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In newspapers of the time Brocius is
usually known simply as Curly Bill, but later history has also
referred to him by the spelling of Curley Bill. The spelling of "Brocious"
has also been used (including in modern movies), but "Brocius"
is the name the outlaw used for his maildrop in the Arizona Territory,
according to one published letter of the time. Brocius is probably an
alias. His birth name (including middle initial) and date of birth remains
unknown.
Stories that Brocius once had a wife and
children and paid another man to fight in the American Civil War for him,
all arise from unverifiable claims in a letter that somebody (later
untraceable) once sent to historian Ben Traywick. They are based on the
very poorest of evidence, and are often disregarded.
No known photograph of Brocius exists,
but from description he was known to have been a big man, well-built, with
curly black hair, and of freckled complexion.
Brocius is described by contemporary
Billy Breakenridge in his book Helldorado as being the most deadly
pistol shot of the Cow-boys, able to hit running jackrabbits, shoot out
candle flames without breaking the candles or lantern holders, and able to
shoot quarters from between the fingers of "volunteers." When
drunk, Brocius was also known for a mean sense of humor, and for such
"practical jokes" as using gunfire to make a preacher
"dance" during a sermon, or making Mexicans at a community dance
take off their clothes and dance naked. (Both incidents were reported by
Wells Fargo agent Fred Hume in this memoirs, and both incidents are
alluded to in the newspapers of the time).
Brocius probably came immediately to the
Arizona Territory from Texas around 1878 after arriving at the San Carlos
Reservation with a herd of cattle, but his earlier history is a matter of
question. Wyatt Earp, from conversations with Brocius while transporting
him to Tucson for trial (for shooting town-marshal--in today's
terminology, town police-chief-- Fred White) in 1880, thought Brocius he
was an escaped outlaw from El Paso, Texas. There, he is the man who
possibly had his right ear shot through by Texas Ranger, (and later, Asst.
Marshal) Thomas Mode.
These conversations with Earp were
reported in the Tombstone Epitaph at the time. According to Earp,
Curly Bill had asked him about lawyers during the journey, and Earp had
recommended a man named Zabriski. Curly Bill had said he couldn't use
Zabriski because Zabriski had years earlier been his state prosecutor for
a crime he had been convicted of in El Paso, Texas-- a robbery in which a
man had been killed. Later historical work based in this fact has linked
"Brocius" with a man then known as William "Curly
Bill" Bresnaham, who was convicted in a Texas robbery attempt (1878)
with another known "Cow-boy" of the early Tombstone area, named
Robert Martin.
These men were convicted and sentenced to
5 years in prison, but both escaped, presumably to the southwest Arizona
Territory. Since both Robert Martin and Curly Bill became known as leaders
of the rustlers in Arizona Territory, they are almost certainly the same
Robert Martin and Curly Bill of the Texas crime.
According to author Robert Utley, Robert
Martin was a member of the Jesse Evans gang of outlaws in New Mexico
during the mid to late 1870's. Billy the Kid briefly joined this group
before going to work for John Tunstall. Evans' gang, a loosely-knit
consortium of desperadoes known as "The Boys", would end up
fighting against The Regulators during the Lincoln County War.
Due to the time frame, location, and his
friendship with Martin, Curly Bill Brocius may have been a member of the
Evans gang as well. Perhaps tellingly, when Brocius was shot in Galeyville
in 1881, he derided his attacker, Jim Wallace, as a "Lincoln County
sonofabitch".
Undersheriff Wyatt Earp (with a deputy)
was transporting Brocius by buckboard to Tucson for trial after the
October 27, 1880 shooting of 31 year-old Tombstone town marshal Fred
White, following an incident where Brocius' gun discharged accidentally,
while he was drunk and surrendering it to White. Brocius allegedly deeply
regretted the incident, and reportedly liked White personally. He was
arrested immediately after the incident by Wyatt Earp, who
"buffaloed" him (hit him over the head with a pistol barrel) in
the process. Wyatt Earp, acting in his capacity as deputy sheriff (undersheriff
for the Tombstone area) of Pima County, Arizona, then took Brocius to
Tucson the next day for trial, possibly averting a lynching. Brocius
waived his right to a preliminary hearing, which is evidence he wanted to
get out of town.
Wyatt at this time held a county law
position and Virgil Earp, at that time U.S. deputy marshal, held a federal
position. Virgil Earp would briefly succeed White as town marshal (the
town law position) for a period of less than two weeks, before being
replaced at about the same time Wyatt resigned his own law position.
Virgil would eventually be given the job of city marshal again, seven
months later (by this time Tombstone had grown from town to city), and
would hold it at the time of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Virgil was
not present at the White shooting.
White died two days after being shot, by
which time Brocius was in jail in Tucson. Although formally charged with
the murder of White, and spending most of November and December 1880 in
jail awaiting trial, Brocius was finally acquitted with a verdict of
accidental death. In favor of Brocius' case was that White himself, before
he died from his wound, had testified that he thought the pistol had gone
off by accident, and that he did not believe the shooting was intentional.
Wyatt Earp also testified in favor of Brocius -- an irony, given their
later deadly feud.
Brocius was known as a rustler, but for a
time, he also worked as a tax collection agent for Cochise County Sheriff
Johnny Behan, making other rustlers pay taxes on their stolen cattle (the
money went into the sheriff's coffers and added to his salary).
On May 26, 1881, Brocius was shot by a
compadre after an argument in Galeyville. The bullet passed though his
neck and out the opposite cheek. Though the bullet must have passed very
near many vital structures, Brocius survived. He was by this time an
outlaw of considerable reputation, and although referred to as a gunfighter,
most of his shootings happened during drunken brawls or robberies.
In July, 1881 Brocius and gunfighter
Johnny Ringo were said to have gone to Hauchita, New Mexico, to kill
William and Isaac Haslett in revenge for the deaths of Clanton members
Bill Leonard and Harry Head, who had attempted to rob the Haslett
brothers' general store weeks earlier. Later in July, Brocius was said to
have led an ambush attacking a Mexican trail herd in the San Luis Pass
killing six vaqueros and torturing the remaining eight men.
There is no way of historically verifying
these stories however, and Brocius was not charged with the crimes. These
events, like the Haslett killings, also occurred quite near the time of
Brocius' very serious wound, so his involvement in them is somewhat
questionable. Diarist George Parsons saw Brocius on October 6 at the ranch
of the McLaury brothers in the Sulphur Spring Valley, while Parsons was
riding as part of an Indian scouting party, and noted that even by then,
Curly Bill was well enough to ride, but had not yet completely recovered
from his wound of 5 months before.
Following the death of Old Man Clanton
(Newman Haynes Clanton) in the Guadalupe Canyon Massacre on August 13,
1881, Brocius became a primary leader in the very loose-knit cow-boy gang.
Parson's refers to Brocius as "Arizona's most famous outlaw" in
early October, 1881. However, despite many reports since, the Cow-Boy gang
was not closely organized. They had a loose gang-based association, but
broke off into several small groups, and outlaw acts committed by them
were rarely heavily planned or coordinated. Therefore, Brocius' leading of
the gang was not by iron fist, nor did he either approve or
disapprove actions members of the gang became involved in. The gang was,
more than anything else, a collection of independent outlaws that used
their association with the Cow-Boys as a base of operations.
Gunfight at the
OK Corral and after
Following the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral
in October, 1881, Brocius may have participated in the attempt to kill
Virgil Earp and (more probably) the later assassination of Morgan Earp.
Again, however, Brocius was not charged, as there were no eye witnesses to
either crime.
After the killing of Frank Stilwell by
the Earp party in Tucson on March 20, 1882 during the now famous Earp
vendetta ride, Brocius was deputized, given a warrant issued for Wyatt
Earp by Sheriff Johnny Behan, and sent to bring back Earp, who was in the
Whetstone Mountains outside town.
Earp, who was also looking for Brocius in
revenge for the death of his brother Morgan, encountered Curly Bill on
March 24, 1882 at Iron Springs (today's maps show this as Mescal Springs).
Brocius was camping outside his tent near the springs, and was surprised
while in the act of cooking over a campfire. It may have been Wyatt's good
fortune that Brocius, an excellent pistol shot, chose to use a shotgun as
his first weapon (he may not have been wearing his pistol). In the
gunfight that followed, Wyatt killed Brocius with a double shotgun blast
to the chest from a range of about 50 feet. Brocius narrowly missed his
own shot, hitting only Wyatt's long winter coat.
Wyatt's account from memory, of the fight
at Iron Springs, given in a series of interviews with the San Francisco
Examiner in 1896, and repeated to biographers John Flood and Stuart Lake
(Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal) matches in all essential details an account
of the fight given separately by a jailed Doc Holliday to a newspaper in
Denver in May, 1882, just two months after the fight (and while Wyatt was
in Gunnison, Colorado). If the fight at Iron Springs didn't happen much as
Wyatt told it, it is difficult to explain how Earp would remember a
fiction made up with Holliday, after nearly half a century, as well as if
it had actually happened. Therefore, it is generally believed to be fact.
After Brocius' death, his friends were
said by John Flood to have buried the body on the nearby Frank Patterson
ranch on the Babocomari River. This land, close to the original McLaury
ranch-site before the McLaurys moved to the Sulphur Springs Valley in late
1880, originally is believed to have previously belonged to Frank
Stilwell, and is located on the river about five miles west of Fairbank.
If Brocius' body is there, in a still-wild section of country, the
gravesite has been lost. Some claimed that Curly Bill escaped, changed his
name, and went (back) to Texas. However, he was never seen again in
Tombstone after March 24, 1882, despite a $2,000 reward later put up by
the Tombstone Epitaph for an authentic interview and sighting of him
alive.
Tombstone historian Ben Traywick has
argued that this was too much money for a man like Brocius to turn down
for a chance to tweak the Earps and their supporters in the bargain,
especially since he was not wanted by the law in Arizona for any crime,
and had no reason to disappear when he did (and certainly no reason to go
back to Texas, where he actually was probably a wanted man). In any
case, the money offered by the Tombstone Epitaph was never claimed.
- Sifakis, Carl. Encyclopedia of
American Crime. New York: Facts on File Inc., 1982.
- "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Brocius"
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