Wyoming Tales, Part 1: Walking in the Shoes of Big Nose George

George Parrott was a career outlaw -- a known thief, murderer and would-be train robber. When justice finally caught up with him and his game, he was destined for the hangman's noose. Yet George's demise was only the beginning of a bizarre posthumous tale. Tune in to learn why it's technically possible, even today, to walk in Big Nose George's shoes (and not, perhaps, in the way you might assume).

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome

(00:28):
back to the show, Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always
so much for tuning in. We have a well, we
don't need to make a huge, huge thing about it,
but we are back on the horse theme wise, We're
we're doing it. No, we're finally, uh, we're finally getting
to the point where we're gonna make an episode for
every state in the US. We're back on our Stuffian

(00:50):
Stephen's bullish, right, that's right, that's right. We made, Promises
were made, ben, Promises were made and uh overpromised and underdelivered.
I'll our our buddies, Soufian. And now we're picking back up.
We're picking back up the last two that's the thing
they use in Wyoming. And we're even gonna do this
as a as an intentional two parter that couldn't become

(01:12):
an intentional four part an intentional four part or Earth
or a three part or we don't know, um, but
for the moment, we're gonna start talking about tales of Wyoming,
the ignoble death of Big Nose George, which is a
great name for a what do you call that? A
cow polke? Uh, Bronco Buster Outlaw, Yeah you go, uh yeah,

(01:34):
or a Coen Brothers film, or maybe an extra if
they ever do a sequel to that. What was that
last thing they did on the ballot of buster scrugs,
Buster scrugs? Wonderful? Was wonderful? Little? What do you call those?
An anthology with all the different ones. Tom Waits played
an old prospector better than Will Ferrell ever could have

(01:55):
hoped to do. But yeah, George, big Nose George k
A George Perrot a k A George Warden a ka
George Magnus sorry man use a k A Big break George,
And finally, our favorite and the title character of this episode,
Big nos George. That is super producer Casey Pegram approved. Look, folks, Uh,

(02:20):
this guy's life is interesting. He is an outlaw from
the eighteen hundreds. Uh, but you know you live by
the gun, you die by the gun. Maybe the most
interesting part of this story is, sadly enough, his demise
because you see spoiler alert, George right now is uh

(02:41):
spending his postlife existence in multiple ways as a flower
pot and ashtray pair of shoes science experiment. This is
actually true? Yeah, this is not what he saw coming
though his main focus. His main focus stuff like what
you would loosely call frontier crimes. Like Wyoming History on

(03:05):
w y o history dot org describes him as a
known horse thief even though he got acquitted. He was
one of those people living at the not just the
edge of the the civilized world as they saw it
at the time, but at the edge of the legal world.
Like people would know that this guy was stealing horses

(03:28):
even if the charges didn't stick. He strikes me as
the kind of person who, like, if big nos George
walked into i don't know, the wrong bar or something,
there would totally be that movie moment where someone goes, well, well, well,
old big beak George, you've got a lot of nerve
coming in here, to showing your face round here, stick

(03:49):
in your beak in here. I wonder if he really
did have a big nose, and like maybe like you know,
the saloon doors swing both ways, probably like would lead
with the big nose and that's what would open those
saloon doors. And I'm sure are our boy. George frequented
saloons from time to time, but he spent most of
his time holding up in a very frontier kind of

(04:11):
unsettled area west of what today would be called Casey, Wyoming.
And he kept company with a gang led by a
man named sim Jan and he and his band of
merry outlaws were active in the Powder River area of Wyoming.
They robbed, uh, stage coaches of of cash shipments, you know,

(04:34):
like they had like the you know, Wells Fargo was
was initially a stagecoach company because they would ship money
to and from their bank locations or I believe they
were a courier service and then became a bank. But
that was a very popular target for robberies. It's almost cliche.
And then of course just if they were just passengers
on the stage coaches, they would be like yeah, oh yeah,

(04:54):
put your money in this bag and their jewels and
all that. Other members of the gang included Frank mc any,
Joe Man use again that was one of his a
k a. S. Jack Campbell, John Wells, Tom Reid, Frank Toll,
and Dutch, Charlie Burris. Yeah, Dutch is because of Red Dead.
Dutch is one of my favorite outlaw names right now.

(05:16):
But uh, but yeah, I do have to say sim
John sounds like a Star Wars name. I'm surprised George
Lucas hadn't hadn't got to that when they're talking about
the leader. So his nose reference the themes of referring
to this guy by his nose. It's true his surname

(05:36):
is Perro or parents. Some people probably called him as well.
His stories believe his nickname was maybe a reference to
his large nose, which was by multiple sources described a
beak like, or maybe it was a play on his surname.
Either way, he definitely had a rep force stealing from
stagecoach travelers, and then eventually he escalated to train raw berries,

(06:00):
which are you know. I think in the stereotypes of
the wild West, train robberies are one of the most
iconic tropes. So let's talk about one of these train robberies.
Just for an example. August Big Nose and his gang,
along with Dutch, they planned a theft from the Union

(06:22):
Pacific Railroad. They had a pay car located near Como, Wyoming,
east of Medicine Bow. At the time, these things were
kind of predictable because the railroad, this company in particular,
would carry cash via this pay car on a monthly
run to pay all of its employees across their network.

(06:44):
So here's what the bandits did. They go to the
tracks before the car arrives, and they loosen a spike
in the rails. They wrap it with telegraph wire, and
then they hide in the nearby brush. And their plan
is like, look, we probably don't have to overthink this.
We're just gonna hide in them bushes like spive versus
spy style if you remember that cartoon. And then as

(07:06):
the train rolls by, we're going to pull that spike
and that's gonna dislodge the rails. That's gonna cause the
train to go off the tracks. Boom. We take the
money and that's you know, insert x gold pieces of
piece boys or something like that. We don't know if
it was gold pieces. But unfortunately railroad company employees, we're

(07:29):
you know, doing their jobs. So they spotted that suspicious
spike and they actually fixed the damage and then alerted
the law wave. The train never even got there in
time for their their little wildly coyote scheme to work. Exactly.
That's exactly what I was thinking about. Uh, So they
had to flee. They had to lamb it up to

(07:49):
Rattlesnake Canyon just the most Western sounding. Is all this
stuff is so fantastic. At the base of Elk Mountain,
it was twenty five miles to the southwest of where
the cry was to have been committed. Uh. The sheriff
of Carbon County, his deputy, Robert widow Field, and a
detective employed by the Union Pacific Railroad Company tracked them there,

(08:12):
a guy named Henry Tip Vincents. So when their two
pursuers representing the law, the swift hand of justice came
on their little camp, their bandit camp, the gang actually
had the drop on them and shot them and then
buried their bodies uh near where they had you know,

(08:33):
pitched their camp. Uh, And then they took off again
to Montana. Perot maintained his freedom for a couple of
years after that, but things were to take a turn
in the pretty near future. Yeah. So, even though George
and some of his compatriots are able to elude the law,

(08:54):
living as they do on the kind of the edge
of US civilization at this point, not everybody gets away.
Dutch is caught, historians believe as early as eighteen seventy nine,
and people were pretty upset that these folks and law
enforcement were murdered, so there was a lot of tension

(09:15):
in southern Wyoming. Yeah, it's a big deal. And these days,
you know, those types of folks would be branded as
cop killers and be pursued even more aggressively, which makes
it even more dangerous for the criminals. Maybe not in
the way you would expect, because now we're looking at
the possibility of mob justice. On January twenty three, Dutch

(09:37):
is being transported by train from Laramie to Rawlins. His
train stops for refuel, coal and water at a place
called Carbon and while the train has stopped, a mob
cops on board. They physically drag Dutch off and they
hang him from a telegraph pole. They also don't say,

(10:01):
you know what, when he's dead, you look in the body.
They say, this guy is not worthy of being buried
in the cemetery because that's where Deputy widow Field has
been laid to rest. So we're putting in an unmarked
grave somewhere in the brush outside the cemetery boundaries. And
that is historically a huge, huge insult that was far

(10:26):
older than the US. Ironic, they buried him in the
very stage brush which she was hiding to get the
drop on that train, not the exact you know, bush,
but similar uh so yeah, I mean, at this point,
George is still lambing it in Montana. After those murders
and that robbery gone bad, he single handedly robbed a

(10:48):
military convoy with some local merchants were traveling east with
a stockpile of cash. Uh. And he was successful, but
it was to his ultimate down to fall because he
got really cocky and therefore pretty sloppy, and he felt
like he was untouchable. So he returned back to the
town where the merchant was from and went into a saloon,

(11:12):
presumably leading with that beak like knows of his, and
he started just talking trash bragging about the robbery, about
the murders. Even I mean, good lord man, he is
not following the cardinal rules of being on the lamb.
You keep your mouth shut and keep your head down.
At least that's that's my understanding from like watching the Sopranos.

(11:34):
But someone of course recognizes the guy, hey, this is
a big news, you know, uh, and wires the Carbon
County Sheriff's Department, specifically the sheriff himself, James Rankin, who
high tails it for Montana. In July, Yeah, so that's

(11:56):
that's the thing. And you know, folks, I'm probably not
alone and wondering this, But have you ever seen true
crime shows or accounts of how an outlaw gets caught,
and there's always that moment where they're like, and then
the murderer was it the local Applebee's where he talked
about how he had murdered that person and spat on

(12:16):
their dog as well on the way out. I think
I'm always mystified how that happens, and I have to assume,
like some of those people want to get caught. Big
Nose George the dot. But is it unfair to assume
that there's alcohol involved? Yeah? I was. I was about

(12:36):
to say, if if it's an old timey western saloon
or Applebee's, the old timey western saloon of modern day,
I would say definitely some some drinks were involved. That's
what happened. And loose lips do, in fact think ships,
and they certainly sunk Big Nose George. Because he was

(12:56):
taken in and he was rounded up. The sheriff, James
Rankin found him and two other members of the gang
who had escaped, uh and he escorted them back first
to Laramie and then rode with them on a train
headed to Rollins, with the gut on them the whole
time saying you're not going to get away that easy. Uh.

(13:18):
And also I would propose that we say loose lips
lasso ships. Indeed, the jokes they do not worth it,
but no pun left behind. Uh, no joke left behind either,
I think so. So after they returned George to Wyoming,
there is a mob waiting for him. Rankin was right
when he assumed there would be a lynch mob waiting, uh.

(13:39):
And they were going to lynch the guy right off
the train, according to some folks quoted in Atlas Obscura.
And I don't want to give you the name of
the article just yet because it spoils one of the weirdest,
most grizzly parts of the story. So historians conjecture there
must have been something at least I think the way

(13:59):
they say is fairly charismatic about this guy, because George
was able to convince the lynch mob, let me go
to trial, don't hang me from the telegraph pole, let
me let me have that day in court totally. I mean,
he definitely was able to out talk his partner Dutch,
who had no such luck. So on September three, eighteen eighty,
Big Nose George was put to trial or reigned in Rawlins,

(14:23):
and he was represented by a lawyer, a gentleman named
George Francis Warden, who was unsuccessful in his defense of
Big Nose George, who was sentenced to hang by the
neck until dad on April two, eighteen anyone, oh man,
there's a there's a two gallant song that is definitely

(14:43):
not about this. It's called LUs Crusades jail, but it
has that same vibe the night before the execution kind
of thing, or you know, somebody sitting in jail thinking
about their impending mortality. Big George isn't having it. Remember,
this is what they would call the wild West. Ten
day 's before his execution takes place, he tries to escape,

(15:05):
which is a time honored a hobby of many outlaws
of this air up. Yeah, he had gotten ahold of
a pocket knife and he had used that to saw
through the rivets on the leg shackles that bound him,
and then he snuck up on Robert Rankin and knocked
the guy in the head with the leg shackles Rankin's

(15:25):
wife came in mid jail break, and she managed to
slam the outside door closed and then she fired her
husband's gun in the air, and people from the town
came running for help. Word of this attempted, this aboard
of escape spreads really quickly, right, and what happens another

(15:46):
mob forms and they're saying, dad, burn it, Dad gumm itt.
That man had no intention of going forward with his execution.
He's lying to us the way that he's trying to
lie to that judge. So they d ACKed him in
the street again. Yeah, mob justice, Uh, it's it's a
thing I gotta I gotta say, though, I'm sort of

(16:07):
proud of George for for showing a little restraint and
not just like sliddy the guy's throat with the pocket knife.
He just gave him a good knock over the head.
And and kudos to to the gentleman's wife for for
taking the situation in hand, because otherwise George probably would have,
you know, been on the lamb again. So that's right.
The lynch party put him up onto a box and

(16:27):
looped the noose around his neck and the other end
over a telegraph pole and instructed him to jump Um,
but you know, in the uh, in the interest of
his own self preservation, he refused, so he kicked the
box off from under him. That's how a proper hanging
supposed to work anyway. Um, and the rope actually broke,
I'm not mistaken. So they tried to rinse and repeat,

(16:49):
grabbed him, put a ladder against the pole, forced him up,
and strung him up again, and then yanked the ladder away. Um.
But this didn't go west planned either, did it? Right?
This part is you know, if you can set your
humanity and empathy aside, This part is pretty hilarious from
a prat fall kind of physical comedy aspect. Slapstick is

(17:11):
the word I'm looking for. So they try to hang
him again. The rope is too short, so it doesn't
break Perrow's neck. It leaves him too. He's left strangling
slowly asphyxiating on the line. But he didn't They were
in a rush. They didn't do the best job binding
his hands, so he's able to free them and he's
like shimmying up the pole, lasso still around his neck,

(17:34):
out of reach of the mob. Picture the Benny Hill
music playing, and the witnesses are saying This was not
super pleasant, funny British comedy. Instead, he was loudly begging
for someone in the mob to shoot him, to take
his life. Again. This didn't work. He eventually fell off
of the poll and he was strung up a third

(17:55):
time in a hurry, and he was violently strangling again.
They didn't man in to break his neck, which is
what you're supposed to do when you hang people. Is
the whole science of the placement of the knots and
their their calculations. So he strangles and he dies of asphyxiation.
By the time they had brought him down, And this

(18:18):
is so messed up, the rope had actually rubbed his
ears off during the during the execution. This is a
very nasty way to go. Joe Wolf, Yeah, rubbed his
That's like the most gnarly rope ber and one could
ever imagine ears rubbed clean off. But that wasn't the
the end of the story. Death was not the end

(18:44):
of the indignities that Big Knows George, aside from his nickname,
would suffer um. After he died, nobody claimed his body
um so as as was the procedure, his body was
brought to the coroner's office, but it didn't stick around
there for very long because it was taken absconded with

(19:05):
under cover of night by a compare of physicians by
the names of John Osborne and Thomas McGhee who wanted
to experiment on paros dead body and find the source
of his criminality. Uh that this is according to the
Atlas Obscure article as well. Um, and then then many

(19:27):
other sources. Yeah, poking around in there. This is the
early days of science, very rudimentary. They were thinking they
were doing God's work. I suppose, right, Well, there's you know,
there's a lot of there's a lot of speculation at
the time around what we can predict about a person's

(19:47):
behavior based on their physical makeup. So this is a
time when people would have thought about phrenology, right, Phrenology
being the discredited pseudoscience saying that certain bumps or certain
perceived abnormalities and skull shape maybe indicative of positive or
negative cognitive traits. This is also found up in a

(20:08):
lot of racism. So doubtlessly they're looking to see if
he has The surgeon Thomas McGhee is looking to see
Proos the lobes of his brain to see if there's
something that he thinks is bigger that's an indicative of
like greed or avaice or covetousness or what that's right,

(20:28):
that's right. In order to do that, in order to
get it said brain, he saws the top of George's
head off, pops the brain out. Or actually he doesn't
do it. His friend, the physician, John Osborne does it.
Saws the top of the head off, pops the brain out,
and gives it to his friends Thomas McGhee the surgeon,
and he you know, does his business. So the top

(20:49):
portion of big nosed George's skull is given to a
fifteen year old girl named Lillian Heath, who served as
McGhee's like surgery assistant, uh and went on to become
Wyoming's first woman physician, which I think it's pretty awesome,
but what a weird, like disturbing thing to to to

(21:10):
give a fifteen year old. But she also to mind,
she also didn't become physician just because of that. She
had a weird medical absolutely a clear medical career and
a clear path and then it was was pretty to
a lot of weird frontier medical procedures like this. I
imagine because she didn't seem to bat an eyelash at
Supposedly she kept it for her entire life and used

(21:32):
it interchangeably as an ashtray, a flower pot, and even
a doorstop. Because you know it's gonna be a little
heft to the top portion of a human skull. But
what happened to the rest of the body, you're asking, Well,
this is where Peru encounters a posthumous career that could
be comparable to the posthumous career of saints. Different parts

(21:54):
of his body go to different places. Once warn everybody,
if you're a little more delicate of disposition, this may
be a bit grizzly. So the bottom portion of Proo's
skull is tossed in a whiskey barrel with the rest
of his bones and his body. It's there for about
a year while these two men continue their experiments. At

(22:18):
one point we know that Osborne send some body parts
to a tannery and then commissioned to get this not
just a pair of shoes, but a medical bag and
even a coin purse made out of Pero's skin. Osborne
is very specific about this, and he said, I instructed
the shoemaker to keep nipples on the ski and to

(22:40):
prove that the skin was lad of a human. But
he did not follow my instructions. Uh, no word on
if there was a refund or discount. And in that
regard still historians do not know what Osborne's true motive
may have been for making these grizzly kind of keepsakes,

(23:02):
because at the time the world of medicine didn't look
at human remains as you know, incredibly symbolically significant or something.
They were material you could use in the process of
education and learning. Once the doctors were done, they made
the shoes, the coin pers the bag, the flower pot,

(23:23):
the ashtray, etcetera. They buried the barrel with the rest
of his remains, and that's where his story starts to
fade into legend until a political career brings the shoes
back to prominence. That's right. Despite this doctor being seemingly

(23:44):
a bit of a psychopath or at the very least
an odd character, he became a very popular political candidate
and in eight two was elected to become the first
democratic governor of the great state of Wyoming, me And
was said even then two have worn human skin shoes

(24:05):
At his inaugural ball in ee. So I guess this
wasn't as odd as we might think of it today.
It was a little bit more of like a frontier
justice kind of flex, like I represent the law and
order candidate. I mean, look, you just look at my shoes.
They got nipples on them, They got they got outlaw
nipples on my shoes. It didn't have the nipples. Remember

(24:25):
he's still bad about that. Yeah, well that's a bummer.
But they Okay, if if he had had his drouthers,
they would have had outlaw nipples on the shoes. Um,
how else are you gonna know? Uh? Later, Osborne would
actually become the Assistant Secretary of State under President Woodrow Wilson,
so a storied career in politics, despite being a bit
of a ed geane kind of figure. You know, yeah,

(24:49):
Mr President, I know we've got a lot of stuff
going on in the nation. But have I ever told
you about these shoes? And then Wilson, you know, just
with a cerbic wit, told him, well, if they're human skin,
where are the nipples, buddy, nipples on a breastplate? Remember
that expression? And Game of Thrones, yes, yes I do. Uh.

(25:13):
And and the debate regarding oh maybe it was the
Schumacher batman. But yes, you're right, the shoes continued to
play a role. And this means that in some way,
Big Nosed George's life was where his his legacy was
not what he had intended. We can only imagine. However,

(25:36):
the story of his body doesn't end there. On May eleven,
construction workers we're doing some extrivation to create a new
building on Cedar Street, and then they found a whiskey barrel.
And when they opened that whiskey barrel, they found it
was filled with human bones. Later they would learn this

(25:57):
location was behind the building that served as Dr McGee's
office slash Mad Scientists Lab for years and years before,
and it was pretty clear based on the cadaverous contents
of the barrel who they belonged to in life. There
were numerous human bones, including get this, a skull with

(26:17):
the top saw it off, and just like the two
people who had gathered around to watch Big George be
hanged three times, a crowd gathers around to watch as
this barrel of bones is retrieved. And that's when our
former fifteen year old who later becomes a physician comes

(26:39):
back into the story, which I did not expect I know,
it's a twist indeed. I mean she's well into her
eighties at this point, but still alive and well. Uh.
And she gets contacted, her husband brings the skull cap
to the scene and like Excalibur from the Sword in

(27:01):
the Stone or the reverse kind of version of that. Uh.
I can think it's some other references in pop culture,
but Cinderella, there you go, boom glass, slipper baby, the
skull cap fits perfectly and they all live happily ever after,
sort of the yeah exactly. Um. So, at this point

(27:22):
the locals were convinced that these were in fact the
remains of Big Nose George. At the time, they didn't
need any other proof. But then then you had the
magic of DNA testing coming into the picture and and
in fact did verify that that is what these were. Yep.
Today you can see the upper half of his skull

(27:43):
and the shackles that were used while he was hanging
in the collection of a railroad museum in Iowa, the
Carbon County Museum, because the people who discovered the bones
immediately offered them to this museum. In rollins. Right now,
we don't know what happened to the medical bag, and

(28:03):
we know that the coin purse was at one point
or another quote unquote misplaced. They know it was the
coin pers was once upon a time in the museum's
collection because there was an gentleman who had worked at
the museum for decades and knew that they had the
coin person at one point. The cataloging system wasn't probably

(28:26):
super good. A lot of the people working there were volunteers,
so maybe a little more likely to take a keepsake. Noel.
The whole time I was reading this story, you know,
I kept wondering what they used to make the coin person,
kept hoping it wasn't the obvious answer for which coin
person is also a euphemism, But it very much was.

(28:49):
Some of the people volunteering at the museum may have
just thrown the coin pers away or purposely lost it
because they felt inappropriate handling it. Because was made out
of George's scrotum. I gotta say, though, not to be
too you know gross about scrotum is a perfect material
to make a coin person out of. The shape is there,

(29:12):
It's really there? You really have, Yeah, it holds up. Indeed,
you don't really have to retrofit it too much. You know, Sorry,
I know that's morbid, but so is the story. But
delightfully so. This is a fun amalgam of frontier justice
and uh, corpse desecration and just good old ingenuity, you know,

(29:33):
making skull caps into ashtrays. Yeah, it's it's very there's
more than a tinge of Cormac McCarthy's vision of the
West here, totally. Yeah, you can go see it today.
Depending on how COVID works out of vaccination, you may
even run into the museum's director, Kelly Bohannan. Bohannan has

(29:56):
done a couple of things to modernize the displays. One
of those is that they've moved the human shoes too
an area behind like a partial wall, so that if
you're sensitive to seeing human remains in that way, you
can avoid it. You won't just get like, you won't
just get surprised or pranked by this grizzly keepsake. And

(30:20):
this brings us to another question, and we've talked about
on Ridiculous History a little, but even more so on
on another show called Stuff they Don't Want You to Know.
How do you properly deal with the remains of the dead?
How do you deal with these folks who were outlaws.
I mean, like, this was a big deal. If you
ever saw the Bodies exhibit when it came through the US,

(30:41):
this was a big deal when people started asking about
the provenance of those bodies that we're used in those displays.
Who were these people, what was their background, and how
do they come to be used in this display, which
admittedly is really cool, But also there are ethical questions
involved in any museum curatorial process, right whether it's like

(31:03):
worth these artifacts stolen from indigenous people perhaps, or from
some culture that was looted and and they actually belong
with that culture, for example, or in that country. This
is a different question. This is more a question of
human dignity, because I think we would all agree that
whatever big nosed George's crimes may have been, however heinous,

(31:24):
you probably didn't deserve to have his scrotum removed and
turned into a coin purse. Yeah, exactly, And today his
skulls not on display, I don't believe, but you can.
You can see the shoes and Bohannon tries to see
both sides of the issues. She's quoted in Atlas Obscura,

(31:45):
you know, pointing out that yes, he was a criminal.
He killed two members of law enforcement. And bohan And says,
maybe there's still some wild West sentiment, the idea that
because these folks were criminals, they don't deserve the posthumous
dignity that are you know, members of the law abiding
public would deserve. But then there are other people who

(32:06):
would say, you know, their shoes, they're made to look
like shoes, their warren is shoes, therefore their shoes. And
Bohanan says, well, the other side of that, basically is
imagine telling that to someone's like living relative, their mother,
you know, their kid. That's some cold stuff to say.
But no, only I think we have to confess no judgment.

(32:29):
And there is a certain segment of the ridiculous historian
population listening today and saying, guys, I got it. You've
sold me. Where can I buy a pair of human
skin shoes? Have you missed the point where maybe a
little you're well, yeah, what what points aside? You are
in luck? Because there is a it's it's a really

(32:53):
basic website. I'm almost borderline convinced that's not real. But
it's a company called the Human Leather Company. Their little
subtitle is Ultimate bespoke leather products. Um, and it looks
like on the on the front page is a wallet,
quite crusty looking wallet. And they described themselves and there
about me section. We are a specialized leather products company,

(33:16):
and we only worked to a very specific order book.
In fact, we only craft a very limited number of
pieces per year, depending on our stock of raw materials.
We closed our order book a few years ago as
our waiting list became too large for us to be
able to service all our outstanding requests. We will soon, ever,
be opening our waiting list again to our exclusive clientele.

(33:36):
So if you're interested in potentially yeah oh this is
by the way, please keep your inboxes and your mind's open. Um.
You can drop them a line and info at human
leather dot com. Need we say more human leather? Apparently
a pair of leather human leather shoes from this company,
though I see no price lists here, running about twenty
seven grand. Well, this was back when, um so this

(33:59):
comes from an article on how stuff works, which I
will point out is a fantastic, fantastic article by jess
Lynn Shields. So it's possible that when Shields was working
on this, the website was a little more open. But
it's also possible that this website maybe a bit of

(34:22):
a prank, similar to the hoofu website from years ago,
which which said it was selling human flavor tofu. I
tried to order some, and then I quickly learned that
they got me. It wasn't wasn't a real thing. So
who knows? Who knows? One way to find out is
to email that address info at human leather dot com

(34:45):
and let us know. Let us know what you find
should you feel so inclined, you know. No, I don't
know what else they sell. I I hope it's not
coin purses. It looks like that. It's definitely a wallet. Uh,
It's definitely looks like a leather wallet of some sort
in the one picture they have on the website. They

(35:07):
have also set up a Bitcoin donation payments. So juries
out on whether or not these folks are continuing the
legacy of Osbourne. There but here ends the tale. Our
first tale from Wyoming, the story of Big Nose George
all goes to show Man. The end of his life

(35:30):
was kind of the beginning of his story in American culture,
which is rough. It's weird how that works out sometimes. Um,
but huge Thanks to Gave Luzier, researcher extraordinaire for the
hot tip on the Human Leather Company and big nose. George, Um,
that's that's that's a really interesting one. I would love
to see this dramatized. At the very least. This feels

(35:53):
like a very grizzly entry into some sort of maccabre
Wild West anthologies here you know what I mean. And brothers,
I'm telling you, go Cohen and McCarthy get the band
back together. I love it, and just have McCarthy right.
Some vignettes in a new anthology will call it the
Dark Ballad of Buster Scruggs or the Ballad of Buster

(36:15):
Scrugs after Dark. Also just call it wild West Skin
of Max. That's two on the nose because of the shoes.
Look more Workshop on the nose, on the big nose.
That's two on the big nose. Thanks also, of course,
to our super producer Casey Pegram, our guest producer Andrew Howard,
Thanks to Christopher Hasciotis, and thanks to Eve's Jeff co

(36:37):
who uh noll. I think we should have back on
the show pretty soon. What do you say? Yes? I
completely agree. Eves is a delight. Please check out her
show This Day in History Class, which says the name
implies it as a daily history podcast where each episode
coincides with that calendar date and some cool historical thing
that happened on that day in history. Also ja Ill

(37:00):
the podcast The Sturing the wonderful and talented Mrs Jill Scott.
That Eve's also produces huge thanks to Alex Williams, who
composed our theme. Jonathan Strickland the Quister. I think we're
we're safe from him for a little while, but you
never know. The clock, the giant Grandfather clock is always
taking on that one. Yeah, we better screwed through the
outro too before he finds out we're recording. So, folks,

(37:23):
one serious question. How do you think museums should handle
pieces artifacts that have a controversial providence, whether that relates
to human rights and dignity, or whether that relates to
things taken from another culture. Let us know. You can
find us on the internet. We like to recommend ridiculous

(37:44):
historians on Facebook, but you can find us as individuals
as well. We certainly can. You can find me at
how Now Noel Brown on Instagram, where I pretty much
hang out exclusively I've got a Twitter somewhere out there.
I think I switched it to at how now Noel
Brown on Twitter, but I don't really been. On the
other hand, is a prolific Twitter and instagrammer? Oh thanks, No, importantly,

(38:06):
prolific is not the same thing as good. You can
find me at Ben Bullen H. S W on Twitter,
where you'll see me mid research on a lot of
strange things. You can also find me at Ben Bullan
bo w l I n on Instagram. No new goal
in life, I propose I want to speak for all

(38:27):
of us on the show here. Yeah, let's try not
to be human. Shoot not to be human. She's okay.
I don't think I don't need that in my life.
The Human Leather Company can can go with God, but
uh count me out. Yeah, Human skin Books is about
as far as I would go and have to be
a really good book or some kind of necronomicon. Yeah,

(38:49):
we'll see you next time books. For more podcasts from

(39:09):
My Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.