Every year, when my sister returned from summer camp, she — and the rest of the neighborhood Campfire Girls — could be heard singing favorite campfire songs for the next several weeks. One song I particularly remember hearing, repeatedly, went something like this:
One dark night, when we were all in bed,
Old Mother Leary left a lantern in the shed,
And when the cow kicked it over, she winked her eye and said,
There’ll be a hot time in the old town tonight…
FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!
Did I mention that I heard it repeatedly? That’s because the song was intended to be sung repeatedly, with the alarmist-sounding ‘FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!’ getting slightly louder with each repetition. It was something of a miracle none of our neighbors called the fire department in response to those wailing girls.
Supposedly, the song referred to true events of October 1871, when a devastating fire swept through the heart of downtown Chicago, beginning with a small shed on DeKoven Street owned by the O’Leary family. A Chicago Tribune reporter named Michael Ahern revealed that a cow had kicked over a lantern while she was being milked.
Because the story was printed in a newspaper, many people believed it.
Years later, Ahern admitted that he’d invented the story, but that didn’t stop Campfire Girls from singing about it for the next 100 years.
The actual cause of the Chicago disaster was, however, somewhat more complicated. After evicting the Native Americans who had lived for millennia along the shores of Lake Michigan, the incoming settlers commenced to construct a city of 250,000 people, in a place notorious for its high winds — using wood as the primary building material.
Toss in an extended period of drought, and Chicago was a tragedy waiting to happen.
But in 1871, it was still common for a family to keep a milk cow handy, even while living in a city. (Refrigerators being rather uncommon, due to the fact that electricity was rather uncommon.) So it probably seemed perfectly sensible for reporter Michael Ahern to lay blame for the terrible fire on a clumsy milk cow, rather than where it truly belonged: on a quarter million people who built a city out of wood, in the wrong place.
That kind of honest assessment does not easily lend itself to humorous campfire songs, however.
We’ve been having big fires here in Colorado recently, such as the Marshall Fire in Boulder County, last month, that resulted in the loss of 1,000 houses made of wood. These wooden houses had been constructed in an area known for occasional high winds exceeding 100 miles per hour… and in fact, just such high winds played an important, and destructive, role in the Marshall Fire on December 30, 2021.
So far, no one’s cow has been blamed for the Marshall Fire, although preliminary investigations are pointing to a small shed as the likely initial point of ignition.
Instead of blaming a cow, the mainstream media has settled on a very different, and more insidious, culprit.
‘Climate change’.
To quote from a few recent news reports and op-eds about the Marshall Fire:
Colorado Public Radio story by Miguel Otárola:
Regional land managers draw a clear line between the fire and climate change. “This is a result of climate change,” said Stefan Reinold, the resource manager for parks and open space in Boulder County. “It is impacting communities across the west. This drought and having no snow is outside the norm…”
ABC News story by Daniel Manzo, Samantha Wnek, and Dan Peck:
The wildfires that tore through Boulder County, Colorado Thursday afternoon are an unfortunate example of how climate and weather can combine to disastrous effect… As with many climate change-amplified disasters, the conditions that set the stage for the explosive and fast-moving fires had been developing and intensifying in the months prior…
Colorado Sun op-ed by Marcel Arsenault:
While the cause of the fire is still being determined, it came after the worst December drought in 87 years. Dry grass fields created the incendiary conditions for this tragedy. It is a reminder that climate change ultimately will spare no one…
This makes me terribly uncomfortable, because even though the cause of the fire is still being determined, the cause has been determined. I’m uncomfortable because I, personally, burn many gallons of petroleum-based fuels on a daily basis… and eat food grown and transported via a petroleum-based food system… and in general, I live a lifestyle that has an enormous carbon footprint.
When the mainstream media blames the Marshall Fire on climate change, they are essentially blaming me.
What happened to blaming the cows? Cows don’t take it personally when you blame them, even when an entire city burns down.
But when news reporters and scientists lay the blame on ‘climate change’, their finger is pointing directly at me, and I — typical American consumer that I am — end up being plagued by guilt.
Worst of all, we can imagine the humorous but complicated songs the Campfire Girls will be singing 100 years from now.
One dark night, when we were all in bed,
Selfish corporations and ignorant consumers unwittingly generated a climate change disaster that overheated the atmosphere, and drove Colorado into ever-deepening drought conditions, culminating in forests and suburban neighborhoods going up in flames that even technically advanced fire departments could not handle,
And even though there were lots of cows in Colorado who could have been blamed, the politicians and their friends in the mainstream media winked their eyes and said,
If we don’t seriously tackle climate change within the next decade, they’ll be a hot time in the old planetary ecosystem tonight…
FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.