Incapable of earning an honest living, McCurdy joined a cabal of crooks and committed a string of poorly executed bank and railroad robberies across the Great Plains. Literally every single one of his recorded safe-cracking endeavors ended in abject buffoonery. Tales of his legendary exploits include:. To make matters worse, his ability as a gunman was comparable to his prowess as a thief. On October 7, , abandoned by his banditti with stolen whiskey in hand, McCurdy was tracked to a hayshed by three sheriffs and a pack of bloodhounds.
He opened fire and an hour-long gunfight ensued. When the smoke cleared, McCurdy was down in the dirt and dead as a doornail. Elmer McCurdy was a lousy crook. Which begs the question, how did this putz achieve enough notoriety to make the history books?
By virtue of the incredibly bizarre Old West fad of putting dead bodies up for show. Dating back to the Civil War , enterprising embalmers put unclaimed bodies on display at their mortuaries to not only help with identification but as an advertisement for their services.
Johnson was horrifically determined to be compensated for his work. The remnants of Elmer McCurdy were embalmed with an arsenic-laced ultra-preservative that would allow the body to last in a strikingly lifelike condition indefinitely.
This was the norm at the time for the unclaimed dead, which left the preserved body waiting for its next of kin. Johnson decided that the most reasonable of all available options was to repurpose McCurdy as scenery for his funeral parlor, where he stiffly stood with a gun by his side, propped-up like a ficus for five years. Johnson charged visitors five cents to see the dead man up close. Though hardly the first funerary practice that saw objects placed in the mouth of the deceased, feeding McCurdy change like a coin-op arcade was certainly the tackiest.
But this was not the only escapade his body was involved with during his residency at the Johnson Funeral Home. Dead man walking rolling! Zany hijinks aside, McCurdy was proving to be quite the sensation. Word traveled fast of Johnson being in possession of an attraction that was drawing huge crowds at the box office.
Carnival promoters from all over the country made offers to purchase McCurdy, but as far as Johnson was concerned his human taxidermy was not for sale. They took Elmer to his homeland and he was finally laid to rest. Just kidding. Morbid curiosity about the effects of decomposition is naturally understandable, and, unless a given vocation called for it, people did not often have the opportunity to know what a dead body looked like before the days of the internet.
Cheaply-made dime novel melodramas—the precursor to pulp fiction magazines—were sensationalizing the myth of the American West. To take advantage of that, given an entertainment venture that immersed itself in all-things-lurid, what would be a better top-billing than a bona fide cowboy corpse? Or, at least, a cowboy-clad cadaver!
His gruesome and deeply unethical sideshow became quite successful, and gained some notoriety. They were not his brothers, however — according to an article published by the Library of Congress, they were James and Charles Patterson, who operated the Great Patterson Carnival Show. Sonney and, later, his son Daniel, owned the corpse for more than 45 years, loaning it out to a variety of people. Singh now felt the mummy was too gruesome to show in public, and as a final indignity after decades of desecration, in the early s it was sold to the owner of The Pike, an amusement park in Long Beach, California, where it was hung from the rafters in a haunted house, covered in neon paint.
An autopsy — which involved getting through multiple layers of paint and wax — determined the man had died from a gunshot wound. Though, not surprisingly, his final resting place is still a tourist attraction. Emily Burnham is a Maine native and proud Bangorian, covering business, the arts, restaurants and the culture and history of the Bangor region. More by Emily Burnham. Skip to content. This is the final resting place of Elmer McCurdy, an alcoholic and notoriously bad outlaw who was killed in during a shootout.
No one claimed McCurdy's body, so the local undertaker in Pawhuska embalmed it and charged people a nickel to see the "mummy. The undertaker was swindled and McCurdy's body was then bought and sold to many different side shows, circuses and other places where it could be put on display for amusement.
This went on for decades.
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