Photo – Big Nose George Parrot’s Death Mask, Dr. Osborne’s shoes, photo of George Parrott – Courtesy wyohistory.org
The tales around some Wyoming stories are wrapped skin tight. So it is with George Parrot, also known as Big Nose George.
On this date, in 1984, Big Nose George Parrott’s remains were given to the Carbon County Museum in Rawlins. This skin tight story begins:
On March 22, 1881, Big Nose George’s hands were tied behind his back, and a noose was around his neck. The mob made him stand on an empty kerosene barrel. The fine people of Rawlins then tossed a rope over the crossbar of a telegraph pole. After hefting George, the rope broke. The bandit fell, while begging to be shot. The mob denied the request.
Instead, they produced a new rope and made Parrott climb a twelve foot ladder. Making the climb difficult was the repaired leg irons that Parrott dismantled while in jail.
Finally, Big Nose George Parrott choked to death. A fitting death for a murderer of a lawman.
Out of the estimated 200 people gathered to watch or participate in the spectacle, no one claimed the body.
About two and one half years earlier, on August 19th, 1878, a gang of outlaws ambushed Carbon County Sheriff Deputy Robert Widdowfield and a Union Pacific detective Henry Tip Vincent. The outlaws murdered the lawmen near Elk Mountain. Big Nose George Parrott was the gang’s leader.
A few months later, Parrott was overheard in a saloon in Montana, bragging about killing the lawmen. One of the saloon patrons telegraphed Carbon County Sheriff and notified him of Parrott’s location. Parrott was arrested not long after.
One of the outlaw gang’s members, Charley Burris, was taken off of a train in Carbon by a mob of citizens and lynched for the deaths of the two lawmen.
On September 13, 1880, Parrott was arraigned in Rawlins for the 1878 murders of Widdowfield and Vincent.
After the lynching of Parrott in Rawlins, Dr. Osborne and Dr. Maghee, a doctor for the Union Pacific Railroad, claimed the corpse of Parrott for medical study.
Dr. Osborne made a death mask of the outlaw and then had the man skinned. The skin was tanned and made into a pair of shoes for the good doctor. Dr. Maghee studied the criminal’s brain.
Big Nose George’s skull was cut into two pieces. The top half was given to his protoge and nurse, Lillian Heath. Heath later became Wyoming’s first female physician. Heath used the upper half of the skull for a door stop, and later, for an ashtray. The lower half of the skull was buried with Parrott’s bones, inside of a whiskey barrel. The whiskey barrel was discovered buried in Rawlins in 1950. Workers were excavating the area at Fifth and Cedar Streets for a new department store.
The two halves of the skull were briefly reunited, and then they were split again. The skullcap is now housed at the Union Pacific Railroad Museum in Council Bluffs, Iowa. The lower half of the skull is at the Carbon County Museum in Rawlins.
Renowned forensic anthropologist, George Gill, and Wyoming State Archeologist, Mark Miller, reunited the halves of Big Nose George’s skull in 1995 when they worked on a study of frontier violence with University of Wyoming graduate student, Kristi McMahan. The study confirmed the skin on Osborne’s shoes was indeed human. Neither the shoes, nor the small piece of skin on the skullcap were tested biochemically as such testing would have destroyed both. Gill hoped to match the skin on the shoes to the skin on the skull to prove the skin definitely belonged to Big Nose George.
