Was there an assassin on Grant's train?

[Wild Bill]

Uh, oh. I see that I shot off my mouth, a constant problem, and stepped right into the 70 cent spread (you know, the stuff that coats the dirt floor in horse and mule corrals), again. And Roger caught it, again.

For those of you who care, my argument that John H. Surratt, Jr., was on Grant's train is presented in my book, Confederate Freedom Fighter, which can be got from the Surratt Society book store. It's a cheap read.

I write, to the disgust of many, something I call historical fiction. Fiction is a genre in which 10% or more of the book is made up. I maintain that I just barely go over that line and about 85-90% of what I write is non-fiction, real history. I invite the reader to check me out by including either footnotes or chapter notes, telling you where I got my material.

I also look at the standard materials in a different manner that traditional authors of the Lincoln Assassination. This often results in turning the usual accounts on their heads. For example, when Mudd's neighbors testify at the trial of the conspirators how horrified they were to hear of Lincoln's assassination through Mudd, I write it exactly the opposite. What do you think 3 Southern, pro-Confederates are going to say to each other out in the middle of Southern, slaveholding Maryland miles from any Yankee witnesses?

So, in Confederate Freedom Fighter, I took the usually dismissed account of a federal detective that he followed Surratt up Pennsylvania Avenue on April 14, that other saw Surratt in Charley Woods' barbershop with Booth, and that a stable owner helped him get to Grant's train in time to board, telling federal investigators he was merely picking up rental horses, a common practice among liveries in Washington. Then the numbers of armed soldiers caused Surratt to remember his training for the priesthood and reconsider his mission. He continued on to Canada, meeting Sarah Slater en route (a la John Stanton). I once asked Andrew Jampoler about this possibility and he refused to talk to me about it, seeing me as a nut (there's that word again). He's probably right.