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America's worst theater disaster took
place in Chicago on December 30, 1903.
A stage fire spread to the auditorium at
the new Iroquois Theater, killing nearly
six hundred people. To remove bodies
from the smoldering structure, two-man
teams carried out victims in slings made
of bed linens donated by area department
stores. The injured were taken to
hospitals;
the dead were loaded into
horse-drawn wagons and transported to
over a dozen different undertaking
parlors and city morgues.
We got this
For the first few hours after the fire,
Chicago's central police station on
Washington Boulevard, the First
Precinct, took names and descriptions
from family members desperate to find
missing victims thought to have been at
the Iroquois Theater that afternoon.
At the same time, police officers and
undertakers in more than a dozen morgues
worked diligently to find identifying
information on the bodies of victims.
Until morgues were closed for that
night, police officials read out names
of identified victims to family members
who gathered at the first precinct
hoping for word.
The morgues were closed
around midnight the night of the fire to
better organize victims and record
keeping. Using handwritten lists and dial-up
telephones in kerosene-lit morgues and
police stations, the coroner's
office, police and fire departments
devised a simple but efficient method of cataloging the dead
and their belongings. Each body
was numbered and a description was
recorded.
Victims' possessions such as
jewelry and money were noted in the body
description at the morgue then placed in
numbered envelopes
corresponding to the body
and transported to the police
department. Items of comparatively
little value such as shoes and clothing
were kept with the body and provided
valuable clues to help in
identification. More than one
victim's identify was first suspected by
the recognition of a
bit of skirt fabric, necktie or a petticoat, or
when a label from a shopkeeper in a distant
city was connected with missing person
reports that referenced a connection to that
city. Though still spotty in rural
areas,
telephone and telegraph service
played a critical communication role in
tracking down and connecting bits of
information.
Bed sheets were unreliable status markers and 1904 rubberneckers were brazen
One procedure turned out to be a
failure. Morgues tried to use
sheets to cover the bodies of victims
that had been identified. People
searching for their families became
frustrated when they couldn't find them,
however, and turned back the
sheets. The problem was
exacerbated for a time by Looky Lous who
dropped by mortuaries to gawk at the
victims and tore away sheets to view
bodies beneath. Authorities soon
restricted access.
Crushed facial features, bruises,
bluing, lacerations, blackened and
charred skin and incinerated hair.
A majority of fatalities had come from
the 2nd- and 3rd-floor balconies where
temperatures from a back-drafted
fireball were extreme and from which
dozens of people were driven to jump to
their death to escape, or pushed from
fire escapes by the crowd surge behind
them. Bodies sometimes showed multiple types of
injuries, other times showed little sign
of trauma.*
Many of the bodies were damaged badly
enough to make identification
difficult. Had today's Disaster Victim Identification
(DVI)
technology such as DNA been available
in 1903, a half-dozen instances of
temporary mistaken
identification would have been avoided
but overall Chicago did a masterful job
of handling so many fatalities.
Official procedures adjusted
The Minneapolis Journal article above
offers bits of information about
behind-the-scene processes employed to
manage Iroquois Theater fire victim
identification and record keeping.
Under ordinary circumstances Chicago's sequential
procedure required 1.) an inquest into the
cause of death, 2.) issuance of a death
certificate, and 3.) issuance of a burial
certificate. Railroads were not permitted to
ship a body without a burial certificate.
The volume of Iroquois fatalities required
alterations in the procedure. Identified
bodies needed to be removed from morgues to
make room for the city's normal mortuary
requirements. Relatives could not remain in
Chicago hotels for an extended period. As a
result, a majority of death certificates
issued the day after the fire were for
bodies that needed to be shipped out of
Chicago by rail to cities in Indiana, Ohio,
Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa. In
an era without electronic communications,
certificates were hand carried between
municipal offices, undertakers and railroads
by family members who then traveled back
home with the victim's body where a local
undertaker saw to burial.†
The health department agreed with the coroner's office
that burial certificates could be issued in
advance, giving time for the coroner's
office to appoint an inquest jury and
schedule witnesses.
Inquests were conducted by the
coroner's jury beginning on January 6, 1904
and completed nineteen days later.
Dr. Martin Otis Heckard (1863–1934) served
Chicago as registrar of vital statistics for
forty years. He married Lenore Pfau four
years after the Iroquois Theater fire.
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