"Late one night when we were all in bed, Old Mother Learly 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.'"

The words of this song are from a popular ragtime song written in 1896 reflects the popular belief about the cause of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

Catherine O'Leary and her husband were Irish immigrants living in Chicago that night when dry conditions and high wind caused a fire that consumed their barn to spread and consume most of the city. It's been estimated that before it was over nearly $200 Million in property damage was done, nearly 100,000 people were left homeless and about 300 people lost their lives.

But when the fire had burned out the damage was not quite done- a completely different fire got started when Michael Ahern, a reporter at the Chicago Tribune reported that the fire had started when a cow kicked over a lantern while it was being milked. He didn't actually name Mrs. O'Leary in the report but she was soon outed as the culprit when people found out the fire started in her barn. Artists started portraying the incident in pictures and drawings in newspapers and periodicals. Legend was born.

Anti-Irish sentiment took hold and people began to circulate hateful stories. People began to claim that Mrs. O'Leary was drunk when she was milking the cow or that she was covering up the evidence. Some even claimed to have seen the broken pieces of latern glass in the ruins of the barn. Of course no one ever produced any evidence.

But this story doesn't fit the facts. At the official inquiry it was noted that the first to report the fire was Daniel "Peg Leg" Sullivan. He saw the fire, ran across the street to the barn to free the animals (which included one of his mother's cows) and then told the O'Leary's. The official findings were that there was no way to determine the cause of the fire and that it could have been anything from arson to a windblown spark from a chimney.

But in 1893 Ahern admitted to making up the story- which was much too late for Mrs. O'Leary's reputation to be salvaged. Nobody ever seemed to hear about the retraction. They only knew that a small fire in a barn set their entire world on fire. Their lives had been horribly altered forever and they needed someone to blame. Nobody ever bothered to think about the fact that it was ridiculous to assume O'Leary was milking her cow in the middle of the night

Enough evidence was finally collected and presented to the Chicago city counsel and Mrs. O'Leary was cleared of wrong doing....In 1997...126 years after the fact.

Catherine O'Leary lived out the rest of her life in the public eye, constantly being blamed for a fire she didn't set. a descendant of O'Leary stated that she spent the rest of her life in the public eye, in which she was constantly blamed for starting the fire. Overcome with much sadness and regret, she "died heartbroken."