Sweetwater County Historical Museum - Green River, Wyoming
Page and images by Bob Leathers. 2024.
The Sweetwater County Historical Museum is located in Green River, Wyoming. It is a free admission museum. Pictures in the museum are allowed. The museum is small, but the staff is knowledgeable and helpful. The museum has on display Big Nose George Parrott's gun that killed Carbon County Lawmen Bob Widowfield and Tip Vincent.
More on this website at: 1878: The Parrott and Burris Gang - The Murder of Lawmen Bob Widdowfield and Tip Vincent
Images by Bob Leathers with permission from the Green River Historical Museum.
Major John Wesley Powell
From Green River, Wyoming on May 24, 1869 Major John Wesley Powell and a group of voyagers set out to discover the mysteries of one of the last unexplored regions in the continental United States the Green and Colorado Rivers. Powell was a disabled veteran who lost his right arm in the Civil War. Later he turned to exploration, and in 1869 and 1871 led crews down the rivers and through the Grand Canyon.
The town of Green River was chosen as the starting point because it was here that the river and the transcontinental railroad met. The newly completed Union Pacific Railroad brought boats and supplies to the launch site.
Powell's expeditions departed from an area around a small island in the Green River. In 1969 the site was designed a National Historic Place and renamed Expedition Island.
Years later the wild river that Powell knew as the Green was tamed and changed by the installation of two dams; Fontenelle, fifty miles upstream from Green River, and Flaming Gorge, seventy miles downstream.
Powell was later appointed director of the Smithsonian's Bureau of Ethnology and director of the United States Geological Survey. He died in 1902 and is buried in Arlington Navional cemetery.
The Powell expeditions fired the imagination of the American public with the romance of exploring a final frontier, but more importantly, the scientific studies of the river basins were the first done in the remote Colorado Plateau, and formed the basis for a new arid land policy. (Sweetwater County Historical Museum)
The Sweetwater County Historical Museum
The Gun that Killed Carbon County Lawmen Widowfield and Vincent
Remington New Model Army percussion revolver
.44 caliber
Manufactured from 1863 to 1875, the Remington family of percussion revolvers saw extensive use during the Civil War and on the post-war western frontier. An excellent weapon, it was, in several respects, superior to the Colt percussion revolvers of the same era. William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody owned one for many years. This 44 Remington belonged to the Old West outlaw George "Big Nose" Parott. (Sweetwater County Historical Museum)
"Big Nose" George Parrott
The Outlaw Who Became a Pair of Shoes
In August of 1878, an outlaw gang led by George Parrott - often called "Big Nose" by his associates - bungled a train robbery east of Rawlins, Wyoming, in Carbon County.
Not long afterward, Parrott and his gang murdered two lawmen who were tracking them near Elk Mountain.
The gang scattered and Parrott was arrested the next year in Montana. He was taken back to Rawlins, where he stood trial, was found guilty, and sentenced to be hanged.
On March 22, 1881, he attempted to break out of the Carbon County Jail and an enraged mob lynched him.
Two Rawlins doctors, John Osborne and Thomas Maghee, took charge of Parrott's body in order to carry out a medical study. His brain was removed and his skullcap presented to Lillian Heath, Maghee's 16-year-old female assistant, as a souvenir. (She later went on to become Wyoming's first licensed woman doctor.)
Osborne skinned Parrott's corpse, had the skin tanned in Denver, and incorporated it into a pair of shoes, which he wore to his inaugural ball when he was elected Governor of Wyoming years later.
In 1950, workers in Rawlins unearthed a wooden barrel that contained a disarticulated human skeleton.
The skullcap was missing, and Dr. Lillian Heath Nelson, who was still in practice there, was consulted.
She still had Parrott's skullcap, and it was a perfect fit for the skull.
Parrott's 44-caliber Remington New Model Army revolver, complete with two notches cut into the grip, is displayed here. Dr. Osborne's shoes and a cast of Parrott's skull are on exhibit at the Carbon County Museum in Rawlins. (Sweetwater County Historical Museum)