The Legend Of John Wilkes Booth

[Dave Taylor]

(01-14-2016 04:16 AM)maharba Wrote:  At Garrett's, John Wilkes Booth, still under the assumed name Boyd, asked to inspect a map. Young Richard Baynham Garrett
handed the map to him. Booth told the boy that his ultimate destination was Mexico.

That was April 1865. By 1870, a man calling himself John St.Helen was in Granbury TX and who privately revealed he was in fact, John Wilkes Booth.

I'm very pleased to see you consulting material from the Garrett family since they are a reliable, primary source on the topic of the death of John Wilkes Booth. Their accounts easily disprove any conspiracy theory that "the government shot the wrong man and tried to cover it up". If the man killed had been anyone other than John Wilkes Booth, the Garretts would have happily called the government out on it due to the troubles it caused them. These soldiers burned their property down and arrested two of the Garrett sons for a time. Then, when the Garretts appealed to Congress for some financial compensation for their lost barn, they were perpetually denied for being "disloyal" aka Confederates. If anyone had motivation to screw over the government and mess with the official story, it was the Garretts. And yet, time and time again, every single Garrett present on April 26, 1865 reaffirmed that the man killed at their farm was the assassin of President Lincoln. Each Garrett family member, to his or her dying day, countered any half crazed conspiracy theory with the truth.

One of my favorite examples of a Garrett "truth bomb" is this one from a clearly exasperated Rev. Richard Baynham Garrett:

"Mr. Bates in his letter to me...asks, 'How do you know that the same man came back from the woods that went into the woods?' Did he think us a set of fools that we should not know a man in broad daylight that we had been entertaining for two days?"