Wedding Ride - Summer of 2013 - Next Stops Oklahoma and Texas

I got a good night's rest in Dodge City and headed out for Oklahoma around 5:45 the next morning.  I had another short riding day planned (325 miles) but again, lots of things to see along the way.  The forecast called for rain in the area, so I donned the rain gear and got the hell out of Dodge!  (See, I spent the night in Dodge City if you'll recall, so "Got the hell out of Dodge", get it?)

This is the closest I've gotten to taking my own picture while riding the motorcycle.  That's my shadow on the side of the road just outside Buffalo, Oklahoma.

I must have barely missed a rain shower as I was crossing into Oklahoma on US-183.  The roads were wet and I could see it still raining to my east.  As I rode into Buffalo, Oklahoma, I noticed a war memorial on the grounds of what I believe was the local VFW.  I pulled in to take a look.  It was a nice memorial in honor of all who have served and protected their country.

The Veterans Memorial in Buffalo.  There are flag poles that include a flag for each branch of the service.  The granite stones are inscribed with the names of veterans from the area who have given their life in service of their country. And, the most moving part of the memorial is the sculpture of the soldier sitting in the front.

The soldier is sitting and has his notebook on his knee as he writes a letter home.  This sculpture really added to the emotional impact of the memorial and drove home the personal sacrifice our men and women in the military make to keep us free.

I only made it a few blocks down Hoy Street in Buffalo before I noticed a large mural painted on the north side of one of their downtown buildings.  I had to circle back around the block because it caught my eye and I wanted to take a closer look.

The mural in Buffalo at the corner of Hoy and Williams Streets.

A close up of the east end of the mural that features the bank.

This is the west end of the mural. I think it is a historic painting of Buffalo because even though you can't see it in this picture very well, the building on the far right in the mural has the name "Buffalo" on it. I wasn't able to find out anything about the artist.

I also noticed this old gas station sitting across Hoy Street from the mural.  I thought it was kind of cool looking too.

I continued down US-183 out of Buffalo and made a gas stop in Woodward.  I took advantage of the stop in Woodward to grab a Snickers and a Mountain Dew for breakfast then continued on toward my next planned stop in Kingfisher, OK.

Thirty miles or so southeast of Woodward, a missed turn caused me to pass through another small town called Seiling.  Actually, the missed turn didn't really cost me anything in distance and, had I made my turn, I would have missed out on the sights Seiling had to offer.

The east end of the mural in the Veterans Memorial Park in Seiling, Oklahoma.  The mural is located at the corner of Main and 3rd Streets in Seiling.

The center portion of the mural.  This is a painting taken from a picture of Seiling from around 1906.

The mural was painted by art professor, Dr. Bob Palmer, and his students from the University of Central Oklahoma in Edmond, OK.  I'm thinking they might have had something to do with the mural in Buffalo also, but there's no reference to the Buffalo mural in the information I could find.

The mural is on the wall that's part of the Veterans Memorial Park in downtown Seiling.  The park includes various military apparatus.

Seiling Veterans Memorial Park. In honor of all U.S. Military personnel past, present and future whose service in defending the free world is greatly appreciated.

I took US-270/281 southeast out of Seiling to Watonga where I headed due east on OK-3/33 toward Kingfisher.  I was able to get another 65 miles down the road from Seiling before I hit my first bout of real rain.  Prior to that, it was mostly just wet roads and road spray that I had to worry about.  But, as I rode into Kingfisher, it officially began to rain.

My reason for stopping in Kingfisher was to get a picture of the statue of Sam Walton.  Kingfisher is Sam Walton's birthplace.  Sam was the founder of Wal-Mart.

Sam Walton and his dog, Ol' Roy, sit outside the Wal-Mart Supercenter in Kingfisher.

By the time I rode out of the Wal-Mart parking lot that was home to Sam Walton's statue, it was raining pretty hard.  I had passed a statue in the heart of downtown Kingfisher on my way to the Wal-Mart, so I wanted to stop there and get a picture of it also.

This sculpture of Jesse Chisholm sits at the corner of US-81 and OK-33 in downtown Kingfisher.  Titled, Ambassador of the Plains, it was created by sculptor John Gooden.

If you remember from the earlier blog post about Dodge City, the Chisholm Trail was one of the greatest cattle trails in the U.S. and was used to move millions of head of cattle from Texas to the railheads in Kansas.  The Chisholm Trail ran along what is now US-81.  The trail was blazed by a mixed-blood Cherokee guide named, Jesse Chisholm, and this statue sits right along the old trail in his honor.

I continued on OK-33 to Guthrie for my next gas stop and a little side trip that I thought would be interesting.  A little over a mile north of the main street (Noble Ave) sits Summit View Cemetery and Summit View Cemetery has its own "Boot Hill".  Summit View's Boot Hill only has two graves in it, but they both have an interesting story.

Boot Hill in Summit View Cemetery in Guthrie, Oklahoma.  It took me a little while riding the Harley through the cemetery to find it, but I finally tracked these two down.

Bill Doolin's grave.  One of the two outlaws buried in Summit View's Boot Hill section.

Bill Doolin was suspected of being a member of the infamous Dalton Gang who terrorized the West from 1890 - 1892 robbing various banks and trains.  It's believed Doolin might have been holding the horses in an alley in Coffeyville, Kansas when four members of the Dalton Gang where killed in a shootout as a result of a botched bank robbery (they tried to rob two banks simultaneously).  Doolin got away and later formed his own gang called the Wild Bunch.

The Wild Bunch got away with several successful bank robberies before the group of relentless law enforcement called the Three Guardsmen finally caught up to them.  The Three Guardsmen were made up of the lawmen Bill Tilghman, Chris Madsen and Heck Thomas.  In early 1896, Doolin was captured by Bill Tilghman, but escaped on July 5th.  He was hiding out in Lawson, Oklahoma when Heck Thomas tracked him down and killed him with a shotgun blast.

The headstone tells some of the story of Elmer McCurdy, the other Summit View outlaw.

I pulled most of my information on Elmer McCurdy from Wikipedia.  McCurdy was another bank robber who met a violent death.  After hiding out on a farm and then a ranch near Pawhuska, Oklahoma, a posse tracked him down.  Instead of surrendering, McCurdy got into a gun battle with the posse from his hiding spot in a hay shed.  Posse members claim McCurdy took several shots at various members of the posse before they opened fire on him.  The return fire was so intense that neighbors came out to watch the battle from a safe distance.  When the firing died down and no return fire was coming from the hay shed, the Chief of Police climbed the ladder and found McCurdy dead of a gunshot wound to the chest.  

This is when the McCurdy story gets interesting.

When no one claimed McCurdy’s corpse, the undertaker in Pawhuska embalmed it with an arsenic-based preservative and allowed people to see "The Bandit Who Wouldn't Give Up" for a nickel. People would place nickels in McCurdy's mouth, which the undertaker would collect later. As increasingly large numbers of people came to view his remains (with each leaving a nickel), McCurdy was said to have made more money in death than in life. Many carnival operators asked to buy the mummified body from the undertaker, but he refused.

Almost five years after McCurdy died, a man showed up from a nearby traveling carnival known as the Great Patterson Shows claiming to be McCurdy's long-lost brother. He indicated that he wanted to remove the corpse to give it a proper burial. Within two weeks, however, McCurdy was a featured exhibit with the carnival. For the next 60 years, McCurdy's body was sold to successive wax museums, carnivals, and haunted houses. Eventually, McCurdy's corpse wound up at an amusement park in Long Beach, California.

In December 1976, during filming of the television show The Six Million Dollar Man, a crew member was moving what was thought to be a wax mannequin that was hanging from a gallows. When the mannequin's arm broke off, it was discovered that it was in fact embalmed and mummified human remains. Later, when medical examiner Thomas Noguchi opened the mummy's mouth for other clues, he was surprised to find a 1924 penny and a ticket from Sonney Amusement's Museum of Crime in Los Angeles. That ticket and archived newspaper accounts helped police and researchers identify the body as that of Elmer McCurdy.

His remains were examined in 1976 by forensic anthropologists. McCurdy's remains revealed incisions from his original autopsy and embalming, as well as a gunshot wound in the right anterior chest. Additionally, a copper bullet jacket or gas check from a .32-20 caliber projectile was found embedded in his pelvis (analysis of the projectile showed that the jacket was manufactured between 1905 and the 1930s). Also, video superimposition of the remains with photographs of McCurdy's corpse in the University of Oklahoma's Western History Collection confirmed McCurdy's identity.

He was finally buried in the Boot Hill section of the Summit View Cemetery in Guthrie, Oklahoma on April 22, 1977. The state medical examiner ordered that two cubic yards of concrete was to be poured over the casket, so that his remains would never be disturbed again.

It rained like crazy as I rode east out of Guthrie along OK-105.  Things calmed down a little north of Chandler on OK-18 and had pretty much stopped by the time I turned east on historic Route 66 headed toward my in-laws home in Bristow.

My wet and very dirty Road Glide at rest in Bristow for a couple of days.

I spent some time visiting with my in-laws in Bristow and watching the weather for a chance to make a break for Texas without having to spend another day wet.  I decided to make a run for Texas on Wednesday.

The ride to Texas was about 460 miles and mostly on interstate.  I did get to do a little bit of US-377 south out of Stroud, Oklahoma down to Ada where I picked up the Chickasaw Turnpike.  Don't be too impressed.  The Chickasaw Turnpike is a two-lane toll road.  In fairness, it was good road and traffic moved right along, but since I'm not a big fan of toll roads in general, a two-lane toll road was particularly appalling to me.

I gassed up in a little town called Davis and then hit I-35 for the remainder of my ride.  The rain started just south of Fort Worth, but was off and on, so it wasn't too bad.  I made one extra stop at Horny Toad Harley-Davidson in Temple, Texas (how could I not stop at Horny Toad H-D?) and continued to slip in and out of light rain the rest of the way to Kyle where I would be visiting Jeremy and Casey and meeting my new granddaughter, Kayla Renee, for the first time.

Jeremy was still at work when I got to Kyle so I treated myself to a What-A-Burger with jalapenos and killed a little time.  I decided to move on closer to Jeremy's house, but didn't get more than a mile before the bottom dropped out.  I took refuge at a Valero gas station, bought a cigar and sat outside and smoked it while waiting for the rain to die down again.  It did and I was back on the bike for the final couple of miles to Jeremy's.

Before the evening was done, I was finally getting to meet Miss Kayla and that made all of the days of riding, riding in the rain, riding in the heat, all were worthwhile.

Pappy meets Miss Kayla.  One of many pictures I took and sent to Renee to torment her until she could fly down a couple of days later.

Renee said I needed to write less in these blogs.  She thinks I'm being too wordy.  So, I tried to include more pictures and less words in this one (though I couldn't resist all the words associated with the Elmer McCurdy story.)  I also learned to make the pictures a little bigger for you.  Let me know what you think.

The next post will cover the second wedding of the trip as well as the return back to Virginia.  More fun and a bunch of interesting stops on the way back.  See you soon.