Fido (Abraham Lincoln's dog)

Abraham Lincoln's yellow mongrel never lived in the White House. Crowds and fireworks after the 1860 election terrified him, so the family left him in Springfield with a friend, John E. Roll, along with Fido's favourite sofa and instructions that he was never to be scolded for muddy paws. His end shows how a story shifts with each telling. An 1893 report in the Illinois State Journal called his stabbing by a man whittling a stick an accident; an account in the same paper in 1931, credited to Roll's son, made the man half-drunk and the blow deliberate.