Elmer McCurdy was an Oklahoma outlaw whose career as a robber lasted less than a year and whose career as a corpse lasted sixty-six.
Born in Maine in 1880, McCurdy drifted west through his twenties — plumber, soldier, miner — before turning to train robbery in 1911. By every account, he was almost comically inept at the work. His first holdup, a Missouri Pacific train near Lenapah in March, netted nothing after his nitroglycerine blew open the safe and obliterated the silver coins inside. His second job, on the Iron Mountain–Missouri Pacific line near Okesa in October, hit the wrong train; he and his accomplices made off with about forty-six dollars in coin and two jugs of whiskey. A sheriff's posse ran him to ground the next day in a barn in the Osage Hills. He was killed in the gunfight that followed, on the morning of October 7, 1911. He was thirty-one years old.
What followed is the part of his story that endures.
McCurdy's body was taken to a Pawhuska funeral home, where it was embalmed with an arsenic-laced fluid intended to preserve it long enough for relatives to claim him. None came. The funeral director, finding the body increasingly profitable as a curiosity, propped it up in a back room and charged passersby a nickel to view the bandit who wouldn't give up. Five years later, two men claiming to be his brothers arrived to take the body home. They were not his brothers. They were carnival operators.
For the next sixty years, Elmer McCurdy traveled. He turned up in dime museums and traveling carnivals across the Midwest, then in haunted houses and amusement-park dark rides on the West Coast. His provenance was forgotten; he was assumed by his successive owners to be a wax mannequin. In December 1976, while a film crew was setting up a scene for The Six Million Dollar Man at the Pike amusement park in Long Beach, California, a crew member moved a "wax figure" hanging from a gallows in the park's funhouse. Its arm came off in his hand. Inside was bone.
The Los Angeles County Coroner's office, working from a 1924 penny and a ticket stub from a Los Angeles museum lodged in the figure's mouth, traced him back through the carnival circuit to the Pawhuska funeral home and at last to the barn in the Osage Hills. Oklahoma claimed him. On April 22, 1977, sixty-six years and two weeks after his death, Elmer McCurdy was buried at Summit View Cemetery in Guthrie. To prevent any further removal, the state poured two cubic yards of concrete over his coffin.
His headstone, paid for by the Indian Territory Posse of Oklahoma Westerners, gives only the dates and the route home.