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Interesting info on Wiki about the Pestigo Fire. It suggests in a couple of places that slash-and-burn operations to clear land for farming were the cause. It also says that Wisconsin was in a drought before the fire and the summer of 1871 was a hot one, yet the slash-and-burn operations continued. These days, we have strict burn limits during such weather.

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The combination of wind, topography and ignition sources that generated the firestorm at the boundary between human settlements and natural terrain, is known as the "Peshtigo paradigm". Those conditions were closely studied by the American and British military during World War II to learn how to recreate firestorms during bombing campaigns against cities in Germany and Japan. Denise Gess, co-author of Firestorm, said, "They actually made a 'demo' first, a little scale model of wooden buildings, and studied how you would drop bombs until it created a firestorm. Something that devastating and that hot."
Rutkow (2012) writes that the event prompted almost no change to the practices of the lumber industry or the way settlers approached life in forests. He notes that in the following decades, the rate of industrial logging increased and the amount of forest fires increased throughout the country, with Wisconsin itself experiencing major fires in 1880, 1891, 1894, 1897, 1908, 1910, 1923, 1931, and 1936. The loss of half a million acres a year was not uncommon.

It's interesting that they think the lumber ship could not navigate because of the dense smoke.

There was a huge forest fire in 1894 in Minnesota (the Great Hinkley Fire) that was caused by dry weather and the huge amounts of slash left on the ground after cutting timber.

There was an old lady at our cabin that had lived through it as a child. She and her family fled to a swamp/lake and hunkered down in the water for a long time.

During the era when most Great Lakes cargo went on wood ships (and many of those were not huge), just the known wrecks averaged something like every six days. Freshwater waves come in more often than seawater waves, and can break a ship more quickly. I talked once with one of the guys that used Clive Cussler’s sub to look for wrecks, and said many of the recent wrecks appear to be insurance scams — stripped of anything that can be quietly sold later and scuttled during purported night cruises while a buddy is nearby to get him back to shore.