Episode Details

The Fire Born recounts the twin disasters that struck Peshtigo and Chicago on the same night through the eyes of those who lived them, revealing how ordinary people discover extraordinary resilience in the face of unimaginable loss. Spanning Scotland, the American frontier, the Civil War, Chicago, and Wisconsin's lumber camps, The Fire Born is an epic story of love, courage, loss, and renewal set against a nation transformed by ambition, industry, and westward expansion. Survivors of the Peshtigo Fire described fire tornadoes a mile high, balls of flame exploding from the sky, and people, animals, and buildings left standing like statues of carbon — phenomena historians still can't fully explain. The novel follows Delia, a Swedish orphan in a Wisconsin lumber-camp brothel, and Big Mo, a verse-quoting lumberjack fleeing a violent past, whose lives become entwined with William Butler Ogden, the "Richest Man in the West" and Chicago's first mayor, whose rail and timber empire unknowingly provided fuel for the coming inferno.

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