"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
In the narrow lane of the dead surged the policemen, bringing ever more
and more forms to cord up beneath the tables. Then came the press of
people, who, frantic with anxiety, had beaten back the police guard to
look for loved ones in the charnel house. There was Louis Wolff, Jr.,
searching for two nephews and his sister. There was Postmaster Coyne, who
had hurried from a meeting of the crime committee to lend his aid. There
were Aldermen Minwegen and Alderman Badenoch, and besides them scores of
men and women anxiously looking and looking, and nerving themselves to
fear the worst.
"Have you found Miss Helen McCaughan?" shrieked a hysterical woman. "She's
from the Yale apartments, and----"
"I'm looking for a Miss Errett--she's a nurse," cried another.
"My little boy--Charles Hennings--have you found him, doctor?" came from
another.
From every side came the heartrending appeals, while the din was so great
that no single plaint rose above the volume of sounds. And all the time
the doorway was a place of frightful sights.
"O, please go back for my little girl," gasped a woman whose face and
hands were a blister and whose clothing was burned to the skin. She
staggered across the threshold and fell prone. Her last breath had gone
out of her when two policemen snatched up the body and bore it to an
operating table.
"O, where's my Annie?" screamed another woman, horribly burned, whom two
policemen supported between them into the restaurant. But at the word she
collapsed, and, though three physicians worked over her for ten minutes,
she never breathed again.
ONE LIFE BROUGHT BACK FROM DEATH.
Of a sudden Dr. E. E. Vaughan saw a finger move in a mass of the dead
against the far wall of the restaurant.
"Men, there's a live one in there," he cried, and, while others came
running, the physician flung aside the bodies till he had uncovered a
woman of middle age, terribly burned about the face, and with her outer
garments a mass of charred shreds.
In a second the woman was undergoing resuscitative treatment on a table,
while the oxygen streamed into her lungs. Two doctors worked her arms like
pumps, while a nurse manipulated the region of the heart. At length there
was a flutter of a respiration, while a doctor bending over with his
stethoscope announced a heart beat just perceptible. Another minute passed
and the eyelids moved, while a groan escaped the lips.
"She lives!" simply said Dr. Vaughan, as he ordered the oxygen tube
removed and brandy forced between the lips. In five minutes the woman was
saved from immediate death, at least, though suffering terribly from
burns. She was just able to murmur that her name was Mrs. Harbaugh, but
that was all that could be learned of her identity before she was taken
away to a hospital.
ONE HUNDRED FEET IN AIR, POLICE CARRY INJURED ACROSS ALLEY.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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