An inquiry into Custer's Last Stand was also finally wrapping up, and immediate history was kinder to the losing general than the future would be. An article about Custer's untouched office in his Michigan home began:
"The former home of the gallant but ill-fated Custer, where now reside his venerable parents and only sister who was widowed by the same terrible tragedy at the Little Big Horn, which extinguished the light in many a bright home on that terrible June day in 1876. . . ."
The presence of the past was in evidence in a story about Jefferson Davis. When the former president of the Confederacy considered running for the Senate in Mississippi, The Inquirer noted: "As a means of pacifying the few people in the North who still honor him by despising him for treason, he declares that he is not a monster, but is just like other men, that the war would have been fought without him and the outcome would have been similar."
And news that someone had tried to kill the actor Edwin Booth during a play in Chicago was played on the front page under the headline "Attempt to assassinate the great tragedian." Nowhere did the article say that Edwin was the older sibling of John Wilkes Booth, who had slain a president.
In the 50th-year essay, The Inquirer noted that many of the businesses that had advertised in that long-ago issue were now themselves gone. It also wondered how history would view its efforts.
"Perhaps," it mused, "those who go over the files of papers of the present day a half century hence will find as much to contrast, and it may be that our business, political and social ways and habits may at that day in the future seem to those who make the comparisons to have been quite peculiar."
