"Lest We Forget": Chicago's Awful Theater HorrorEverett, Marshall
History
"Lest We Forget": Chicago's Awful Theater Horror
Everett, Marshall
Iroquois Theater, Chicago -- Fire, 1903; Theaters -- Fires and fire prevention
Few half hours in battle bring more of horror than the half hour that
turned the cafe into a charnel house, with its tumbled heaps of corpses,
its shrieks of agony from the dying, and the confusion of doctors and
nurses working madly over bodies all about as they strove to bring back
the spark of life.
Bodies were everywhere--piled along the walls, laid across tables, and
flung down here and there--some charred beyond recognition, some only
scorched, and others black from suffocation; some crushed in the rush of
the panic, others but the poor, broken remains of those who leaped into
death. And most of them--almost all of them--were the forms of women and
children. It is estimated that more than 150 bodies were accounted for in
Thompson's alone.
The continuous tramp of the detachments of police bearing in more bodies,
the efforts of the doctors to restore life, and the madness of those who
surged in through the police lines to ransack piles of bodies for
relatives and friends, made up a scene of pandemonium of which it is hard
to form a conception. There was organization of the fifty physicians and
nurses who fought back death in the dying; there was organization of the
police and firemen; but still the restaurant was a chaos that left the
head bewildered and the heart sick.
The work was too much for even the big force of doctors that had flocked
there to volunteer their services. Everybody in which there was the
slightest semblance of life was given over to the physicians, who with
oxygen tanks and resuscitative movements sought to revive the heart beats.
As soon as death was certain the body was drawn from the table and laid
beneath, to give place to another. But systematic as was this effort,
heaps of bodies remained which the doctors had not touched.
In a dozen instances, even when the end of the work was in sight, a hand
or foot was seen to move in this or that heap. Instantly three or four
doctors were bending over rolling away the dead bodies to drag forth one
still warm with life. In a thrice the body was on a table and the oxygen
turned on while the doctors worked with might and main to force
respiration. Almost always it was in vain--life went out. Two or three
were resuscitated, though it is uncertain with what chances of ultimate
recovery. One of these was a Mrs. Harbaugh, who had been brought in for
dead and her body tossed among the lifeless forms that ranged the walls.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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