The chaos continued as Claire struggled to stay close to her family. Her father carried Willy; her mother held the other children, Charlotte and Robert, by the hand; and Claire followed a few steps behind. When a man grabbed at her bundle, a stranger intervened and dragged him off—but when Claire turned back, she could no longer see her family through the smoke and crowds. She waited on a corner and then was forced to move again when fire approached and the crowd surged back. She took shelter in a small alley, watching every face as people streamed past, but she couldn’t find her family. After calling out in vain, she stood alone on the nearly deserted street.

Murphy then explains the fire’s behavior. Temperatures that sometimes reached 1,500˚ Fahrenheit created towering columns of rising air, drawing in oxygen that mixed with burning fuel and occasionally produced explosions of unburned gases. The resulting winds could approach hurricane force, tearing off roofs and hurling burning furniture hundreds of feet. A street could go from safe to bursting into flames a second later.

Chamberlin found a blanket in an abandoned shop, wrapped it around himself for protection, and pushed to the fire’s leading edge at Franklin and Randolph Streets. He found confusion and panic everywhere: wagons heaped with goods, men dragging trunks and knocking down women and children, and desperate crowds willing to pay large sums for any cart or conveyance. The Randolph Street Bridge was the only outlet for the entire region south of Madison Street; a solid mass of people and vehicles pressed across it. Too exhausted to fight through, Chamberlin climbed onto the bridge railing and watched from above. He observed an undertaker leading a procession of boys, each carrying a coffin on his shoulders, through the surging crowd. Then, the fire swept down Randolph Street: Oil barrels at Heath’s store exploded, the Nevada Hotel’s north wall collapsed nearly without sound in the din, and, looking east, Chamberlin saw what he described as “a surging ocean of flame” (63). The scorching heat finally drove him into the fleeing crowd below.

Frear reached his sister-in-law’s house on Des Plaines Street, one block from the burning Jefferson Street. He got the three children—one of whom required special care—into a wagon and delivered them to a friend’s house 10 blocks away. The return trip was badly delayed when a bridge opened to allow boats to flee downriver, and Ewing Street was barricaded with vehicles and abandoned household goods. When Frear finally got back, a wild-eyed Mr. Wood—a family friend who had stayed to help pack—burst in with news that the fire was now threatening the very block where the children were staying.

Frear, his sister-in-law, and Wood grabbed a cab, but surrounding streets were impassable. His sister-in-law leaped out and ran toward the fire; only a passing acquaintance, who reported that the children were safe at the St. James Hotel, stopped her from running farther into the burning streets. The St. James had no sign of the children. Frear ran three blocks to the Sherman House, where smoke from a recent roof fire still seeped through hallways as panicked guests dragged luggage to the stairs. The children weren’t there either. Frear ran into a nephew, and they paired up and stopped at Wright’s Restaurant, where exhausted firemen from the Little Giant engine declared that the department had given up because it could do nothing more.

Murphy immediately clarifies that this wasn’t entirely true. Scattered companies were still fighting; Chief Marshal Williams was personally hosing down a bridge crossing, and James H. Hildreth, a civilian, had obtained roughly 2,500 pounds of explosives and was attempting to blast firebreaks in the fire’s path. His first charges did little more than blow out windows and open walls, sometimes feeding the fire rather than stopping it, but Hildreth continued trying to improve the method.

In the restaurant, Frear watched as an injured woman, whose dress caught fire on the courthouse steps, was brought in. He and his nephew left to find that the fire was moving faster than they could on foot, with the wind lifting large sheets of flame free of burning buildings and throwing them across the street. Upon entering a wealthy neighborhood, Frear expected to find composure and instead found the same disorder as elsewhere—residents screaming, furniture burning in the street, a woman praying on her knees struck down by a passing wagon, and one man deliberately setting fire to an abandoned pile of valuables. Concluding that the children couldn’t be found, they returned to the St. James, only to learn that his sister-in-law and Wood had already been moved. A rumor that all bridges were burning threw the hotel into fresh panic, and Frear lost his nephew in the stampede. Alone again, he ran through the business district past looters and the body of a dead boy, and he passed a girl whose loose hair had caught fire. When someone threw liquor on the girl, it flared up and covered her in blue flame. He found one damaged bridge still capable of bearing the crowd, crossed after watching a man fall into the river and go unnoticed by anyone, and got to the other side. Minutes later, the bridge burned and collapsed.

White’s experience was calmer by comparison. He reached the Tribune building without difficulty, found staff rushing a special edition to press, and saw others on the roof keeping it wet. The building was a showpiece of fireproof construction—granite exterior, iron ceilings and beams, brick walls—but its roof was the standard tar-over-wood type, requiring constant attention. White watched from an upper floor as the fire destroyed surrounding buildings while the Tribune building stood, and he left feeling confident it had survived.

White didn’t realize that the city waterworks, which sat directly in the fire’s path and was covered by a wooden roof, would soon burn. At around three o’clock in the morning, the waterworks burned, and the pumps stopped, cutting off the city’s water supply. Without water, the men on the Tribune roof couldn’t continue, and the building eventually fell. Writer Charles Mackintosh, after cataloging the Tribune building’s formidable construction, concluded that its fireproof qualities lasted only until it was destroyed.

White packed his family’s belongings—including a caged parrot—and drove a wagon to a friend’s house but got stuck in a traffic jam with the fire a quarter mile behind him. A sudden shift in wind slowed the flames and allowed the jam to clear. White noted that the crowd around him was cooperative and polite, an observation that he would later emphasize in his account of the fire. On his way back, he encountered his family on foot; his wife told him that the house had already burned. He loaded everyone aboard and drove four miles out of the city to his brother’s vacant cottage, where they kept an uneasy vigil watching the fire glow on the horizon, uncertain whether the wind might turn and reach them.

The fire crossed the Chicago River a second time and spread through the North Division. Tens of thousands scrambled to escape; many died trapped in dead-end streets, and hundreds near Lake Michigan waded into the cold water up to their shoulders to wait out the flames. Claire, alone and choking on smoke, ran in whichever direction seemed least obstructed. She found a wide alley and rested on a barrel. Several men hurried past without speaking; a third said something in German she couldn’t understand. When she looked up, fire and smoke had already blocked the entrance the men came from. She turned to leave by the other end—and found it, too, blocked by fire. She was trapped on all sides.