On Aug. 2, 1885, an unprecedented storm dropped 5 1/2 inches of rain on Chicago, all that water finding its way to the river. ... Sewage was carried into Lake Michigan, contaminating the city's water supply and triggering an outbreak of cholera that killed one of every eight Chicagoans.
That disaster sent the city's engineers back to the drawing boards ... A whole new man-made addition would be tacked onto the Chicago River, paralleling the route of the Illinois and Michigan Canal but dwarfing the older waterway.
This Sanitary and Ship Canal was provided with banks set up to 201 feet apart, and lessons learned during the massive construction project were shortly afterward applied to the building of the Panama Canal.
Chicago Tribune, Aug. 29, 1995
Imagine that. A cholera outbreak killed 90,000 Chicagoans -- and also generated engineering lessons that helped build the Panama Canal. The saga has been retold so many times, in books, journals and over the airwaves -- and, yes, in this newspaper -- that most Chicagoans attuned to local history know of its gruesome details.
Imagine that, indeed. Fact is, the story of Chicago's killer cholera epidemic is a fiction, a phony melodrama.
It was concocted a half-century ago to sell the public on a Chicago-area flood control scheme that evolved into what's now called the Deep Tunnel project.
Author Libby Hill, who teaches in the department of geography and environmental studies at Northeastern Illinois University, has tried valiantly to debunk the cholera epidemic, most recently in a July 29 Tribune Magazine article titled "The making of an urban legend."
Chicago did suffer a massive storm on Aug. 2, 1885, and polluted river water did flood into the lake. But a shift of winds pushed the contaminants away from the city's water intakes. Over the next two weeks, the anticipated fouling of drinking water didn't occur. One newspaper said winds and low temperatures had "combined to reduce sickness and the death rate far below the average of this season of the year. ... Chicago is very fortunate."
But the seeds of a bogus legend had been planted. According to Hill, a 1956 pamphlet published by what's now the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District recounted the 1885 deluge and added that, "Death from the terrible diseases of polluted water was one byproduct of the storm."
And in 1976, as part of a debate in the Tribune's pages over the then-nascent Deep Tunnel project, Sanitary District President Nicholas J. Melas argued that the project was needed: He recounted how the 1885 flooding "caused the deaths of 90,000 people." Three years later, Chicago Magazine reaffirmed that after the storm, cholera and typhoid "wiped out 90,000 people."
Outbreaks of killer diseases truly did play havoc with Chicago and its people: stockyards runoff, water-borne sewage, spoiled food and lethal bugs variously brought dysentery, smallpox, diphtheria, influenza and other contagions to the city.
Chicago did not, though, suffer deaths of Black Plague proportion in 1885. We're sure of that -- and we have Libby Hill to thank for setting us straight.
We could attribute the legend's long life and frequent repetition to a decidedly un-Chicago trait: gullibility. Ninety thousand deaths?
We'd rather, though, characterize this as a case of facts getting in the way of a good story. Less embarrassing that way.
Oh, and that business about 1871? There really was a fire.