The Sad Odyssey of Elmer McCurdy – Part 1

 

Elmer McCurdy, Frank Curtis, Frank Davidson, and Charles Smith were a fixture in sideshows from the 1920s through the 1960s.  Nothing fancy about that.  Well, except for a couple things.

All four men were the same person.

Oh, and he died in 1911.

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It all began on the very first day of 1880, when Elmer McCurdy was born in Washington, Maine.  He was the son of Sadie McCurdy and, possibly, Charles Smith.  Sadie’s brother, George and his wife, Helen, adopted young Elmer to save her the embarrassment of raising an illegitimate child in that day and age.

Eventually Sadie told the boy that she was his real mother, not Helen, and she didn’t know who his father was.

From reports, the stigma weighed heavily on the young man because, around that time, he became resentful, unruly, and rebellious.  He began drinking heavily as a teenager, a habit he would continue for the rest of his short but adventurous life.

Elmer seems to have tried to pull himself together.  After moving away, he returned to Maine and became an apprentice plumber while living with his grandfather.

But bad times seemed to haunt him.

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The country experienced an economic downturn in 1898 and McCurdy lost his job.  Then, in 1900, his mother and grandfather passed away within a month of each other.

Shortly after his grandfather’s death, the aimless young man drifted around the eastern U.S.  He worked as a miner and a plumber but his hard drinking caused him to struggle to hold down a job for long.

He moved to Kansas and Missouri, then joined the army.  His honorable discharge (on November 7, 1910) would seem to indicate that his military career was a positive change in his life…except…

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McCurdy had made a friend in the army who he soon ran into in St. Joseph, Kansas.  The two had an idea for a way to grab some quick cash but Elmer’s bad luck came back to haunt them both.  They were arrested and charged with possessing burglary paraphernalia (chisels, hacksaws, funnels for nitroglycerin, gunpowder and money sacks).

Somehow the two erstwhile bank and train robbers convinced the judge that the equipment was for a foot operated machine gun they were inventing.

Elmer McCurdy moved on and continued to try his hand at bank and train robbery, but his bad luck and inept planning caused most of his capers to end poorly.

How bad was it?

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In March he heard that an Iron Mountain-Missouri Pacific train was transporting a safe containing $4,000.  Three men joined forces with him to rob the train when McCurdy said he could use his skills with nitroglycerin to open the safe’s door and…

Yeah.

When Elmer attended the army’s training classes on the use of nitroglycerin, he may have been a less-than-apt student.  He did manage to blow the door of the safe, but most of the silver was melted and fused together by the blast.  The gang was able to chip away and make off with about $450 worth of silver.

Yeah.

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That September he and two partners worked for hours to break through the wall of The Citizens Bank in Chautauqua, Kansas. This time his nitro charge blew the door off the vault, destroying much of the bank interior but leaving the safe that was inside the vault unscratched.  McCurdy quickly tried to blow the safe door but couldn’t get the charge to ignite.

With time quickly running out the men grabbed $150 in coins sitting outside the safe and made their escape.  They split up and Elmer spent the next few weeks salving his disappointment (and running through his money) with alcohol, while staying in a friend’s hay shed.

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McCurdy managed to achieve a little fame with his next robbery.  On October 4, he and two accomplices heard that an MKT (Missouri, Kansas, and Texas) train was carrying $400,000 in cash for the Osage Nation.

Remember me calling Elmer inept?  Yeah, they stopped the wrong train.  The passenger train they accosted netted them $46 and two demijohns of whiskey.

Elmer returned to the hay shed with his cut of the take, including the whiskey.

So he got some notoriety when a newspaper account called their theft, “one of the smallest in the history of train robbery.”

Ouch.

Worse yet, now there was a $2,000 reward out for his capture.

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Early in the morning of October 7, Dick Wallace and brothers Bob and Stringer Fenton used bloodhounds to track the drunken fugitive to his hay shed hideout. The three lawmen surrounded the shed and waited for daylight.

In an interview for the October 8, 1911 edition of the Daily Examiner, Sheriff Bob Fenton recalled: “It began just about 7 o’clock. We were standing around waiting for him to come out when the first shot was fired at me. It missed me and he then turned his attention to my brother, Stringer Fenton. He shot three times at Stringer and when my brother got under cover he turned his attention to Dick Wallace. He kept shooting at all of us for about an hour. We fired back every time we could. We do not know who killed him… (on the trail) we found one of the jugs of whiskey which was taken from the train. It was about empty. He was pretty drunk when he rode up to the ranch last night.”

McCurdy was killed by a single shot to the chest which he sustained while lying down.

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The short, unsuccessful career of an inept criminal came to an end, but the most amazing part of Elmer McCurdy’s adventure was just beginning.  I’ll cover that incredible tale in just a few days, when I post, “The Sad Odyssey of Elmer McCurdy – Part 2”.

It is even more unbelievable than his story up until his death.

 

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