbert, an overture.'

"Dillea--God bless him, his ranks already thinning out in the orchestra
pit--struck up the 'Sleeping Beauty and the Beast' overture. Of the
thirty odd musicians in the pit not over half a dozen remained to follow
Dillea and his baton. But the little fellow, ashen pale, his eyes glued on
the raging mass of flame above, never whimpered. He kept right on, and
only left his post when the flames drove him away from his leader's stand.
When Dillea disappeared down the opening in the orchestra pit half of the
lower floor had been emptied. This I noticed only in an aside, for my eyes
were fastened on the sea of agonized, distracted little ones in the
balcony and gallery."


AN ELEVATOR BOY HERO.

The bottom of the elevator shaft in the doomed theater was a scene of
pandemonium when the stage hands tried to get the girls out. Archie
Barnard headed the chain gang and behind him were J. R. O'Mally, Arthur
Hart and William Price. As soon as the women reached the floor they began
to run wild, and had to be caught and tossed from one man to another. The
women in the first tier of dressing rooms were the first down and they
were helped out without much trouble.

On his second trip up with the elevator young Robert Smith ascended into
an atmosphere that was so thick with smoke that he could not see or
breathe. He found one of the girls on the sixth floor and then took on
another load from the fifth. By the time he had come down with these, the
flames and smoke were threatening the men in the chain. The clothing of
Barnard and William Price was on fire and their hair was burning.
Nevertheless they threw the girls out and waited for the third load.

This load came near not arriving. The smoke was so thick that Smith had to
find the girls and drag them into the elevator and by the time he had
done this he was almost overcome. The elevator was burning at the place
where the controller was located, and Smith had to place his left hand in
the flame to start the car. The hand was badly burned, but the car was
started and came down in time for the girls to receive assistance from the
men who were waiting. When the last girl was out the men left the
building.

Up in the gridiron, where the smoke was thickest, the four German boys who
worked the aerial apparatus were caught, fully sixty feet from the stage
floor, and no one had time to come to their assistance or to pay any
attention to them, because there were too many other people to be saved.

At first, they did not know what to do. As the smoke became thicker and
the heat more intense they moved to get out. One of them, who was some
distance from his companions, was caught in the flames of one of the
burning pieces of draperies, and either because he lost his presence of
mind or because he could not hold out any longer, he jumped. Some of the
people on the stage floor heard him fall, but he did not move and no one
could help him. He could not be found after the other people escaped from
the stage. His three companions climbed over the gridiron scaffolding and
made their way down the stairway to safety.

"I heard the little fellow fall," said Arthur Hart, "and that is the last
I knew of him. It was a long jump, and I presume that he was badly
injured."

"I stuck to the car until the ropes parted," said young Smith, the
elevator boy, "and then I began to get faint. Someone reached in and
pulled me out just in time to save my life. The larger part of the girls
were in the dressing rooms when the fire broke out, and they all tried to
get out at once. A great many tried to crowd into the elevator and it was
hard work to keep it going. I made as many trips as I could."


TWO BALCONY HEROES.

A man who gave his name as Chester, with his wife and two daughters, was a
hero who escaped without letting the police know who he was. This man was
in the lower balcony of the theater and in the panic he succeeded in
reaching the fire escape with his children and wife. After getting on the
fire escape, the flames swept up and set the clothing of his wife and
girls on fire. Burned himself, he fought the flame and then realizing that
delay meant certain death he dropped the children to the ground, a
distance of ten feet, and then dropped his wife. Then he leaped himself.

W. G. Smith of the Chicago Teaming Company, 37 Dearborn street, saw them
jumping and with some of his men he picked them up and carried them into
his store. This was before the fire department arrived.

When all had been taken in Smith rushed back into the alley to find the
lower fire escape filled with screaming, struggling women. All were
hatless and their faces were scorched by the intense heat. He shouted to
them to wait a moment, as the firemen were coming, but one woman leaped as
he spoke. She too was taken into Smith's store and all his patients were
taken later to nearby hotels, where their injuries were attended to.

After Smith left the alley Morris Eckstrom, assistant engineer, and M. J.
Tierney, engineer of the university building, ran to the rescue of the
women on the fire escape. The firemen had not yet arrived, and the screams
of the women with the flames creeping upon them were frightful to hear.

"Jump one by one," shouted Eckstrom, "and we'll catch you."

Tierney grabbed a long blanket from the engine room, and the women,
realizing it was their only chance, leaped into it. In some cases they
were injured, but none was seriously hurt.

"I know we caught twenty women that way, before the flames got so terrific
that none of them could reach the fire escape," said Eckstrom. "I saw a
dozen women and children and some men, through the open door to the fire
escape, fall back into the flames."


THE MUSICAL DIRECTOR'S STORY.

Musical Director Herbert Dillea of the "Mr. Bluebeard" company, who was
one of the first of the members of the orchestra to see the fire, had
several narrow escapes from death while he endeavored to rescue four of
the chorus girls who had fainted in the passageway which leads from the
armor-room to the front smoking apartment.

Dillea was nearly overcome by the thick smoke which filled the areaway,
but, with the assistance of some of the stage employes, he succeeded in
carrying the unconscious actresses to the street. The young women, upon
reaching the fresh air, soon revived, and they were taken care of in
stores until they got their street clothing.

Dillea said that several other members of the orchestra vainly endeavored
to persuade some of the audience who were occupying front seats to enter
the passageway, but no attention was paid to them.

In describing his experiences Dillea said:

"It was during the second verse of the 'Pale Moonlight' song that I
suddenly saw a red light to my left in the proscenium arch. The moment I
saw the red glare I knew there was a fire, and in whispers I ordered the
other members of the orchestra to play as fast as they could, as I thought
the asbestos would be lowered. We had hardly begun to play when the
asbestos started to come down, but right in the middle it stopped, and it
remained so.

"By this time the chorus girls were shrieking with terror, as the fire
brands were falling among them on the stage. As soon as the audience saw
the fire brands they began to arise, but Eddie Foy ran out and begged them
to remain quiet, assuring them that there was no danger. The audience paid
no attention to him and the panic followed. Then I thought it was time to
make our escape, and I turned to the orchestra men and told them to follow
me to the passageway. While I was running through the areaway I shouted to
the actresses. They ran from their rooms, and four of them fainted. It was
only with the greatest difficulty they were carried out."


CHILD SAVES HIS BROTHER.

Willie Dee, the 12-year-old son of Mr. and Mrs. W. E. Dee, who lost two
children in the fire, by a presence of mind and bravery that would have
been commendable in a person of mature years saved himself and a smaller
brother not 7 years old.

The four children of Mr. and Mrs. Dee attended the theater on the fatal
afternoon in company with their nurse, Mrs. G. H. Errett. Besides Willie,
the oldest of the children, there were two twin boys, Allerton and Edward,
between 6 and 7 years of age, and the baby 2-1/2 years old. Willie was one
of the first to notice the fire and called to the nurse to go out. The
nurse did not grasp the situation, thinking the flames a part of the act,
and hesitated. Noticing her hesitation, Willie seized the nearest one of
the children, Allerton and pulled the smaller boy with him down the
stairs from the first balcony in which the party was seated. The two boys
were unable to move fast enough to keep ahead of the crowd, although they
were the first ones out. They were overtaken and both of them shoved
through the doors in front, where they became separated. Willie thought
his little brother lost and went home without him. The smaller boy was
later picked up and taken into Thompson's restaurant, from which place he
was taken home, practically uninjured.

The other twin, Edward, was killed where he sat. The nurse and baby
succeeded in reaching the first landing, where they were trampled
underfoot. A fireman took the baby from the nurse's arms and placed it in
charge of Dr. Bridge. The doctor succeeded in resuscitating it and took it
to his home at Forty-ninth street and Cottage Grove avenue, where it died
early the following morning.




CHAPTER VII.

THE ORIGIN OF THE FIRE--THE ASBESTOS CURTAIN AND THE LIGHTS.


The real story of the origin of the fire was told by William McMullen,
assistant electrician. He said: "The spot light was completely
extinguished at the time of the fire. I am positive of this, because I was
working on it. Three feet above my head was the flood light. I noticed the
curtain swaying directly above it and suddenly a spark shot up and it was
ablaze in a second."

McMullen called the attention of his assistant to the flame.

"Put the fire out," he said.

"All right," said the other man, reaching down, using his hands to put out
the small flame.

"Put it out! Put it out!" shouted McMullen.

"I am! I am!" said the other, clapping the flimsy stuff between his hands.

Some of the stage hands at this moment noticed the fire.

"Look at that fire!" these called out. "Can't you see that you're on fire
up there! Put it out!"

"D---- it, I am trying to," said the man who was clapping away at the
burning paint impregnated muslin.

Then a flame a foot high shot up and caught the draperies above those on
fire.

"Look at that other one. It's on fire," some one on the stage yelled.

"Put it out!" shouted another.

"All right," said the man on the perch. But he did not clap hard enough
or fast enough, and in ten seconds the flames were beyond his reach.

It was after these hand clapping attempts to extinguish the fire had
proved futile that McMullen shouted a call for the asbestos curtain to be
put down.

"I did not see the curtain move."


ANOTHER ACCOUNT OF THE FIRE'S ORIGIN.

W. H. Aldridge, who was employed to operate one of the so-called calcium
lights, told how the fire started.

"I was about twenty feet above the lights which were being used, having
left my place to watch the performance," he said. "While I was looking
down on the performers I noticed a flash of light where the electric wires
connect with the calcium light. The flash seemed to be about six inches
long. As I looked a curtain swayed against the flame. In a moment the
loose edges of the canvas were in a blaze, which rapidly ran up the edge
of the canvas and across its upper end.

"A man named McNulty was in charge of the light. Whether he accidentally
broke the wire and caused the flash I do not know. The light was about
twenty feet from the floor. It consisted of a 'spot' light, used to follow
the principal performer, and a 'flood' light, which was used to produce
the moonlight effect."


WERE ELECTRIC LIGHTS TURNED OUT?

James B. Quinn, general manager of the Standard Meter company, who was
present throughout the panic, said on this point: "Had the electrician who
had charge of the switches for the foyer lights remained at his post long
enough to have turned on the lights in the foyer there would not have been
one-half the loss of life in the foyer and balcony stairs. When that
awful darkness fell on the house the frenzied people did not know where to
turn. They had not become fully acquainted with the turns because the
theater was new. I was there and assisted in removing the dead and dying,
and having been connected with lighting plants all my life I know what I
am talking about. We did not have an electric light turned on for two
hours after the fire. It was too late then. True, we had lanterns, but
they were inadequate and would not have been needed had the electrician or
his assistant done their duty. When the lights were turned on it was done
by outside electricians."


STATEMENT OF MESSRS. DAVIS AND POWERS, MANAGERS OF THE THEATER.

When the fire broke out Manager Will J. Davis of the Iroquois was
attending a funeral. A telephone message was quietly whispered to him and,
after hesitating a moment, Davis unostentatiously slipped on his overcoat
and left the place.

Mr. Davis and Harry J. Powers later stated as follows:

"So far as we have been able to ascertain the cause or causes of the most
unfortunate accident of the fire in the Iroquois, it appears that one of
the scenic draperies was noticed to have ignited from some cause. It was
detected before it had reached an appreciable flame, and the city fireman
who is detailed and constantly on duty when the theater is open noticed it
simultaneously with the electrician.

"The fireman, who was only a few feet away, immediately pulled a tube of
kilfire, of which there were many hung about the stage, and threw the
contents upon the blaze, which would have been more than enough, if the
kilfire had been effective, to have extinguished the flame at once; but
for some cause inherent in the tube of kilfire it had no effect. The
fireman and electrician then ordered down the asbestos curtain, and the
fireman threw the contents of another tube of kilfire upon the flame, with
no better result.

"The commotion thus caused excited the alarm of the audience, which
immediately started for the exits, of which there are twenty-five of
unusual width, all opening out, and ready to the hand of any one reaching
them. The draft thus caused, it is believed, before the curtain could be
entirely lowered, produced a bellying of the asbestos curtain, causing a
pressure on the guides against the solid brick wall of the proscenium,
thus stopping its descent.

"Every effort was made by those on the stage to pull it down, but the
draft was so great, it seems, that the pressure against the proscenium
wall and the friction caused thereby was so strong that they could not be
overcome. The audience became panic-stricken in their efforts to reach the
exits and tripped and fell over each other and blocked the way.

"The audience was promptly admonished and importuned by persons employed
on the stage and in the auditorium to be calm and avoid any rush; that the
exits and facilities for emptying the theater were ample to enable them
all to get out without confusion.

"No expense or precaution was omitted to make the theater as fireproof as
it could be made, there being nothing combustible in the construction of
the house except the trimmings and furnishings of the stage and
auditorium. In the building of the theater we sacrificed more space to
aisles and exits than any theater in America."


FIRST RELIABLE STATEMENT AS TO WHY THE CURTAIN DID NOT COME DOWN.

The man who gave the first reliable explanation of the failure of the
"asbestos" curtain to operate properly was John C. Massoney, a carpenter,
who was working as a scene shifter.

"The reflector was constructed of galvanized iron or some similar
material, with a concave surface covered with quicksilver about two feet
in width," he said.

"The reflector was twenty feet long and was set on end. The inner edge was
attached to the stage side of the jamb of the proscenium walls with
hinges. Along the inner edge, next the hinges, was a row of incandescent
electric lamps.

"When the reflector was not in use it was set back in a niche in the
proscenium wall, and the curtain, when lowered, passed over it. When used
it was swung around to the desired position, and projected from the wall.
When the reflector was in use it prevented the curtain being lowered."

"I have not ascertained whether the reflector was in use. The one on the
south side of the stage was not, and from this I infer that the one on the
north was not being used. If it was not in use, then somebody must have
been careless."

Massoney said he was on the south side of the stage when the fire started.

"I did not see the fire start, but I saw it soon after it began," he said.
"The fire was in the arch drapery curtain, which is the fourth curtain
back of the 'asbestos' curtain. I saw the 'asbestos' curtain coming down
soon after, but I noticed that the south end was very much lower than the
north end. The south end was within four or five feet of the stage floor,
while the north end was much higher.

"I ran round to the north side and up the stairs to the north bridge. I
found the north end of the curtain was resting on the reflector. I tried
to reach the curtain to push it off the reflector, but could just touch
it. I could not get hold of it. I am 5 feet 11 inches tall, and I can
reach a foot above my head at least, so I figure that the north end of the
curtain was nineteen or twenty feet from the floor.

"When I first reached the bridge sparks were flying in one little place
near me, but before I got down I saw a great sheet of circular flame going
out under the curtain into the audience room. I stayed on the bridge as
long as I could trying to move the curtain. I half fell down the stairs of
the bridge and got out as fast as I could."

"Why didn't you call some one to help you?"

"There was no one on the bridge when I got there and no one on duty, that
I could see, on the north side of the stage."

"Was the reflector in use?"

"I do not know."

"Whose duty was it to look after the reflector?"

"I do not know."

"Did the curtain blow to pieces?"

"It seemed all right. There was no hole in it that I saw."


ANOTHER STORY AS TO WHY THE CURTAIN DID NOT LOWER.

Joe Dougherty, the man who attempted to lower the asbestos curtain, says
that the reason it stuck and would not come down was that it stuck on the
arc spot light in the first entrance near the top of the proscenium arch.
He was the last man to leave the fly loft and at the time he attempted to
lower the asbestos curtain he was twenty feet or more above it, so that
when it caught on the arc spot light he was unable to extricate it. The
opening of the big double doors at the rear of the stage, he says, caused
such a draft that the curtain could not be raised again to free it from
the obstruction.

Dougherty denies that the wire used by the flying ballet had anything to
do with the obstruction of the curtain. The regular curtain was within a
few inches of the asbestos sheet and had been operated a few minutes
before the fire occurred. If one curtain worked the other would if the
flying ballet rigging was not in the way.


THE THEATER FIREMAN'S NARRATIVE.

W. C. Saller was the fireman employed by the theater managers to look
after fire protection. He was formerly connected with the city fire
department.

"I was on the floor of the stage about twenty feet from the light," he
said. "The base of the light was on a bridge fifteen feet from the floor.
The light was about five feet high and was within a foot and a half or two
feet of the edge of the proscenium arch and close to the curtains. I saw
the flame running up the edge of the curtain and ran to the bridge. I
threw kilfire on the burning curtain but saw it did not stop the blaze and
yelled to those below to lower the asbestos curtain. When the curtain was
within fifteen feet of the stage floor the draft caused it to bulge out
and stick fast. It was impossible to lower the curtain further, and after
that nothing could be done to stop the fire.

"In my opinion the draft was caused by the doors opening off the stage
into the alley and Dearborn street. There were no explosions except the
blowing out of fuses in the electric lighting system."

Saller was severely burned about the hands and face.


THE STAGE CARPENTER.

Edward Cummings, stage carpenter, and his son, R. N. Cummings, his
assistant, of 1116 California avenue, testified that the fire started in
the curtains at the south end of the stage. Both asserted that the draft
or suction caused the asbestos curtain to stick. They said the fire spread
with remarkable rapidity among the curtains, which were about two feet
apart, and when the asbestos curtain stopped they said that no human
agency could have prevented the disaster that followed.


THE CHIEF ELECTRICAL INSPECTOR'S TALE.

Chief Electrical Inspector H. H. Hornsby of the city electrician's
department declared the electric wires in the theater were in the best
condition of any building in Chicago.

"The wire leading to the calcium arc light might have been broken or
detached," he said. "It requires no volts of electricity to operate one of
those lights. The man operating the light may have got his legs or arms
entangled in the wires and broken one of them at the point of connection
or he may have pulled the light too far and broken or detached the wire.
The arc created would have produced intense heat and readily ignited the
inflammable curtain. If the light had not been set so close to the scenery
the curtain could not have blown into the arc.

"While the theater was being wired Inspector B. H. Tousley made
twenty-five or thirty inspections. Though the ordinance requires only such
wires as are concealed to be placed in iron conduits, in the Iroquois all
wires were put in iron tubes. The switchboard was of marble, with the
connecting wires behind it in iron conduits. The management seemed
desirous of making the electric system the best possible and adopted every
suggestion we offered to improve its safety. I am satisfied there was not
a better job in Chicago. I do not believe it could have been made safer.

"It is impossible to guard against a wire being broken. The wire leading
from the switchboard could not be inclosed in an iron conduit. It had to
be flexible to permit the light being moved around. The arc light was
encased in a closed box to prevent sparks falling on the floor or being
blown into the scenery. All the fusible plugs were in cartridges to
prevent sparks from falling if the plugs burned out. Every precaution we
could think of was taken to make the system absolutely safe."


ONE OF THE COMEDIANS SPEAKS.

Herbert Cawthorn, the Irish comedian, who took the part of Pat Shaw in
"Mr. Bluebeard," assisted many of the chorus girls from the stage exits in
the panic. After being driven from the building he made two attempts to
enter his dressing room, but was driven back by the firemen, who feared
lest he be overcome by the dense smoke.

With several others of the leading actors in the play Mr. Cawthorn took
refuge in a store on Dearborn street after the fire. He was still in his
abbreviated stage costume and was suffering considerably from the cold.

He gave a graphic description of the origin of the fire and of the panic
among the stage hands and actors. He described the scene as follows:

"I was in a position to see the origin of the fire plainly, and I feel
positive that it was an electric calcium light that started the fire. The
calcium lights were being used to illuminate the stage in the latter part
of the second act, when the song, 'In the Pale Moonlight,' was being sung.

"I was standing behind a wing on the lefthand side, which would be the
righthand side to the audience, when my attention was attracted above by a
peculiar sputtering of what seemed to me to be one of the calciums. It
appears to me that one of the calciums had flared up and the sparks
ignited the lint on the curtain. Instantly I turned my attention toward
the stage and saw that many of the actors and actresses had not yet
discovered the blaze.

"Just then the fireman who is kept behind the scenes rushed up with some
kind of a patent fire extinguisher. Instead of the stream from the
apparatus striking the flames it went almost in the opposite direction.
While the stage fireman was working the flames suddenly swooped down and
out. Eddie Foy shouted something about the asbestos curtain, and the
firemen attempted to use it and the stage hands ran to his assistance.

"The asbestos curtain refused to work, and the stage hands and players
began to hurry from the theater. There was at least 500 people behind the
scenes when the fire started. I assisted many of the chorus girls to get
out, and some of them were only partly attired. Two of the young women in
particular were naked from their waists up. They had absolutely no time to
even snatch a bit of clothing to throw over their shoulders."


ABOUT THE LIGHTS.

A dozen different stories from a dozen different people were told about
the extinguishment of the electric lights. Assistant City Electrician
Hyland, who was the acting head of the city's department during the
absence of City Electrician Ellicott, stated:

"The switchboard controlling the electric lighting apparatus is located
under the place where the fire started at the left side of the stage. It
was made of metal and marble and practically indestructible. The wires
were led into the switchboard through iron tubes, and those tubes and
wires are there yet. I visited the theater after the fire and turned on
five sets of lights. Those five were in working order, but I think they
controlled the lights into the foyer and halls. The lights in the theater
were burned out. That I know, because when I paid my first visit to the
switchboard I found the switch affecting the lights in the auditorium
turned on. The terrific heat in the theater when the fire was sweeping
across it must have burst the glass bulbs and may have melted the wires
leading into the lights in the auditorium. How many minutes it took to
explode these incandescent lights and melt the wires running to them
depends entirely upon the length of time it took the theater to turn into
a furnace.

"I have been told that a moonlight scene was on the stage just before the
fire broke out. In such a scene it would be customary to turn off most if
not all of the lights in the auditorium, so as to darken the place where
the audience was and concentrate upon the stage what little light was
used. Yet, the way I found the switchboard, with the circuit leading to
the auditorium turned on, the knob melted off and the condition of the
board showing that it could not have been tampered with since the fire,
convinces me that the lights must have been on when the fire broke out, or
else they were turned on after the first flames were discovered. It is
hard to discover the facts even from people who were in the theater at the
time it was burned. Almost every one tells a different story."




CHAPTER VIII.

SUGGESTIONS OF ARCHITECTS AND OTHER EXPERTS AS TO AVOIDING LIKE
CALAMITIES.


Robert S. Lindstrom, a well known Chicago architect, makes the following
suggestions: "It is earnestly requested that the following suggestions be
published for the benefit and warning of patrons of public places, also as
an aid to city officials, architects and builders, as a possible means of
averting another horror such as has been witnessed in the Iroquois theater
fire.

"Every theater in Chicago is virtually a death trap set for patrons even
under ordinary conditions. Barring fires and panics, the playhouses are
not amply provided with exits, and are unsafe on account of overcrowding.
Thereby each person attending a performance in any of Chicago's theaters
does so at a risk of his own life. This also applies to all halls that are
hurriedly arranged for public meetings and especially during the election
campaign work and convention gatherings.

"A theater may be absolutely fire-proof, but when the seating capacity of
the house has been overcrowded by reducing sizes of stairs, aisles and
exits the building is really worse than a non-fire-proof building, for in
the latter the smoke would have a chance to escape.

"The following suggestions will partially avert such a horror as has been
witnessed at the Iroquois, which was advertised as the safest fire-proof
theater in Chicago:

"All seats throughout the house should be placed far enough apart from
back to back so that an open passageway running from aisle to aisle shall
be large enough to allow a person to get out without disturbing all the
people seated in the section. In the Iroquois the seats in the gallery are
so closely spaced from back to back that one cannot sit in a comfortable
position at any time. All seats should be made of iron framework, with
seats fixed so that danger of catching clothing on upturned edges may be
averted, which in the present theater seats causes very much delay in a
rush. The upholstering should be done with asbestos wool and all covering
done with asbestos fire-resisting cloth.

"An aisle should be left between the orchestra and the front row of seats.
Main aisles should be made so that they connect with the aisle in front,
also the aisle in rear, without any obstructions, and an exit door placed
at end of each aisle leading directly to the vestibule. The present system
is one large door at the center so that people from the side aisles
collide with those from the center aisles and no one can get out. It is
also very important that the door opening, with doors open, is a trifle
larger than the aisle; all seats that face on aisles to be plain to
prevent clothing from catching on same.

"Carpets should be prohibited in all halls and aisles and replaced by
interlocking rubber tile or some similar covering to prevent slipping in a
rush.

"All steps should have safety treads, composed of steel and lead, in place
of slate or marble, which becomes slippery and dangerous. Stairs to be
straight without winds or turns and at every ten feet from the sidewalk
there should be a landing twice as long as the width of the stairs and
doors at the foot of the stairs should be a trifle larger than the stair
opening.

"All balconies and galleries above the first floor should have a metal
hand rail back of each row of seats securely fastened to the floor
construction.

"Doors should swing out; in addition to door handle threshold to have an
automatic opening device so as to throw doors open in case of fire or
accident. Also at each fire exit there should be in view of the audience a
box containing saw and tools and plainly marked for use in case of fire,
providing locks on doors fail to work. In addition an attendant should be
placed at each fire exit and remain there until the house is vacated
during every performance.

"Fire escapes should be made of regular stair pattern with treads eleven
inches and rises seven inches, and treads provided with steel and lead
composition covering and risers closed.

"Instead of sloping the ceiling toward the stage it should be made level
with a cone shape toward the center and there connect with a down draft
ventilator and an emergency damper controlled by a three-way switch from
stage, box office and each balcony, made large enough to form a smoke flue
in case of fire. Wires controlling this ventilator should run in conduit
fireproofed and in addition to switch an electric emergency switch
weighted with a fused link to make a contact when link breaks. Same to
apply to stage, halls and stairways, except that fireproof ducts will
connect halls and stairs with outer air. In addition to the ventilator
every part of the house should be equipped with a system of sprinklers
operated automatically by a gravity system. A large glass chandelier such
as used at the Iroquois should be prohibited.

"Emergency lights in case of fire and accidents during the performance to
light up the house should be placed on ceiling of main auditorium,
balconies, halls and stairs and built of fire-proof boxes with wired
plate-glass face. These lights should be operated on a separate system and
run in fireproof conduits, and controlled from the street front, also to
have a fusible weighted switch on stage.

"Fire doors should be constructed of steel with wired plate-glass panels
so that fire can be prevented from outside sources, but if in case of
accident the lock should fail to work from the inside, the glass panel can
be broken with tools that should be placed in reach and plainly marked.

"Calcium lights should be prohibited anywhere in the auditorium. The place
is generally on the gallery. In the Iroquois the scenic lights were placed
at the extreme top of the upper gallery, with a supporting framework that
rested on the aisle floor and obstructed aisle to audience.

"Counter-weights of curtain should be made in sections with fusible link
connections so that in case of fire curtain will drop of its own weight.

"Curtain should be constructed of steel framework and made rigid and run
in steel guides of sufficient size to allow for expansion in case of fire.
Stage floor should be four inches thick, solid, laid on concrete bed.

"A special waiting room with a special exit, entrance to same to be from
main foyer, should be used especially for patrons using carriages so as to
prevent the present system of blocking exits and vestibule with people
waiting for carriages and preventing exit of crowd.

"On stage of every theater there should be a fire plug, also a hose long
enough to reach any part of the house, to run on a reel.

"A loss of life in a panic cannot be entirely prevented, but some of the
above suggestions if carried out will, at least, prevent a wholesale loss
of human life.

"All theaters should be thoroughly investigated and where the slightest
detail is found to conflict with the law and the safety of an audience
the city officials should prevent the use of such house until it has been
properly constructed."


THE ARCHITECT SPEAKS.

Benjamin H. Marshall, architect of the theater, received the news of the
disaster in Pittsburg, Pa., and at once started for Chicago. He was
stunned by the intelligence, and, speaking of it, said:

"This seems to be a calamity that has no precedent, and I can not
understand how so many people were caught in the balconies unless they
were stunned by the shock of an explosion. There were ample fire exits and
they were available. The house could have been emptied in less than five
minutes if they were all utilized. The fact that so many people were
caught in the balconies would prove that they were stunned and
panic-stricken by the report rather than by the fear of a fire. It is
difficult for me at this time to even guess as to the cause for the great
loss of life.

"I am completely upset by this disaster, more so because I have built many
theaters and have studied every playhouse disaster in history to avoid
errors."


EXAMINATION BY ARCHITECTURAL EDITOR.

Robert Craik McLean, editor of the _Inland Architect_, who spent some time
investigating the claim that the theater was equipped with an asbestos
fire curtain, said: "After a careful investigation, I am convinced that
the theater was not equipped with a curtain such as is demanded by the
city ordinances.

"I visited the damaged theater, but there was no sign of an asbestos
curtain. Fire will not destroy asbestos, and if there was a curtain there
when the holocaust occurred it had been removed, and an investigation
should be made to learn what became of it. If no curtain had been removed,
as is claimed, I cannot understand how the claim can be set up that the
theater had a fire curtain. No one denies that there was a curtain there,
but had it been made of asbestos, as required by the ordinance, it would
not have been destroyed by the draft of air, as is claimed by the
management of the house. An asbestos curtain must have a foundation of
wire or some other material, and had the Iroquois been equipped with such
a drop the wire screen, at least, would be there to prove it."

"Mr. Samuel Frankenstein of the Frankenstein Calcium Light company, made
the statement to me that he had had a conversation with the stage manager
of the Iroquois regarding the fire drop. Mr. Frankenstein said that the
stage manager told him that the Iroquois stage was not equipped with a
true fire curtain. According to Mr. Frankenstein, the stage manager went
further than this, and declared that there were only three theaters in
Chicago equipped with real asbestos drops."


PROPOSED PRECAUTIONS FOR NEW YORK THEATERS.

Charles H. Israels of the firm of Israels & Harder, architects of the new
Hudson theater, and several of the large hotels, suggested a number of
precautions which might be adopted in New York theaters. Among other
things he advocated an ordinance requiring all the theater emergency exits
to be used after each performance.

"Nearly every modern theater in this city," Mr. Israels said, "is
adequately provided with exits, with which the audience are not familiar,
and which are used so seldom that the employes are unused to having the
audience pass out through them. Besides the one exit ordinarily in use
there are four emergency exits, and the law requires them to open either
on a brick enclosed alley at the side of the theater or directly into the
street.

"The people in the gallery, who are in the place of the greatest danger,
would undoubtedly become thoroughly accustomed to using these outside
stairways.

"The main advantage to be gained by this suggestion over all others is
that it could be put into immediate operation without the spending of a
single cent on the part of the owners of most of New York's playhouses.

"In a few of the theaters it might be argued that the stairways at the
emergency exits were not sufficiently inclosed to allow the crowds to pass
down in safety. The law now requires the stairways to be covered at the
top, and covering the outside rail with heavy wire mesh raised about two
feet above its present level would prevent any one from falling over the
side.

"Fireproof scenery or scenery which will at least not flame, is a
practical possibility now. The building code should compel the use of
scenery on frames of light metal covered with canvas that has been
saturated in a fireproof solution. Fireproof paint is compulsory on the
woodwork behind the proscenium wall, but in painting scenery combustible
paint may be used.

"The law should be most strictly enforced as to the cleaning out of
rubbish beneath the stage. In a number of the theaters of New York this is
done only occasionally."




CHAPTER IX.

THIRTY EXITS, YET HUNDREDS PERISH IN AWFUL BLAST.


Those in greatest danger through proximity to the stage did not throw
their weight against the mass ahead. Not many died on the first floor,
proof of the contention that some restraint existed in this section of the
audience.

Women were trodden under foot near the rear; some were injured. The most
at this point, however, were rescued by the determined rush of the
policeman at the entrance and of the doorkeeper and his assistants.

The theater had thirty exits. All were opened before the fire reached full
headway, but some had to be forced opened. Only one door at the Randolph
street entrance was open, the others being locked, according, it appears,
to custom.

From within and without these doors were shattered in the first two
minutes after the fire broke out--by theater employes, according to one
report, by the van of the fleeing multitude and the first of the rescuers
from the street, according to another.

The doors to the exits on the alley side, between Randolph and Lake
streets, in one or more instances, are declared by those who escaped to
have been either frozen or rusted. They opened to assaults, but priceless
seconds were lost.

Before this time Foy had run back across the stage and reached the alley.
With him fled the members of the aerial ballet, the last of the performers
to get out. The aerialists owed their lives to the boy in charge of the
fly elevator. They were aloft, in readiness for their flight above the
heads of the audience. The elevator boy ran his cage up even with the line
of fire, took them in, and brought them safely down.

As Foy and the group reached the outer doorway the stage loft collapsed
and tons of fire poured over the stage.

The lights went out in the theater with this destruction of the
switchboard and all stage connections. One column of flame rose and
swished along the ceiling of the theater. Then this awful illumination
also was swallowed up. None may paint from personal understanding that
which took place in that pit of flame lit darkness. None lives to tell it.

To those still caught in the structure the light of life went out when the
electric globes grew dark.

In spite of the terrible form of their destruction, it came swiftly enough
to shorten pain. This at least was true of those who died in the second
balcony, striving to reach the alley exits abreast of them.

Six and seven feet deep they were found, not packed in layers but jumbled
and twisted in the struggle with one another.

Opposite the westernmost exit of the balcony--on the alley--was a room in
the Northwestern University building (the old Tremont house) where
painters were working, wiping out the traces of another fire.

They heard the sound of the detonation of the fuse; they heard the rush of
feet toward the exit across the way. Out on the iron stairway came a man,
pushed by a power behind, himself crazy with fear. He would have run down
the iron fire escape, but flames burst out of the exit beneath and wrapped
themselves around the iron ladder.


HORRIBLE SIGHT MET THE FIREMEN UPON ENTERING AUDITORIUM.

The postures in which death was met showed how the end had come to many.

A husband and wife were locked so tightly in one another's arms that the
bodies had to be taken out together. A woman had thrown her arms around a
child in a vain effort to save her. Both were burned beyond recognition.

The sight of the children's bodies broke down the composure of the most
restrained of the rescuers. As little form after form was brought out the
tears ran down the faces of policemen, firemen and bystanders. Small hands
were clenched before childish faces--fruitless attempts at protection from
the scorching blast.

Most of the children could be recognized. Fate allowed that thin shadow of
mercy. They fell beneath their taller companions. The flames reached them,
but they were face downward, other forms were above them, and generally
their features were spared.

The persons crowded off the fire escape platform, and those who jumped
voluntarily by their own death saved persons on the lower floor from
injury. Scores jumped from the exits at the first balcony, the first to
death and injury, the ones behind to comparative safety on the thick
cushion of the bodies of those who preceded them and who fell from the
balcony above. Other hundreds from the main floor jumped on to the same
cushion--an easy distance of six feet--without any injury.

When the firemen came they spread nets, but the nets were black, and in
the gloom they could not be seen. They saved few lives--argument for the
use of white nets hereafter.

The chain of mishaps surrounding the catastrophe extended to the fire
alarm. There was no fire alarm box in front of the theater, as at other
theaters. A stage hand ran down the alley to South Water street and by
word of mouth turned in a "still" alarm to No. 13. The box alarm did not
follow for some precious minutes. At least four minutes were lost in this
way.

Of the 900 persons seated in the first and second balconies few if any
escaped without serious injury.

So fiercely the fire burned during the short time in which hundreds of
lives were sacrificed that the velvet cushions of the balcony seats were
burned bare.

The crowds fought so in their efforts to escape that they tore away the
iron railings of the balconies, leaping upon the people below.

From 3 o'clock, when the alarm was sent in, to 7:30 o'clock, when the
doors of the theater were closed, the charred, torn, and blistered bodies
were carried from the building at the rate of four a minute. One hundred
were taken out across the plank way.

Many blankets filled with fragments of human bodies were taken from the
building.

Hundreds of bodies were taken from the building, their clothing gone,
their faces charred beyond recognition. Under pretense of serving as
rescuers ghouls gained entrance to the theater and robbed the dead and
dying in the midst of the fire.

Men fell on their knees and prayed. Men and women cursed. A rush was made
for the Randolph street exits. In their fear the crowds forgot the many
side exits, and rushed for the doors at which they had entered the
theater. Little boys and girls were thrown to one side by their stronger
companions.

Ten baskets of money and jewelry thrown in this manner were picked up from
the main floor when the fire was extinguished.

Men and women tore their clothing from them. As the first rush was made
for the foyer entrance to the balconies men, women and children were
thrown bodily down the steps.

A few score of those nearest the doorways escaped by falling or being
thrown down the stairs of the main balcony entrances.

Scores were wedged in the doorways, pinned by the force of those behind
them. There in the narrow aisle at the balcony entrances they were
suffocated and fell--tons of human weight.

All succeeded in leaving their seats in the first balcony. Climbing over
the seats and rushing up the slanting aisles to the level aisles above,
they fought their way. Those at the bottom of the mass were burned but
little. The top layer of bodies was burned till they never can be
identified.

Darkness shrouded the theater with its hundreds of dead when the fire was
under control that the building could be entered. The firemen were forced
to work in smoky darkness when they started carrying the bodies from the
balconies.


THE GALLERY HORROR.

James M. Strong, a Chicago board of trade clerk, the sole survivor of all
the occupants of the gallery who tried to escape through the locked door,
smashed with his fist a glass transom and climbed through it. Three
members of his family, who followed him down the passageway, shared the
fate of others. Their bodies since have been discovered, burned almost
beyond recognition.

"If the door hadn't been locked hundreds of persons could have saved their
lives," said Strong.

The passageway, along which Strong and many now dead ran to supposed
safety, led toward the front of the theater, past the top entrance to the
gallery. Strong had been unable to secure seats and was standing in the
rear of the gallery with his mother, Mrs. B. K. Strong, his wife, and his
niece, Vera, 16 years old, of Americus, Ga. When the fire started all ran
toward the nearest exit.

"The exit was crowded," said Strong. "We ran on down a passage at the side
of it, followed by many others. At the end, down a short flight of steps,
was a door. It was locked. In desperation I threw myself against it. I
couldn't budge it. Then, standing on the top step of the little stairway,
I smashed the glass above with my fist and crawled through the transom.

"When I fell on the outside I heard the screams on the other side, and,
scrambling to my feet, I tried again to open the door, but couldn't. The
key was not there. I ran down a stairway to the floor below, where I found
a carpenter. I asked him to give me something to break down the door, and
he got me a short board. I ran back with this and began pounding, but the
door was too heavy to be broken.

"I scarcely know what happened afterward. Smoke was pouring over the
transom and I felt myself suffocating. Alone, or with the assistance of
the carpenter, I at last found myself at the bottom of the stairway
opening into the lobby of the theater. From there I pushed my way to the
street. Until then I didn't know I was burned."


GIRL'S MIRACULOUS ESCAPE.

The most miraculous escape was that of Winnie Gallagher, an 11-year-old
girl, who occupied a seat with her aunt almost directly under the stage.
When the panic was started she jumped to her feet and after being thrown
about and trampled upon and having her clothing torn from her she managed
to climb over the seats and reach the street in safety. What few pieces of
wearing apparel she had on at the time were in ribbons and a messenger
boy, seeing her predicament, pulled off his overcoat and wrapped it around
her. She went to the Central station, where she gave the police her name
and asked that someone take her to her home, 4925 Michigan avenue.


AN ACCOUNT FROM THE BOXES.

The first two lower boxes on the left of the stage were occupied by a
party of young women who were being entertained by Mrs. Rollin A. Keyes of
Evanston, in honor of her young daughter, Miss Catherine Keyes, who was
home from school in Washington for the holidays.

"We arrived at the theater shortly after the first act," said Miss Emily
Plamondon of Astoria, Ore., a member of the party, in describing the fire.
"As far as I could see the house was filled with women and children, who
occupied seats on the first floor and in the galleries. It was about a
quarter to 3 when one of the young women in the party asked Mrs. Keyes if
she did not smell something burning and an instant afterward a great cloud
of smoke spread across the stage and into the body of the house.
Immediately we realized the danger we were in, as did all around us.
Instead of a rush to the doors, the audience gazed for a moment at the
stage, and as a whole the people appeared very calm, under the
circumstances, and as if contemplating how they would escape.

"Again another cloud of smoke issued from the stage and several stage
hands appeared, shouting at the top of their voices for the people to sit
down. But it was only for an instant that they obeyed, for by that time
the smoke had spread through the theater and men, women and children were
gasping for breath. Then a mad rush was made for the doors and for the
supposed exits, but in vain. Mrs. Pearson and Mrs. Keyes commanded us to
keep together by all means and just as we were leaving the boxes the
theater became darkened, which, I suppose, was caused by the burning out
of the electric light, and thus made our escape the harder. We plodded
through the aisles until we came within about ten feet of the main
entrance without encountering any violence from the panic-stricken women
and children who were fighting for their lives. Then the crush became
terrible and the members of our party, Mrs. Rollin A. Keyes, Mrs. Pearson,
Misses Charlotte Plamondon, Catherine Keyes, Elmore of Oregon, Amelia
Ormsby, Grace Hills, Josephine Eddy and Miss Elizabeth Eddy realized that
it would be impossible to get to the street through that door.

"It was only a short time, however, when somebody knocked down two doors,
which had been locked, and the majority of the people on the first floor
escaped through them without serious injury. Miss Charlotte Plamondon, who
was bruised about the face and hands, and I were the only ones in the
party who escaped with our wraps. The others had their clothes torn almost
from them, as they were hurrying from the burning theater.

"Before we had left the boxes the fire had spread to the first row of
seats and the stage hands were endeavoring to lower the asbestos curtain.
When it was about half down it became caught and the attempt to drop it
was abandoned. A great gush of fire then spread to the draperies over the
boxes. The people were wonderfully calm, it seemed to me, for so crucial
a moment and it was not until the smoke filled the house that they became
frantic and screamed for help. We could hardly breathe and I believe had
we been in the theater a few minutes longer we, too, would have been
suffocated, as the heat and smoke were becoming unendurable. Had the exits
been open and unlocked the loss of life would not have been nearly so
great."

"We were seated for half an hour before the fire broke out. Our attention
was first attracted by a wreath of flame, which crept slowly along the red
velvet curtain. We all noticed it. So did the audience and I could see
little girls and boys in the orchestra chairs point upward at the slowly
moving line of flame. As the fire spread the people in the balcony and on
the first floor arose to their feet as if to rush out of the place. Then
Eddie Foy hurried to the front of the stage and commanded the people to be
quiet, saying that if they would remain seated the danger would be
averted. All the people who were then on the stage maintained remarkable
presence of mind and the chorus girls endeavored to divert the attention
of their auditors off the fire by going on with their parts.

"I looked over the faces of the audience and remarked how many children
were present. I could see their faces filled with interest and their eyes
wide open as they watched the burning curtain.

"Then I looked behind me and realized the awful consequence should the
people become alarmed. The doors, except for the one through which we
entered the theater, were closed and apparently fastened. Up in the
balcony I could see people crowding forward in order to obtain a better
view. Again the audience arose as if to flee.

"Eddie Foy again rushed on the stage and waved his arms in a gesture for
the people to be seated. But just then the shrill cry of a woman caused
the women and children to rise to their feet, filled with a sudden and
uncontrollable terror.

"'Fire!' I heard her exclaim, and in another instant the eyes of the
audience were turned to the exits in the rear. The flames lighted up the
stage as the light tinsel stuffs blazed up, and the scene changed from
mimicry to tragedy. A confused, rumbling noise filled the theater from the
pit to the dome. I knew it was the sound of a thousand people preparing to
leave their seats and rush madly from the impending danger. The noise of
their footsteps in the balcony was soon deadened by the cries for aid from
those who were hemmed in by the struggling mass.

"On the stage the chorus girls, who had exhibited rare presence of mind,
turned to flee. Many were overcome before they could stir a step. They
fell to the floor and I saw the men in the cast and the stage hands lift
them to their feet and carry them to the rear of the stage. By this time
the scenery was a mass of flames."


INSPECTION AFTER THE FIRE.

Deputy Building Commissioner Stanhope with three inspectors made a
thorough examination of the theater building yesterday.

"I first examined the building with respect to the safety of its walls and
found them in perfect condition," said Mr. Stanhope. "They are not out of
plumb an inch and are as good as they ever were. The steel structure is
not injured except that portion which supported the stage. The heat has
twisted some of the supports but they can be replaced at little cost.
Except the backs of the seats and the floor of the stage the interior of
the auditorium was not injured by the fire. The carpets in the gallery,
where most of the people were killed, were not even scorched."


A YOUNG HEROINE.

Verma Goss is one of the young heroines of the fire. She attended the
theater in a party composed of her mother, Mrs. Joseph Goss; her
5-year-old sister, Helen; Mrs. Greenwald of 536 Byron street and her young
son Leroy. In the rush for the door Miss Verma caught her young sister's
hand and pulled her out of the crowd and carried the child to safety. She
thought her mother was following, but she and her sister were the only
ones of the party who escaped.


A NARROW ESCAPE.

Mrs. William Mueller, with her two children, Florence Marie, 5 years of
age, and Barbara Belle, 7, occupied a seat in the parquet.

"I was not in the theater auditorium," said Mrs. Mueller. "I was in one of
the waiting rooms, but was on my way to our seats. As I entered the doors
somebody yelled fire. I looked up and saw the curtain ablaze. Then came
the stampede. I picked up my children and ran toward the door. I was
caught in the jam and it seemed that I would fail to reach it. Some man
saw my plight and jumped to my assistance. He picked up Florence and threw
her over the heads of the rushing people. She fell upon the pavement, but
was not badly injured."


FINDS WIFE IN HOSPITAL.

The first woman to be rescued over the temporary bridge between the
theater and the Northwestern university building was Mrs. Mary Marzein of
Elgin, Ill. She was severely burned and lost consciousness after her
rescue. A score or more suffered death on every side as she crept over the
ladder. They were thrown aside and knocked down, but she clung to the
ladder and escaped. She was taken to the Michael Reese hospital and did
not regain consciousness until the following day. Her husband, who is an
employe of the Elgin Watch Company, searched all the morgues and was
making a tour of the hospitals when he found his wife.

When Mrs. Marzein recovered in the afternoon the first person she inquired
for was her husband, who at that moment was being ushered into the room.
Their eyes met as she was whispering his name to the nurse, and an
affecting scene followed.


A MIRACULOUS AND UNCONSCIOUS ESCAPE.

One of the most miraculous escapes from the fire was that of Miss Winifred
Cardona. She was one of a party of four and with her friends occupied
seats in the seventh row of the parquet.

"The first intimation I had of the danger was when I saw one of the chorus
girls look upward and turn pale. My eyes immediately followed her glance
and I saw the telltale sparks shooting about through the flies. The
singing continued until the blaze broke out. Then Mr. Foy appeared and
asked the audience to keep their seats, assuring them that the theater was
thoroughly fireproof. We obeyed, but when we saw the seething mass behind
struggling for the door we rushed from our seats. I became separated from
the other girls and had not gone far before I stumbled over the prostrate
body of a woman who was trampled almost beyond recognition. For an instant
I thought it was all over. Then I felt someone lift me and I knew no more
until I revived in the street. It was the most awful experience I have
ever had and I consider my escape nothing short of miraculous."


LITTLE GIRL'S MARVELOUS ESCAPE.

"I'm the most grateful man in all Chicago," said J. R. Thompson, who owns
the restaurant. "My sister was in the theater with my two children--John,
aged 9, and Ruth, aged 7. Sister got almost to the door with both of them.
Then Ruthie disappeared. She told me she knew the child must

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