The Bixby Letter

[Steve]

(07-18-2017 05:14 AM)RJNorton Wrote:  As far as what happened to the original letter...

In 2008 the Dallas Historical Society made an announcement:

http://www.columbiatribune.com/915e8ffb-...55d83.html

I do not believe I have ever read a follow up to the society's efforts at verification. Has anyone? I assume the society found out what it has is not authentic, but I do not recall any follow up stories on what was discovered.

As far as I know the Dallas Historical Society has never made any public announcement about their copy of the letter, but I did contact them by email and their reply confirmed that the tests proved the letter was not authentic. Unfortunately, their response did not go into detail on what was tested or how they came to that conclusion.

This USA Today article from 2008 has a photograph of the Dallas copy:

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nati...tter_N.htm

If you click on the image and examine the letter closely there are a couple of problems that should've alerted the DHS that the letter was not authentic before it went to the media:

1. There's a "(5)" after the word "five"

2. The Dallas copy's text is incorrect; it's missing the word "to" after the word "tendering", so it reads "tendering you the consolation" instead of "tendering to you the consolation"

Since nobody has ever found the original letter, if it still exists, we can only speculate what it may have looked like. However, I think there's a clue that's been overlooked due to widespread proliferation of the famous forged copy of the letter. The words "Executive Mansion" in the heading would indicate the original letter was likely written on preprinted White House stationary. Like-

The condolence letter written to Fanny McCullough:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:...Letter.jpg

The 1863 letter from Lincoln pictured midway through this 2016 article:
http://magazine.wfu.edu/2016/02/23/treasure-hunter/

Compare to the image of the 1861 condolence letter written to the parents of Elmer Ellsworth which was not written on preprinted stationary:
http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?col...b&recNum=0