| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Legend of John Wilkes Booth: Myth, Memory, and a Mummy. By C. Wyatt Evans. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004. xvi, 269 pp. $24.95, ISBN 0-7006-1352-8.)
When John Wilkes Booth was killed by soldiers in Virginia in 1865, his body was immediately returned to Washington, D.C. A formal identification and autopsy took place. Although this process was properly done and witnessed, a huge mistake followed. Authorities provided false stories as to the disposition of his body. Anxious to consign the assassin to oblivion, they rushed his remains to a secret grave and so forestalled Lincoln haters from memorializing him. Not unexpectedly, it was not long before questions arose as to the reasons for the haste and confusion. Was the government covering up something? Had Booth, in fact, escaped?	1
C. Wyatt Evans's The Legend of John Wilkes Booth offers the first book-length treatment of the aftermath of this blunder. Evans's story starts in Enid, Oklahoma, where a drifter named David E. George committed suicide in 1903. Rumor soon swept the dusty boomtown that George was Booth. News of this astounding "civic curiosity" quickly reached a national audience, and George's body was embalmed and preserved for the gaze of the curious—hence a genuine twentieth-century mummy. Before long it was on tour.	. . .

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