Minisode 10 – Guess What I Heard: 46 Dollars and 2 Bottles of Whiskey

So who was Elmer J. McCurdy?

Well, he went by many names–“The Bandit Who Wouldn’t Give Up”, “The Mischief-Making Vagabond”, “The Mystery Man of Many Aliases”, “The Oklahoma Outlaw”–some while he was alive, others after his death. He was an outlaw, mostly active in Kansas and Oklahoma during the early 1900s. Specifically, he was a bank and train robber. 

Born in 1880, Elmer had a rough upbringing with lots of personal loss, which led to lifelong alcoholism. He spent three years in the US Army where he was trained to use nitroglycerin for demolition. He would utilize this in his crimes, but it was generally acknowledged that he was…well…pretty inept in its use. Several instances of him over- or underestimating the amount of nitroglycerin needed to create explosives is documented. For example, he once blew up the safe he was trying to rob, incinerating all the cash inside in the process. 

With the combination of his less-than-stellar explosives skills and his heavy drinking, he was not…ahem…great at the whole outlaw thing. Ultimately, this proved to be his downfall.  On October 4, 1911, Elmer, along with two other men, attempted to rob a train that supposedly carried a crazy amount of cash. Sources say either $4000 or $400,000 in cash, which equates to around $125 thousand and $13 million today respectively. Either way, a big chunk of change! However, they mistakenly stopped and robbed a passenger train instead. 

When all was said and done, they got away with $46, a revolver, a coat, a watch, and two bottles of whisky. A newspaper account of the robbery later called it “one of the smallest in the history of train robbery”. 

Ouch. 

Elmer fled to a friend’s ranch in Oklahoma, taking the pilfered whiskey with him. He drank through the night then went into a hay loft in a barn on the property to sleep. Unbeknownst to Elmer, police had tied him to the train robbery and were actively searching for him at that time. They tracked him to that very barn using bloodhounds, surrounded the structure, and waited for the sun to come up. 

In the morning around 7am, it is reported that exchange of fire began with Elmer. After approximately an hour, Elmer was found dead of a gunshot wound to his chest. The date was October 7, 1911 and Elmer was 31 years old.