An outlaw’s life was never meant to end well. The men who rode the hoot owl trail knew that, chose it anyway, and accepted that their final chapter would likely be written in blood or rope. But George “Big Nose” Parrot got something far stranger than a grave. His body ended up in the hands of a pair of frontier doctors with unsettling ideas, and his skin ended up in a rather unusual pair of shoes.
Parrot was born in France in 1834, though much of his early life remains a mystery. He used several aliases, occasionally claimed Ohio as his birthplace, and left little reliable record behind. What is known is that he first appeared in the historical record in August 1878, when he and a gang attempted to hold up a Union Pacific train near Medicine Bow, Wyoming. The target was a car carrying cash for the company payroll.
The plan was to loosen a rail by wrapping a telegraph wire around a spike and yanking it from the brush, derailing the train before the robbery began. Unfortunately for the gang, railroad employees spotted the loose spike, repaired it, and moved on. Some of the outlaws wanted to kill the workmen, but Parrot and Frank Toll objected, arguing that there was no profit in murder for its own sake. The laborers were allowed to live, and they promptly reported what they had seen.
Deputy Sheriff Robert Widdowfield and Union Pacific detective Henry “Tip” Vincent tracked the gang to Rattlesnake Canyon at the base of Elk Mountain. They found the outlaws’ campfire still smoldering. Widdowfield placed his hand over the embers, remarked that the fire was still hot and that the outlaws would likely be found by nightfall, and stood up. A single bullet struck him in the head or neck, killing him instantly.
Vincent spurred his horse to escape but was boxed in and shot out of the saddle. He rose to his knees and returned fire, but he was too exposed and was riddled with bullets. The killers took the weapons and valuables off the dead lawmen, covered the bodies with brush, and moved on. The double murder was reportedly the first time law enforcement officers were ever killed in the line of duty in Wyoming.
The railroad put up a reward, likely around one or two thousand dollars, and wanted men soon began hunting the gang. The gang scattered. Some headed to Montana, some to Canada, and others to the Black Hills. Frank Toll was shot dead a month later attempting to rob a stagecoach outside Deadwood.
John Irwin, who was with Toll and was arrested, confessed to his role in the murders and received life in prison. Others simply vanished from the historical record. Parrot and Dutch Charlie Burris continued their criminal careers, robbing a general store in Montana, trading whiskey to Native Americans for horses, and selling the horses at Fort Benton before splitting up. Burris was arrested and put on a train bound for Rawlins, Wyoming, but the train stopped to load coal in Carbon, where a mob dragged him from the car and hanged him from a telegraph pole.
Widdowfield was buried in the town’s cemetery; Burris was not considered worthy of the same ground and was buried in an unmarked grave outside its boundaries. Parrot remained active, robbing stagecoaches and even holding up the U. S. Army in broad daylight.
His target was a businessman traveling with an escort of fifteen soldiers and a large amount of cash. The robbery took place just outside Terry, Montana, and Parrot could not stop bragging about it in saloons. Word eventually reached Carbon County, Wyoming, and Sheriff James Rankin arrested him without incident, placing him on a train bound for Wyoming. When the train stopped in Carbon, a mob placed a noose around Parrot’s neck and stood him on a whiskey barrel.
But this time, nobody kicked the barrel out from under him. Parrot begged, pleaded, and gave a full confession of his role in killing the two deputies. The mob let him live, confident that a jury in Rawlins would convict him. Parrot changed his tune once he arrived in Rawlins.
He pleaded not guilty, gave his lawyer a false name, and claimed to have been born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1843. The jury found him guilty and sentenced him to hang. Thirteen days before his scheduled execution, Parrot escaped his shackles with a pocket knife he was allowed to keep, hid in wait for Sheriff Rankin, and bashed the lawman nearly unconscious with the iron shackles. He might have escaped entirely had Rankin’s wife Rosa not heard the commotion, come running with a pistol, fired a warning shot into the ceiling, and held the outlaw at gunpoint until help arrived.
The town had run out of patience. The next morning, a mob of thirty armed men entered the jail, ignored the sheriff’s request to wait for the legal execution date, and led Parrot out to a telegraph pole. Around two hundred people watched. The execution was a disaster.
The first attempt failed when the rope was too long and Parrot’s feet touched the ground. A second attempt, using a twelve-foot ladder, also went wrong when Parrot got his hands loose. He begged the mob to shoot him or at least let him jump so his neck would break. Instead, the mob slowly pulled the ladder away and let him strangle.
His body was left hanging for at least an hour. At one point, a doctor refused to declare him dead, so the mob simply hoisted him back up. On March 22, 1881, Big Nose George was dead. His story, however, was just beginning.
A pair of doctors by the names of Thomas McGee and John Eugene Osborne obtained Parrot’s body. They made a plaster death mask, preserving his large nose for posterity. They opened his skull to study his brain, giving the top portion to McGee’s fifteen-year-old assistant, Lillian Heath. Then Osborne, who reportedly held a grudge after being delayed by one of Parrot’s robberies, began slicing strips of skin from the outlaw’s back, thighs, and chest.
He sent the skin to a tannery with instructions to make him a pair of two-tone shoes and a matching medical bag. Osborne also requested that the shoes be adorned with Parrot’s nipples, one on each shoe. The person who made the shoes refused that particular request, so the skin loafers were finished without their intended decorations. Osborne reportedly wore the shoes when he was inaugurated as governor of Wyoming in 1893.
The outlaw was largely forgotten until 1950, when construction workers in Rawlins uncovered a whiskey barrel containing human bones, half a skull, and those same leather shoes. Lillian Heath, still alive at eighty-five, brought in the skull cap she had kept for decades, and it matched the remains perfectly. Those remains were positively identified as Big Nose George Parrot. The skull cap had been used over the years as an ashtray, a doorstop, and a flower pot.
Heath went on to become the first female physician in Wyoming and lived until 1962. Parrot’s death mask and shoes remain on display at the Carbon County Museum in Rawlins, where the man dubbed Big Nose George finally found his place in history, little changed from the strange and violent world he had once inhabited.