Robert Martin Parkhurst was born in Mattoon, Illinois. He is a distant relative of Lyman Parkhurst. His father was a civil war veteran and moved his family out to the quiet plains of Nebraska in the 1880s. Robert married Emma Blanche Trott in 1898. In 1902 he partnered with a Mr. Williams and established a brewery in Basin, Wyoming. The Bighorn Basin had just been opened up to white settlers a few years earlier, and this was their first brewery. In August of 1902 Robert's father passed away in Nebraska, and the brewery soon closed up and the Parkhursts divorced shortly after. Robert went back to Nebraska to become a farmer. In 1914 he remarried in Arkansas. In 1919 his wife died and he moved once again, to East Carroll, Louisiana. Some time later he moved one last time to Shoshone, Idaho, to be with his son. He had a late in life conversion and was baptized at age 76 in that town. Robert Martin Parkhurst died on the the 13th of January, 1952. He was 87 years of age.