The Eastern California Museum, Independence, December 2024. Photo: Liambruckercasey, Wikimedia Commons, CC0.
Somewhere in this small Inyo County museum is a set of dentures a local man made himself, from melted toothbrush handles and coyote teeth. The rest of the collection is why the stop is worth more than the oddity.
The story, as told by visitor accounts and a 2005 magazine piece, goes like this. A local man, usually named as George Washington Hancock, needed dentures he couldn’t get. He melted down celluloid toothbrush handles, shaped the softened plastic to his gums, and set it with teeth from a coyote. The museum’s own county page never mentions the dentures. Roadside America, citing a May/June 2005 issue of the auto-club magazine Via, places them at the museum, and a visitor blog described seeing them in 2019. The accounts disagree on when he made them, the early 1900s or the 1940s.
Whether you can see them now is another matter. Since March 2026 the historic west wing has been closed for a new gallery, “Re-Imagine Eastern California Museum,” due to open in spring 2027. We could not confirm where the dentures sit in the building or whether they are out during the work. Ask when you call: (760) 878-0258.
What the county does list as open is the Indigenous Lifeways Gallery, the reference library, the research files and the bookstore. The museum says its collection of Owens Valley Paiute and Panamint Shoshone baskets is one of the largest in California, with about 400 on display in the Anna and OK Kelley Gallery. Its Manzanar holdings include hundreds of photographs donated by people who were incarcerated at the camp, built through a long collaboration with the Nomura family; Manzanar itself is about six miles away. Outside, the Historic Equipment Yard has a restored steam locomotive, The Slim Princess, and a self-guided tour sheet.
The museum is at 155 N. Grant St., open Tuesday through Sunday, 10am to 5pm, closed Mondays and county holidays. The county page lists no admission price. It is run by Inyo County.