(Cross-posted from St. Croix 360 and inspired by the Heritage Initiative.)
Boston Corbett (Library of Congress photo, via Wikipedia)
The strange story of the strange man who killed John Wilkes Booth apparently came to an end along the banks of Minnesota's Kettle River, 29 years after Thomas "Boston" Corbett shot Booth in a Virginia barn. Corbett fled to the north woods after escaping from a Kansas asylum, where he had been committed for waving a gun around in the Kansas legislature.
He is thought to have settled and spent the final part of his life in the forests of Hinckley, Minn. The popular Hinckley restaurant and doughnut shop Tobies has a bit about Corbett on their website, reporting that Corbett "settled in a small cabin just east of town, earning a living supplying venison for a logging camp near the Kettle River."
"Burying the dead, 90 in one trench."
Minnesota Historical Society photo.
On September 1, 1894, fire consumed 200,000 acres of land around Hinckley that had been cut over by the logging companies, leaving brush littered across the landscape, a vast tinderbox. There is a "Corbett, Thos, Age 57, residence, Hinckley; burned in the woods north-east of Hinckley, near Kettle River" in the official roll of the at least 418 victims of the fire.
Corbett probably suffered from mercury poisoning. A hat-maker by trade, like Alice in Wonderland's "Mad Hatter," the toxic metal had attacked his mind even before the Civil War, causing delusions and dangerous behavior. In 1858, he castrated himself to save himself from the temptation of Boston's prostitutes.
He served much of the war in the Union Army and was then in the party of soldiers that hunted the conspirators in Lincoln's assassination at Ford's Theatre. Corbett claimed God's hand aimed his gun when he shot Booth through the slats in the side of a barn where Booth was hiding and which the soldiers had just set on fire.
