C.C. Pyle hired a traveling carnival to accompany the race. The plan was to set up the carnival at the checkpoint and charge admission. Red Grange was to MC the whole affair and the runners were required to make an appearance that night after having run all day.

The carnival was the typical 1920s traveling show with “freaks” and “games of skill” (as C.C. Pyle called them). The sideshow included a five-legged pig, a fire-eater, a tattoo artist, “Kay Ho” (sometimes “Wo Kah”, depending on the newspaper) the movie dog, and the “Poison Girl,” who did a routine with snakes.

In the sparsely populated West, the carnival did poorly. When the race reached the more populated areas it did well. Except when it was shut down for running “games of chance,” as the Sheriff in Rolla, Missouri called them.

One of the more interesting items in the sideshow was a mummy, billed as an “Oklahoma Outlaw.” The mummy was actually the cadaver of a two-bit robber named Elmer McCurdy. In 1913, McCurdy and some others robbed a train in Oklahoma. McCurdy was killed by the posse and taken to the undertaker in Pawhuska, OK.

With no relatives to claim the body, the undertaker embalmed McCurdy using a process that used arsenic. The more arsenic, the better it preserved the body, drying it out and, in effect, mummifying it. McCurdy’s cadaver stood in the corner of the funeral parlor in Pawhuska for several years, unclaimed. Finally, someone claimed the body, saying they were his family. The mummy was sold to a carnival sideshow and wound up in Los Angeles, where C.C. Pyle hired the carnival.

In the 1970s, an Oklahoma City artist named Fred Olds read an article that the “Oklahoma Outlaw” was discovered at a “fun park” in L.A. During a shooting of a television show a stagehand bumped into it and an arm fell off. When they tried to repair it they became suspicious and took the “prop” to a coroner who determined that it was human. Fred Olds was able to prove that it was McCurdy and brought him back to Oklahoma and buried him at Boot Hill, in Guthrie, Oklahoma.