The Wild West 12: Outlaws

these films weren't biopics. When it comes to movies, the more entertaining right, and the box office responds to that, and there's no better way to do that than to embellish a few things. The real William Cody was born in eighteen forty six. When he was just eight, his father was brutally attacked, and as he watched his father dying in bed, he declared that he wished to be all grown up so that he could kill the men

who attacked his father. Most historians today believe that Cody was a good storyteller, but what we do know is that as an adult during the Civil War, he was a Union scout, and then in eighteen sixty six he married Luisa Frederici, and in eighteen sixty seven he earned the nickname Buffalo Bill while hunting buffalo for the Kansas Pacific Railroad, where he bragged that he killed forty eight

of the animals in just thirty minutes. Cody's antics eventually caught the attention of General Phillip Sheridan, who wanted a positive public relations spin for the US Army. He joined Cody on buffalo hunts, and the media just couldn't get enough. Pulp fiction magazines were already in the business of romanticizing stories about life in the West, and it didn't take long before a writer convinced Cody to take his stories on tour. Within a year, Cody created his Scouts of

the Prairie show. It was such a success that he ended up traveling the country with it for the better part of a decade. By eighteen eighty three, though, the show had evolved to something that was so large it could only be staged outdoors. Now called Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, he hired cowboys, cowgirls, mountain men, and Mexican voccaros. He brought an elk, bison, and even bear. At an eighteen eighty five Annie Oakley joined, impressing crowds with her

shooting skills. By the time of the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in eighteen ninety three, roughly six hundred and fifty people worked on his show. The stage was functionally fifteen acres of land, the grand stands had room for more than eighteen thousand people. And at that very same exposition, historian Frederick Jackson Turner remember him from our first episode this season, was giving a speech about life on the

American Frontier. To him, the preceding few decades had been more formative to American identity than any other before it. As he understood it, American settlers had experienced the frontier, and in turn, the Frontier had left an indelible mark on the character of America. This is what Hollywood would eventually pick up on. Today, when we think of the Wild West, we're not thinking about the time and place as it was, but the idea as it has been

formed in our imagination. But one thing's for certain. Our image of the Wild West is almost always about people and their stories, which is why they're still so interesting today. I'm Aaron Mankee, and welcome to the wild West. Tumbleweeds, dusty trails, cowboys, and of course outlaws and one rugged gunslinger with his black hat and horse, has always captured imaginations with his lawlessness and daring exploits. Billy the Kid

is a name that we all know. Born in eighteen fifty nine, Billy first found trouble at just fifteen years old. It seemed that he helped a man play a prank by hiding clothes from a launderer. The sheriff didn't find the joke funny and arrested Billy. Not one to be contained, Billy escaped through a jailhouse chimney. While working as a civilian teamster at the Camp Grant Army Post, Billy was bullied daily until he reached the breaking point and shot

his tormentor. He was arrested and again escaped. At this point, though, honest work was no longer an option for him, so Billy joined forces with Jesse Evans and his gang known as the Boys. Eventually, Billy found work in eighteen seventy seven with a guy named John Tunstall protecting him and his cattle. So when Tunstall was murdered during the Lincoln County War, Billy swore vengeance and joined the Regulators, another

infamous outlaw gang. He then took on those who wronged Tunstall in a series of gunfights, earning Billy a reputation as a skilled gunslinger. Again, Billy was arrested, but in a plea deal for a pardon, he testified against others who participated in the Lincoln County War. Sadly, the district attorney didn't hold up his end of the bargain and Billy was locked up anyway, But Billy did what Billy always did. He escaped, going on to form his own

gang called the Rustlers. In late eighteen eighty he was captured yet again and jailed again. Convicted of murder, the judge sentenced him to hang, and once again you guessed it, he escaped, but in July of eighteen eighty one he would finally run out of chances when he was shot and killed by a sheriff. His story was dramatic, and drama always gives wings to the tales we tell. So as the stories about Laws and their gang spread, the line between fact and fiction started to become more and

more blurry. Some of these characters are remembered as Robin Hood's stealing from the rich and giving back to the poor. Others earned sympathy by fighting against a system that had somehow wronged them. One famous outlaw that became larger than life is, of course, Jesse James. Born on September fifth

of eighteen forty seven. James grew up in Clay County, Missouri, although his father, Robert sadly passed away just three years later, leaving Jesse's mother, Zirelda, and his older brother Frank to carry on. During the Civil War, the division between pro Union and pro Confederate sentiments in Missouri escalated to violence. Groups of anti Union bushwhackers, including Jesse's older brother Frank, launched brutal attacks on anti slavery Union towns, and when

Jesse turned sixteen, he followed in his brother's footsteps. After the Civil War, Jesse rose to lead a gang of bank and train robbers. His legend grew with each daring exploit, partly thanks to an ex Confederate soldier and newspaper editor who crafted a myth of James as a heroic Southern robin hood, and he played the part well, maintaining a respectable public image. The gang's luck changed, however, when they attempted to rob the First National Bank of Northfield Minnesota.

This time, the townsfolk fought back, killing two gang members and kicking off a search for the rest. Jesse and his brother Frank barely escaped and ended up moving to Tennessee under false identities. But death comes for us all, doesn't it, and legendary outlaws are no exception. In eighteen eighty two, while Jesse was dusting a picture on the wall, he was shot in the back of the head, and so ended the colorful life of one of America's most

rugged Wild West sweethearts. By the late eighteen hundreds, the thirty year period of the Wild West was coming to an end. The eighteen ninety census showed that the once clear frontier line that divided the settled areas from the wild ones had become too blurry. The wild part of the Wild West, at least according to the US government, had been tamed. You could see it everywhere you went, too. Streets had been laid, and the foundations for public projects

had been created. Jails, schoolhouses, and businesses began dotting the landscape in a tidy fashion. Americans were becoming less interested in expanding outward and more drawn to growing roots. The Wild West was shrinking but it hadn't failed to sunset just yet. That's where Elmer enters the picture. He was born up in Maine in eighteen eighty to a teenage girl named Sadie, and as you might expect, his early

life was full of hardship. So Elmer was raised by his aunt and uncle, Helen and George, and his parentage was kept a secret from him to shield Sadie from embarrassment. However, after his uncle George died in eighteen ninety, Elmer discovered the truth. According to some, it was that that left him feeling betrayed, driving him to become rebellious as a teen. His grandfather found him an apprenticeship as a plumber, but just as life was looking up, a recession struck in

eighteen ninety eight. His aunt Helen and mother, Sadie both lost their jobs, and then in August of nineteen hundred, his mother passed away. That was when Elmer decided to head west for a fresh start. Little did he know that his journey would lead him down a path with other Wild West legends in the most unusual of ways. It began with the daring leap onto a freight train. Every moment on those rattling trains was a dance with fate,

avoiding the prying eyes of company detectives. But after days of heart pounding travel, he arrived in Niola, Kansas in nineteen oh three. This bustling town was at the heart of an industrial boom. The town had seventeen miles of paved roads, indoor plumbing, electricity, and a public library. If On arriving, Elmer adopted the alias of Frank Curtis and took up a plumbing job at the Eagle Cornice Works

and Plumbing Shop. He worked hard, too, often ten or twelve hour shifts just to meet the demand of the growing town. He even joined the volunteer fire department, always ready to battle the flames and earn a few bucks for his bravery. Embracing the spirit of community, he became a member of the local trade union and attended town meetings,

taking part in shaping the town's future. The local newspaper sang his praises, calling him an industrious young man, rubbing shoulders with the town's elite, and even catching the eye of a merchant's daughter. It seemed Elmer had finally found a place to call home. One fateful night, However, under the influence of alcohol, he spilled the truth about his

alias and a supposed barroom murder. Whether or not it was a tall tail fueled by booze remains a mystery, but whatever the case, William Root, his boss, couldn't take the risk and unceremoniously fired him, leaving Elmer feeling trade. Once again, seeking new horizons, he left the town he loved and headed to Missouri, where he worked in the dangerous depths of a zinc mine. From there, he enlisted in the US Army, where he excelled as part of

a machine gun detachment. When that military journey came to an end, he was honorably discharged with praises for his excellent and faithful service. Armed with those discharge papers, he set his sights on Saint Joseph, Missouri. Unfortunately, luck wasn't on his side, and after just a week of job hunting, he found himself penniless. In his desperation, Elmer turned to a former army buddy named Walter Schopplery. Walter took a

week's leave and rushed to his friend's aid. Almost immediately, three police officers arrived and arrested the pair, accusing them of possessing burglary tools. Headlines about the sensational arrest were splashed all over the local newspapers. The officers claimed that they had confiscated not just tools used by burglars, but also a device for pulling safe combinations and a funnel used for nitroglyphs. Elmer and Walter faced serious charges, but

Elmer decided to put his army inventiveness to use. He spent a story that the tools were part of a new machine gun tripod and the supposed nitroglycerin funnel was just a funnel that he had made for Walter. The trial was intense, but Elmer demonstrated his tripod invention in front of the court, convincing the jury to return a

not guilty verdict. It wouldn't be his last encounter with crime, though, After meeting the notorious Walter Jarrett in Saint Joseph's jail, Elmer was lured into the world of outlaws and bank robbers. For good. Jarrett's fascination with the outlaw Jesse James only fueled their ambitions. With their sights set on robbing the Iron Mountain Train, Elmer, Jarretts and the rest of their gang planned to make history, but the heist quickly turned

into a chaotic mess. The safe was harder to crack than they anticipated, and their inept use of explosives caused most of the silver inside to melt and fuse to the walls of the safe. Despite their failed attempt, word

of their crime spread like wildfire. Undeterred, the gang set their sights on a new target, a bank in Chautauqua, Oklahoma, but their plan to tunnel through the brick wall and blast the vault door also backfired spectacularly no pun intended, I swear the explosion they set off ended up wrecking the bank, and they barely managed to steal a few

hundred dollars. Unwilling to give up, they plotted their next move robbing a train that carried royalty payments to the Osage Nation, but instead they mistakenly robbed a local passenger train, netting them a mere forty dollars in cash, plus a pocket watch, one coat, and roughly two gallons of whiskey. Despite their lack of success, though law enforcement was hot on their trail. Determined to bring these wannabe outlaws to justice,

they used bloodhounds to track them down. At first, the man hunt looked promising as the dogs picked up the outlaws trail into the nearby woods, but heavy rains began to fall, washing away footprints and the scent. The media dubbed the gang the Bartlesville Posse and reported on their ambitious plans, describing the explosives and fuses that they found near the crime scene. And alcohol would once again play

into Elmer's downfall. In the following days, he hit out at a local ranch where he indulged in stolen whisky while bragging to a ranch hand that he had come from a train that had been held up. Eventually, Elmer passed out, but the lesson here for everyone at home is pretty clear. Don't get drunk if you've got a crime to hide. Right as dawn broke the next day, on October seventh of nineteen eleven, the authorities caught up

with Elmer. The men took up stations outside the barn where he was sleeping off the whiskey in a bed of hay. Around seven am, the men surprised Elmer as he stumbled out of the barn, perhaps still a bit drunk from the night before. Caught off guard, he fired wildly at them and then ran back in side the barn.

Elmer and the men exchanged gunfire for nearly an hour, but at some point they realized that he was no longer firing back, so they convinced a brave ranch hand to go inside and check on the situation, which is how they found Elmer dead on the floor, his body riddled with bullet holes. Now I need to be honest here that these circumstances surrounding his final days are shrouded

in a bit of uncertainty. Reports on the events before the shootout at the barn are inconsistent and contradictory, leaving the truth behind his death forever unknown. Some have suggested that the shootout never even occurred, and that Elmer wasn't present when the train was robbed. Instead, they wondered if the posse just happened to come across Elmer sleeping off whiskey in the barn and shot him by mistake. A few have even suggested that one of his own gang

was the one who killed him. Whatever happened, though, Elmer's end was just the beginning. While his life as an outlaw may have paled in comparison to Jesse James or Billy the Kid. What set him apart was what came next next. It began with the embalming process at the Johnson Funeral Home in Pulhuska, Oklahoma. His body was treated with arsenic, turning it into an unexpectedly well preserved corpse. But with no one coming forward to claim the body,

the undertaker came up with an idea. He dressed McCurdy's body and bannedit attire, armed it with the rifle, and then put it on display, charging visitors to view the macab exhibit. You see. Back then, laws related to corpses were a lot more lenient, and displays like this were not uncommon. Several years went by until some carnival owners

approached the undertaker, eager to purchase Elmer's body. He refused, so they concocted a story posing as the dead outlaws relatives and tricked the undertaker into handing over the corpse. After that, Elmer's well preserved remains were featured in various carnivals and sideshows all over. Then, in nineteen twenty two, a guy named Lewis Sonny, the head of an entertainment company, acquired the body. And placed it in his traveling show

The Museum of Crime. After that, Elmer's corpse became a prop in a couple of movies, after which it was stored in a warehouse in Los Angeles. And at this point most everyone had forgotten that this prop was actually a human corpse, which is why in the mid nineteen seventies, Elmer's body could be found hanging from a fake gallows in the Laugh in the Dark Funhouse at the New Point Amusement Park in Long Beach, California. Strange, right, But

hold on, because it only gets worse. When the hit TV show The Six Million Dollar Man came to the amusement park to film and episode, the production crew mistook the corpse for a mannequin and accidentally broke its hand off, revealing real human bones inside. As you might imagine, everyone pretty much freaked out, so the police were called and the coroner's office examined the body, finding a copper jacketed

bullet and early nineteen hundreds embalming fluid. Eventually, with the help of Oklahoma historians, they identified the remains as Elmer McCurdy, noting that his mouth was stuffed with carnival ticket stubs, and there you have it. Clearly, in life he was nowhere near as infamous or successful as other outlaws like Jesse James or Billy the Kid. But in death his ability to stick around eclipsed all of them quite literally.

Oh and one more thing. Billy the Kid's final resting place might be a mystery, but Elmer mccurty's sure isn't. In the spring of nineteen seventy seven, someone kindly offered up a free plot in the legendary boothill section of some View Cemetery in Guthrie, Oklahoma. It was a chance to give him a proper burial, although a pretty delayed one, to be honest. When the day finally arrived for Elmer mccurty's final journey, it was a horse drawn hearst that

solemnly carried him toward boot Hill. Inside a plain pine coffin held the well traveled body, ready to lay him to rest sixty six years after his death, and the cemetery that day was filled with hundreds of people, all gathered to bid farewell to the failed outlaw who unintentionally became a legend ever since. Historian Frederick Jackson Turner gave his famous speech at the World's Columbian Exposition in eighteen

ninety three. The notion of the West, at least the one that folks like Buffalo Bill Cody, Jesse James, and all the rest painted for us, has embodied the American spirit. This belief lived on from generation to generation, becoming woven into American identity. In the end, whether fact or fiction, the American Frontier's myth continued to shape a nation's soul, inspiring its people to dream, explore, and believe in the

power of the untamed, uncharted future ahead. As the West's physical landscape changed, the Wild West simply relocated from the wide open plains to the minds and hearts of Americans, where it remains to this very day. For many of our cowboys and out laws, the stories that fed their

folklore were deeds done in life. But Elmer McCurdy's legend was formed post mortem, and he finally got something that he could only have dreamed of in life, a spot on Boot Hill, a famous burial ground for gunfighters who, as they say, died with their boots on. As his coffin was lowered into the earth. That day, authorities poured ample amounts of concrete on top of it, ensuring that mccurty's days of macab travel were at an end. It seems that he had finally earned his spot alongside the

outlaws of old and a place in our imaginations. The Wild West has always been a real life cinematic universe, full of textured characters and major events. It's neat and tidy that way, but hopefully today's exploration of some of the more colorful characters helped you spot a favorite or two amongst the bunch. And if Elmer McCurdy's prop store core was the one that caught your fancy, you're in

for a treat. We've got one more grizzly tale of life after death in the wild West to share with you, and if you stick around through this brief sponsor break, my teammates Ali Steed will tell you all about it.

so somebody else could hang him. He was tried and found guilty on December fifteenth, eighteen eighty, and in the spring of eighteen eighty one, the judge sentenced him to hang. George had no intention of being executed. In March, George attempted to escape. He succeeded in brutally subduing his jailer, but not his jailer's wife, who forced him back to his cell. Incensed over the attack on the jailer, residents stormed the jail and dragged George outside, where they intended

to string him up from a telephone pole. The first two attempts were gruesome failures, but as they say, third time's the charm. Can you believe that's only the beginning of our story? George's corpse wasn't exactly laid to rest. With no family to claim the body, it fell into the hands of doctors Thomas McGee and John Osborne. Curiosity at the criminal condition led them to examine his brain, but all they found was that George's brain was no

different from a normal one. Doctor Osborne molded a death mask of George's face, and, in a gruesome twist removed the skin from his thighs and chest. He then sent the skin to a tannery to make a pair of shoes and a medicine bag. Yes, you heard that right, shoes and a medicine bag made from the skin of an outlaw. After receiving his new duds, Doctor Osborne entered the political arena, becoming the first Democratic governor of Wyoming. It said that he even wore the infamous shoes to

his inaugural ball in eighteen ninety three. Later, he climbed the political ladder further, becoming the Assistant Secretary of State under President Wilson. Meanwhile, his young assistant, Lillian Heath, held on to Big Nose George's skull cap. She went on to become the first female doctor in Wyoming, an incredible trailblazer in her own right. Big Nose George seemed lost to history until one day in nineteen fifty, workers at a construction site found a whiskey barrel filled with human

bones and a sowd off skull in Wallin's Wyoming. The shocking discovery sparked curiosity and speculation. A crowd gathered to witness the grizzly remains, and some remembered that Lilian Heath might actually have a piece of the puzzle. Eighty years later, Lillian confirmed the match between the skull caps she had kept as an ash tray and the skull found in the barrel. DNA testing later verified the results and the mystery was solved. These were indeed the remains of Big

Nose George. Today you can see the death mask, skull and infamous skin shoes displayed at the Carbon County Museum in Rollins. The museum attracts visitors from far and wide, eager to get a glimpse of the wild West's most bizarre outlaw. Outlaws might have been rough and tough characters, but in poor George's case, the vigilantes really kicked it up a notch.

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