Booth's Horse Fell....

[John Fazio]

(12-22-2016 08:13 AM)BettyO Wrote:  I have to agree with Laurie and John in this....I had never read in any newspaper (and I have hundreds upon hundreds I've collected over 40 years....)

Unless, as he wrote in the diary, "in jumping, broke my leg", he meant that he attempted to jump the mare over a fence, ditch, etc....which, seems unlikely as he was riding the roads, not over cross-country -

Thanks, John.

Betty:

Here's the context of Booth's admission to his diary:

I walked with a firm step through a thousand of his friends (i.e. the audience), was stopped (i.e. by Forbes), but pushed on (i.e. he got past Forbes with a writing, probably a forged authorization). A Colonel was at his side (i.e. Rathbone. That he assigns rank suggests that Rathbone was in uniform, but there is no proof of this.). I shouted sic semper (he left off the last word because he wasn't sure of its spelling) before I fired. In jumping broke my leg. I passed all his pickets (probably a reference to the guards on both sides of the Navy Yard Bridge), rode sixty miles that night (perhaps, if he initially rode away from Dr. Mudd's farm and then doubled back to it, for which there is some evidence), with the bone of my leg tearing the flesh at every jump (not literally tearing, but figuratively, because Dr. Mudd described the broken fibula as a relatively minor injury, which would account for how he was able to make his way across the stage and out of the theater, mount his horse and ride furiously, at least initially, toward Soper's Hill. He could afford to exaggerate the distance he rode and the pain he felt because there were no witnesses to either (apart from Herold) as there were to what had happened in the theater.)

John