Daily Smile

[{"type":"text","text":"Now let's all watch a bunch of seals sneezing..."}]

Smile 4 8 24

Cowboy State Daily is Wyoming’s largest newspaper with Wyoming’s most experienced journalists. 

<title>Daily Smile: Monday, April 8, 2024 | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Now let's all watch a bunch of seals sneezing...

Daily Smile: Monday, April 8, 2024

 Now let's all watch a bunch of seals sneezing...

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily's business and tourism reporter, Renée Jean

Renée Jean

Business & Tourism

Raymond Felix brought a brand-new bike to Sturgis this year. New to him, that is.

“We bought it about two weeks ago,” he told Cowboy State Daily. “I traded my Sporty in. I said, ‘We’re going to Sturgis, so I want a better bike.’”

The bike is a 2017 Softail Slim FLS with 5,000 miles on it, “practically new” for what was Felix’s first trip to Sturgis. He went with his family — his mom and dad, Leon and Alisa, and his girlfriend, Yessenia Marenco. 

The four were among hordes of bikers — literally thousands — riding the Devils Tower loop for a Sturgis Rally tradition called Wyoming Wednesday. 

Sundance’s claim to fame on Wyoming Wednesday is a burnout contest that’s been going on for more than half a century in front of the historic Dime Horseshoe Bar.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"The Legend Of The Burnout"}]

Local legends say the Dime Horseshoe Bar’s burnout actually started inside the establishment, which takes its name from a horseshoe pattern inlaid into the bar top with dimes.

The story goes that a bar patron decided to do a burnout inside the bar and the owner chased him out.

Other riders joined the fun, putting on their own spontaneous burnout event on the street in front of the bar.

It started a tradition that has continued ever since, though these days it’s more of a planned thing, complete with bike mechanics who swap used tires for new, saving the bikers’ good tires for their return trip to either the Sturgis Rally or home. 

The bar has since also built a stage for the bikes, elevating them above the crowd so everyone can see. That also helps keep the smoke over everyone’s heads. 

A set of fans blows the clouds of acrid, billowing smoke away from the bikers. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"A Big Father-Son Moment"}]

Felix had a dream for his first Sturgis, and watching the Dime Horseshoe Bar’s Burnout in Sundance was it.

But he didn’t just watch the burnout as he’d planned.

Jess Jones, owner of the Dime Horseshoe Bar along with her husband, Casey, is persuasive that way. 

She kept calling for entries, and Felix’s dad, Leon, kept urging Raymond to enter.

“They talked me into it,” he said. “I was like, ‘All right, let’s do it. I’m down for it.’”

Felix’s parents have been coming to Sturgis — and to Sundance’s burnout — since 2011. But until this year, Raymond couldn’t join them. All four work for the same delivery-driving business, which makes planning time off together tricky.

“It’s hard for all of us to take vacation at the same time,” Leon said. “This is the first year we got to do it.”

A friend showed Leon and Alisa all the cool places to go, including Sundance. 

“We love it,” Alisa said. “It’s amazing. Seriously, every year we look forward to coming.”

For Leon, finally sharing Sundance with his son — and seeing him compete so well in the burnout — was not just a great memory. It is a father-son milestone he cherishes. 

“It’s like a father’s dream to have your kid come ride with you,” he said. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Hitting Sixth Gear"}]

Felix had been told he probably wouldn’t be able to cycle his engine past fourth gear. 

But when he hit four without signs of strain, he kicked it up to five and then six. 

Smoke, he explained, is the whole point of a burnout. 

“The bigger the cloud of smoke is, the better,” he said. “So you go through first, second, third. You want to keep the gears shifting. But so it handled six just fine.”

Family and friends replayed the moment he hit sixth gear, and Raymond’s eyes lit up.

“Check this out,” he exclaimed. “The sixth-gear pin! I was in sixth gear!”

That ultimately earned him enough crowd appreciation that he took third place, along with a $250 cash prize. 

First place, and the $750 in prize money, went to Bill Snider, a regular from Michigan who said he will put the money back into his bike.

Snider was in Sundance hanging out with his daughter, Erica Goble, and her fiancé.

Goble drove to Sundance from Colorado to be with her dad, and said she thought the event was “pretty cool.”

Snider told Cowboy State Daily he spends little time at the Sturgis Rally itself, preferring to spend his rally time in tiny Sundance and Hulett in Wyoming.

“We go over there, but we go over there once, buy a T-shirt and leave,” he said.

In Wyoming, he said, he has found people are welcoming and treat you like family — and that’s what keeps him coming back.

Burnout 20260812 165049 8 15 26

<title>Why Sturgis Riders Have Packed Sundance, Wyoming, For 50 Years Of Its Annual Burnout | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Sturgis Motorcycle Rally riders have packed Sundance, Wyoming, for its annual burnout for more than 50 years. Legend has it the burnout started inside the Dime Horseshoe Bar. “The bigger the cloud of smoke is, the better,” says one rider.

Why Sturgis Riders Have Packed Sundance, Wyoming, For 50 Years Of Its Annual Burnout

There is just something about the Elk Mountain Hotel that inspires devotion.

Peter Thieriot, for example, was warned that the Elk Mountain Hotel was nothing more than a money pit. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"He bought it anyway."}]

Locals joked that the hotel required a tetanus shot before walking in.

No one was laughing once Thieriot finished restoring it. 

He took the hotel back to its studs, then rebuilt it room by room by room.

Nine layers of wallpaper were stripped from the dining room. Samples of each layer still decorate a wall just outside the dining room, even though Thieriot no longer owns the hotel.

Christine Neel is the hotel’s present-day owner. 

She did what a lot of small-town Wyoming kids wind up doing — leaving Wyoming. 

Her folks packed up and moved to Texas before Neel graduated from high school. She went to Texas A&M, becoming an “Aggie,” with a major in nursing and business.

But when the 120-year-old Elk Mountain Hotel went up for sale in January 2020, she leapt at the chance to take over the tiny boutique hotel in little Elk Mountain, where the elevation of 7,264 feet far exceeds its population of 146 people. 

“I’ve been in love with the hotel since childhood,” Neel told Cowboy State Daily. “I grew up not too far from there on a ranch … I remember going to brunches over there, attending weddings over there, before and after the renovation.”

When she heard the owners had decided to get out of the hotel business, something clicked. 

She suddenly knew she wanted to own that hotel.

“I think it just has a charm like no place else has,” she said. “I’ve always just loved it. So I couldn’t say no when the opportunity came up.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Reborn From Ashes"}]

Neel says many travelers find the Elk Mountain Hotel by surprise when they’re traveling to Yellowstone National Park along Interstate 80. 

It’s a pleasant surprise for most. Tripadvisor shows a 4.8 out of 5-bubble rating, and it’s easy to see why.

At first sight, it’s like gazing into another time and place, and then melting into it with each step toward the hotel. None of the rooms have televisions, which deepens the effect.

There are no air conditioners humming, either.  

Tiny refrigerators and microwaves are the only nod to the modern world — and they do not bother. They’re quiet.

The hotel sits at the base of Elk Mountain, in the same spot where the Overland Trail once had its stage stop, just east of the Medicine Bow River.

The establishment was then known as The Crossing. 

After Union Pacific finished the Transcontinental Railroad, The Crossing fell into disrepair and burned down in 1905.

A man from Wales named John Evans built a new hotel on top of the ashes, naming it Mountain View Hotel. It was white with green trim then, and it’s white with green trim now.

No one knows exactly how or why Evans came to Wyoming. What is known about him is that he was adopted by the Jones family and worked for a time at the Evan's Bro’s Store in Carbon, now an abandoned coal town southwest of Medicine Bow.

Eventually, Evans married his adoptive sister, Mary Ann Jones.

The couple had 10 children, seven of whom died very young. Some of those children are buried at the old Carbon Cemetery.

When the couple moved from Carbon to Elk Mountain to work for J.S. Jones, they had two living children, Joseph and Aubrey. John ran the bar and Mary was the cook. 

They bought The Crossing from Jones in 1903. Two years later, after their son William was born, The Crossing burned down.

The couple borrowed money from Mary’s sister Catherine to rebuild the hotel. 

They had 16 bedrooms upstairs and a bar and dance hall downstairs. It had indoor plumbing and Elk Mountain’s first power plant. In addition to itself, the hotel’s coal-fired plant supplied power to neighbors as well. 

The dance hall quickly became a community gathering spot for dances, parties, political rallies and town meetings.

In the 1920s, John Evans and his boys built an open-air dance pavilion.

Many famous people would come to play at the Garden Spot Pavilion, including Lawrence Welk and Louis Armstrong.

The hotel’s 12 rooms echo some of that history. 

Two are named for both Welk and Armstrong. Others are devoted to famous Wyoming figures Jim Bridger, Esther Hobart Morris and Eliza Swain. 

Another honors someone infamous: “Big Nose” George Parrot.

Each room leans into its historic namesake, with relevant photographs, artwork, and history hanging on the walls. 

The hotel is framed by mature trees and a profusion of pink hollyhocks — perfect for the Victorian architecture.

Inside, the vintage charm continues with a warm mixture of leather, wood, and posh upholstery alongside photos of historical Elk Mountain figures that help tell the hotel’s unique story. 

The restaurant serves steaks and pasta, along with homemade desserts and cocktails. Reservations are required.

Stay there once, and it’s easy to understand why people keep coming back. Because there’s just something about the Elk Mountain Hotel. 

Elk Mountain Hotel 20260811 095626 8 15 26

<title>How Wyoming’s Elk Mountain Hotel Went From Money Pit To Historic Showplace | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Built 120 years ago when an Overland Trail stage stop burned down, many warned its previous owner it would be a money pit to restore. He did it anyway, and now the Elk Mountain Hotel has become a showplace on the National Register of Historic Places.

How Wyoming’s Elk Mountain Hotel Went From Money Pit To Historic Showplace

Jake nichols 720

Jake Nichols

Wyoming Life

Around Wyoming

Harvard University once claimed to possess up to three books in its libraries that were bound in human skin.

Thanks to relatively new technology, two of the works in question have been debunked, but not without leaving one proven authentic and opening a rabbit hole filled with questions.

[{"type":"text","text":"First, books bound in the largest organ of humans are a thing. "}]

[{"type":"text","text":"In fact, the practice was once more popular than one might think. "}]

Second, in response to binding books in human skin, Wyoming history says, “Hold my beer.”

The Cowboy State has an ashtray, a medicine bag and a pair of shoes all made from the remains of a notorious outlaw who met his demise at the end of a rope.

[{"type":"text","text":"Don’t Judge A Book By Its Cover"}]

Two decades ago, the internet was abuzz with hoax-or-real tales of literary works bound in human skin, particularly a few tomes reportedly owned by an Ivy League school.

It started in 2006 after an article appeared in the university publication “The Harvard Crimson.” 

Written by Samuel Jacobs, who was named editor-in-chief of Time Magazine three years ago, “The Skinny on Harvard’s Rare Book Collection” zeroed in on three unique books in the university’s 15 million-volume collection purportedly bound in human flesh.

Jacobs fleshes out the texts, ranging in content from medieval law to Roman poetry to French philosophy. A lawbook, for one, has been discredited in its claim to be skin-wrapped. It’s bound in flesh, but not human.

“Practicarum Quaestionum Circa Leges Regias Hispaniae” is a Spanish lawbook containing material dating back to 1605. It was bought for $42.50 from a New Orleans book dealer in 1946 and shelved in the Langdell Law Library at Harvard, according to the library’s curator, David Ferris.

Nothing about the book’s cover seems out of the ordinary, though it appears to have a hue suggestive of skin tone. It’s what is handwritten in purple ink on the book’s last page that sets one’s skin to crawling.

“[T]he bynding of this booke is all that remains of my dear friende Jonas Wright, who was flayed alive by the Wavuma on the Fourth Day of August, 1632.”

DNA tests performed in 1992 proved inconclusive. The tanning process was partially to blame, but truthfully, technology just wasn’t up to the task until more recent scientific advancements in what is known as peptide mass fingerprinting (PMF) made positive identification possible.

In-house testing performed by Harvard using the analytical technique for protein identification PMF proved conclusively that Wright’s remains do not bind the 400-year-old book, nor do any human’s. The cover is sheepskin.

Another book in question — a 1597 French translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses housed in the Countway Library’s Center for the History of Medicine — also was proven to be sheepskin even though a small penciled annotation appearing on the inside cover reads: “Bound in human skin.”

[{"type":"text","text":"The Hide That Binds"}]

The myth busting leaves Harvard with one final volume touted as epically epidermically bound.

“Arsène Houssaye’s Des Destinées de L’ame” is part of Harvard’s massive Houghton Library collection. The meditation on the soul and afterlife was gifted by the author to a friend, Dr. Ludovic Bouland, sometime in the mid-1880s.

Bouland, a noted medical doctor and prominent bibliophile, bound the book with the skin from an unclaimed body of a female mental patient who had died of a stroke. A note was found inserted in the book after it was donated to the university in 1954 by the widow of John B. Stetson Jr. (yes, that Stetson, son of John Sr., founder of the famed cowboy hat company).

The two-page note is handwritten in French by Dr. Bouland. It reads, in part:

“This book is bound in human skin parchment on which no ornament has been stamped to preserve its elegance. By looking carefully, you easily distinguish the pores of the skin. A book about the human soul deserved to have a human covering: I had kept this piece of human skin taken from the back of a woman.”

The same testing conducted in early 2014 that disproved Harvard’s two anthropodermic-bound books was able to confirm the binding of “Des Destinées de L’am” as most likely that of a human.

Other written works confirmed bound in human skin can be found at the John Hay Library at Brown University (four volumes) and the Historical Medical Library of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia (five books, including three of which came from the skin of the same woman).

Perhaps the most famous example of anthropodermic bibliopegy is a book gathering dust on a shelf at the Boston Athenaeum.

The Highwayman: Narrative of the Life of James Allen Alias George Walton

,” is a memoir of Walton’s. He narrated the autobiographical story to the warden of the Massachusetts State Prison while on his deathbed in 1837.

He insisted the book be bound in his own skin and given to a man, John A. Fenno Jr., who fiercely resisted Walton’s attempt to rob him. Fenno’s daughter reportedly gifted the work to Boston Athenaeum, but the library/museum has no written proof of that. 

[{"type":"text","text":"Literarily Interred"}]

OK, books bound in human skin sounds revolting. But the practice was once somewhat accepted, if not common.

Termed anthropodermic bibliopegy, the binding of books in human skin dates back to at least the 16th century, according to a study released in the Journal of the American Medical Association in January 2014.

In the mid-1800s, anthropodermic binding was at its height. Historians cite several reasons for the macabre practice.

Confessions of criminals were sometimes bound in the skin of the convicted by court order. Doctors and scientists also helped popularize the gruesome fashion, sometimes binding medical journals and texts in epidermic. Family members were also sometimes literarily interred as a memorialization.

Since PMF made testing more accurate, dozens of suspected books have been analyzed. A team of scientists (Anthropodermic Book Project) comprised of anthropologists, bioanalytical chemists and the like, have tested more than 50 volumes to date, of which 18 were confirmed as human, 13 not human and 31 as yet undetermined.

One rare book considered by those in the antiquarian book trade to be the “Holy Grail” of skin-covered tomes tested false for human skin.

Notre Dame University’s Hesburgh Library alleged to possess an anthropodermic bibliopegy — a 1504 philosophy book once thought to be owned by Christopher Columbus and bound in the skin of a Moorish chieftain. It turned out to be pigskin.

[{"type":"text","text":"Outlaw Becomes A Pair of Shoes"}]

Well before it officially became a state, the rugged Wyoming Territory was a haven for highwaymen, cattle rustlers and cold-blooded killers.

George “Big Nose” Parrott was one such desperado, and he met a gruesome end. His hanging was only the beginning of his punishment.

Parrott was evil personified, what literary types refer to as the antagonist.

In Wyoming, outlaws like Parrott were simply known as “bad guys” and they were strung up quick as God-fearin’ men could find rope and reason.

Parrott was born in Montbéliard, France, in 1834. He arrived in Wyoming Territory in the late 1870s and immediately began robbing stagecoaches with his gang. Eventually, Parrott eyed larger scores — trains — and with bigger reward came bigger risk.

Parrott ended up killing a Union Pacific detective and a local lawman in a robbery gone wrong near Como Lake, midway between Medicine Bow and Hanna, Wyoming. Wanted posters went up everywhere and his capture was inevitable.

One by one his gang members were picked off as a $1,000 reward for Parrott was doubled when he robbed a wealthy Montana merchant, Morris Cahn, in July 1880.

[{"type":"text","text":"By August, Parrott was arrested in Montana."}]

Sheriff Robert Rankin feared angry Wyomingites would be waiting with a necktie party back in Carbon County and, sure enough, despite precautions, a masked posse of about 20 men grabbed Big Nose and drug him to the first telegraph pole they could find.

Up Parrot went by his neck, kicking and struggling. The mob urged the bandit to confess to the killings, promising they would cut him down if he did. Parrott spilled his guts and, true to their word, the angry mob turned him back over to Sheriff Rankin.

Parrott was convicted after a two-day trial and faced hanging. But Big Nose had been plotting his escape and did so, briefly, after jumping the sheriff and his wife Rosa one evening.

He didn’t get far. Townspeople in Rawlins anticipated such a break and surrounded him. This time they weren’t sparing the rope.

Parrott was hung then and there in downtown Rawlins on March 22, 1881, in front of some 200 people who gathered to watch the outlaw swing.

[{"type":"text","text":"Big Nose Is Parted Out"}]

Dr. John E. Osborne conducted the autopsy along with Dr. Thomas Maghee. They made a plaster of Paris cast of Parrott’s face, cut a large swath of skin from his chest and removed the dead man’s skull cap to examine the brain.

Dr. Maghee gave the skull cap to his 15-year-old assistant, Lillian Heath, who incidentally would go on to become Wyoming’s first female physician. For decades, she used the skull piece as an ashtray, a doorstop and flowerpot.

Dr. Osborne, meanwhile, sent Parrott’s skin to a tannery in Denver with instructions to fashion him a pair of shoes with the dead man’s nipples on each to prove they were footwear made from a human being. He also wanted a doctor’s bag if there was any of George’s skin leftover.

When Osborne received the shoes, he reportedly was miffed that the nipples were not included in the taxidermy. Still, rumor has it, Osborne wore the shoes to his inauguration ball when he was elected governor of the Wyoming in 1893.

For a time, the shoes, the death mask, a wanted poster and the skull cap were on display at the Rawlins Bank. They are now in the permanent collection of the Carbon County Museum in Rawlins.

[{"type":"text","text":"The medicine bag made from Big Nose George’s skin has never been found."}]

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<title>Yes, Skin From Wyoming Wild West Outlaw "Big Nose George" Was Used To Make Shoes | Cowboy State Daily</title>

This is the macabre story of a once-common practice of binding books with human skin — and how Wyoming did that one better by skinning notorious Wild West outlaw "Big Nose George" and making him into a pair of shoes. His skull was made into an ashtray.

Yes, Skin From Wyoming Wild West Outlaw "Big Nose George" Was Used To Make Shoes

Kolby fedore

Kolby Fedore

When Brian Downing opened his eyes somewhere in Wyoming in the summer of 1975, he saw a giant pink elephant dancing above him.

[{"type":"text","text":"For a moment, he wasn't entirely convinced it was real."}]

Downing had gotten out of the Army a few months earlier and was hitchhiking from Washington, D.C., to Bellingham, Washington, before starting college at Georgetown University that fall.

[{"type":"text","text":"\"It was a respectable means of transportation then,\" he recalled."}]

Somewhere in eastern Wyoming, two Native American men picked him up and offered him a Coors. 

That alone was something of a novelty. At the time, the cold Colorado beer was hard to get east of the Mississippi River, and Downing remembers it as a welcome break from the summer heat.

"My hosts were at least somewhat inebriated and had a dismembered doll on the dashboard," Downing said.

[{"type":"text","text":"That was disconcerting, but off they went."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"Eventually, Downing fell asleep."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"He woke when he sensed the car had stopped. Still groggy, he looked up."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"A dancing pink elephant and a sign for DT's Liquors."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"\"It took a moment to shake off the idea I was dreaming,\" he said."}]

The men dropped him off near Rawlins about an hour later. Downing continued west and made it all the way to Washington.

He doesn't remember much more about that peculiar ride, but more than 50 years later, he vividly remembers the elephant.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Seeing Pink Elephants"}]

[{"type":"text","text":"There is something almost too perfect about Downing's story."}]

Americans, after all, had been "seeing pink elephants" long before Downing saw his in Wyoming.

The expression became shorthand in the early 20th century for the bizarre hallucinations associated with heavy drinking and alcohol withdrawal.

Jack London famously invoked the imagery in his 1913 autobiographical novel 

, writing of a man who sees "blue mice and pink elephants" in his delirium.

In Walt Disney's 1941 animated classic, Dumbo and Timothy Mouse accidentally drink water spiked with champagne. What follows is one of the strangest sequences Disney ever put on film.

Elephants multiply, dance, march and morph into bizarre shapes in a surreal, ethanol-soaked dream.

"Pink Elephants on Parade" didn't invent the association between pink elephants and booze, but it helped plant the image firmly in American popular culture.

[{"type":"text","text":"And in Cheyenne, the joke became even better."}]

Because DT's wasn't named for delirium tremens, although it would make sense. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"D.T. Was A Guy"}]

[{"type":"text","text":"Mike Moser has heard the assumption plenty of times."}]

Moser, executive director of the Wyoming State Liquor Association and a former Cheyenne bar owner, first moved to the city in 1980 and has spent decades in Wyoming's liquor industry.

"The vast majority of people don't realize the dude's name was D.T. Johnson," Moser said. "It wasn't the DTs that you get from alcohol. It was just his initials."

Johnson was also an important figure in Wyoming's early liquor industry. Moser said he became the first president of the Wyoming State Liquor Association in 1945.

It wasn't until the early 2000s that DT's expanded, Moser said. The owner bought A&A Discount Liquor and converted it into a second DT's.

That larger operation became DT's Liquor Mart and Tusker Bar. It eventually closed in late 2024.

Back in 1975, a hitchhiker woke up beneath Cheyenne’s giant pink elephant and wondered if he was hallucinating. He wasn’t. The booze-loving pachyderm has been bobbing over DT’s for decades. "We make sure that we keep that icon moving," says DT's owner.

Daily Smile: Monday, April 8, 2024

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