The Great Chicago Fire, as it became known, began in Patrick O’Leary’s shed when a cow kicked over a lantern. Another wooden city, more violent winds to fan the flames, more civic-minded officials too worried about keeping their jobs and too slow to act. The resulting fire killed more than three hundred people. It is remembered as one of the worst disasters in American history and is taught to schoolchildren for years to come.

Twenty years after the fire, however, a local newspaperman named Michael Ahern admitted he made up the cow story to sell newspaper copy. The true cause? The authorities couldn’t tell. A spark from a chimney perhaps. Or arson. It’s a possibility this time—some itinerant passing vagrant with a desire akin to your own. You like that idea.

There’s another theory, though, one you like even more. The Chicago fire, despite its infamy, was actually only one of several fires in the same area at the same time. It wasn’t even the largest. A little further north, on the shores of Lake Michigan, a forest fire developed into a firestorm the likes of which has never been seen again. This time two and a half thousand people were killed. In the small town of Peshtigo so many died there weren’t enough residents left alive to identify the bodies. Hundreds were buried in mass graves. One and a half million acres of land scoured clean.

But that was only the beginning. On the east coast of the lake, the town of Holland was razed to the ground, along with the lumber community of Manistee a hundred miles further north. Further east still, on the shores of Lake Huron, another fire swept through the town of Port Huron, and a few days later both Urbana, Illinois, just south of Chicago, and Windsor, Ontario, were also ravaged.

What chances? All these separate fires in the same area at the same time. Ignatius L. Donnelly had his own theory about that. He was a U.S. congressman and what might generously be called a bit of an eccentric. You wonder if you will get off that lightly. He had some interesting thoughts concerning the lost city of Atlantis, though, and his theory of catastrophism posited that the ancient civilization was destroyed by a global catastrophic event, a volcano or meteor strike. As evidence for his theory, Donnelly put forward the simultaneous fires of the Chicago area of 1871. He placed the blame for the fires on a single cosmic event, the periodic Comet Biela that broke up as it passed over America, raining fiery death upon the population in the form of methane-rich meteorite fragments.