True West Magazine
Old West adventures await across the Cowboy State’s colorful Carbon County
Quite likely the most gruesome artifact on exhibit in any museum in Wyoming (maybe the West) is the pair of shoes at the Carbon County Museum in Rawlins. They might appear to be just simple leather shoes, and they are…except that the leather is the skin of Big Nose George Parrott.
When on a history tour of Carbon County, Wyoming, a key stop is Encampment’s Grand Encampment Museum, a superior collection of 14 relocated and restored mining camp buildings.
Photo by Candy Moulton
The skinning came after the hanging from a telegraph pole in front of the Hugus Store on Front Street in Rawlins…and that happened after Parrott hit Sheriff James G. Rankin over the head with a pair of shackles and then escaped from the county jail.
True West Magazine
The latest biography of Daniel Boone, plus new bios of Doc Holliday and Buffalo Bill, and histories of the Chiricahuas and California good-time girls.
Bob Drury and Tom Clavin make an excellent writing team and have found success in recent years with their creative collaboration, including their best seller
The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend (2013). Most recently they have tackled together the American Revolution with
Valley Forge (2018) and World War II with
Lucky 666: The Impossible Mission That Changed the War in the Pacific (2016). I am not sure why they decided to return to American 18th- and early-19th-century history with
LINCOLN How’d Billy get the gun?
It will be 140 years ago on Wednesday, April 28, that outlaw Billy the Kid shot jail guard J.W. Bell on a staircase in the Lincoln County Courthouse, setting in motion his escape from the gallows, and adding another layer of gloss to his legend.
Billy the Kid escaped from the old Lincoln County Courthouse, pictured here, on April 28, 1881, killing two deputies in the process.(Jim Thompson/Albuquerque Journal)
Bell stumbled down the steps and out the courthouse’s back door before dying. Only moments before, the hapless guard and his prisoner, the Kid, had entered the building through that door after a visit to the outhouse.
True West Magazine
Phil Coe
Have fun trailing the Lone Star outlaw from Texas to Kansas.
Charles E. Rankin, retired editor of the University of Oklahoma Press and astute historian of key figures of the Old West, posed a question a while back when we were having lunch and discussing James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok.
“What the hell was Phil Coe thinking?”
We agreed on the answer.
“He wasn’t.”
John Wesley Hardin
Coe’s decision to try to gun down Hickok on October 5, 1871, in Abilene, Kansas, might not have been the wisest choice for a 32-year-old, but it turned out to be a pretty good career move.
On the Santa Fe Trail: 1821-2021
The bicentennial of the National Historic Trail is a great reason to hit the road and rediscover why it is the West’s original “Mother Road.”
When you get right down to it, almost every trail ever blazed was for profit. Despite all the glory associated with them, the lure of money was behind the Chisholm Trail (first for trade goods, then for selling longhorns in Kansas)and the California and Klondike trails (to find goldfields) and the like. The Santa Fe Trail, on the other hand, never even thought about fame it was all about money.