Some day-to-day events leading to the Great Chicago Fire are products of my imagination. Others have been reconstructed through research of contemporary newspapers, books, personal accounts, and maps, as well as books and articles published on the subject in recent years.

In addition to the standard works, I’m grateful to the following: Jim Murphy’s Newbery-Honor book The Great Fire (New York: Scholastic, 1995); Peter Cookson, Jr. and Caroline Hodges Persell’s Preparing for Power: America’s Elite Boarding Schools (New York: Basic Books, HarperCollins, 1985); Jeffrey Geller and Maxine Harris’s Women of the Asylum: Voices Behind the Walls, 1840–1945 (New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1994); Phillip L. Safford and Elizabeth J. Safford’s A History of Childhood and Disability (New York: Teachers’ College, Columbia University, 1996), and John H. White, Jr.’s The American Railroad Passenger Call, Parts 1 and 2 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).

I’m especially grateful to Lewis Carroll and his classic Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, first published in 1865. Lewis Carroll is the pseudonym of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Fellow devotees of this work will spot the many references. For this work, I relied on a version electronically published by the Project Gutenberg.

I’m grateful to the many generous people who helped inform this story: Rose Marie Leitza Crotti; Sal Angello; historian Patrick McKnight and curator Sarah Smith (Steamtown National Historical Site, Scranton, Pennsylvania); my editor, Lisa Sandell, for her unflagging support and patience; friends Clara Gillow Clark, Joyce McDonald, and Elizabeth Partridge for reading parts of this story and sharing pages; Bambi Lobdell, just because; my mother, Joan Jenkin, for inspiring me to write about a nanny; my grandchildren for inspiring certain (*ahem*) character traits; and my husband, Joe, who helped me find the right ending on our many walks around the lake.

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to use the following:

Cover portrait by Tim O’Brien.

Cover background: Chicago’s Court-House Square on fire, North Wind Picture Archives.

Godey’s Lady’s Book, The Granger Collection.

Mine strikers, Library of Congress.

Avondale Mine Disaster, The Granger Collection.

Crowd waiting outside Avondale Mine, ibid.

View of Chicago before the Great Fire, Topfoto/The Image Works.

Chicago’s Cook County Court-house, Library of Congress.

Map showing reach of the Great Fire of Chicago, The Granger Collection.

Catherine O’Leary’s cow, ibid.

The Great Fire, Corbis.

Steam-powered fire engine, Keystone Archives/HIP/The Image Works.

Two men standing in ruins, Library of Congress.

Incomplete set of columns of Fifth National Bank, ibid.

Ruins at Union train depot, ibid.

Map by Jim McMahon.

Sal Angello, courtesy of his sister, Rose Marie Crotti.