The Montreal Link

[John Fazio]

Susan, Barry, Steve, Laurie, John, et al.:

Ficklin got around. He even fought in the Mexican War. During the Civil War he served as a Confederate purchasing agent in Europe, a blockade runner and an agent of the Confederate Secret Service. He was implicated in an earlier plot to assassinate Lincoln. It is known that he was absent from Washington from 1861 through April, 1865, but that he was in the capital on the fateful day of April 14. It is also known that while he was in Washington he had contact with George Atzerodt and that he stayed in the Kirkwood House on the 14th, the residence, at the time, of Vice President Johnson. Atzerodt, too, had a room at the Kirkwood. Ficklin was arrested on April 16 with a whistle upon his person, whistles being a means of communication apparently used by Confederates in the city (Secret Service Agents and Mosby men). He denied complicity and had to be released on June 16 because of lack of evidence despite the fact that Lafayette C. Baker and Major James O'Beirne were personally convinced of his complicity.

What is not commonly known is that he played a major role in trying to direct shipments of Montana gold to the Confederacy in 1863 and 1864 after gold was discovered in the Big Sky country in 1862, 1863 and 1864. Headquartered in Salt Lake City, the trans-shipment point for both the Confederacy and the Union, he received shipments from the gold fields from operatives such as the notorious Jack Slade, who then returned to Montana with wagons full of dry goods, which found a ready market in the mining communities. Very little of the Montana gold, however, found its way into Confederate coffers. Credit for this belongs to Sidney Edgerton and his nephew Wilbur Fisk Sanders, Lincoln's men in Montana, who resorted to vigilantism to assure that the gold went North, and this despite the Confederate sympathies of a majority of the inhabitants of the mining districts. The Vigilantes of Montana hanged some 21 men from January through October, 1864. without trial, before matters came under their control.

John