Daniel Pinkwater Schooled Me

I have been a fan of Daniel Pinkwater since I first read The Neddiad: How Neddie Took the Train, Went to Hollywood, and Saved Civilization. Not only was that book highLARious, but it also taught me. Remember The La Brea Tar Pits thing? (If not, https://songsofinnocenceampexperience.blogspot.com/2019/02/my-other-favorite-context-free-quote-of.html?q=La+Brea will take you there.) I read that book to my daughter, who liked it enough to continue on to The Yggyssey: How Iggy Wondered What Happened to All the Ghosts, Found Out Where They Went, and Went There (get it? The Neddiad and The Yggyssey? Is this mic on?), then to The Adventures of a Cat-Whiskered Girl, and we're now reading Bushman Lives! (since Escape to Dwerg Mountain, which was supposed to come next in this series*, hasn't been published for various and sundry reasons). I'll confess that none of the books after the first has come up to the high level of that tome, but I have enjoyed each of them, and I am still hoping that there will be more. Which is unlikely, since Bushman Lives was published in 2012--eight years ago as of this writing--and there was only a two year gap between books 1 and 2, 2 and 3, and 3 and 4.

Oh, well.

To the point of this particular screed, however, last night in Bushman Lives! Daniel had a bit about The Great Chicago Fire, and I learned two things (since verified via internet research...meaning a quick visit to Wikipedia):

(1) it was not a cow kicking over a kerosene lamp that started the fire and
(2) at the same time that The Great Chicago Fire was blazing away, there were several other fires going on...which have been ganz forgotten. The biggest of them was The Peshtigo Fire, and it was much worse than The Great Chicago Fire. It...well, let's just let Wikipedia take the reins on this:

"The Peshtigo fire was a very large forest fire that took place on October 8, 1871, in northeastern Wisconsin, including much of the Door Peninsula, and adjacent parts of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The largest community in the affected area was Peshtigo, Wisconsin. It burned approximately 1,200,000 acres (490,000 ha) and was the deadliest wildfire in American history, with the estimated deaths of around 1,500 people, and possibly as many as 2,500.


"Occurring on the same day as the more famous Great Chicago Fire, the Peshtigo fire has been largely forgotten, even though it killed far more people. On the same day as the Peshtigo and Chicago fires, Holland and Manistee, Michigan (across Lake Michigan from Peshtigo), and Port Huron at the southern end of Lake Huron also had major fires, leading to various theories by contemporaries and later historians that they had a common cause."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peshtigo_fire?fbclid=IwAR2d5diZ3rCtRBOiYzGhmxut9P1Gsn4BFtx3fhFuhAHWhB7Z-nuZjK1aUuQ

Is that some shit or what? 

You just can't rely on history, can you? 



* Series...yes, in the loosest of senses. The first two books function as a fairly normal series, but after that Pinkwater just kind of follows a minor character around, so the story of the third book hasn't got much of anything to do with the first two books, and so far the fourth book is following suite.