The intent of the Time Travel Series is to recreate the past as realistically as possible - Daily Episode Guide.
Historical Backdrop
On Sunday, October 8, 1871, the city of Chicago was a tinderbox. Fewer than two inches of rain had fallen since Independence Day. Temperatures had climbed to 85°F that afternoon — very high for early October — and a relentless southwest wind, gusting between 35 and 45 miles per hour, scoured a city built almost entirely of wood: 561 miles of wooden sidewalks, 57 miles of wooden-block roads, pine-plank bridges, and roughly 40,000 wooden structures packed together so tightly that a reporter from the Chicago Evening Post described the neighborhoods west of the river as “thickly studded with one-story frame dwellings, cow stables, pig sties, corn cribs, sheds innumerable — every wretched building within four feet of its neighbor, and everything of wood.” The fire department — 185 men and 17 horse-drawn steam engines — was already shattered from battling a four-block blaze the previous night that had raged for sixteen hours and left equipment damaged and men unable to see or speak.
Our subject is Margaret Callahan, age thirty-two, an Irish-born housewife living in a narrow one-and-a-half-story pine workers’ cottage at the south end of DeKoven Street, barely two hundred feet from the barn behind Patrick and Catherine O’Leary’s cottage at No. 137. Margaret’s husband, Thomas, is a freight-handler at the rail yards; they have three children under ten. She arrived from County Cork in 1864 and has never known any home in America but this one.
Sunday, October 8, 1871 — 6:12 A.M. — DeKoven Street, West Division, Chicago
You open your eyes in the dark. The air in the bedroom is thick and close, carrying the sour-milk smell of the straw-tick mattress and the faint bite of yesterday’s coal smoke that never quite leaves the walls. Your youngest, Nora, two years old, is pressed against your ribs, her forehead damp with sweat. October, and you are sleeping with the window cracked because the heat will not break. The pine boards of the ceiling are close enough to touch if you raised your arm. Through the single window, the sky is the color of a bruise — not yet dawn, but light enough. Thomas is already gone. He left at five for the Sunday half-shift at the Burlington & Quincy freight house. You can tell because his boots are missing from beside the door and the kitchen stove is still cold. Your mouth is dry. It has been dry for weeks. The privy out back stinks worse than usual. The mud in the alley has baked into cracked hardpan. You swing your legs to the floor, feel the grit of dust on bare pine boards, and begin the day.
Sunday, October 8, 1871 — 7:40 A.M. — Kitchen, Callahan Cottage, DeKoven Street
You kneel before the cast-iron cookstove and feed kindling into its belly. The iron is warm from last night’s banked coals. You blow gently — the ash puffs up and catches — and the kitchen fills with the smell of burning pine shavings. You set the kettle on and cut four slices from the loaf of soda bread you baked Friday. There is bacon — three strips, saved for Sunday — and you lay them in the skillet. Patrick, your eldest at nine, and Mary, six, sit at the kitchen table in their underclothes, barefoot, legs swinging above the floor. Patrick is scratching at a mosquito bite on his ankle. The kitchen is seven feet by nine feet. Every surface holds something: the bread board, the lard tin, the tin of tea, the half-empty sack of oatmeal, a crock of dripping. A kerosene lamp sits on a shelf but you don’t light it — the morning sun through the east-facing window is enough, and kerosene costs twelve cents a gallon. Through the window you can see Catherine O’Leary’s barn, the white-painted plank door propped open, and Catherine herself, short and stout in her dark dress, hauling a pail toward the cow pen. Five of her six cows are already lowing for their morning milking.
Sunday, October 8, 1871 — 9:55 A.M. — Holy Family Church, West 12th Street (Roosevelt Road), Chicago
You walk up the limestone steps of Holy Family Church with Nora on your hip and the two older children before you. The church is enormous — the largest in Chicago, and barely five years old. Father Damen built it for the Irish of the West Side and it seats twenty-five hundred. Inside, the air is fractionally cooler and smells of beeswax candles, incense, and the collective sweat of a thousand wool-clad bodies packed into oak pews. You find a place in the back, on the left. You cannot see the altar clearly but you can hear Father Damen’s voice, sonorous, faintly accented — he is Belgian — carrying over the congregation. You lower the kneeler and go to your knees. The Latin washes over you: Introibo ad altare Dei. Nora fusses. Mary tugs at the collar of her dress, which is too tight because she has outgrown it and you have already let it out twice. Patrick stares straight ahead, serious, imitating the men. You mouth the responses. The stained glass casts watery blues and reds on the stone floor. You think about the heat, and whether there is enough flour for the week, and whether Thomas will remember to bring the wages home before stopping at Mahoney’s tavern. Outside, the wind is rising.
Sunday, October 8, 1871 — 1:15 P.M. — DeKoven Street, West Division
