Mrs. O'Leary's Cow Has a Bad Attitude

I'm a lifelong fan of folk music, so I'm familiar with a lot of old campfire tunes and legends put to rhyme and passed down through the years. But I don't recall that I ever heard of Mrs. O'Leary's cow, the subject of a book by acclaimed children's poet Mary Ann Hoberman. When I read on the jacket of Mrs. O'Leary's Cow that it had been adapted from a popular song, I sought out the song, and it looks like Hoberman wrote the bulk of the book, using just the opening verse as a jumping-off point.

For those as unfamiliar as I was, Mrs. O'Leary's Cow is the alleged cause of the Great Chicago Fire in the late 1800s that killed more than 100 people and left thousands without homes. The song contends that the cow kicked over a lantern left in the barn, and that's how the trouble all began. There's a hint of malice in the wording, as the cow "winked her eye and said, 'There'll be a hot time in the old town tonight!'"

Hoberman matches the cadence of this verse well in the ensuing pages as various members of the community react to the cow's predicament, with the fire department eventually coming to her rescue. There's no indication in the book of where this is taking place; it seems like a rural area with few houses, not the sort of place where a blaze would be likely to devastate thousands. Hoberman's book has nothing to do with the Great Chicago Fire. Instead, the entire focus of the book is rescuing the cow from the predicament of her own making.

Jenny Matheson's bold oil paintings convey the urgency of the situation, with lots of concerned faces peering out from the pages, wondering if a rescue is possible. My favorite illustration shows the ten firemen working together to get the cow off the roof, though it's rather inexplicable how she gets up there in the first place. The book doesn't go into the mechanics of her getting from the floor of the barn to the roof; readers are simply expected to accept that she manages it somehow. But if she can get up to the roof, why can't she just jump out the window to safety?

Throughout the book, printed in bold, black letters, is some variation on "There'll be a hot time in the old town tonight!" The book concludes as it began, with the cow winking as she reflects on the "hot time" she's made. In the context of the Great Chicago Fire, this seems very distasteful, but even lifted out of that context entirely, the cow doesn't seem to have any regrets for what has happened. Indeed, there's still the sense that she may have done it intentionally, just because she wanted to be the center of attention. If that was her desire, she got her wish, since the whole community rallies around her, and she winds up tucked into bed inside the O'Leary household, as cozy as a cow could ever be. Never mind that the barn burned down and that, if the firefighters hadn't gotten there as quickly as they did, the house could have gone up in flames as well.

Thus, while Mrs. O'Leary's Cow is a creative riff on an old folk song, it doesn't quite sit right with me. It seems to send the message that if you want people to pay attention to you, you should make some mischief, and this hardly seems like a very positive message to send, especially when the mischief is this dangerous.