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
In 1965, historian Robert M. Utley was in his second year as the National Park Service’s Chief Historian in Washington, D.C. Two years later he would publish Frontiersmen in Blue; the United States Army and the Indian, 1848-1865 (Macmillan) the follow-up to his first book, The Last Days of the Sioux Nation (Yale University, 1963).
I first met Robert M. Utley in May 1977. He came to Bloomington to receive a Distinguished Alumni Service Award from Indiana University. I was a graduate student in history at IU at that time, and as soon as I learned that Utley was coming to campus, I sought out my mentor, Martin Ridge, to beg for the opportunity to pick up our guest at the Indianapolis airport and deliver him back. I assured Ridge that I would positively die for the opportunity to meet Utley. He thought this but a slight ambition (and never tired of reminding me of it in later years), but agreed to allow me to play chauffer. This eventful meeting was as Bogart s