Bravery and terror

The womenmade it out of the auditorium with Bertha and Grace escaping through the main entrance onto Randolph St. before realizing Emily wasn't with her. She made it back inside the theater (no small feat since a sea of people was surging through the doors and lobby in the opposite direction) and in the darkened theater found Emmy on the marble stairs, semi conscious,but people were falling over and climbing overEmmy and others who fell early in the rush and were unable to extricate themselves.  The crowd pushed Bertha back outside before she could free her sister and by then had grown in size and forcefulness.  Bertha was unable to push back inside a second time. By the time crowds stopped pouring from the theater, police were on the scene and prevented people from going inside.

Louis and Bertha searched 10-15 hours

Joined by their olderbrother, machinist Louis C. Geik (1860-1926), Bertha searched the numerous morgues until they closed around midnight, and resumed the search in the morning.

St. Luke's Hospital

Louis finally found his sister's body at St. Luke's Hospital and made the official identification. Newspapers did not report anythingabout the condition of Emmy's body but given Bertha's description of Emmy being caught on the stairs, she probably died of   suffocation and internal injuries from being trampled.  Burial was in a family plot in Graceland Cemetery in Chicago where her mother had been laid eighteen years earlier.

Illinois natives, Emma, Bertha and Louis were three of four children born to German immigrants, the late Caroline Stack Geik (1829-1885) and  Henry Geik (1822-). In 1903 the siblings lived at 731 Fullerton Avenue in Chicago.  Bertha worked as a public school teacher † and Emma worked as a dressmaker (as had theirfather, mother, and older sister, Ida).

Grace Nethercut

In the years after the fire

Grace Nethercut became active in the Hemenway Methodist church.  Bertha revealed, after Grace's death, that their friendship ended when they quarreled over different perceptions of the trauma of their Iroquois Theater experience and escape.  For Bertha, who lost a sister, it was life-defining.  For Grace who perhaps grew weary of hearing about Emma's tragic death, not so much.

A decade after the fire Bertha married widow Herbert W. Snow (1874-1937), a chemist born in Utah. (Herbert's son from his first marriage, Royall Henderson Snow, was a Rhodes Scholar, became a literatureprofessor at Harvard University and wrote several books of and about poetry.)

Bertha and Emma's brother Louis, who had helped Bertha search for Emmy's body, bought a home on Belmont Avenue.

Thirty years after the fire an interview with Bertha appeared in a newspaper story about the Iroquois Theater fire. It was in that interview that she said Emma looked forward to her wedding when they went to the Iroquois back in 1903. Perhaps the recollection stayed with Bertha because she felt a twinge of survivor guilt and regret for having persuaded her sister to go to the matinee.  Unfortunately,she didn't name Emma's fiancé.

Discrepancies and addendum

* Sometimes spelled as Geick or Geich and Emmy's given name as Emma.

 † Bertha taught music at the Louis Nettelhorst School. Three students from Nettelhorst died at the Iroquois: Agnes Lange, Johnny Washington and Louis Buschwah.

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