Democratic Sentinel, Volume 19, Number 28, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 July 1895 — PURSES OF HUMAN SKIN. [ARTICLE]

PURSES OF HUMAN SKIN.

Gruesome Souvenirs Mede from the Cuticle of Desperados. The report comes froze Tacoma, Wash., that the cuticle of Tom Btancfc, a desperado who was killed a few days ago, will be tanned and made into pocketbooks. While in jail in Seattle, Blanck made a wooden imitation of a pistol, with which be held up the jailor and escaped. He was followed by the jailor and a posse and killed, as he would not surrender. Exactly how the pocketbooks will be disposed of is not stated, but judging from the results of several enterprises of this kind in the past, the owners of Blanck’s skin will have do difficulty in disposing of their manufactured stock. One of the inhuman practices brought to light by the investigation set on foot by Gen. Benjamin F. Butler into tbe affairs of the Tewkesbury (Mass.) poorhouse was the skinning of dead patients and tbe making of souvenirs of various kinds of the skins, for which tbe keepers or others in the sc’«.une found a ready market. The same state of affairs is said to have existed at the Ohio State prison, in Columbus, fifteen years ago. Prisoners were knocked in tbe bead or shot on the slightest provocation by the keepers and guards, who were all banded together for the traffic in human skin souvenirs. These outrages finally became so flagrant that an investigation was held, which resulted in tbe turning out of all the keepers and guards in the prison. None of the men was ever prosecuted, as it was impossible to get tangible evidence. There must have been money in this human skin traffic or the men engaged in it would not have taken such chances. There are many persons whose morbid tastes make them delight in the possession of just such gruesome souvenirs, and it is not infrequent that some man of a reckless, roving disposition and a checkered past is seen proudly displaying a tobacco pouch, purse or other “ pocket novelty ” made from the skin of a human being. The use of human skin in making small articles that could be carried in one’s pocket was quite common in Mexico and the wild Southwest forty or fifty years ago. It is more than possible that some of tbe possessors of these articles flaunted them as an evidence of desperate and bloodcurdling tendencies. During tbe French revolution tanning of human skins was common, and volumes of Rousseau’s works are said to have been bound in the cuticle of those who had derided him.