Again, they didn’t get much of a haul from the robbery. The blast woke up half the town, and the men had to flee before they could blast away the inner door. Elmer placed an explosive charge on the safe and blew the outer door off. The gang got away with little money.Įlmer next partnered with another man to rob a bank in Chautauqua, Kans. So enormous it melted most of the silver in the safe and blew shards of it into the wall. They hopped aboard and Elmer planted a nitroglycerin charge at the door of the train’s safe.Īn enormous explosion followed. He and a gang of friends tried to rob a Pacific Express train. Then with his three-year stint in the Army behind him, Elmer took his first steps toward being a criminal in 1910. In 1907 he joined the Army and learned about weapons and nitroglycerin, though apparently not much.
Over the next few years, Elmer traveled to Kansas, plying his trade as a plumber and taking work as a miner. He also apprenticed himself as a plumber. After some troubled teenage years as a drunkard, he settled into the role of protector of his mother. He didn’t know his father, though some historians speculate it was an older cousin.Įlmer grew up living with his mother and an uncle and aunt, and later his grandfather. He was born to Augusta “Sadie” McCurdy in 1880 in Washington, Maine. The path that Elmer McCurdy followed to Oklahoma from his early days in Bangor and Washington, Maine, was a curious one. I don’t know which of us hit him.” Elmer McCurdy Then he took three shots at Wallace before we opened up on him. Brothers Bob and Stringer Fenton and Dick Wallace tracked him to the barn.īob 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.
#ELMER MCCURDY MOVIE#
Movie poster for the Great Train Robbery.Ĭornered in a hayloft, McCurdy had sworn not to be taken alive, and he wasn’t.
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