‘They’re Idaho horns’

Carrey shot only one bighorn sheep, but had accrued somewhere between 75 and 110 skulls by the time he was in his 70s. He found many on hunts that he guided, and others were gifted to him.

Carrey would carve some horns into belt buckles or spurs for friends and family. Boggan’s late wife, Sharon, received the last buckle he fashioned before his 2002 death. Boggan keeps the small, horseshoe-decorated treasure safe wrapped in a handkerchief, now.

On the horns he kept whole, Carrey wrote the date, location and name of the person who brought it to him.

In the O’Connor center, one skull bears the name of Buckskin Bill, who was often called “one of the last mountain men” of the American West. He was born Sylvan Ambrose Hart and moved to the Five Mile Bar of the Salmon River in 1932 where he lived in central Idaho isolation until his death in 1980.

Keeping collection information tied to specimens has unique implications for research today, allowing scientists to take a glimpse into a past population’s genetics and distribution. Though it is unclear if Carrey recorded such details for science, personal recollection or another reason, Boggan touts the action as evidence for Carrey being “ahead of his time.”

After Boggan’s initial meeting with Carrey in 1988, Boggan’s boss, New Hampshire businessman Robert “Bob” Senter approached Carrey about buying his ranch. Senter would later want the horns too, which Carrey had kept in his attic.

The two struck a deal. Carrey agreed to sell him about 40 of the bighorn skulls from the collection for $10,000. There had been thieves breaking into Carrey’s ranch and making off with some of the skulls, Boggan said. A plaque in the O’Connor center also attributes the sale to Carrey lacking the space to keep them.

Senter, who owned and operated a ranch in Riggins, promptly had the horns hauled, illegally, to Las Vegas, where they were boxed and shipped, also illegally, to his home in Plaistow, N.H. Senter was an avid, worldwide hunter and had a trophy room on the East Coast, but the collection stayed sealed in those shipping boxes over the decades.

“I used to be a guide,” Boggan said. “So I’d have long horseback rides, and they’d never left my mind — getting them back.

“Horns do not belong on the East Coast. They’re Idaho horns.”

In 2014, Boggan approached an aging Senter about the collection that had weighed heavy on his heart for decades. He knew that once Senter died, the heads would never return to Idaho.

“They’d get split up, you know,” he said. “Nobody else would ever take care of these things.”

Senter had already given away a couple from the collection he had, but after a bit of haggling, he agreed to sell Boggan the remaining 38 for around $2,000. Senter died in 2017.