The Gathering - an old hoax apparently but also a real shoe-maker

 

The Most Unique Picture Ever Taken 

Photo 1883 at Hunters Hot Springs, Montana

2 Wyatt Erp

3 Teddy Roosevelt

4 Doc Holiday (John Henry)

5 Morgan Erp

6 Liver Eating Johnson (we'll have to find out who he is!)

7 Buth Casidy (Geo. Parker)

8 Sundance Kid (Harry Langebough)

10 Bat Masterson

12 Harry Britton (another one I don't know)

14 Judge Roy Beean 

15 Ben Greenough (a third who I will be looking up!)

So this is the first result of my query at Duck Duck (which went right to Google for a change!)

The identities of these men, photographed on the porch of Doctor A.J. Hunter’s Hot Springs Hotel, are still in question.

"That photo was dated 1883. Evidently over the years as unwelcome facts eliminated some of the characters, other names and dates were substituted. Ben Greenough was substituted for Alan Pinkerton, founder of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, but Greenough would have been 13 and didn’t arrive in Montana until 1886. Butch Cassidy would have been 16. One version of the photo identifies a figure as the Sundance Kid while another identifies him as Bat Masterson.

I wrote to a Theodore Roosevelt historic site in New York. They didn’t positively say he couldn’t have been at the hot springs, but noted that he did not move West until 1884. He did visit North Dakota for three weeks in September, 1883, coming directly from New York and returning directly there. Also, the photo identifies him as “Teddy Roosevelt,” but he wasn’t called that until the 1890s, so the caption would have been written well after the event.

I also contacted the Judge Roy Bean Visitor Center in Langtry, Texas. The manager replied that they had no information concerning the judge’s whereabouts in 1883. All the records indicated that he probably did not leave Texas during that year and it was extremely doubtful that he could have been the man in the photo. Perhaps to make up for the loss of Judge Bean, someone had substituted Texas John Slaughter.

The amazing -- and frustrating -- discovery I made was that no matter how many inconsistencies I found, no matter how many figures had to be eliminated by being absent, too young or (even more convincingly) dead, people kept defending the photo and finding excuses. For whatever reason, they really wanted to believe it!

“Maybe the date is just wrong,” they’d say. “Maybe the names got mixed up.” “Maybe that’s not Morgan Earp, but that doesn’t mean it’s not Teddy Roosevelt.” “Maybe you can’t prove Roosevelt and Bean were there, but you can’t prove they weren’t.”

SOURCE: LYNDEL MEIKLE Open Range,

May 6, 2016 Updated Feb 7, 2017 

I'm adding this post to Sepia Saturday...which is all about old photos!

This week we have a photo of a young woman working in a factory setting...making shoes with sewing machines.

 I should share about my Great times 4 Grandfather Isaac Booth, (1795-1836) who was a shoe maker (cobbler by name) back in the days when it was all done by hand. He moved (1810) with his family from Stanford CT (Fairfield County) to Genoa, Caiuga County, New York by the time he was 15.  His father's residence was soon (1820) in Canandaigua, Ontario County, NY.  

But Isaac Booth Jr. married (1817) in Geneseo, Ontario County NY to Jane McElhaney. By 1820 his family was in Farmington, then Livonia by 1823...all in Ontario County NY. He moved to Green Creek, Sandusky OH by 1833, where his last child was born in July and his wife died in October. The baby died in Jan. 1834. And Isaac only lived to 1836 himself, dying in Canandaiga NY.  He was buried with Jane in Green Creek OH however.

The only photo I can share about him, is his headstone.

Isaac Booth, Died 17 August 1836.