Chris Ritter

[Pamela]

   

I copied these from a collector's site called The Railsplitter.

The photo of the bearded man may be Chris Ritter.

John Wilkes Booth lives! The ultimate conspiracy theory... and HOAX!

976. (BOOTH, John Wilkes.) Christopher C. Ritter was an Indiana butcher who claimed that after the assassination, Booth successfully escaped to South America. (See: Weichman, A True History of the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln and of the Conspiracy of 1865, pp. 482-483) Group of Autograph Letters Signed, including: April 26, 1895, 4pp., to E. Rosenburger, "The slayer of President Lincoln is alive. I have hundreds of letters on that score from him to me, but his lips are sealed to anyone but me..." Also, one from June 27, 1897, on the reverse of which Ritter has typed a poem "Expansive Delusion-or-What Ritter knows of Lincoln's Assassination and J. Wilkes Booth's Movement Afterward." Ritter pens that he is looking for some financial backing to help publish his theories: "I would like to take a partner to furnish the money to publish the first 2,000 books..." Also, July 28, 1897, concerning the selling of photos: "the cost of any of these I leave to your own sense of Justice as any income from this source is a great help to me to bring out my book which will have 42 plates of photos of persons connected with the narrative..." Another example of an opportunist seeking profit from supposedly having "inside knowledge" on the great conspiracy. An interesting series of letters. Included in this collection is a two-page poem written by Ritter and an alleged Autograph Letter Signed from John Wilkes Booth TO Ritter, November 12, 1873. (Supposedly in "pig Latin" with a period translation by the great Lincoln collector Emerson.) "We had been over Venezuela for some months and on our return visited Paragrawe (sic)... Have you heard of Edwin or how Kathy and her child are getting along..." On the copy letter, Ritter has noted "this is a copy of a letter written by Booth as J.W. Hunoth, Jr." The "translation" on letterhead from the office of another early Lincoln collector, A.E. Fostell, who aquired most of the Emmerson collection at the turn of the century. Together with three photographs - two cabinet cards and a mounted albumen, detailed in period ink as the "real victim of the shooting by Boston Corbett." It is a portrait of Edward Fox who was supposedly misidentified as John Wilkes Booth. Also: a signed cabinet card of Col. C.C. Ritter, dated 1895. An archive detailing a wonderful early hoax which was believed by many.
(Est. $1,200-1,500)