Major Historic Wildfire Disasters

The Peshtigo Fire of October 8, 1871, which burned across northeastern Wisconsin and adjacent Michigan on the same night as the more famous Great Chicago Fire, remains the deadliest wildfire in recorded United States history, killing an estimated 1,500 to 2,500 people and destroying the town of Peshtigo almost entirely within hours, driven by drought-cured slash left from logging operations and a sudden cold-front wind shift. Roughly four decades later, the Great Fire of 1910, often called the "Big Burn" or "Big Blowup," swept across roughly three million acres of Idaho, Montana, and Washington in just two days in August, killing at least eighty-seven people, most of them firefighters, and its scale directly shaped the young U.S. Forest Service, cementing an institutional commitment to aggressive fire suppression that would dominate American wildland fire policy for the next half-century.