Monday, May. 22, 1950
The Return of Big Nose George
The citizens of Rawlins, Wyo. (pop. 8,634) had no end of trouble after they decided, one night back in 1880, to lynch a bandit named George Parrott. It was easy enough to get him out of jail. "Big Nose George," intent on escape, had thoughtfully filed off his leg irons and knocked the jailer cold with them, thus had left himself undefended. But he was a hard man to hang.
The lynching party stood him up on a box, roped him to a telegraph pole and told him to jump. He refused. They kicked the box out from under him and the rope parted. They grabbed him, put a ladder against the pole, forced him up, strung him up again and yanked the ladder away. George wrapped his arms & legs around the pole and hung on. But George eventually got tired, and the lynching was a success.
The manner of his death, and the details of his life, made Big Nose George something of a folk hero around Rawlins. He had made a career of shooting men and chasing women and had climaxed it by removing spikes from the Union Pacific Railroad's main line in an attempt to derail a pay train. The attempt failed. But when a posse set out after him, George and a companion named "Dutch Charley" Burris bushwhacked two of them, killed them, and also stole their horses--about as low a crime as a man could commit. Dutch Charley was lynched almost as soon as he was caught; Big Nose George managed to survive until that night on the telegraph pole.
After his demise a Rawlins physician, Dr. John E. Osborne--who later became governor of the state--sawed off the top of Big Nose George's skull as a present for a girl medical student and then skinned him, tanned the hide and made a medicine case and a pair of shoes from the leather. The shoes are still on display at the Rawlins National Bank.
Last week a crew of workmen in downtown Rawlins dug up an old whisky barrel containing human bones. Whose were they? Somebody remembered that Dr. Lillian Heath, the girl who had received the top of Big Nose's skull, was still alive and still had her memento. It took only a few minutes to prove that the whisky barrel contained the bandit's remains: the lower section of the skull fitted the memento perfectly. The discoverers of Big Nose George's bones proudly offered them to the Carbon County museum for all to see.
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