An Outlaw Who Became A Pair of Shoes and Another Who Became a Late TV and Movie Star

Although they are undeniably macabre, death photos of Old West outlaws show just how wild this period of American history truly was.

There's also a story behind most of the surviving pictures of dead criminals. Here are a couple of examples, for those with strong stomachs.

George Francis Warden (aka Parrot)

George Francis ("Big Nose")  Warden (aka Parrot)

Captured after an attempted train robbery, George Francis (“Big Nose”) Warden (aka Parrot) (1834-1881), who also went by a number of other aliases, was captured, tried, convicted, and sentenced to be hanged.

After he attempted to escape from jail, a mob lynched him from a telegraph pole. He wasn't buried, though, because a pair of local physicians, John Osborne (1858-1943) and Thomas Maghee (1842-1927), hid his corpse in a whiskey barrel and spirited the outlaw's body away, hoping to study his brain. One of the doctors, Thomas Maghee, had a criminally insane wife. He hoped that, by studying Big Nose George's brain, he might help her. (Another report contends that, rather than both doctors' hiding the body, Osborne sent Big Nose George's brain to Maghee.)

The other doctor, John Osborne, also had designs on Big Nose George's body, but Osborne's were far weirder than his fellow physician's plans for the outlaw's brain.

 

Osborne made a death mask from the lynched man's face before skinning Big Nose George's thighs and chest. He sent the skin to a tannery to have it made into a pair of shoes and a doctor's bag.

According to a news report, Osborne instructed the tannery to retain Big George's nipples as proof that the shoes were made from human skin, but his directive was ignored.

Gov. John Osborne

Later, when Osborne, a Democrat, was elected as Wyoming's governor, he wore the shoes to his inaugural ball.

Supposedly, Osborne was motivated by revenge: Big Nose George had caused a delay to a train aboard which Osborne was traveling to a party.

Even after all this mischief, what was left of Big Nose George's remains got no rest: they're now exhibits in the Carbon County Museum in Rawlins, Wyoming.

Elmer McCurdy

The train he robbed near Okesa Oklahoma on October 4, 1911, was the last Elmer McCurdy (1880-1911) would ever rob: he was shot to death in a gunfight with police.

Elmer McCurdy as Johnson displayed him

An undertaker, Joseph L. Johnson, embalmed the body, but when no relative claimed the corpse and no one would pay him for the service he'd rendered, Johnson decided to dress the body, stand it up inside a wooden coffin, place a rifle in McCurdy's hands, and exhibit the corpse to anyone who paid him a nickle for the privilege.

As an exhibit, the dead outlaw proved popular enough to attract the interest of James Patterson, the owner of the Great Patterson's Carnival Show. Posing as one of McCurdy's brothers, Patterson and an accomplice called Wayne, who also claimed to be one of the outlaw's brothers, shipped the corpse to Arkansas City, Kansas. McCurdy's mummy was a popular draw for Patterson until the showman sold his business to Louis Sonney.

Sonney exhibited wax figures of such outlaws as Bill Doolin and Jesse James, and the mummified body of McCurdy fit right in with Sonney's Museum of Crime. Upon Sonney's own death, the traveling days of McCurdy's corpse came to an end, at least for a time, as his body was stored in a Los Angeles warehouse. However, McCurty's corpse made a cameo appearance in the 1967 Hollywood movie She Freak, for which the mummy was an actor on loan to producer David F. Friedman.

The outlaw's corpse changed hands a few more times and was exhibited on Mount Rushmore and at an amusement park fun house in Long Beach. It also starred in an episode of the television series The Six Million Dollar Man, playing a hanged man. When a grip moved the body, an arm broke off, revealing human bone and muscle tissue, and police removed the mummy to the Los Angeles coroner's office. The coroner, Dr. Joseph Choi, found that the corpse had died of a gunshot wound. A forensic anthropologist, Dr. Clyde Snow, identified the skull as being that of Elmer McCurdy.

The remains were buried in the Summit View Cemetery in Guthrie, Oklahoma, next to those of outlaw Bill Doolin, and two feet of concrete were poured over McMurdy's coffin to ensure that, finally, he would be able to rest in peace.

As an outlaw, McCurdy wasn't all that successful: the train he'd helped try to rob turned out to be a passenger train, not the train he and his fellow robbers believed was carrying $400,000 in cash bound for members of the Osage Nation, and the robbery netted the gang only $46, some whiskey, a revolver, a coat, and a watch—not much booty in exchange for his life. In death, though, McCurdy's mummy proved not only an accomplished traveler but also a superb entertainer—sideshow attraction, movie star, and television actor—who entertained millions.

The Old West doesn't get any wilder than that!