Gilded Age's Peshtigo Fire True Story Is Even Worse Than The Show Suggests
Warning: SPOILERS for The Gilded Age
The Gilded Age episode 8 “Tucked Up in Newport” includes a scene in which Jack Treacher (Ben Ahlers) tells Bridget (Taylor Richardson) about how his mother had perished in the Peshtigo Fire, but the show doesn’t make it clear just how bad that wildfire was in real life. Jack explains that most people have never heard of this fire because it happened on the same day as the Great Chicago Fire. The somber moment at his mother’s gravestone begins to hint at the tragic nature of the event, but the true story of the Peshtigo Fire is actually quite devastating.
Episodes of The Gilded Age have included Thomas Edison, Clara Barton, T. Thomas Fortune, and many other real-life characters as well as events that actually happened in the 1800s. When Bridget discovers Jack paying his respects at a gravesite, he tells her about how his mother had died in the lesser-known Peshtigo Fire of 1871, which was a real wildfire that happened in Wisconsin. The event was overshadowed by the Great Chicago Fire, which started the same day. The exchange is sad and clearly painful for Jack, but the show doesn’t go into any more detail about what happened beyond this scene. Julian Fellowes had previously exercised his historical fiction storytelling with Downton Abbey, and so The Gilded Age’s nod to such real-life events has been no surprise.
The Peshtigo Fire occurred on October 8, 1871 in Wisconsin and to this day remains as the deadliest wildfire in United States history. Over 1 million acres were set ablaze, and at least 1200 (and up to 2500 according to some historians) people were killed (via National Weather Service). Fellowes decided to make Jack’s mother in The Gilded Age one of those people. The Great Chicago Fire broke out on the same day as the Peshtigo one due to the same dry windstorm that had blown in from the southwest. Sadly, due to Peshtigo being a small lumber town, largely cut off from the world because of the fire, most people only ever knew about the Chicago fire, leaving Peshtigo to fend for itself. Although The Gilded Age explicitly references the tragedy, the true story of the Peshtigo Fire is clearly far worse than the show suggests.
When Jack, Agnes’ footman in The Gilded Age, reveals that his mother had died in a fire, it’s sad enough in itself, but the fact that she was killed in a horrific fire that got little recognition or relief efforts compared to the Great Chicago Fire, makes her untimely end even more painful. To this day it’s unclear how many people died in the Peshtigo Fire, so at the time of The Gilded Age, even more questions would have lingered about how bad it was. With the telegraph line destroyed, many didn’t even know about the Peshtigo Fire until days later when messengers on foot were finally able to convey the message to those outside the wildfire’s radius (via La Crosse Tribune).
Though the Great Chicago Fire caused a severe amount of economic loss for the city, hundreds, possibly thousands of people, paid with their lives in the Peshtigo Fire. It’s unlikely that The Gilded Age season 2 would explore the Peshtigo Fire any further given that it was something that occurred to the relative of a secondary character in the show. Still, it’s an interesting event to include in The Gilded Age and one that few viewers would have recognized, all the more proving just how tragic this forgotten fire was.