illegitmacy Archives - New England Historical Society

On Oct. 11, 1911 an Oklahoma sheriff’s posse had Elmer McCurdy on the run. The Maine man – a plumber-turned-outlaw – had robbed a train a few days earlier in Katy, Okla.

The robbery was a disaster for the would-be gangster. It was his second train robbery and one of his gang had been captured. That man had turned the sheriff onto McCurdy, and they had tracked him by bloodhound to the Osage, Oklahoma Badlands.

Movie poster for the Great Train Robbery.

Cornered in a hayloft, McCurdy had sworn not to be taken alive, and he wasn’t. Brothers Bob and Stringer Fenton and Dick Wallace tracked him to the barn.

Bob Fenton told what happened to the Oklahoma State Register in a story headlined: Katy Robber Pays Price of Train Holdup in His Own Blood: “He took a shot at me first. Then he shot at Stringer. Then he took three shots at Wallace before we opened up on him. It took an hour before he dropped. I don’t know which of us hit him.”

Elmer McCurdy

The path that Elmer McCurdy followed to Oklahoma from his early days in Bangor and Washington, Maine, was a curious one. He was born to Augusta “Sadie” McCurdy in 1880 in Washington, Maine. He didn’t know his father, though some historians speculate it was an older cousin.

Elmer grew up living with his mother and an uncle and aunt, and later his grandfather. After some troubled teenage years as a drunkard, he settled into the role of protector of his mother. He also apprenticed himself as a plumber. But at age 20, Elmer’s mother died. Left on his own, he went west. Over the next few years, Elmer traveled to Kansas, plying his trade as a plumber and taking work as a miner.

Elmer McCurdy in life.

Life of Crime

In 1907 he joined the Army and learned about weapons and nitroglycerin, though apparently not much. Then with his three-year stint in the Army behind him, Elmer took his first steps toward being a criminal in 1910. He and a gang of friends tried to rob a Pacific Express train. They hopped aboard and Elmer planted a nitroglycerin charge at the door of the train’s safe.

An enormous explosion followed. So enormous it melted most of the silver in the safe and blew shards of it into the wall. The gang got away with little money.

Elmer next partnered with another man to rob a bank in Chautauqua, Kans. Elmer placed an explosive charge on the safe and blew the outer door off. The blast woke up half the town, and the men had to flee before they could blast away the inner door. Again, they didn’t get much of a haul from the robbery.

The Katy Train Robbery

This teed up Elmer’s robbery of the Katy train, his third and final crime. (Some histories, though, say Elmer had killed a man in Colorado at one point.) The robbery of the Katy train also did not go well. Some have theorized that Elmer and his gang actually robbed the wrong train, that their actual target was an express due later carrying gold.

Elmer and the gang took control of the train, uncoupled the passenger car from the engine and left it standing on the tracks. They stole less than $50 from the passengers inside and made off with a couple of jugs of whiskey. Was their plan to use the passenger car to block the oncoming express to get a better haul? Perhaps. Either way, it never happened.

With little to show for his efforts, Elmer hid out in Osage where the posse surrounded him and killed him. He was nearly 32 years old. His journey then took an even stranger turn.

Elmer McCurdy Beyond the Grave

After his death, the sheriff had Elmer McCurdy transported to Pawhuska, Okla. He was embalmed at a local funeral home and placed in a back room awaiting someone to come forward to claim his body. Nobody did.

Elmer McCurdy in a coffin

Laws governing human remains were less strict in those days. The undertaker decided that if no one would claim the body and pay for his services, he would at least use Elmer to display the excellence of his work. He propped Elmer, dressed in his gangster clothing and rifle in hand, in a corner. Some say he charged a small fee to view Elmer McCurdy, the Embalmed Bandit.

Over the next five years the undertaker turned down offers to sell McCurdy’s body to various freak shows and carnivals. Finally the Great Patterson Shows tricked him into giving Elmer up. The carnival had two of its men masquerade as relatives of Elmer McCurdy. For decades, Elmer would travel the west and Midwest as a freak show attraction. Displaying bodies of dead gangsters and other famous and infamous people was not uncommon.

His story has been told numerous times in television shows around the world and in books. In 1977, The Life and Afterlife of Elmer J. McCurdy: A Melodrama in Two Acts, told his story. And in 2003, Elmer McCurdy: The Life and Afterlife of an American Outlaw was published.

End of the Road

Elmer’s journey finally came to an end after 66 years on the road. He had been on display at a haunted house amusement called the “Laff in the Dark” at a seedy city pier in Long Beach, Calif., called The Pike. The year was 1977. The hit television show The Six Million Dollar Man, then in its fourth season, came to The Pike to film.

The Laff in the Dark was to be the backdrop of an episode titled the “Carnival of Spies.” As crews readied the ride for use, they moved what they thought was a red mannequin hanging from a fake gallows. When a piece of the hand broke off, they discovered the mannequin was actually a human body. They took it to the Los Angeles County Coroner’s office. The coroner found a copper-jacketed bullet in the chest and embalming fluid used in the early 1900s. Someone had stuffed carnival ticket stubs into his mouth. With the help of historians, they realized they had Elmer McCurdy’s body under layers of Day-Glo paint.

After identifying McCurdy, the Oklahoma Historical Society arranged for McCurdy to be transported to Guthrie, Okla. where he was buried in the Boot Hill section of the cemetery that housed actual fellow bandit Bill Doolin and his Wild Bunch gang. Though more successful as gangsters, the Wild Bunch’s career couldn’t hold a candle to Elmer McCurdy’s nearly 100-year odyssey.

To make sure he stayed put, the Oklahoma authorities poured two yards of concrete on top of Elmer McCurdy’s grave.

This story was updated in 2022.

John Adams’ daughter in 1785 dumped the charming rake Royall Tyler to marry a dashing military hero. She may well have regretted her choice, but her secretive nature prevents us from knowing.

Abigail, or ‘Nabby,’ was the only daughter of John and Abigail Adams who lived to adulthood. She was handsome, not beautiful, and reserved. When she was 16 years old, Royall Tyler came to Braintree to practice law. He won, then lost, her heart.

What Nabby couldn’t have known was that her husband-to-be, William Stephens Smith, was a has-been at 30, and Royall Tyler would become a successful politician, professor and literary celebrity.

Royall Tyler

The dashing Royall Tyler

Royall Tyler was born June 18, 1757 in Boston, the son of a wealthy merchant. His father died when he was young. He studied at Harvard, where he squandered half his inheritance on drinking, partying and gambling. He also fathered a child with a cleaning woman.

After college, he studied law under Francis Dana, for whom a young John Quincy Adams had worked when he served as minister to Russia. Tyler then moved to Braintree, where he lodged with Abigail Adams’ sister and brother-in-law, Mary and Richard Cranch.

He soon grew friendly with John Quincy Adams and his sister Nabby, who at 16 was eight years younger than he.

Tyler cut a dashing figure. He was handsome, well-mannered and dressed stylishly.

Abigail Adams found Royall Tyler charming, and believed him when he told her he had reformed. She wrote to her husband, then in Europe. The young man had ‘a sprightly fancy, a warm imagination and an agreeable person,’ she wrote, though she admitted Tyler was ‘rather negligent in pursueing (sic) his business … and dissipated two or 3 more years of his Life and too much of his fortune to reflect upon with pleasure; all of which he now laments but cannot recall.’

She also told John Adams that Royall Tyler was courting his daughter.

Reformed Rake

John Adams exploded in writing at the news. He wrote Abigail a letter in January 1783:

I confess I dont like the Subject at all. . . . My Child is a Model, as you represent her and as I know her, and is not to be the Prize, I hope of any, even reformed Rake. . . .

But Tyler persisted and John Adams eventually relented. By the spring of 1784 he won Nabby’s heart and the approval of her parents. The Adams family expected them to marry.

Nabby’s letters are lost, and she never mentioned Royall Tyler in her letters. Still, it’s possible from her mother’s writing to glean what happened.

Stories about Tyler’s college days resurfaced in Braintree, and the Adamses came to think of him as an insincere flatterer.

Nabby Adams

In 1784, Nabby sailed for Europe with her mother to join her father and oldest brother, John Quincy.

Nabby wrote letter after letter to Royal Tyler. Ships from America kept arriving without letters from him. She kept to herself her ‘fear, suspicion, doubt, dread and apprehension.’

Finally, her mother broached the subject with her. Nabby asked Abigail whether she thought someone they knew was a man of honor. Abigail responded:

I replied yes a Man of strict honour, and I wisht I could say that of all her acquaintance. As she could not mistake my meaning, instead of being affected as I apprehended she said, a breach of honour in one party would not justify a want of it in the other. I thought this the very time to speak. I said if she was conscious of any want of honour on the part of the Gentleman, I and every Friend she had in the world, would rejoice if she could liberate herself.

Nabby decided to dump Royall Tyler.

In the summer of 1785, Nabby told her mother about the break-, up, asking that ‘neither the Name or subject may ever be mentiond to her.’ She sent Tyler a Dear John letter in September that year.

Consolation

Nabby’s letter devastated Royall Tyler. He took lodgings with the Palmer family in Boston, where he was consoled by Betsey Palmer. He took so much consolation from Betsey he fathered a child with her – and possibly two — while her husband was away.

Tyler then married Betsey Palmer’s daughter Mary, and they had 11 children. He took part in suppressing Shay’s rebellion, which took him to Vermont. There he became chief justice of the Vermont Supreme Court and a professor of jurisprudence at the University of Vermont.

Royall Tyler became a literary celebrity as well. He wrote a comedy, The Contrast, performed in New York City before George Washington and members of the first Congress. He wrote a satirical newspaper column, published a novel, the Algerine Captive, authored legal tracts, plays, a musical, two long poems, essays and a travel narrative.

Tyler later said he only regretted his youthful profligacy to the extent it hampered his ambition later in life.

William Stephens Smith

When Nabby Adams broke up with Royall Tyler, she had her eye on someone else: Col. William Stephens Smith, secretary to the American delegation to London.

Smith was the son of a wealthy New York merchant, a Princeton graduate and a veteran of the Revolution where he had served on George Washington’s staff. When she married him, Nabby had on idea of the downward spiral his career would take.

They married in 1786 and returned to New York, where they had four children.

Smith received appointments to several federal posts, but he dabbled in Latin American coups and speculated recklessly in land. By 1809, the family lived on a small farm in western New York State. The rest of the Adams family viewed him as hopelessly improvident.

Nabby discovered a small lump on her breast, which turned out to be an aggressive form of breast cancer. In 1811 she returned to Boston and had a mastectomy without anesthetic.

She survived the operation and returned to New York. The cancer returned, though, and she told her husband she wanted to die in her father’s house. Her wish was granted on Aug. 15, 1813.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Elmer McCurdy, Maine Plumber, Dumbest Outlaw, Traveling Corpse