But the eyewitness accounts also have inherent limitations. The fire was so overwhelming that no one person could encompass, let alone accurately recall, its entirety. "It was too vast, too swift, too full of smoke, too full of danger, for anybody to see it all," Chicago Tribune editor Horace White recalled in his own narrative. In addition, the mass of memories do not neatly add up to anything approaching a consistent story. Having read dozens of narratives in his scrupulous search for the facts, Musham concluded with some exasperation, "The accounts disagree almost unanimously as to details." They disagree as well on the opinions they express regarding such issues as whether (and which) people were well or ill behaved, the effectiveness of the relief efforts, and the prospects for the future. To complicate things further, narratives written close to the event were colored by the understandably shifting moods of a traumatized populace looking for a silver lining but vulnerable to pessimism and rumor, while the ones penned later were inflected by the writer having seen or heard other stories and by the inevitable loss of reliable detail and addition of stylistic embellishment.