BlinkX

Traveling after the Civil War wasn't a straightforward event, even for an assassin's corpse. Around sunrise on April 26, 1865, Booth was tracked down to a large Virginia tobacco barn. He was fleeing under the alias James W. Boyd. After refusing to exit, the barn was set ablaze by an overzealous tracker. But before he could escape the inferno, Booth suffered a gunshot wound which would lead to his death (via Navy Medicine, posted by Indiana State University). After he died, Booth's body was wrapped in a horse blanket and transferred from a market wagon, to a steamer ship, a government tugboat, and finally onto an ironclad, the U.S.S. Montauk, docked in the Washington Navy Yard (via Roger J Norton).

Arriving sometime around 1 a.m. or 3 a.m. on April 27, Booth's body was placed on a makeshift carpenter's bench next to a rotatable gun turret. The horse blanket that covered the body was removed and replaced with a tarpaulin. It was going to be an unusually hot day for April, the metal siding of the boat likely growing warm to the touch as the body awaited examination.

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