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From here.

Legend has it that the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 began when Mrs. O'Leary's cow kicked over a lantern, igniting her straw. The flames then allegedly consumed her barn, jumping from one wooden structure to another until virtually the whole city lay under flame. Before the flames were through, more than seventeen thousand buildings were destroyed, a hundred thousand people were left homeless, and at least two hundred fifty had died.

Less well-known is that the whole of the American Midwest fell victim to disastrous fires the night of October 8, 1871, from Indiana to the Dakotas, and from Iowa to Minnesota. All told, they represent the most mysterious and deadly conflagration in national memory. Eclipsed in history by the Chicago cauldron, little Peshtigo, a small community of two thousand near Green Bay, Wisconsin, fared far worse in terms of lives lost. Half the town - 1,000 people - died that terrible night, suffocated where they stood, or consumed by flames whose origins remain unknown. Not a single structure was left standing.

Where did the flames come from, and why so suddenly, without any warning? "In one awful instant a great flame shot up in the western heavens," wrote one Peshtigo survivor. "Countless fiery tongues struck down into the village, piercing every object that stood in town like a red-hot bolt. A deafening roar, mingled with blasts of electric flame, filled the air and paralyzed every soul in the place. There was no beginning to the work of ruin; the flaming whirlwind swirled in an instant through town." Other survivors referred to the phenomenon as a tornado of fire, reporting burning buildings lifted whole in the air before they exploded into glowing cinders.

What eyewitnesses described was more like a holocaust from heaven than an accidental fire started by a nervous cow. And in fact, according to a theory propounded by Minnesota Congressmen Ignatius Donnelly, the devastating fires of 1871 did fall from above, in the form of a wayward cometary tail. During it's 1846 passage, Biela's comet had inexplicably split in two; it was supposed to return in 1866, but failed to appear. Biela's fragmented head finally showed up in 1872 as a meteor shower. Donnelly suggested the separated tail appeared in 1871 and was the prime cause of the widespread firestorm that swept the Midwest, damaging or destroying a total of twenty-four towns and leaving 2,000 or more dead in its wake. Drought conditions that fall no doubt contributed to the extent of the conflagration. History today concentrates on the Chicago Fire alone and largely overlooks the Peshtigo Horror, as it was then called. It ignores altogether Biela's comet and it's unaccounted-for tail.

There is still sufficient coupled-cause to support a careless smoking source for the fire:

This drawing by artist Marshall Philyaw shows how the fire might have started in the O'Leary barn. Although purely conjecture, it is conjecture based on the inquiry testimony of Daniel Sullivan and Dennis Regan.
Both men testified that they were in the O'Leary home on the evening of October 8, but before the fire started. Sullivan told the fire officials that he had been to the barn "hundreds of times." He also testified that the barn had a wooden floor and that the boards were wet.
Perhaps the men left the O'Leary house together and walked to the barn to relax for a few minutes before going home. Did Sullivan's peg leg slip on the wet wood, causing him to stumble and drop his pipe into some hay or wood shavings? Or did he trip over Dennis Regan's feet?
Perhaps Regan, relaxing against the wall of the barn, suddenly stretched out his legs as Sullivan hobbled by, causing him to lose his balance and fall.
No one knows what really happened in the barn on October 8, 1871, but the evidence seems clear that the fire was not caused by Mrs. O'Leary's cow kicking over a lantern.

I'd be interested in seeing some newspaper accounts of 'fire from the sky' from that era to support a possible meteorite cause though ...

Hmmm ... the Peshtigo Fire ...

The Biggest Blaze
While the Great Chicago Fire – and its "cow culprit" – was the best known blaze to erupt during this fiery two-day stretch, it wasn't the biggest. That distinction goes to the Peshtigo Fire, the most devastating forest fire in American history. The fire roared through Northeast Wisconsin, burning down 16 towns, killing 1200 people, and scorching 1.2 million acres before it was done.
Historical accounts of the fire say that the blaze began when several railroad workers clearing land for tracks unintentionally started a brush fire.
Before long, the fast-moving flames were whipping through the area "like a tornado," survivors said. It was the small town of Peshtigo, Wisconsin that suffered the worst damage. Within an hour, the entire town had been destroyed, and some 800 residents lost their lives.

From: http://www.ci.cedar-falls.ia.us/fire_dept/CFFD_prevention_wk.htm

'Holes' found in Preshtigo meteorite fire cause ...

Date sent: Mon, 01 Sep 1997 12:07:11 -0400 (EDT)
From: HUMBPEIS Subject: Re: Great Chicago Fire
To: cambridge-conference@livjm.ac.uk
Priority: NORMAL
from: Mark Bailey Re: Great Chicago Fire:
The suggestion made in the film `Target Earth', that the Great
Peshtigo Fire was started by a meteorite or bolide does not fit with
the evidence in both Father Pernin's (1874) account and that of Robert Wells
(1968) [Refs: P. Pernin 1971, `Wisconsin Stories: the Great Peshtigo Fire',
State Historical Society of Wisconsin; R. W. Wells 1968, `Embers of
October', reprinted 1995 Peshtigo Historical Society]. Wells, however, does
mention a report by Phineas Eames, one of the Birch Creek farmers, who
describes an event which closely resembles a bright fireball. This occurs
one hour after the devastating Peshtigo Fire, and so could not have been the
cause of the latter even if the fireball had touched ground.
Mark Bailey
Armagh Observatory
meb@star.arm.ac.uk

From: http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/ccc/cc090197.html

For completeness, Father Pernin's (1874) account:

http://www.library.wisc.edu/etext/WIReader/WER2002-0.html

And it begins with this introduction:

The Great Peshtigo Fire: An Eyewitness Account
by Reverend Peter Pernin
from the Wisconsin Magazine of History 1971
Introduction
OCTOBER 8, 1971, marks the centennial of the two greatest natural catastrophes in the history of the Middle West. Ironically, both happened not only on the same day but almost at the same hour; both had been preceded by ample but disregarded omens; and both stemmed from the same fundamental causes--wood rendered tinder-dry by prolonged drought, plus the factor of human carelessness. In Chicago, a lantern thoughtlessly placed within kicking distance of a cow in a barn on De Koven Street is reputed to have set off the most destructive metropolitan blaze in the nation's history, resulting in a property damage of $200,000,000 and virtually annihilating the city's core.
In northeastern Wisconsin, fires set by hunters, Indians, lumberjacks, railroad workers, and farmers burning stumps and rubble culminated in the nation's worst forest fire, in terms of lives lost.
Although the Wisconsin fire ravaged 2,400 square miles and destroyed numerous settlements and isolated farms on both sides of Green Bay, it has gone down in history as the Peshtigo fire, because it was in this village and in the farming area immediately surrounding it that industry and population were the most concentrated, that the fire reached its greatest virulence, and that the majority of the fatalities occurred.
In the fall of 1871, like other localities to which the expanding railroads were bringing an undreamed prosperity, Peshtigo, on the river of the same name in Marinette County, was exploiting the surrounding forest lands to the fullest advantage. William G. Ogden, the Chicago millionaire, had invested heavily in what was then the country's largest wooden-ware factory to convert the river-borne logs into such articles as pails, tubs, broom handles, barrel covers, and clothespins. There was also a sawmill, a sash, door, and blind factory, a foundry and blacksmith shop, stores, hotels, a boarding house, and, to the villagers' considerable pride, a schoolhouse, and a Protestant as well as a Catholic church.
All this was as of the early evening of October 8, when the village's official population of 1,700 was swollen by an influx of recently arrived laborers to work on the railroad right-of-way, in addition to the usual number of salesmen, travelers, and visitors to be found in any similar village. By daylight less than 1,000 of this number were still alive, and only one structure, a partially constructed house, remained standing.
The occurrences of that dreadful night have never been accorded their proper place in the history of American disasters, primarily because Chicago's ordeal was by its very nature more spectacular, more universally publicized, and more often revived in print. Peshtigo's chief historians have been two journalists and a novelist, Frank Tilton--a Green Bay newspaperman who in 1871 put together a book of eyewitness accounts and his own reportage to sell for the benefit of the survivors--Robert W. Wells of the Milwaukee Journal, who in 1968 gave the Peshtigo story a skillful and readable reconstruction, and William F. Steuber, Jr., who in 1957 used the tragedy as the basis for a prize-winning novel.