Cara Stillman, a twenty-three-year-old Stanford graduate, and her forty-year-old aunt, Amy Mulligan, attended the fateful afternoon matinee of Mr. Bluebeard at Chicago's newest playhouse, the Iroquois Theater.  Cara and her twin sister Minna had been visiting their aunt Amy since October and planned to remain in Chicago for several more months. On December 30 in 1903 they became two of nearly six hundred victims in America's worst theater fire, Amy as an injured survivor and Cara as a fatality.  Though Minna didn't go to the Iroquois that day, many newspapers proclaimed her dead or severely injured.*

Terror

Cara and Amy had seats in the second-floor balcony at the Iroquois Theater. Like most parties in the theater, they became separated during the chaos.

Amy made it to the fire exit, but when she looked frantically through the smoke-filled darkness for Cara, could not see her. She fought her way back through the frenzied crowd into the auditorium but still could not find Cara.

Badly burned on the face, neck, and arms, Amy was forced to exit the theater without knowing if Cara had escaped.

Cara's body was identified the day after the fire by her uncle, Amy's husband, Edward H. Mulligan, at Moran's funeral home. Her father, John M. Stillman, traveled from California to Chicago to bring his daughter's body home. Funeral services were held on January 9 at the Stillman home at 520 Alvarado Row in Stanford.

Forever and forever Stanford red

Stillman family roots were interwoven with those of Stanford University. John Maxson Stillman (1852–1923), Minna and Cara's father, was Stanford's first chemistry professor, a department head, and served as acting president for a time.  His father, Jacob D.B. Stillman,† had been physician to Leland Stanford who founded the university.   John's brother, Stanley Stillman (1861–1934), was a professor of surgery at Stanford.  John's twin daughters, Cara and Minna, born in 1880, graduated from Stanford, and as an adult, Minna worked for decades at the school library. Daughter Dorothy graduated from Stanford in 1913 and her husband was the university's Catholic chaplain. Other than a family trip to England in 1899, and a fateful time in 1903 Chicago, the family spent all their lives in the Palo Alta area.

The Stillman girls were active in the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority at Stanford, and Cara was vice president of the campus Women's League. They graduated in the spring of 1903, Cara with a BA in history and Minna with a BA in mathematics.  That fall the sisters had said goodbye to their father, mother, and younger sister — Emma E. Rodolph Stillman (1855–1936) and Dorothy Stillman (1888–1972) — as they traveled east to spend a year in Chicago with their aunt Amy, their father's half sister.

Amy Stillman Mulligan (1863–1957), wife of Edward H. Mulligan, had grown up on the 282-acre Stillman Ranch — including its 100-acre vineyard on which the University of Redlands was built in 1909.  Cara and Minna's father, John M. Stillman, and their aunt Amy were the children of Jacob David Babcock Stillman  who had been gifted the vineyards by Leland Stanford (see below). John M. Stillman had been born to Jacob's first wife, Caroline Beal Maxson (1822–1852), and Amy to his second wife, Mary Gavitt Wells Stillman (1833–1923).  She and Edward became engaged in July 1893.

I found no evidence that the Mulligan's had children.  Leaving Redlands and her Stillman family bonds for Chicago after her 1896 marriage to Edward might have been difficult for Amy but appears to have been of short duration.  An 1872 West Point graduate, Edward had begun his working career as an agent in Antwerp, Belgium for the Bell International Telephone Company.  He moved to California in 1890 for health reasons and went to work as a manager for Southern California Edison in Pasadena.  In his obituary it was reported that he left California only twice during his life and was happy to return.  One of those absences was around 1899–1903 when he and Amy lived in Chicago.

In the years after the fire

Cara's twin Minna Stillman (1880–1974) did not marry. She went to work in the library at Stanford University and became head of the documents department. In Stanford's archives is her diary in which she describes the family's trip to England in 1899 and the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Unfortunately, the diary is not available online. Minna continued working at the school after her retirement, as a secretary in the graduate business school, and was involved in various university organizations and events. She remained in the ten-room Stillman family home at 520 Alvarado Row until her death in 1974.  (Until around 1916 designated as # 2, the Stillman home might have been razed.) Minna was buried in Colma, California, at the Cypress Lawn Memorial Park. It seems likely Cara was buried there too.

Dorothy Stillman, Cara and Minna's younger sister, married Robert Duryea in 1914. Robert became the Catholic chaplain at Stanford. He and Dorothy had two children.

By 1910 Amy and Edward Mulligan returned to California, living in the San Bernardino and Pasadena areas, where they later cared for Amy's then widowed mother, Mary Gavett Hathaway Wells Stillman.  In the 1950s, Amy found herself alone, widowed and childless, living in Redlands, CA.  At death she joined her husband in the Stillman family plot at Hillside Cemetery.

In 1966 and again in 1976, the Stillman Foundation donated $10,000 (roughly $80,000 and $45,000 today) to the Redlands California Community hospital.

More often than not I've noted that Iroquois victims were not cited in obituaries of their parents and siblings who died decades after the fire, as though they'd never existed.  The Stillmans were the exception.  Cara's death was mentioned in John's, Emma's and Minna's obituaries.

Discrepancies and addendum

* Many newspaper reports and books would report that Cara's twin, Minna, had also been at the Iroquois and had survived with serious injuries.  A 1964 Stanford graduate who spoke with Minna before her death reported to the Stanford Magazine that Minna said she had not attended the Iroquois at all. (Thank you, Camille Hanlon, of Waterford, CT, for this clarification.)

† John and Amy's father was Jacob Davis Babcock Stillman (1819–1888).  Jacob had been a physician to Leland Stanford (1824–1893), a wealthy and influential figure in the late 1800s.  Stanford was a U.S. senator, California's eighth governor, president of the Central Pacific and and Southern Pacific railroads, and founder of Stanford University.  In the 1870s Leland was building a race horse breeding farm and wanted more information about the locomotion of horses.  He contracted with an English photographer and  friend, Eadweard Muybridge (1872–1904), to photograph his race horse, Occident, and in 1873 asked Muybridge if photography could provide less ambiguous information about the movement of horses than was then available in texts and still illustrations.  Muybridge spent several years experimenting with photo emulsions, shutter control, lenses and cameras, at last devising a method of chronophotography, photography of running horses that contributed to motion picture technology.  Leland Stanford later engaged his physician, Jacob Stillman, to couple Muybridge's photos with anatomical information in an 1882 book, Horses in Motion.  In it, a majority of Muybridge's photos were converted to pen and ink drawings.  His lengthy description of the complex 12-camera methodology he'd used to capture the footage was severely reduced and edited by Stillman.  In a final insult, the only reference to Muybridge's contribution was relegated to an appendix.  Muybridge sued but the case was dismissed and he lost funding for future motion photography projects.  A paper by Adolph Zukor that accompanied a 1953 Muybridge exhibit, published by Stanford in 1972, provides a detailed account of the Muybridge-Stanford story. and there is a nice condensation of Muybridge's work on Wikipedia.

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