Death Claims the President

At 2.15 on the morning of Sept. 14, William McKinley, the twenty-fifth President of the United States, breathed his last, death resulting from the bullets fired by Leon Czolgosz Sept. 6, an autopsy on the 14th proving that the bullet which passed through both walls of the stomach near its lower border also had passed through the back walls of the abdomen, hitting and tearing the upper end of the kidney, and developing gangrenous conditions in the stomach, pancreas and elsewhere along its track, which made death “unavoidable by any surgical or medical treatment.” Coming after confident, if not certain, expressions of hope of recovery on the part of the surgeons and physicians, and after Christendom had recovered somewhat from the shock of the attempt on the President’s life, and had begun to breathe somewhat freely, the comparatively sudden termination of the case, heralded by the dispatches of the afternoon of the 13th, produced agony and sorrow impossible to describe.