372: Trail of Vengeance with Rob Hilliard

00:03:19:13 – 00:03:34:00
Dan LeFebvre
As longtime listeners of Based on a True Story know, I always like to start with an overall letter grade for a movie’s historical accuracy. So today we’re talking about 2025 Trail of Vengeance. What grade does it get?

00:03:34:02 – 00:04:00:25
Rob Hilliard
Well, it’s a little bit of a tough question to answer, mainly because it’s a fictional story. So, and they’re, you know, obviously we’re going to get into this there, there is at least one, true to life character in the story. And it certainly references real events like the Civil War and, and some specific things within the, specific actions within the Civil War that we’ll get to.

00:04:01:22 – 00:04:45:05
Rob Hilliard
But it is it really makes no pretense of being a true story. So it’s a little less like, things that you’ve covered in the past, like tombstone or, even like a series like Billy the Kid, which are based on true events, real people. And it’s kind of reshaping those. This is more like along the lines of, like a Dances With Wolves or, like there’s a movie called Shadow Riders with, Tom Selleck and, Sam Elliott and they those are both Westerns that are set shortly after the Civil War.

00:04:45:05 – 00:05:16:09
Rob Hilliard
And they reference back to the Civil War. But there, like I said, they don’t really make any pretense of being based on on, true story or all real characters. So that’s a prolonged way of saying I would probably give it a B, in because it wasn’t, there weren’t any, like, glaring anachronisms. There was nobody wearing, you know, re boxes or walking around or anything.

00:05:17:15 – 00:05:34:08
Rob Hilliard
And I didn’t go to the like the extensive trouble of looking at, well, I, I did actually a little bit, but looking at some of the armaments that were carrying and making sure that they dated to the right period and stuff, most of the things were were accurate. I did get a little bit of a chuckle.

00:05:34:08 – 00:05:55:29
Rob Hilliard
There’s a crowd scene where they show people kind of walking down the street in the town, and there’s kind of dozens of people, and the first thing that struck me was, they look awfully clean for being, you know, in kind of a, 1870 ish, type of time period. But, but yeah, that’s, you know, that’s minor stuff.

00:05:55:29 – 00:06:16:19
Rob Hilliard
So I would say it’s a B I think largely they, they capture the time period accurately. And, you know, like I said, they, they weren’t they weren’t attempting to portray it as, as an actual true story with, with one glaring exception that I, I know you’re going to hit right now.

00:06:16:22 – 00:06:43:05
Dan LeFebvre
You know what I mean? It is good. It’s good to know that, too, because I think a lot of times it just being set in a historical time period, it can just lend itself to, oh, this must be based on a true story. So it’s also good to know that. But the part that you probably are talking about is what I’m going to follow up with, because one of the key things to me when I watch Trail of Vengeance is it’s probably the first feature film that I’m aware of, at least that features John Scoble as one of the main characters.

00:06:43:12 – 00:06:54:16
Dan LeFebvre
And I know you’ve done a ton of research into the real John Scoble for your book. So what letter grade would you give the movie for just how it brings John Scoble to life on screen?

00:06:54:18 – 00:07:13:21
Rob Hilliard
Good question. And yeah, I guess it’s probably worth noting for everybody. We wouldn’t. Well, I shouldn’t say we wouldn’t be having the show, but you wouldn’t be having me on as a guest right now if it weren’t for the fact that I had written a book about, John’s Google. So, I really I won’t, I won’t, give you a long preamble on this one.

00:07:13:21 – 00:07:33:10
Rob Hilliard
I thought they did a really good job. As you might expect, I was a little nervous going into it. And I was like, hey, Amanda, they’re going to, you know, how are they going to handle this? Are they going to mess it up or whatever? But, I actually the, the letter grade I wrote that was an A-minus.

00:07:33:12 – 00:08:07:24
Rob Hilliard
And, I guess, I mean, I can just go ahead and give you the details on the only reason it’s an A minus. But really the way there’s one particular scene, where Scoble is talking to, Catherine, which is the Rumer Willis, character, and, the, he, he’s talking about his background and kind of giving, some of the story of how he was a spy during the Civil War and, that he had been, recruited to be a spy.

00:08:07:24 – 00:08:51:28
Rob Hilliard
And we’ll touch on that a bit later. But what he says there or the description that he goes through there, is really straight out of what we know about John Scoble. And so, kind of getting into that, what we know about John Scoble is entirely, there have been variations on it, but everything derives back to a book that was written by Allan Pinkerton called The Spy of the rebellion in 1883, and that, at the outset or very near the outset of the Civil War, the neither at the outbreak of the Civil War, neither the North nor the South had their own spy agency or what was then called Secret service.

00:08:52:09 – 00:09:21:27
Rob Hilliard
We use that terminology different today. When they said Secret Service, they would mean something more like our FBI or CIA. And that’s a term that goes back to England. And you know, long before that. So, but neither neither side had that at the outbreak of the war because the US was very much an isolated, isolationist country at the time, they didn’t really feel like they had the need to have one, until April of 1861.

00:09:21:27 – 00:09:46:19
Rob Hilliard
And all of a sudden they were they were in a war. And both sides immediately realized they needed that. So, the federal the Union side, they made the decision to, just much like we would today when you don’t have when you have a need that you need to fill and you don’t have a way of immediately sort of staffing up to do it at the government level, you just bring in the contractor.

00:09:46:22 – 00:10:22:10
Rob Hilliard
And so what they did was they hired a Pinkerton agency, or specifically hired Allan Pinkerton, who’s based in Chicago, and he basically picked up his whole Pinkerton Detective Agency lock, stock and barrel and brought them to Washington, D.C., and the people who the day before basically had been, detectives and investigating crimes and things like that. Now all of a sudden, they were spies and they were spies for, for the Union Army, for the Federals against the Confederacy.

00:10:22:13 – 00:10:46:26
Rob Hilliard
And so Pinkerton, 20 years later, like I said in 1883, wrote this book called The Spy The Rebellion. He’s you’ve heard me say this before, when you interviewed me in the past, Pinkerton was a brilliant, groundbreaking detective. Kind of a middling spy. He did some things that were pretty innovative, which we’ll talk a little bit about as we go through here.

00:10:47:18 – 00:11:19:03
Rob Hilliard
But he tended to over inflate, exaggerate troop numbers, and, basically not he would just sort of deliver everything in a, in a, in a batch. He wouldn’t make a concise report that he could hand to, general McClellan, who was ahead of the Army of the Potomac at the time, or to President Lincoln and and have, like, a concise intelligence report, he would just kind of almost, almost literally hand him a batch of papers and say, well, here’s what we found.

00:11:19:03 – 00:11:47:07
Rob Hilliard
And it was like, you know, one report from this person which conflicts with another report from this person, and they kind of left them on their own to sort that out. So not a great spy, spy chief, I should say. And, so. And he was a miserable writer, a terrible, a terrible author. And, so the reason I mentioned that part is when you’re reading The Spy of the rebellion, it desperately needs an editor.

00:11:48:02 – 00:12:16:10
Rob Hilliard
And it’s very confusing because you’ll say one thing in one place and then another thing in another, and you’re left scratching your head saying, well, I thought this person was doing this, but you saying on the same day they’re also doing this, you know, miles away. So the reason I launch into all that, backstory is and this finally gets back to why I’m saying it was an A minus, because the story is actually a little bit different.

00:12:16:10 – 00:12:54:03
Rob Hilliard
The way they reported it for 150 plus years, people accepted the way Pinkerton presented the story about John Scoble and about his spies being in Richmond in, this would have been spring of 1862, and there were, in Pinkerton’s book, there were four names that he that he talked about, in that contacts mainly. There’s a couple of others, but one was Timothy Webster, who was kind of the primary spy in the field, on behalf of, Pinkerton and his operatives.

00:12:55:11 – 00:13:32:15
Rob Hilliard
And in other words, John Scoble. Course. And then then he talks about how he hated Wharton and a Carey Creek lot. And so really, only difference of three letters between, you know, between the two names and it was, again, very confusing. He talks about them both being in Richmond in different contexts. And, so for the longest time, a century and a half, people were under the impression that that was one in the same person.

00:13:32:15 – 00:14:05:25
Rob Hilliard
And the Pinkerton was just such a lousy writer that he was really talking about one person, but he was using two different names, and it was understandable. When I first started researching this, I thought the exact same thing. I’m like, how can this person be here where he’s actually saying she’s here? And it doesn’t make sense. And but the key part and this is, this is how it’s stated in Trail of Vengeance, is that if you accept that they’re the same person, then he talks about, then I gotta make sure I get this right, because I can always get it backwards.

00:14:05:25 – 00:14:34:10
Rob Hilliard
I always carry who was with John Scoble and Hattie was with Tim Webster. So if you accept that they’re the same person, like I said, that was kind of the generally accepted, historiography, I suppose, to be the right term for, for a long time. Then that meant the school was with Tim Webster. So the and then when Tim Webster.

00:14:34:12 – 00:15:00:12
Rob Hilliard
But spoiler spoiler for my book and for the movie. But he was captured by the Confederates and, Hattie Laughton was also captured. Then, by extension, you have to accept that. Well, if they captured the two of them, they must have captured Scoble as well. And that’s how, I will not get the pronunciation of his name correct.

00:15:00:12 – 00:15:37:09
Rob Hilliard
But I believe with Bengay, I can ogbe. But I think that’s close. A friend of mine is Nigerian and I can argue he is also Nigerian, so I actually checked with him to try and get some more close on the pronunciation. But, that’s the actor who plays John Scoble. And when he’s explaining this in the scene where he’s talking to, Katherine or Rumer Willis, he says that he was captured with them with Webster Lawton, and then he was released because the Confederates didn’t believe, basically, that a black man would be intelligent enough to be a spot.

00:15:37:12 – 00:15:59:19
Rob Hilliard
And and like I said, that was accepted as fact for for a very long time, but specifically until 2018. And in 2018, there was a book came out with the, one of the great book titles of all time. It was called Pinkertons, Prostitutes and Spies. But we’re not going to get into the prostitutes part, but I had to look that up on their own.

00:15:59:19 – 00:16:26:23
Rob Hilliard
But, and it was, written by God and John Stuart, a historian, and John Stuart, who had really just gone deeper and dug deeper in the research than anybody had previously. And he was able to determine that they were, in fact, two separate women who both were spies for the Pinkerton Agency. Now, neither of those was their real name, which is what made it confusing.

00:16:26:25 – 00:16:54:10
Rob Hilliard
And, so the those were both names of Pinkerton and fabricated, like I said, that the how close they are made it appear as if he had just sort of screwed up and had a, as you know, one person called two different names, but at the end of the day, and this was, the conclusion of Stuart’s research was that they were, in fact, two separate women.

00:16:54:11 – 00:17:25:29
Rob Hilliard
He was able to identify who they were. And, that Hattie Lawton is actually he he poses I can’t recall now if, if this was actually verified 100%. But he poses that Hattie Lawton was actually Kate Warne, who was the famous female actor, important agency. And of course, you and I talked about her before. We talked about victims because she was kind of a lead character in that, and, but Carey.

00:17:25:29 – 00:17:58:14
Rob Hilliard
So that was Hattie Carey. Was a a woman named Kitty Brackett who was separately a female spy for the Pinkerton Agency. She was the one that worked with Scoble on a sort of separate but parallel mission in Richmond, while Webster and Warne, M.I.T., you know, whatever name you want to use, was, they were on, like I said, a separate but parallel mission, same time frame, different actors in Richmond.

00:17:58:16 – 00:18:35:24
Rob Hilliard
So with all that very confusing, I’m sure your listeners are probably scratching their heads. Now. What the heck is even talking about? And you need a, you know, scorecard to follow the players here, but, the in Trail of Vengeance, the story that’s presented is the original sort of accepted canon, which was that Goble was, captured as part of the, Webster Hattie, as part of them being caught, and then released and then he was released.

00:18:36:18 – 00:19:01:02
Rob Hilliard
It actually makes a whole lot more sense. If you look at it, the two separate people, the story, you know, kind of make sense. Better. And, and so and as you know, that’s the approach that I took in in my book. And I was very fortunate, actually, that that book came out, five years before mine, because to be honest with you, at the time, I was already working on it, and I was still scratching my head trying to figure out how am I gonna write this?

00:19:01:02 – 00:19:26:04
Rob Hilliard
Because it makes no sense. These two people are, or one person is doing two different things at the same time. So, shout out to John Stewart wherever you are. I’ve never spoken to him, but thanks a million for, you know, sorting that out. And, but that’s like I said, that’s the only reason I gave it a minus is because they didn’t incorporate that relatively new scholarship that, you know, that had been done.

00:19:27:06 – 00:19:57:15
Rob Hilliard
So one other thing to mention. I’m going to further muddy the waters here, but just in the interest of full disclosure, for your listeners, they there is, an ongoing, frankly, discussion or controversy around whether John Scoble is in fact, a real person. And so, again, the the source information that we have on Scoble is, Pinkerton’s book.

00:19:58:20 – 00:20:34:27
Rob Hilliard
As I’ve already said, it wasn’t very trustworthy when it came to his, sharing of information or reliable. Maybe trustworthy might not be the right word, but reliable. And he like to change people’s names. So wanted just to kind of set that context a little bit. The reason he did that was, spying maybe even today, but certainly in the 1800s was not considered to be a, respected profession.

00:20:35:12 – 00:20:58:17
Rob Hilliard
People really disliked spies and after the Civil War, of course, when he wrote his book in the 1880s, it was we were into the actually really almost out of the reconstruction period. There was still a lot of division in between the North and the South in the country, politically and much of other things. I say a bunch of other things, as I said, are not important.

00:20:58:17 – 00:21:27:21
Rob Hilliard
Certainly Jim Crow period in the South is extraordinarily important. I don’t want to dismiss that. But, it’s separate from what I’m trying to get to with, with Pinkerton’s handling of this. So because of those sensitivities, and because spies were not low respected, they he changed the names of every person who worked for him in the book whose name hadn’t become publicly known during the Civil War.

00:21:27:24 – 00:21:55:17
Rob Hilliard
So Webster, for example, became, he was captured. His name was in all the newspapers. So everybody knew who he was. So he used Pinkerton uses the name Tim Webster in The Spy for the rebellion. A couple other, people who worked for him, during that period. Price Lewis is one. I can’t think of any other names off the top of my head, but anyway, they their names also became known during the war.

00:21:55:17 – 00:22:31:18
Rob Hilliard
So he uses their names in the book, but, Hattie Laughton and Terry Lot and their names did not become. It was never known who they were at the time of the war, or even after. And so he chose to use, pseudonyms for them. And he very likely did the same for John Scoble. So the controversy around whether Scoble was actually a real person or not is based on the fact that there’s really no record of him prior to the Civil War or after the Civil War.

00:22:31:23 – 00:22:54:11
Rob Hilliard
There’s just the little basically one year period within the war that, Pinkerton writes about in his book, The Problem. And that’s, you know, that’s valid, right? If you can’t find any verification or second source. I mean, that’s ironically, that’s how intelligence works when you gather one sort year by gather one piece of information, you try to confirm that with a second piece of information that aligns.

00:22:54:11 – 00:23:25:20
Rob Hilliard
Right. And here we are six years later trying to do that about a spot. And but the problem is, John Scoble very likely wasn’t his real name. Almost certainly Pinkerton changed some facts about him. Facts. I guess I’ll, er, quote that, but. So, changed some of the story to, help protect Scoles identity.

00:23:25:23 – 00:23:49:27
Rob Hilliard
And in doing so, you totally lose the thread. Now, I said earlier that, Mr. Stewart had gone back and done research and was able to ferret out just who Carrie Lawton and Hattie Lawton were. There’s a critically important distinction there. And that is this was the 1800s, and they were white. Scoble was blond. He was born a slave.

00:23:50:00 – 00:24:09:12
Rob Hilliard
So there had been no record of his birth, no record of where he lived? No, he wouldn’t appear in any census records. Certainly until after the Civil War. And but the problem is, after the Civil War, we wouldn’t know what name to look for, to see whether he was there or not. Because, again, John Scoble probably not his real name.

00:24:09:15 – 00:24:17:24
Rob Hilliard
So as I like to say, you have a guy who was born a slave, became a spy, and is only biographer, probably changed his name.

00:24:17:26 – 00:24:20:24
Dan LeFebvre
So really hard to find that second source. Then.

00:24:20:27 – 00:25:06:18
Rob Hilliard
Exactly. So to get that tie and get that verification, it’s almost impossible. That’s not to say that I’m going to, you know, take a stand and say no, he is absolutely real person. Unquestionably. You know, that’s those people who don’t believe he was real or wrong. Because I don’t know that verification either. But, it is the the preponderance of historians and very well respected historians not only over 150 years, but even much more recently, there were several who, there was, a guy named Ken Nagler who worked for the CIA, who researched into Scoble.

00:25:06:29 – 00:25:26:26
Rob Hilliard
He believes in to be a real person. There was another, man who worked for the NSA. We’re getting into all the spy agencies in here. And his name was Donald Markel, who became an expert on espionage in the Civil War after you retired from the NSA. And he very much believed that Jobs Global was a real person.

00:25:27:20 – 00:25:55:19
Rob Hilliard
So, like I said, these are not people who, from a hundred plus years ago, these are much more current, people who’ve done this research in the past, I don’t know, decade or 15 years. And, so the preponderance of, proof or the preponderance of professional historians believe or accept that Scoble was a real person.

00:25:55:22 – 00:26:06:02
Rob Hilliard
But, there is there is a, reasonable doubt there, or, I don’t know, whatever you want to use. And like I said, for the benefit of your listeners, I wanted to make sure that we that we touched on that as well.

00:26:06:02 – 00:26:27:14
Dan LeFebvre
So it’s fascinating. It’s fascinating to me that they were able to separate the two women, hundreds of years later. Two I mean, that sort of thing. I mean, because you are talking about spies and they’re purpose is to not be known. All right. So, so, so, so you have all these different things working against you and still being able to do that.

00:26:27:14 – 00:26:50:03
Dan LeFebvre
So it would make sense. It just makes logical sense to me that, you know, if Alan Pinkerton is writing something that Scoble would have to be based on somebody, we might not know what his real name was, but the point of just making somebody up, like, if we know that these two women were actually two separate women, he didn’t make them up.

00:26:50:05 – 00:27:13:03
Rob Hilliard
Right. That’s that’s true. And there’s there’s a really, important point to be made. I’m really glad you said that. There’s an important point to be made there. One is, you said, you know, is he a real person? There is a school of thought that may be Scoble, the character in, Pinkerton’s book was an amalgam.

00:27:13:03 – 00:27:33:17
Rob Hilliard
Maybe it was because we certainly know that he used people who were, or employed, I should say, use employed, which is important because they were getting paid. But people who had previously been slaves, that he absolutely used them to gather intelligence and that he interviewed them when they were escaping, or had escaped across, Confederate lines into Union lines.

00:27:33:19 – 00:27:59:12
Rob Hilliard
So we know all that that’s documented outside of, a Pinkerton’s book. But the, there is a thought that he might be, like I said, maybe, maybe a combination of a couple characters together, as opposed to just one person. Again, we’ll never know. The other thing, part of the reason we’ll never know is because, as I said, the packages were based in Chicago.

00:27:59:12 – 00:28:25:13
Rob Hilliard
That was their main office. And, the great Chicago Fire of 1871 burned up all their records. So, there’s a there’s a gap there as well. So you have the time gap and then you have the, you know, physically losing all the files. Gap. And, there was another point that I want to come back to there, and I, I veered off and lost myself.

00:28:26:13 – 00:28:56:20
Rob Hilliard
But the, Oh, you you said when you were talking about. Well, he wrote about two real women, and they were able to verify that if you kind of look at the if you start to question, did Pinkerton fabricate Scoble, you know, out of whole cloth and was he not just a real person at all? The immediate question that comes to my mind is, why would he do that?

00:28:56:22 – 00:29:51:10
Rob Hilliard
Right? And now in first Pinkerton, he was a staunch abolitionist. Well, prior to the Civil War. And so he certainly believed in emancipation, for, for blacks. But he when if you put yourself in his position now spin back to 1883, I’m sure we can all easily do that. To write and write about and essentially glorify, a black character in that time period, which, as I kind of alluded to earlier, you’re talking, you know, Jim Crow era in the South, reconstruction has essentially fallen apart, very deep and, and painful racial divisions, within the country.

00:29:52:28 – 00:30:28:14
Rob Hilliard
So what would be the upside for him? Like, he wasn’t doing it to sell more books, right? If anything, it was probably going to have the opposite effect. It was probably going to cause he would sell less books if he by appearing, sympathetic to, to blacks in that time period. And so, like, just to make himself look like a cool guy or I like, there’s really no, like I said, if anything, I would have created most likely a negative or more of a negative reaction, more of a negative backlash than than any sort of positive one.

00:30:28:14 – 00:31:01:06
Rob Hilliard
So it’s hard to see what his motivation might have been in creating, a fictional Scoble character and addressing him as or, you know, advertising him as, a real person. That’s the that’s the part of the aside from what I mentioned about the historians and all those things, in their investigations. But, that’s the part that just doesn’t really ring true in the John school was not a real person argument.

00:31:01:06 – 00:31:05:22
Rob Hilliard
Like what’s what would be the benefit of Pinkerton making him up?

00:31:05:24 – 00:31:21:05
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah. No, that’s a great point. And it’s speaking of the talk of changing names and things like that, that Pinkerton in his book, if we go back to the movie, there is text at the beginning of the movie that is alludes to something along those lines. It’s kind of one of the key plot points throughout the entire movie.

00:31:21:11 – 00:31:49:00
Dan LeFebvre
I’m going to go ahead and read some of that opening text. It says based on historical figures and events during the American Civil War, the Pinkerton Agency, under the commission of Abraham Lincoln, created a secret spy group known as the woods to infiltrate the Confederate army. They named the woods because their code names uniformly ended with wood. And then throughout the movie, we learn about these spies that had code names like Kirkwood and Westwood and things like that.

00:31:49:03 – 00:31:52:28
Dan LeFebvre
Was there really a spy group known as The Woods?

00:31:53:01 – 00:32:14:12
Rob Hilliard
So when I first watched the movie, which was before, you and I talked about this and, I hadn’t seen these questions and that came up on the screen, as you said, like right at the gates before the start of the movie, actually, and I’ve done I don’t certainly don’t know everything there is to know about spies in the Civil War or out of the Civil War.

00:32:14:14 – 00:32:39:20
Rob Hilliard
But I’ve done extensive, extensive research on the Pinkerton spies during the Civil War. And as soon as I popped up, I was watching with my wife, my son, and I turned to them. And of course, they’re looking at me like, is that true? And we and I’m like, no, absolutely not true. And and I’m like, it’s, you know, totally made up and so cut like, you know, first 10s.

00:32:39:20 – 00:33:32:22
Rob Hilliard
Right. I’m already off on the, a train wreck, you know, but I was wrong. Well, I was kind of wrong. What I said was correct, that they didn’t use the the wood suffix effectively, as code names during the Civil War. That part is correct. They didn’t do that. But, it apparently started very shortly, like within a year or two after the Civil War that Alan Pinkerton started using that code system, not only for his operating lives, but also for, informants who were, I’ll kind of say the good guys, people who were, who were providing that information that they were able to use to capture criminals.

00:33:33:08 – 00:33:59:23
Rob Hilliard
And interestingly, well, there’s a couple interesting points about one is he had a similar system that he used for criminals or people they were investigating, except they use the suffix stone. So it would be like, you know, Featherstone or capstone or whatever. He would assign these names to people they were investigating. So the woods were the good guys?

00:34:00:10 – 00:34:19:09
Rob Hilliard
Technically the spies, as the text of the movie said. And then they didn’t mention the stone part, but the stone would be, the bad guys. And these were just to be clear. It’s not like they took, like it wasn’t Lafayette Stone or Wolf Wood. They didn’t take those names. And added something on to it.

00:34:19:11 – 00:34:45:14
Rob Hilliard
They would make, he would make up, you know, like a four letter, thing, like I said, like Atwood or, whatever. And then that would become that would become their name. But, and they would use that in a, telegraph code, which of course, was communication, not over time or letters. And Pinkerton was a big believer in substitution codes, which he did use during the Civil War.

00:34:45:17 – 00:35:10:09
Rob Hilliard
And he had a very extensive about 170 words, if I remember right, substitution code, where it would be like, I don’t know, remember him off top of his operatives had to memorize all of them. Fortunately, I didn’t. I would have been a terrible operator because I know these, but I don’t remember them. But he would say, like lamp Boyle and that might mean cavalry.

00:35:10:12 – 00:35:38:03
Rob Hilliard
And, coal would, would instead mean, soldier or something like that. So he would use that substitution code. So this was, this would and Stone system was really just an extension of that for people’s names or and then they kept in their files extensive, extensive notes on who, what, what the real person’s name was. So it would be Dan LaFave.

00:35:38:03 – 00:36:03:19
Rob Hilliard
You know, I’ll give you a good guy named. Yeah. Them would, or call wood or whatever. And so and then it would be, you know, Rob Hilliard, capstone and I would be somebody they would be investigating. So they actually had these cards, that, that had those all listed out and they maintained them at the agency.

00:36:03:27 – 00:36:34:02
Rob Hilliard
So another thing thing about this that started, like I said, after the Civil War, so let’s say 1860, 66, 67, somewhere in that ballpark. They used that system, the Pinkerton Agency, which still exists today, by the way. They used that system until 1965, 1965, so almost 100 years or basically a hundred years. And the only reason they stopped it.

00:36:34:03 – 00:36:57:06
Rob Hilliard
So the Pinkerton Agency was being run by Pinkerton descendants up until that time. And as long as they were pictured in descendant as the president of the company, they continued to use that wood and stone system for their agents and, and, and informants and, I can’t remember his name. I want to say it was like Robert Pinkerton the third.

00:36:57:06 – 00:37:23:13
Rob Hilliard
Maybe, he was Allan Pinkerton’s great, great 2 or 3 great mature, grandson. And, when he finally retired or handed over the reins of the, of the company, that’s when in 1965, that’s when they stopped using that system. So, so, yeah, it’s, like I said when I first saw it, I’m like, no, they didn’t do that during a Civil War.

00:37:23:15 – 00:37:34:12
Rob Hilliard
Technically, they didn’t do it during a Civil war. The movie plays a little bit fast and loose with the timing, but they’re rolling off by a couple of years. And the basis of the idea is, very much factual.

00:37:34:15 – 00:37:52:10
Dan LeFebvre
You might have already answered my next question about that, though, because if we don’t really know if John Scoble was real, but not to get too far, the the storyline in the movie, we do find out that, John Goebbels codename towards the end of the movie, we find out I think his codename was like James Howard. So it didn’t even go with wood there.

00:37:52:15 – 00:37:57:00
Dan LeFebvre
But do we know if John Scoble ever used a codename James Howard like we see in the movie?

00:37:57:22 – 00:38:09:17
Rob Hilliard
He he did not know or not. We don’t. Not in any time, as documented. Let’s put it that way. Okay? It’s not again, we don’t know his real name, so he might use some other name. Right?

00:38:09:19 – 00:38:11:14
Dan LeFebvre
John Scoble might have been the codename.

00:38:11:16 – 00:38:38:27
Rob Hilliard
Right. Exactly. Yeah, it could be exactly the opposite. So, yeah, if we go back into that vortex again. But, I did do a little digging, though, and there this is very tangential, but there was actually James Howard, who, was connected to the Pinkertons during the Civil War. He was a, Somebody who was working in.

00:38:38:27 – 00:39:01:24
Rob Hilliard
And I didn’t write this down. I should have, I can’t remember if he was a telegraph operator, or he was maybe an employee of the Telegraph. Company, living in Washington, DC at the outbreak of the war. But he was a Confederate sympathizer. Now, that is not at all unusual. There were hundreds of people who fit that description, and many of them became spies during the war.

00:39:02:05 – 00:39:34:06
Rob Hilliard
Howard did, in fact, become a spy. It was passing information that he learned in Washington, DC and sending it south to the Confederacy when he was identified by Pinkerton, Allan Pinkerton, and, ultimately, I think he was arrested. And, I think they actually just sent him south. I don’t think you jail, but, but anyway, that’s, you know, an interesting tie in.

00:39:34:06 – 00:39:55:26
Rob Hilliard
It’s weird because it’s kind of the opposite of of John Scoble. Maybe it’s just a coincidence. I mean, James Howard isn’t that unusual of a name that it might might land that I’m not? But, But you. No, that was not. There was. No, I guess I should be a little bit more specific. There was never a codename.

00:39:55:28 – 00:40:04:08
Rob Hilliard
Pinkerton never identified a code name that Scoble used during his time. As a as an undercover operative.

00:40:04:10 – 00:40:12:17
Dan LeFebvre
And, I mean, especially if we don’t even really know John Scoble. Then how would we start to know someone? Those other details. We don’t know the base thing.

00:40:12:19 – 00:40:18:16
Rob Hilliard
Yeah, if you’re already given a fictitious name, but why bother trying to get to some other fictitious name? So.

00:40:18:18 – 00:40:39:07
Dan LeFebvre
Well, I have to ask then, because, you know, a lot of movies do make up characters, and maybe you already answered this in the beginning when you were talking about how it was a more of a fictional story in the movie, but the main storyline in the movie revolves around Catherine Atherton and then the main bad guy is a guy named Colonel William Davis, and the only other person in the movie that I would call a main character.

00:40:39:07 – 00:40:53:20
Dan LeFebvre
Feel free to add more if you want, but it would be, Colonel Davis’s henchman, one of the guys named Frank Cooper, and I’m really kind of calling him a main character because he’s the one kind of going around trying to find the woods. And, he’s also recognized by John Scoble because of a huge scar on his face.

00:40:53:22 – 00:40:58:07
Dan LeFebvre
Do we know if any of those people were based on real people from history?

00:40:58:09 – 00:41:29:07
Rob Hilliard
Most likely not. Catherine Allerton is a fictional character. William Davis. Colonel William Davis, who was the Jesse he character? Was, he is a fictional character. I did do some digging just to after I missed on the wood thing. Then I’m like, man, I better all the way back there. But, there were actually a couple of Colonel William Davises in the Civil War on both sides.

00:41:29:10 – 00:41:49:17
Rob Hilliard
Interestingly, some for the Union and for the, Confederacy. But none of them. None of them fit the fit. The description of this character, they were like the war was in Massachusetts or from Massachusetts or whatever. And then, the other one never served in the West. He served in Georgia, if I remember, in the Confederacy.

00:41:49:17 – 00:41:52:00
Dan LeFebvre
So, again, just a popular name. It sounds.

00:41:52:03 – 00:42:17:17
Rob Hilliard
And, that’s a good segue, because Frank Cooper, speaking of popular names, I actually got on the, National Park Service website, and they have a say if anybody out there wants to find out about their ancestors in the Civil War or whatever, you go to the National Park Service, they have a, a subsection of their site where you can search Civil War records.

00:42:18:15 – 00:42:53:03
Rob Hilliard
And really useful, really helpful. So I search Frank Cooper, which proved to be kind of a mistake because there were 45,130 Frank Cooper’s or it was 1000 results. So that was kind of a fail. And then, I tried to narrow down a little bit, on the assumption that he was from Missouri, and we’ll get to the, the Kansas, Missouri, piece of story here in a bit, but I still got when I hit the Missouri, there were 2207 results for that super not section.

00:42:53:03 – 00:43:03:05
Rob Hilliard
So, yeah, again, I think Frank Cooper was just probably, you know, they threw a dart at a, at a name board and that’s the one they came up with.

00:43:03:05 – 00:43:10:02
Dan LeFebvre
So, I mean, that’s, it sounds like one of the bigger targets on the board for a random name. I mean, it’s a it’s a real name that a lot of people had.

00:43:10:02 – 00:43:31:09
Rob Hilliard
So probably absolutely correct. And there’s and there’s, you know, hundreds of variations. There’s, you know, Francis Cooper and then there’s just Frank Cooper and then was Frank Lynn Cooper. And of course, all of them turn up results. So, yeah, I think he was, he was I could tell he was just a fictional character.

00:43:31:11 – 00:43:52:06
Dan LeFebvre
Well, one of the core plot points in the movie revolves around Katherine’s husband, Caleb. It seems to know John Scoble when they were both spies for the Pinkertons. And speaking of the names, Caleb went by William Kirkwood when he was a spy. And so the very beginning of the movie, Caleb is killed, and then Katherine reaches out to Scoble to try to help track down her husband’s killers.

00:43:52:06 – 00:44:09:17
Dan LeFebvre
And that’s kind of the whole trail of vengeance from the title of the movie. How realistic is that concept of John Scoble being called to help the family of a former Pinkerton associate? They don’t seem to be in the Pinkertons now or in the timeline of the movie. But, you know, as a former associate.

00:44:09:19 – 00:44:43:18
Rob Hilliard
There’s no record that I found of anything like that happening. But I will say that it’s plausible. And the reason I say that is, Allan Pinkerton himself. And the agency, even after he was gone, after he passed away, were very big on loyalty. Amongst their agents and, and between them and, I’m sorry, amongst their agents and between Pinkerton and and the operatives.

00:44:44:17 – 00:45:12:22
Rob Hilliard
And just to give a couple of example, like there are a couple photos of that people can find online of, Pinkerton operatives during the Civil War, actually at the time of Civil War. And, there’s there’s actually one that I use in presentations where I’m talking about whether John Scoble was a real person or not, because they have all these people sat around a table, and there’s one black man seated in the center of the table where they’re all eating dinner together.

00:45:13:24 – 00:45:42:18
Rob Hilliard
And, and he’s kind of staring in the camera. I’m like, well, if he wasn’t a real person, then who was this guy? Right. But my point there is, they clearly all kind of hung out together and there’s a couple other pictures, like people maybe seeing pictures of certain units from the Civil War where everybody’s lined up in front of a tent and they’re all, you know, got their kind of, get the beards, go and, and and, nobody’s ever smiling because it.

00:45:42:19 – 00:46:04:15
Rob Hilliard
Yeah. Because it took so long to take a picture, but yeah, they’re all standing, puffed up. And so there’s a couple of pictures like that just of the Pinkertons. And so and then the other thing, the other really good example, this is, I mentioned Kate Warner earlier when she passed away, which was just a few years after the Civil War.

00:46:05:02 – 00:46:32:25
Rob Hilliard
Allan Pinkerton actually footing the bill for her funeral and her burial plot and paid for her headstone. And that’s people can still go see that today. It’s, sort of a morbid, I guess, tourist attraction or tourist site in Chicago or outside Chicago. So there was, like I said, they they really kind of bred this loyalty, between agents.

00:46:32:25 – 00:46:53:05
Rob Hilliard
And I mean, if you think about it. Right. Those are especially if you’re undercover, those are the only people you can depend on. They’re the only people who know your real story and who are going to have your back, and try and protect you when, when you know what hits the fan. And, so, I mean, it’s understandable, right?

00:46:53:05 – 00:47:00:04
Rob Hilliard
It would be not much different, I’m sure, from like, like I said earlier from the FBI or CIA today.

00:47:00:07 – 00:47:16:23
Dan LeFebvre
Oh, we see him with military, too. I mean, you see, I mean, I’ve seen in a lot of movies like, you know, you’re fighting alongside somebody right next to you and they’re the ones that have your back. So even after towards the end of the movie, the war is over, you know, and but they’re still they still have this camaraderie.

00:47:16:23 – 00:47:26:06
Dan LeFebvre
So it does make sense that, you know, during a War two, in the Civil War, these spies would have that sort of bond as well. That makes sense.

00:47:26:09 – 00:47:36:23
Rob Hilliard
Yeah. Yeah. So like I said, very much plausible. But there’s no, I wasn’t able to find any record of that having happened with other any other agents.

00:47:36:26 – 00:47:56:05
Dan LeFebvre
What is speaking of the Civil War, the movie wasn’t really clear about exactly what year it said. It just kind of suggests that it’s happening after the Civil War and after John squabbles time in the Pinkertons. So when Catherine goes to meet John Scoble for the first time in the movie, he’s staying in a place called Cades Cove, Tennessee.

00:47:56:07 – 00:48:07:27
Dan LeFebvre
And it it seems that he’s been there for a while since Catherine was able to track him down there after her husband is killed. Do we know if the real John Scoble lived in Cades Cove after his time in the Pinkertons?

00:48:08:00 – 00:48:34:02
Rob Hilliard
Unfortunately, and I, you know, I kind of already said this, but we we virtually know nothing of Scoble. Prior a little bit prior to the war. No real details, but we kind of where he came from and. And that he was a slave after the war. We know nothing. And that’s, Again, Pinkerton wrote the book later, and he was focused on.

00:48:34:02 – 00:48:53:18
Rob Hilliard
I mean, the title of his book was The Spy of the rebellion. So obviously that’s what he was talking about was the Civil War. He doesn’t mention anything about any of his operatives after the war, even though we have documentation that several of them did continue to work as Pinkerton agents after the war. But in the in the book, you know, he doesn’t get into that.

00:48:54:18 – 00:49:19:09
Rob Hilliard
So we don’t know that there is very much a real place called Cades Cove in Tennessee. Anybody who’s been to Great Smoky Mountain National Park probably knows about that, because it’s one of the major tourist attractions in the park. Gorgeous area. Can, you know, down the valley with the mountains behind it, but, yeah, we don’t know.

00:49:19:12 – 00:49:32:10
Rob Hilliard
You know, we don’t know Scoble live there. It’s against plausible that he might have, but, he might have because he lived in Butte, Montana. I mean, we really don’t know.

00:49:32:13 – 00:49:55:03
Dan LeFebvre
Fair point, fair point. During one of the conversations in the movie between John Scoble and Kathryn, we find there’s there’s a few clues that the dialog just kind of puts in there about John’s childhood. He mentions his dad’s name was John Armstrong. We don’t hear his mom’s name, but he talks about how she read to him from an Ethiopian Bible that they hid on their mattress while they were enslaved.

00:49:55:06 – 00:50:04:17
Dan LeFebvre
And then she died when he was just 12 years old. How well does the movie do, telling the bits and pieces that we know about John’s cobbles? Parents?

00:50:04:19 – 00:50:39:18
Rob Hilliard
Well, again, this was this was to me an interesting question, but for different reasons. So we don’t know anything about his parents. We know that, he was a slave in Mississippi prior to the war. The plantation that he lived on was owned by a guy named Scoble. And much like, you know, many slaves at the time, even after they got out of slavery, they adopted the surname of of the person around the the plantation and kept them, in slavery.

00:50:41:09 – 00:51:10:18
Rob Hilliard
And so that’s the that’s how Pinkerton presents it in the book that that he lived on the plantation of a guy who’s last Abel Scoble. The we like I said, we don’t know anything about his parents. What was it funny to me? Interesting to me is. And this is total coincidence. And maybe I should have started with at the very beginning, of our talk here that I don’t have any association with the movie.

00:51:11:19 – 00:51:39:01
Rob Hilliard
Other than the fact that we, you know, we have a character in common between the two things, but, like, I don’t know that anybody I don’t know the writers or director or any of those people. And and as far as I know, they don’t know anything about me either. So, the reason I say that now is, and the reason I find it interesting is totally coincidentally, we both chose to present very similar backgrounds for Scoble.

00:51:39:27 – 00:52:01:21
Rob Hilliard
So in my book, I talked about his parents, and I had, his mom passed away in childbirth. When when John was born. And then that his father lived, I think until I forget, I said he was, I got to check my notes. I you would think I would know this.

00:52:02:07 – 00:52:05:13
Dan LeFebvre
So I wrote it down. So you have to remember exactly like.

00:52:05:25 – 00:52:24:18
Rob Hilliard
I wrote it twice. I wrote it in the book, and then I saw it in my notes. But. So in my in my story, when John’s father passed away, when, John was six years old. So, as you just said, they had a somewhat similar story where his mother dies when he was young, and she’s not named in quotes in that way.

00:52:24:18 – 00:52:49:14
Rob Hilliard
She’s named in my book either. And, and then you know that his father kind of lives a little while longer, but, but the reality is, you know, we don’t know any of that stuff. I think it’s probably not a total coincidence that we both chose that little piece of the storyline, about his mother passing away.

00:52:49:14 – 00:53:26:22
Rob Hilliard
Because, as you might expect, the lifespan, people who were in slavery at that time was extraordinarily short, and for a whole variety of reasons. But, medical care wasn’t really a thing, for them. And, so if he got sick, if you were having a baby, if you were, if any little thing happened to you, not to mention the fact, you know, very poor nutrition, extraordinarily hard work and working conditions, you know, like, go on a run, but I’m sure you get the point.

00:53:27:09 – 00:53:46:06
Rob Hilliard
So it would it would not be at all unusual, for someone’s parents to to have died young and, so, like I said, probably not a total coincidence, but I just thought it was kind of odd. Kind of funny that, we ended up on a somewhat similar path, you know, totally unrelated to each other.

00:53:46:08 – 00:54:01:25
Dan LeFebvre
So you mentioned, Scoble being on a plantation whose name was Scoble. Have you ever done research to see if you could find, like, where that was and then kind of go from that direction to see if we can learn more about John Scoble or.

00:54:02:04 – 00:54:26:14
Rob Hilliard
Yes. The short answer is yes. And I wasn’t, wasn’t able to come up with anything from the name. And, there’s even I’m now I’m trying to remember this is, this is the, the tenuous line that a somebody who writes historical fiction falls into is when I think about these things, I can’t remember what’s actually true.

00:54:26:15 – 00:54:29:04
Rob Hilliard
When I moved up.

00:54:29:06 – 00:54:31:28
Dan LeFebvre
So it’s plausible. It must be true.

00:54:32:01 – 00:54:57:12
Rob Hilliard
Right. Exactly. And so I’d have to go back and look at the spy of the rebellion. Pinkerton’s book again. But I think there was a mention. I’m almost positive. No, I don’t think about it, that there’s a mention of a specific county in Mississippi. Although I don’t remember the name of it. Now. And and like I said, I went back and looked at, this is what I was researching the book.

00:54:57:12 – 00:55:22:19
Rob Hilliard
So this is, you know, pushing ten years ago now, but I looked at, troop regiment names, officer names from, you know, from the troops who were raised in those areas. Looked a little bit land ownership records in those areas. Didn’t see anything that, you know, that had the name Scoble in it. Which probably, again, just lends itself to the fact that he that Pinkerton fabricated that name.

00:55:22:19 – 00:55:34:07
Rob Hilliard
And, it might have been Cooper. For all we know, Frank Cooper was frank there with thousands of them. So, yeah, no. No way to tell.

00:55:34:09 – 00:55:58:00
Dan LeFebvre
Well, since we’re on the topic of of John was family, there are also some conversations in the movie where he talks about his wife and kids. He says he married a woman named Fanny Woodrow in 1859. They had a daughter named says Mary Armstrong. And then when she passed away, Fanny left with their son, John Armstrong Jr. And so that’s why, during the timeline of the movie, John Scoble is single.

00:55:58:02 – 00:56:02:01
Dan LeFebvre
Do we know anything about that? If that’s accurate?

00:56:02:03 – 00:56:33:25
Rob Hilliard
Not no, we don’t. So there’s, John John’s Goebbels wife, and I’m calling her that because she doesn’t. She’s not named. She gets, a whopping two sentences in Pinkerton’s book, The Spy of the rebellion. One saying that she existed and the other saying that she, took work in Richmond, Virginia. And that’s it. That’s all.

00:56:33:26 – 00:57:00:27
Rob Hilliard
That’s all we know about her. So. And and she is, again, we’re talking about a book was written in 83. Wouldn’t be very unusual for anybody, of any color or anything else, of a woman to be described as so-and-so’s wife, right? As opposed to using her her proper name. And that was, unfortunately for researchers of the 21st century, that was the approach that picker didn’t, chose.

00:57:00:27 – 00:57:13:27
Rob Hilliard
So, we don’t even we’ll know her first name, let alone her last name. You know, no indication of whether they had kids or not. So, that’s, you know.

00:57:14:00 – 00:57:36:27
Dan LeFebvre
One of those things we don’t know, which probably means I thought it was interesting that in the movie, they they called her Woodrow, which, you know, we’ve been talking about how there all these woods in it. So I was like, well, maybe she’s a spy, too. But of course, we don’t even really know much about her. Then we’re probably not going to know if she also was recruited by Pinkertons, although I would say this is just my assumption.

00:57:36:29 – 00:57:55:13
Dan LeFebvre
If Allan Pinkerton went to the length of at least mentioning that she existed, if she actually worked for him as a spy, I would assume there would be more information in there. But I might be. I mean, that’s just my assumption. Like maybe he would have said a little bit more about her.

00:57:55:15 – 00:58:21:13
Rob Hilliard
Yeah. Well, if if I would say, I think you’re you’re on the right track there. If she was spying for him during the Civil War, but that might not be true if she were working as a, Pinkerton detective after the Civil War. Right. And because, like I said, he basically drew a line and, and didn’t really talk about any of the operatives after the war.

00:58:22:18 – 00:58:33:11
Rob Hilliard
So and I’m not saying that to be coy. I’m just I’m just saying, you know, you’re right that if she was if she was actively spying on the Civil War, she would have certainly got a mentioned.

00:58:33:13 – 00:58:43:18
Dan LeFebvre
But it was after the Civil War that they started using the word codename. Right. So those two things then wouldn’t really my, my assumption would have been way out there.

00:58:43:20 – 00:58:49:03
Rob Hilliard
Yeah, I maybe, but you know, maybe the screenwriters were they might have been setting themselves up for a sequel there.

00:58:49:03 – 00:59:06:19
Dan LeFebvre
I don’t oh, there we go. We’re to see. Wait, you already talked about this a little bit. And there is a point in the movie where Catherine asks, well, how he met the Pinkertons, and he tells her that Mr. Pinkerton debriefed runaways and free slaves, and then recruited some of them to return back to the South as spies.

00:59:06:21 – 00:59:12:14
Dan LeFebvre
And I’m assuming then that’s how Scoble, the real John Scoble, was recruited into the Pinkertons.

00:59:12:17 – 00:59:36:19
Rob Hilliard
Yeah, that’s exactly right. In fact, I was, this was the scene that I was referencing earlier where he talks about how he’s recruiting. It is spot on. And then the only little wobble that you know, was in there, from my standpoint was when he talks about being in Richmond and when he says that he was, you know, he was captured with all of Webster and, and Lorton.

00:59:37:22 – 01:00:06:17
Rob Hilliard
So and again, that’s a completely forgivable one because that was, you know, kind of the accepted, backstory for Scoble. But, the just to get a little bit into the, the Pinkerton side of it here, he was, as I said before, he was a very staunch abolitionist, and felt very strongly about emancipation with that.

01:00:06:19 – 01:00:36:03
Rob Hilliard
He was one of, if not the first, people in the intelligence community. And that not includes, like Army intelligence or whoever else, to recognize that these slaves who were escaping and coming into Union line, there were largely slaves, not exclusively. There were some people who were free, people who were also coming across, but, they they were what became known as Contrabands.

01:00:36:06 – 01:01:05:22
Rob Hilliard
And that was the term that was used for slaves who came out of the South and into the North. They were legally considered to be contraband of war, meaning that, and it’s kind of a I always thought kind of a pretty sweet, twist of, legal interpretation where the, the Southerners, the Confederates felt that the slaves were property, right?

01:01:05:22 – 01:01:29:23
Rob Hilliard
They weren’t people. They were property. And so very early in the war, a couple of slaves came across, got onto the Union lines and, and the, after the skirmish that had happened, the Confederate, officer reached out to the Union officer and said, hey, I want my slaves back. And that Union officer happened to be Benjamin Butler, who was another staunch abolitionist of Massachusetts.

01:01:29:25 – 01:01:54:16
Rob Hilliard
But he was also a lawyer. And, and Butler said, well, not so fast if you’re saying that they’re not people, that they’re property and they were captured, effectively captured during a battle, then it would be no different than a cannon or a horse or a rifle. And I’m not giving you your cannon or your horses or your rifles back.

01:01:54:16 – 01:02:28:20
Rob Hilliard
So I’m not giving you your swing back either. And that’s where the in his sort of legal decision, as it were, on that, or his legal rationale, he actually used the terminology contraband of war. And then, within a month or so, President Lincoln recognized, of course, the strategic military value that beyond the human value of it and every, you know, basically every slave that came across, I mean, this is the basis of Emancipation Proclamation as well.

01:02:28:20 – 01:02:57:08
Rob Hilliard
But every slave who was not no longer working on a plantation or working wherever in the South was either that much less production for the South, or it meant that one more soldier or potential soldier for the Confederate army had to stay home and work, right. So he did way weaken the Confederate Army. And, so Lincoln adopted, that policy, across, you know, across the whole country.

01:02:57:10 – 01:03:39:29
Rob Hilliard
And so the slaves were coming across, therefore became those contrabands. And that became kind of a common, language even among the slaves themselves. And so Pinkerton was interviewing these people as they came over because, along with two federate deserters, Union P.O.W., who would either escaped or been released, because all of them had been just, you know, a lot of cases the day before or very shortly before on the other side of the skirmish line, and they would often know, what units were there, how many people were there, how much artillery was there?

01:03:39:29 – 01:04:00:15
Rob Hilliard
Was there a cavalry unit versus an infantry leader or whatever it might’ve been? So he was very deliberate about interviewing those people as they came across and gathering that intelligence to the best that he could, and then trying to to match it up with those we talked about earlier, try to match it up to confirm it, you know, with other sources.

01:04:01:00 – 01:04:23:07
Rob Hilliard
That was, as I said already, that was kind of where Picatinny fell apart in the in doing you did not do a very good job of that part. But but Scoble specifically, you know, he was part of that and he was interviewed as a contraband coming across. And, he made such an impression on Pinkerton.

01:04:24:18 – 01:04:39:12
Rob Hilliard
Mainly because he could read and write, which, of course, most slaves couldn’t, because it was illegal to teach. So to do so in most of the South, and I don’t remember. Do you remember if they mentioned that in the movie, the. Did Skomal say something about the.

01:04:39:15 – 01:04:46:23
Dan LeFebvre
I seem to recall something about that, but I don’t know if I’m, just making that up now off the top of my head. But.

01:04:46:25 – 01:04:51:13
Rob Hilliard
You’re starting to see more into my my into that I did I invent that or was that I.

01:04:51:16 – 01:05:09:25
Dan LeFebvre
I seem to recall something about that that was kind of one of the differentiating facts, but also the other part of that, too. And for, for people listening this if you, go listen to my chat with Rob where we talk about the Pinkertons, we also talk about John Scoble there, too. So that might also be where I’m pulling this from.

01:05:09:27 – 01:05:31:07
Rob Hilliard
That’s where, like I said, you’re following in my travels. Is that really real or did I just do that or did I write that? So, but anyway, yeah, it’s, that was a differentiator is that he could read and write. I just couldn’t remember if it’s I feel like the maybe he said that quickly in the movie, but yeah, I’d like to like you.

01:05:31:07 – 01:06:05:16
Rob Hilliard
I’m not actually positive. So, but he did make such a really strong impression on Pinkerton. And I mentioned, the CIA officer earlier who had done some research into this, and I talked to him, interviewed him when I was preparing my book. And he he used a phrase that I really liked. He said, if if he if Pinkerton had been talking to Scoble today, and debriefing him as a, as a contraband, what would have impressed Pinkerton would have been his street smarts.

01:06:05:19 – 01:06:37:18
Rob Hilliard
And they didn’t use the phrase street smarts as a modern phrase. Not, you know, not one would have been used in the 1800s, but, it it conveys the idea. Right? He was he was very sharp. He understood he pick things up quickly, understood what was going on. Yeah. He could read and write, but he was also somebody who Pinkerton immediately saw could, to use Pinkerton terminology, assume a role, in and be able to go undercover and, and gather intelligence and import it back.

01:06:37:23 – 01:06:45:12
Rob Hilliard
So it takes a special person to do that. And Pinkerton recognized right away, let’s go boys, was somebody who could do it successfully.

01:06:45:15 – 01:07:11:11
Dan LeFebvre
It takes a special kind of person to be willing to do that, especially, you know, if it’s covert. I can’t imagine being in the position of, you know, being finally getting to freedom. And then there’s this job that will take you back. And I’m correct me if I’m wrong. I would assume that he did have a choice in that matter, and he chose then to go back and actually work instead of just running away.

01:07:11:13 – 01:07:54:07
Rob Hilliard
Well. Pinkerton is not explicit on that point. Okay, so, excuse me. My word. Careful here. For a couple reasons. One of them, you know, I’m tiptoeing around spoilers for my book, but, but the, Pinkerton was notoriously as a person. All about the job. And so I mentioned earlier, and he was very loyal to his operatives, which is true, but I don’t think anybody would have described him as like, a kindly boss.

01:07:54:16 – 01:07:54:25
Rob Hilliard
That’s.

01:07:54:28 – 01:07:56:26
Dan LeFebvre
The results, it sounds like.

01:07:56:29 – 01:08:30:28
Rob Hilliard
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And like I said, it doesn’t mean that he wasn’t. He wasn’t loyal and that he didn’t care for his people. But, as you said, he was all about results. So I think he recognized, that opportunity was Scoble and and that he was somebody who would be uniquely positioned. And I probably should also touch on the fact that, that idea of using people who were uniquely positioned was not foreign to Pinkerton because he was the first to employ female detectives in the US, maybe in the world.

01:08:31:00 – 01:08:31:18
Dan LeFebvre
That weren’t.

01:08:31:24 – 01:08:33:08
Rob Hilliard
Him. Oh, sorry.

01:08:33:08 – 01:08:37:14
Dan LeFebvre
Go ahead. No, I was going to say like, hey, Warren, that we’ve mentioned that earlier. Yeah.

01:08:37:16 – 01:08:59:03
Rob Hilliard
Yeah. And so she was the first female detective that he hired and the first female detective anybody hired. But then after that, he actually built, I think he called the Women’s Bureau or Women Detective Bureau or something like that. Recognizing that they could you know, do things and get access to information and go places that men couldn’t, particularly in the 19th century.

01:08:59:21 – 01:09:24:09
Rob Hilliard
So the idea then of using a black man’s ability to do those things, is maybe just a little bit of a tangent off of, the idea of using a woman as a detective or a spy at that time. So, it wouldn’t have been. I guess what I’m trying to get at is it would have been a totally foreign concept for him to do that.

01:09:24:25 – 01:09:33:00
Rob Hilliard
Now, to your point about,

01:09:33:02 – 01:09:55:19
Rob Hilliard
Motivation. I always feel like. And this is really why I’m, I’m kind of choosing my words carefully. In my book, as you know, from reading it, I embedded a little bit more motivation into the reason for doing this. And, I’ll kind of, if you’ll indulge me, I’ll kind of do a little another little quick tangent here.

01:09:55:19 – 01:10:32:03
Rob Hilliard
But in the in the spy in the intelligence community, they talk about the reasons that people become spies and they use the acronym Mice, Mickey. And the reasons are money. Ideology, C coercion and E ego. Okay. Ego, the classic example that would be, from stripping a gear. The famous traitor during the Revolutionary War.

01:10:32:05 – 01:10:33:25
Dan LeFebvre
Oh, Benedict Arnold.

01:10:33:28 – 01:11:07:15
Rob Hilliard
The. Thank you for all my my work. I can think of his wife’s name in this movie. Her. Yeah, but Arnold passed over for promotion. You know, got pissed off at his superiors, and really, it was ego. So the classic example there, he he became, you know, traitor, spy for for the other side, ideology is, like, James Howard, I mentioned earlier, he was a Confederates sympathizer who happened to be living in the North in the capital, Washington, DC.

01:11:07:17 – 01:11:43:09
Rob Hilliard
But his ideology lay with the other side. So he spied and passed information to to the other side of the Confederacy. In that case, money. That’s pretty straightforward, right? Your pile of cash. If it’s big enough, you turn target tables. Coercion, though, can take many forms. And I chose to present score wars story with, a form of coercion, as, you know, his motivation.

01:11:43:25 – 01:12:07:16
Rob Hilliard
No, I think it would be in real life. Certainly a combination of ideology. Right. He he he was a good man. He certainly would have wanted to he wanted to be free himself so that he could have done to help free other black people. You know, there had to be some part of his motivation, be that, you know, how much percent ideology, how much percent coercion.

01:12:07:16 – 01:12:09:12
Rob Hilliard
Remember, we don’t even know the guy’s name.

01:12:09:12 – 01:12:12:07
Dan LeFebvre
Well, right. That’s going to say so.

01:12:12:07 – 01:12:43:24
Rob Hilliard
Yeah, but I always feel a little bit guilty, in my mind, because he might have been, he might have been that guy who was just like, you know what? I’m doing this because it’s the right thing. And doing it for, you know, to use that, that might terminology, doing it for ideology exclusively. I chose for reasons that have nothing to do with him or his personality or anything else, and everything to do with writing and kind of building a fictional story.

01:12:43:26 – 01:13:08:19
Rob Hilliard
I chose to blend in a little bit of, coercion, storyline in there. Because, frankly, because it made him a more interesting character. If you’re, you know, if you’re the the person who’s just always does things because it’s the right thing to do, if you’re always the upright, you know, person, like, you always know you’re gonna do the right thing, for the right reasons.

01:13:10:07 – 01:13:44:04
Rob Hilliard
You strangely, ironically, I guess, become a less interesting character, from a storytelling standpoint. So, so anyway, again, very long winded answer to, to your question there, but, it still doesn’t matter how you slice that. What he did was unquestionably extraordinarily courageous, extraordinarily heroic. There wasn’t you know, to your original point there, there was nothing forcing him to do it.

01:13:44:21 – 01:14:07:23
Rob Hilliard
So he did have some, you know, some freewill choice there. And, and he chose to do, frankly, probably the most frightening thing possible, which is not only risking his life, but his freedom and and probable torture and like every bad thing you can possibly think of, he risked all those things to become a spy.

01:14:07:23 – 01:14:30:23
Dan LeFebvre
So which tells you you kind of some a bit about who he who he was as a person to that he would even do that. But, before I go to the next question, I will say that that was a good job working around your, little plot line there. But, if somebody’s watching this, go pick up Rob’s book to find out that little nugget and that little plot line there.

01:14:31:00 – 01:14:57:21
Dan LeFebvre
But if we go back to this movie, one of the core plot points in the movie revolves around this, this massacre. And I mentioned, Colonel William Davis before, and we never see the massacre in the movie because it’s before the timeline. But the biggest clue that I saw in the movie is, I think it’s about an hour or so into the movie, and there’s a singular mention to something called the Quantrill Massacre, where men, women and children were killed in Lawrence, Kansas, and then the woods knew about it, according to the movie.

01:14:57:27 – 01:15:16:21
Dan LeFebvre
So that’s why in the movie’s timeline, Colonel Davis is now running for a seat in the Senate, and he kind of wants to hide that he was involved in this massacre. And so that seems to be his motivation for hiring hitmen to track down the woods and kill them. Is there any truth to the movie’s telling of this massacre?

01:15:16:24 – 01:15:40:29
Rob Hilliard
Yeah, the the massacre itself was absolutely true. And, it was, I mean, it was national news. It was extremely well known. I wasn’t like you. I think I wasn’t totally clear because it was so. Well known why he was trying to like, I’m not. Either I missed it or maybe it just wasn’t totally well explained.

01:15:40:29 – 01:15:52:14
Rob Hilliard
But why? Colonel Davis was worried about being associated with the massacre. Unless it was. The implication, I think, was that he had somehow ordered it or planned it.

01:15:52:16 – 01:16:01:29
Dan LeFebvre
That was the impression I got was he was basically responsible for it, and now he’s trying to get a seat in the Senate and he’s not going to get votes. If that was the impression I got from the when the movie explained. Yeah.

01:16:02:02 – 01:16:25:04
Rob Hilliard
Yeah. So anyway, I’m, I like to swing back around to that at the end, but just to give me the facts and figures here on, the, this is one of those, some of your listeners may know a lot of Civil War battles had two names, and that was because the newspapers in the South, used, I’m trying remember, the right way.

01:16:25:08 – 01:16:45:10
Rob Hilliard
They use stream names. And then the northern newspapers tended to use, like the closest, the closest town to it or mine on the backwards. But anyway, so you’ll see, like Manassas and Bull Run, it’s the same battle to the. This one, has two different names, but it depended on which side of the line you were sitting on.

01:16:45:10 – 01:17:16:27
Rob Hilliard
So if you were, southern sympathizer or specifically in Missouri, it was called quantiles raid. If you were a northern sympathizer, or in Kansas, it was called the Lawrence massacre. So take your pick. But it was very real event. It happened on August 21st, 1863. And the specifics of it are that a group of raiders, or again, prioritized.

01:17:16:29 – 01:17:43:12
Rob Hilliard
You’re on they were also known as bushwhackers, which is a term that we talked about in the, talked about the Pinkertons, or or guerrillas. So Cantrell’s raiders were about 400 men rode into Kansas and basically just started shooting people and then, and let the town on fire. So they killed somewhere between 160 and 190 people.

01:17:43:23 – 01:18:07:10
Rob Hilliard
All of those were civilians. They were not this was not soldiers versus soldiers, which is what made it, so terrible, what made national news. Some of those were, free blacks who lived in, in Lawrence at the time. And part of what precipitated this, I mean, this is like a you could put somebody probably does teach a whole college course on this.

01:18:07:10 – 01:18:34:18
Rob Hilliard
So I’m not going to give it justice even close. But, Kansas was a free state. Missouri was a slave state. That was the, Missouri compromise that you may or may not have learned about in history class where you’re in high school. And but Lawrence, specifically within Kansas, was known for a long time as kind of a bastion of, anti-slavery, kind of a stronghold of anti-slavery.

01:18:34:21 – 01:18:59:03
Rob Hilliard
And so there were a lot of free box there. So when controls man rode in, they were specifically, looking for black people, mostly black men, but black people who they were, shooting. And then, then they’d beyond that, though, of course, they killed many whites as well. I don’t I wasn’t able to find a breakdown of how many of you trace.

01:18:59:03 – 01:19:27:03
Rob Hilliard
It doesn’t matter. They killed almost 200 people. And burned most of the town to the ground. So, so what precipitated that? Again, this has been going back and forth for a couple of years, even prior to the war. And and then during the war, the Kansas regiments that were known as the Jayhawks, which had a college for both the and so, college sports fans will recognize that name for University of Kansas today.

01:19:27:22 – 01:19:53:11
Rob Hilliard
They conducted race in the Missouri prior to this, 1863 raid. And, so and that was really back and forth. I mean, the Missouri, the Bushwhackers were coming across and killing people, killing soldiers. A lot of this was, as I said, guerrilla warfare kind of back and forth, not, not organized set piece battles like we picture in the East.

01:19:54:07 – 01:20:21:02
Rob Hilliard
And that actually gave, rise to the term bleeding Kansas and, that was used widely in newspapers at the time. But it gives you an indication of just how bad it really was. One other thing to note. There is about a week before the Lawrence raid, there was, a Union prison in Kansas City where they were holding, Confederate, mostly women.

01:20:21:04 – 01:20:49:28
Rob Hilliard
And, they were, as you might expect, many of them were relatives of the bushwhackers. And tragically, the building collapsed, that it really knew what caused that. It wasn’t it wasn’t deliberate, but it collapsed and it killed five women. And among these, one was the sister of a guy known as bloody Bill Henderson, who was the most famous or infamous of Charles Raiders.

01:20:50:01 – 01:21:19:12
Rob Hilliard
And, and then another woman who was a cousin of Cole Younger. He later rode with, and Rob banks with just jacked. So that all and actually, speaking of Jesse James, he certainly had associations with, Raiders and probably was one of them may not have been present at the Lawrence massacre. But he definitely was part of that guerrilla.

01:21:19:22 – 01:21:24:13
Rob Hilliard
It was brother, brother Frank. Both were part of those guerrilla, outfits.

01:21:24:16 – 01:21:29:21
Dan LeFebvre
And that must have been then how they got connected to be the James Younger gang.

01:21:29:23 – 01:22:00:27
Rob Hilliard
Exactly. That’s exactly right. And, so the reason I mentioned the the prison collapse is that might have been part of the motivation for the attack on Lawrence because, you know, kind of a revenge factor. But there were at this point, by 1863, several years worth of, extremely bloody incidents that also prevented it. So, but because that was just the week before, it may have been, you know, it might have been the immediate, the straw that broke the camel’s back.

01:22:00:27 – 01:22:24:08
Dan LeFebvre
It’s also well, at the end of the movie, there’s there’s a final showdown for Katherine’s Trail of vengeance. Throughout the movie, she kills Zeke, who is one of the other, hitmen for Colonel Davis. Accidentally shoots Scoble from the long distance. Shot through the window seem to be aimed at Frank, but. And then she does get closer and actually shoots Frank in the head to kill him.

01:22:24:14 – 01:22:48:23
Dan LeFebvre
She also shoots Colonel Davis point blank range in a showdown with him. And then the movie ends by implying that she thought John Scoble was killed by her accidental shot. But then the movie fast forwards. Many years later, and the very end of the movie we see John Scoble is alive as he’s watching Katherine and her now son Caleb Junior from afar.

01:22:48:26 – 01:22:52:24
Dan LeFebvre
How historically accurate is the way the movie ends?

01:22:52:26 – 01:23:10:15
Rob Hilliard
Well, it’s, I’m not going to pick it apart because it’s a fictional story in an official, so, it’s not. Yeah. And other than Scoble and all the characters he mentioned there were made up for the purposes of the film, so I can’t say, you know, entirely accurate.

01:23:10:15 – 01:23:11:21
Dan LeFebvre
Just not historically.

01:23:11:24 – 01:23:39:17
Rob Hilliard
Right. Yeah, yeah, exactly. They can basically, it’s their story. They can end in any way they want. Yeah, yeah. The, the, the one thing, that, as I said, we were watching this, my wife and son and I were watching, and, when Catherine picks up the Henry rifle and she’s kind of aiming in the window, and, as you said, it was kind of a long distance shot, and I might have even said it out loud.

01:23:39:17 – 01:23:59:03
Rob Hilliard
I certainly thought it. I’m like, she’s going to shoot Scoble if she takes that shot. And sure enough, that’s exactly what happened. So, of course I was very offended at that, since he’s he’s my guy. I didn’t wanna see him shot. But, but, yeah, at the end, you know, they did show, as any good, heroic character.

01:23:59:03 – 01:24:22:08
Rob Hilliard
Does he? He survived it. He pulled through. So, but, yeah, I’ve touched on this previously, but we don’t know anything about, what happened was go after the war. We don’t, you know, we don’t know how long you live where he lived. Anything like, we don’t know if he got shot in the chest and bounced back from it.

01:24:22:09 – 01:24:36:10
Rob Hilliard
And it came back to check on her or not. So, yeah, like I said, it’s it’s a, you know, a fictional story and a fictional ending. So there, it was up to the writers to decide how they wanted to make that one play out.

01:24:36:12 – 01:24:57:01
Dan LeFebvre
I felt like maybe, maybe, maybe they will do a sequel to this, but I felt like when they were talking about his wife, I almost assumed at the end. But when I was watching The end there, I was like, oh, he’s going to reunite with his wife somewhere or something like that, and it’s going to be, you know, him kind of having a happily ever after, I guess.

01:24:57:01 – 01:25:05:13
Dan LeFebvre
I didn’t really expect him to come back and find Catherine randomly after that. But I guess that’s, you know.

01:25:05:15 – 01:25:08:14
Rob Hilliard
Like I said, they can make any ending they, they want. That’s their movie.

01:25:08:14 – 01:25:32:12
Dan LeFebvre
So that’s true. Well, as we wrap up our discussion today, I would like to shift from the movie storyline to another storyline. We talked about a little bit featuring John Scoble. I’m talking course about your historical novel called In Freedom Shadow. There’s a link in the show notes, and as a quick tangent of my own, I know there are people in my audience who work in the feature film industry, so if that’s you, I will highly recommend reaching out to Rob to turn in Freedom Shadow into a movie.

01:25:32:12 – 01:25:37:14
Dan LeFebvre
That would be a fantastic movie. But, before I let you go, Rob, can you give us an overview of your book?

01:25:37:16 – 01:26:03:28
Rob Hilliard
Sure. It’s, I feel like I’ve already kind of done that a little bit, and I don’t want to I don’t want to bore anybody by repeating it, but, it does. It takes the the bit, the we know, the true story about John Scoble from Pinkerton’s book and, lays that on the broader context of what was going on in the Civil War, in the Civil War at that time.

01:26:04:25 – 01:26:25:07
Rob Hilliard
I love bashing Pinkerton as a as a writer. I’ll know one more time here before we wrap up, but what, another criticism that I’m the only one who has this that people have. And reading him is everything seem to happen in isolation. So it was like, well, you know, they were doing this in Richmond during this time period.

01:26:25:07 – 01:27:02:01
Rob Hilliard
And it’s like, well, the Richmond was virtually under attack in the spring of 18. So, by, by the Northern Army during the Peninsula Campaign. And he I don’t think the words Peninsula campaign actually appear in his book. And so anyway, point of all that is, I tried to take that the true story as kind of the backbone of the book and, and then build it into something that looks at the larger context of what was going on and, and puts a little more meat on the bones to tell Scoble story.

01:27:03:00 – 01:27:28:07
Rob Hilliard
And really fleshed out, and, you know, are already talked about this a little bit, but try to get into what were his motivations, why might he have done some of these things? A couple of these people who get just a word or two mention, in Pinkerton’s, story or, the whole Carrie lot, Patty lot and thing.

01:27:28:07 – 01:27:56:24
Rob Hilliard
Like, who was Carrie Latin and what did she do? Why did she do it? And how did she interact with Scoble? There’s very little of that. Almost none in Pinkerton’s book. So try to build, a larger, fuller story. Fictional course, because we don’t know, what what actually happened between those lines. But, I try to fill in some of the, some of the space in between with, with that story.

01:27:56:26 – 01:28:00:13
Dan LeFebvre
And make sure to add a link to that in the show notes. Thanks again so much for your time, Rob.

01:28:00:29 – 01:28:15:06
Rob Hilliard
I appreciate you having me back on. I wasn’t expecting it would be this soon, but we didn’t know that, Trail of Vengeance was coming out and that it was going to feature, John Scoble, that he was going to pop up in, in pop culture so soon. So, yeah, thanks very much.

01:28:15:09 – 01:28:32:04
Dan LeFebvre
Actually, one I do have one, since you mentioned that, since you were just on we talked about the Pinkertons and now a Trail of Vengeance. Would you say that? Which one would you say does a better job of portraying John Scoble and the Pinkertons? He’s not even named Scoble. He’s John Bell. And we’ve talked about both a little bit.

01:28:32:04 – 01:28:35:24
Dan LeFebvre
Do you think Trail of Vengeance did a better job bringing John’s Gospel to life?

01:28:36:03 – 01:28:56:22
Rob Hilliard
I think they did. I mean, in fairness to the writers of the Pinkertons and I know, I, I know I lit into them pretty good when we, when we did this earlier episodes, for their complete disregard for facts. But they, you know, as you said, they didn’t name their character John Scoble. They called him John Bell.

01:28:57:10 – 01:29:40:10
Rob Hilliard
And I think in retrospect, part of the reason for that might have been that because, well, if we’re not tied to this character, no, we that to be tied to his real life storyline, either we can kind of go off whatever direction we want, which they assuredly did. Let it but as I said earlier in this interview, you know, kudos to, to Trail Vengeance for and the writers and the director for, really toeing the line on the, on the Scoble story and, and sticking to, like I said before, almost verbatim, you know, what we know about about Scoble from, from Pinkerton’s work.

01:29:40:13 – 01:29:52:18
Dan LeFebvre
It’s it’s just fascinating that we we don’t know much. So there’s going to be you’re you’re almost going to have to have a story like this that’s made up because we don’t know much. But it is great to hear that what we do know. They did a good job.

01:29:52:20 – 01:30:09:07
Rob Hilliard
Yeah, yeah. And as I said, the I can’t criticize him because I did the exact same thing. Right? I took what was known and filled in the gaps in between. They took a different approach by taking that character and fast forwarding him a few years past the end of Civil War and then creating a story around him there.

01:30:09:07 – 01:30:23:12
Rob Hilliard
But still, you know, having some touch points back to those known, to the known facts. So, you know, two different approaches. But like you said, when they’re so little known, if you’re going to tell a story and have them in there, you got to have something to tell.

01:30:23:14 – 01:30:25:28
Dan LeFebvre
Thanks again so much for your time round.

01:30:26:01 – 01:30:33:23
Rob Hilliard
Appreciate you having me on, Dan. Thanks very much as always.