A John Wilkes Booth boot question

[Houmes]

(05-23-2013 07:24 AM)BettyO Wrote:  There was testimony at the trial that Herold carried a knife in his boot.

Never heard that JWB carried one in his boot or had a sheath in his boot. Lew Powell's knife had a sheath - and unless he wore the sheath in his boot or carried it in his pocket, we don't know - all that was said was that he "Drew his knife"....




Lew Powell's Knife in Sheath (Courtesy Huntington Library Collection)

I'm uncertain if any conclusions can be made from the sheath holding Lewis Powell's knife. I was at the Huntington Library in December and examined the knife for almost an hour. There is no provenance for the sheath other than that it came with the knife when the George Foster Robinson descendant donated it to the Huntington in 1961. The knife is still quite sharp, and the handguard is quite loose. The staff handed it to me in a ziplock plastic bag, which I thought was a novel approach to curatorial storage. I'd corresponded several times with different staff before I arrived at the library if I could examine it with a forensic light source to determine if there were any blood stains still present (the bone handle has a rough surface, easily hiding residue), but that brought a big--and consistent--refusal. So much for the advancement of history, let alone science.