Breaking a leg

[Bill Richter]

All right, Jonathan, you want to go with your gut. Fair enough. Now let's go with my gut.

I am 71 years old. I have worked with horses and mules for 50 years as a wrangler, a mule skinner, and a trail repairman at the Grand Canyon, down in and on top along the rim. I have spent the last 35 years as a professional farrier. I have been run over, kicked, stomped on, had the leather of my boot stripped right off my foot, bitten, and been bucked off of some of the best stock this Arizona countryside has to offer. I have seen all sorts of wrecks (horse and mule accidents to you dudes), and been in many others. I am so stove up I can barely walk. I have had horseshoe nails drawn through my hands right down to the bone with the fat and tissue from my hand left deposited in my palm. My back has been jerked out so many times, it is a chiropractor's dream.

I will say that my gut tells me that Kauffman is correct. Read his website. Mike Kauffman and I disagree on a lot of things about Booth and the assassination, but there is on thing we agree on completely--Booth was an exaggerator (the guy who played him in Killing Lincoln the other night, or overplayed him according to some, had him down pat. He was a born prevaricator and exaggerator and a showman par excellence.

So, he jumped about 12 feet to the stage, was thrown off-balance and wrenched his back (I am an expert on that one!), mounted his horse (who nearly refused to be mounted and who Booth managed to pull to the left to be thrown into the saddle and nearly ran over Stewart who ran out of Ford's Theater to stop them), talked his way across the bridge at the Navy Yard, and fell with his horse on Sopers' Hill, thus suffering one of the most common rider's breaks in his leg, as Kauffman posits, where his companion Davy Herold found him and took him to Surrattsville and then Dr. Mudd's place to be treated.

Gut feeling to gut feeling, there you have it. One fabulist to another.