Custer’s First Child

We find to our embarrassment that we identified the infant in the photograph on pages 24–25 of our June issue (“The Past Springs Out of a Picture”) as the child of General George Armstrong Custer and his wife, Libbie. This immediately drew a number of tongue-in-cheek responses from readers, among them John S. du Mont of Greenfield, Massachusetts, and Michael Harrison of Fair Oaks, California. Mr. du Mont wanted to know the name of the child—“another historical first”—while Mr. Harrison credited us with the “photographic scoop of the century.” On rechecking, we discovered, of course, that the Custers never had any offspring. The baby in the photograph is the child of someone else, and we offer an American Heritage cigar to the first reader to tell us whose.