Breaking a leg

[Rick Smith]

(02-19-2013 04:47 PM)jonathan Wrote:  

(02-19-2013 02:25 PM)william l. richter Wrote:  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.

And I'm 43 and I've torn my knee up, had ligaments messed up, fallen from about 7 feet with all of my weight slamming down onto my shoulder, had the other shoulder pop out of socket a bunch of times and had to shove it back in myself, had concussions, fallen out of a pecan tree, worked on a tobacco farm and had different injuries and ailments with that. So we've both been beat up our fair share. I've got some problem with my shoulder for the last year where I can swing a bat as hard as I want and don't feel anything, but when I try to throw a ball too hard it hurts like hell. My point in mentioning sports injuries was that I have seen and experienced first hand a wide variety of injuries (to myself and others) that can be worked and played through. I believe that Booth's was one such injury.

I've been to Kauffman's website, in fact I addressed several of his points in my earlier post. I've also read American Brutus a couple of times and gone back and watched him on those c-span specials from a while back. I thoroughly enjoyed all of that. I'm just saying that the arguments made come up a little bit short for me. Anything Herold said has to be viewed suspiciously, as does anything that came from anybody at the Mudd residence. We don't know that Booth didn't have a little limp when he was crossing the stage, we don't know that he had trouble mounting his horse, and we don't know that he wasn't in pain crossing the Navy Yard Bridge. All we have is some people who didn't notice anything obvious. It's just not enough for me. Don't get me wrong, I'm open to the possibility that the leg was broken from a horse fall, and I find it pretty interesting. And I may change my mind one day, but not today.

How many of you have had the experience of bringing an 1100 lb horse under control while in the hunt field? I have several times. My family raised thoroughbred horses and we were fox hunters. If you come out of your saddle in the hunt field, meaning out in the wide open spaces, your animal tends to be more difficult to bring under control to remount. Thoroughbreds tend to be highstrung and are uncooperative especially at the times when you most need cooperation. Bringing a large and excited animal under control so that it can be remounted is difficult if no part of your anatomy is injured; bringing one under control, as Booth was trying to do in Baptist Alley, if his leg was broken at the theatre, would be almost impossible.

Rick