They checked the church-fire, but-- "The next thing I knew the fire was in Bateham's planing-mill." A writer in the New York "Evening Post" says he saw in Chicago "buildings far beyond the line of fire, _and in no contact with it, burst into flames from the interior_." [1. See "History of the Great Conflagration," Sheahan & Upton, Chicago, 1871, p. 163.] {p. 421} It must not be forgotten that the fall of 1871 was marked by extraordinary conflagrations in regions widely separated. On the 8th. of October, _the same day_ the Wisconsin, Michigan, and Chicago fires broke out, the States of Iowa, Minnesota, Indiana, and Illinois were severely devastated by prairie-fires; while terrible fires raged on the Alleghanies, the Sierras of the Pacific coast, and the Rocky Mountains, and in the region of the Red River of the North. "The Annual Record of Science and Industry" for 1876, page 84, says: "For weeks before and after the great fire in Chicago in 1872, great areas of forest and prairie-land, both in the United States and the British Provinces, were on fire." The flames that consumed a great part of Chicago were of an unusual character and produced extraordinary effects. They absolutely _melted_ the hardest building-stone, which had previously been considered fire-proof. Iron, glass, granite, were fused and run together into grotesque conglomerates, as if they had been put through a blast-furnace. No kind of material could stand its breath for a moment. I quote again from Sheahan & Upton's Work: "The huge stone and brick structures melted before the fierceness of the flames as a snow-flake melts and disappears in water, and almost as quickly. Six-story buildings would take fire and _disappear for ever from sight in five minutes by the watch_. . . . The fire also doubled on its track at the great Union Depot and burned half a mile southward _in the very teeth of the gale_--a gale which blew a perfect tornado, and in which no vessel could have lived on the lake. . . . _Strange, fantastic fires of blue, red, and green played along the cornices of buildings_."[1] [1. "History of the Chicago Fire," pp. 85, 86.] {p. 422} Hon. William B. Ogden wrote at the time: "The fire was accompanied by the fiercest tornado of wind ever known to blow here."[1] "The most striking peculiarity of the fire was its intense heat. Nothing exposed to it escaped. Amid the hundreds of acres left bare there is not to be found a piece of wood of any description, and, _unlike most fires, it left nothing half burned_. . . . The fire swept the streets of all the ordinary dust and rubbish, consuming it instantly."[2] The Athens marble burned like coal!