The Backstory: Gruesome mementos of the wild west

It’s the Wild West and the first democratic governor of Wyoming, as well as the state's first female doctor, have ties to vicious train robber Big Nose George Parrott. And you won’t believe the mementos they kept. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
All right, you like a story that's part Western, part
political intrigue, part horror, and it's all true. This is
a story about an outlaw who pulled off some pretty
awful murders and then was gruesomely murdered himself, and the
bizarre aftermath of that killing. I'm Patty Steele. The wild
West was wilder than you thought. Next on the backstory.

(00:27):
We're back with the backstory sounding more like a mobster
than a gunslinger. Outlaw George Parrot was known as Big
Nose George, and you can probably guess why. George is
a cattle rustler and highwaymen robbing stage coaches in the
eighteen seventies in Wyoming. But he wants more money and
more notoriety, and in the wild West the best way

(00:50):
to get both at the same time was a train robbery.
It's eighteen seventy eight. George and his cohorts try to
hold up a train, but they bungle the heist. They escape,
but a local deputy and a detective with the Union
Pacific Railroad managed to track them down at their campsite

(01:10):
in the wilderness. A gun battle ensues and the deputy
and the detective are shot to death. George and his
men cover the bodies and they take off, but the
bodies are found and a ten thousand dollars reward is
offered for their capture. George and the others head next
to Montana looking for their next victim. This time they're

(01:31):
looking for a wagon train loaded with money. In a saloon,
they hear about a wealthy local merchant who's about to
head back east to buy tons of goods for his store.
Joining that caravan are wagons sent by the local army
detachment to pick up their payroll. It would be the
perfect payday, or so George thought. He manages to get

(01:56):
a hold of the route the caravan is planning to take.
He sets up his ambush. Now it's February of eighteen
seventy nine. George has just three men with him and
they pick an area on the route where the wagons
will be forced to separate as they have to come
over a steep ravine and then round a bend in
the trail. As each group emerged, George and his men

(02:18):
rob each group of riders. Word is they walked away
with as much as fourteen thousand dollars, which, in case
you're wondering, would be about a half a million dollars
at today's rate. They thought they got away with it,
that they were invincible, But what did a man booze
and big mouths. Sitting in a saloon Not long after

(02:39):
the robbery, they bragged about what they'd done with two
local deputies overhearing the whole story, the deputies nabbed them
and sent George back to Wyoming to face murder charges. Now,
believe it or not, the story just gets weirder. George
is convicted and the night before his execution, he decides
to make an escape. He manages to get his shackles

(03:01):
off and then smashes his jailer over the head with
those shackles, cracking his skull, But the guard yells to
his wife. She pops out and pulls a pistol, forcing
George back into his cell. Yeah, gotta love a tough woman, right,
But that did it for George. Local townspeople turn into vigilantes.
They storm the jail, They grab George, and they string

(03:24):
him up. Immediately, two doctors, Thomas McGee and John Osborne,
take George's body. They want to study his brain, basically,
to figure out what made him such a bad guy.
They saw off the top of his skull to help
themselves to the brain. Oh weirdly, they give the top
of the skull to McGee's medical assistant, Lillian Heath, who's

(03:45):
just sixteen years old, and they also removed the skin
from George's chest and thighs. The rest of his body
was stored in a whiskey barrel filled with a salt
solution for somewhere around a year while they did their experiments.
After that, they buried him in the yard behind McGee's office.
But it seems the wild West got even wilder. Lilian,

(04:09):
doctor McGee's assistant, went on to become the first female
doctor in Wyoming, and she used the top of George
Parrott's skull as everything from an ash tray to a
pen holder, to a flower pot to a door stop
over the years. Meantime, the other doctor, John Osborne, sent
the skin from George's body to a tannery and had

(04:30):
it made into a pair of shoes and a briefcase.
But he then went on to have a glittering career
in politics. In fact, he wore those shoes to his
inaugural ball after being elected as the first Democratic governor
of the state of Wyoming. Later he was a US Congressman,
and finally he became the Assistant US Secretary of State

(04:51):
under President Woodrow Wilson. Over the years, the story of
the death of Big Nose George Parrott just faded away
until nineteen fifty when the whiskey barrel with his remains
was found by construction workers digging near what had been
doctor McGee's office. In order to prove it was George
Parrot in the barrel, investigators got in touch with doctor

(05:13):
Lillian Heath, by then eighty six years old, and had
her send her skull ashtray to them. They found the
ashtray to be a perfect match for the rest of
George's skull. Now it sounds kind of creepy, but you
can actually see on display the shoes that Governor Osborne
had made out of George Parrott's skin and then wore

(05:35):
to his inaugural ball. They're in the Carbon County Museum
in Rawlins, Wyoming, tucked right next to the skull that
was an ashtray. I'm Patty Steel The Backstories, a production

(05:57):
of iHeartMedia Premier Networks. The Elvis Durret and Steel Trap Productions.
Our producer is Doug Fraser, Our writer Jay Kushner. We
have new episodes every Tuesday and Friday. Feel free to
reach out to me with comments and even story suggestions
on Instagram at real Patty Steele and on Facebook at
Patty Steele. Thanks for listening to the Backstory with Patty Steele,

(06:20):
the pieces of history you didn't know you needed to know.