On the evening of October 28, 1880, in the rough Arizona boomtown of Tombstone, a drunken disturbance spilled into a dim vacant lot between Toughnut and Allen Streets. Curly Bill Brocius, a feared outlaw cowboy and leader of the Clanton gang, had been firing his pistol into the air with friends when Town Marshal Fred White approached to disarm him. White grabbed the weapon by the barrel, the gun discharged, and a bullet struck the marshal in the groin. Wyatt Earp, who had borrowed a pistol from Wells Fargo agent Fred Dodge, pistol-whipped Brocius and placed him under arrest.
Brocius protested, insisting he had done nothing wrong. White was carried to a doctor and initially expected to recover. The next day, he gave a statement exonerating Brocius of murder. But that night, his condition worsened.
Brocius claimed the gun had fired accidentally and reportedly regretted the shooting immediately. Fearing a lynch mob given White’s popularity, he waived his right to a preliminary hearing and was quickly transported to Tucson for trial. White died two days after being shot. In his final moments, the marshal testified that he believed the pistol had discharged accidentally and that Brocius had not shot him on purpose.
Wyatt Earp supported this testimony, as did a demonstration that Brocius’s revolver could fire from half-cock and the fact that it had been found loaded with six rounds, only one of which had been fired. After spending most of November and December in jail, Brocius was acquitted with a verdict of accidental death. Years later, Wyatt Earp told his biographer John H. Flood Jr.
that he believed Brocius had been armed at the time and that Earp had not noticed the pistol lying on the ground in the dark until Brocius was already down. Despite having killed several other men in his life, Brocius reportedly liked White personally and always insisted that the death had been a tragic accident. William Brocius, known as Curly Bill, had arrived in the Arizona Territory from either Texas or Missouri around 1878, after briefly visiting the San Carlos Reservation while herding cattle. He made his name as a gunman, rustler, and outlaw cowboy in the Cochise County area during the late 1870s and early 1880s.
For a period, he even served as an unofficial tax collector for Cochise County Sheriff Johnny Behan, compelling other rustlers to pay taxes on their stolen cattle, with the proceeds flowing into the sheriff’s treasury. Contemporary author Billy Breakenridge described Brocius as the most deadly pistol shot of the Cowboys, said to be able to hit running jackrabbits, shoot out candle flames without breaking the candles, and shoot quarters from between the fingers of volunteers while drunk. He was also known for a mean sense of humor, reportedly using gunfire to make a preacher dance during a sermon and forcing Mexicans at a community dance to strip and dance naked. Both incidents were reported by Wells Fargo agent Fred Dodge in his memoirs and referenced in newspapers of the era.
Despite his violent reputation, Brocius continued to court trouble. On March 8, 1881, he and his friend Johnny Ringo rode to Mowry near Camp Thomas, Arizona. There, a cowboy named Dick Lloyd, drunk and playing poker in O’Neal and Franklin’s Saloon, shot and wounded a man, then rode his horse into the saloon where Brocius was drinking. Brocius and about a dozen others shot Lloyd in response.
Saloon owner O’Neil took the blame and was acquitted on May 25, 1881. Later that same year, Brocius was drinking heavily in Galeyville with his friend Jim Wallace, a veteran of the Lincoln County War. Trouble arose when Wallace insulted Deputy Marshal Billy Breakenridge of Tombstone. Breakenridge ignored the insult, but Brocius took offense and insisted Wallace accompany him to apologize.
Wallace complied, but Brocius continued berating him. Wallace left the saloon, and Brocius pursued him. Feeling threatened, Wallace fired, striking Brocius in the cheek and neck. Deputy Breakenridge intervened and arrested Wallace, but the court determined Wallace had acted in self-defense.
In July 1881, an incident unfolded when Bill Leonard and Harry Head attempted to rob the general store of William and Isaac Haslett in Hachita, New Mexico. The Haslett brothers shot Leonard and Head. Some modern researchers claim Brocius and Johnny Ringo rode to New Mexico to avenge their friends’ deaths, but no eyewitnesses could corroborate these events or establish Brocius’s direct involvement in the Hasletts’ demise. On October 6, 1881, four months after Brocius was shot, a scout named George Parsons rode through the McLaury Brothers Ranch in Sulphur Springs Valley and noted that Brocius had not completely recovered from his injury but was well enough to ride.
For this reason, many historians suspect Brocius was involved in the Hasletts’ deaths. Some reports also claim Brocius ambushed a Mexican trail herd in the Skeleton Canyon massacre, in which six men lost their lives and survivors were taken captive, possibly tortured, and killed. Allegedly, Brocius then sold the stolen Mexican beef to Newman Haynes Clanton. The following month, old man Clanton and four others were herding that same beef along the trail to Tombstone when they fell victim to an ambush in what became known as the Guadalupe Canyon Massacre, killed by Mexican assailants.
Yet no credible reports confirmed Brocius’s direct involvement in either incident; he was still recovering from being shot in the face by Wallace only six weeks earlier, and some modern researchers doubt he was well enough to participate. After the Gunfight at the O. K. Corral on October 26, 1881, Brocius robbed the Tombstone-Bisbee stagecoach on January 6, 1882, and the Tombstone-Benson stage the next day.
Deputy U. S. Marshal Wyatt Earp organized a posse to pursue the culprits, but a search in the Chiricahua Mountains proved fruitless. Brocius reappeared in Tombstone on March 17, 1882.
He was implicated in the assassination of Morgan Earp by Marietta Duarte, wife of Pete Spence, but Justice of the Peace Wells Spicer rejected her testimony as hearsay, and charges were dropped. Three days later, on March 20, Wyatt Earp shot and killed outlaw cowboy Frank Stilwell in Tucson while guarding his brother Virgil, who was on his way to California. On March 24, 1882, the Earp party was expecting to meet Charlie Smith at Iron Springs, later known as Mescal Springs, in the Whetstone Mountains. Smith was bringing cash from Tombstone, about twenty miles to the east, to help pay posse expenses.
As the lawmen surmounted the edge of a wash near the springs, they stumbled upon Brocius’s pony deal—Johnny Barnes, Frank Patterson, Milt Hicks, Bill Hicks, Bill Johnson, Ed Lyle, and Johnny Lyle—cooking a meal alongside the spring. According to Wyatt Earp’s account and an anonymous report submitted to the Tombstone Epitaph, he led the posse as they stumbled upon the Cowboys’ camp from less than thirty feet away. From behind an embankment, the Cowboys opened fire just as Earp dismounted. The first shots struck his saddle horn, not his body.
Texas Jack Vermillion, whose horse was hit, remained composed under the barrage and closely shadowed Earp during the ensuing firefight. Doc Holliday, Johnson, and McMaster returned fire and sought refuge. Warren Earp was away on an errand at the time. Eighteen months earlier, Wyatt Earp had protected Brocius against a mob ready to lynch him for killing Marshal Fred White and had given testimony that helped spare him from a murder conviction.
Now Brocius aimed a shotgun at Earp from about fifty feet but missed. Earp returned fire over his horse with a ten-gauge shotgun, fatally striking Brocius in the stomach with a blast of buckshot that nearly severed him in two. Brocius collapsed at the water’s edge. The Cowboys unleashed a volley at the Earp party, but the lawmen’s fire was so intense that those who could fled.
Bullets punctured both sides of Earp’s long coat, one striking his boot heel and another grazing his saddle horn, scorching the saddle hide. Engaging with his pistol, Earp shot Johnny Barnes in the chest and Milt Hicks in the arm. Vermillion tried to retrieve his rifle from under his fallen horse, exposing himself to gunfire, and Doc Holliday helped him gain cover. Earp struggled to remount because a cartridge belt had slipped down his legs but finally managed to get on his horse and retreat.
McMaster was grazed by a bullet that cut through the straps of his field glasses. Earp’s biographer John Flood wrote that the Cowboys buried Brocius’s remains on Frank Patterson’s nearby ranch along the Babocomari River, close to the original McLaury Ranch site about five miles west of Fairbank. Brocius’s grave site has never been identified. Fred J.
Dodge, an undercover Wells Fargo agent in Tombstone, investigated Brocius’s demise. He spoke with J. B. Ayers, a saloon proprietor in Charleston frequented by outlaws and rustlers.
Ayers relayed that those present during the encounter had told him Curly Bill met his end at the hands of Wyatt Earp; they removed the body that very night and buried it on Patterson’s Ranch along the Babocomari. The Tombstone Nugget offered a one-thousand-dollar reward for proof that Curly Bill lived, and the Tombstone Epitaph countered with two thousand dollars. Neither was ever collected. Brocius was not a wanted man in the eyes of Arizona law enforcement, and if he were alive, he had no reason to disappear.
Returning to Texas, where according to Earp’s recollection he might still have faced murder charges, seemed highly improbable. Brocius has sometimes been confused with Curly Bill Graham, a different outlaw from the same region and era. Graham was killed in a gunfight by Deputy Sheriff James D. Houck on October 17, 1887, and buried in Young, Arizona; historians do not consider him the same Curly Bill.
Brocius’s birth date, birth name, and birthplace remain unknown. Some historians speculate he may have been William B. Graham from Missouri, or Robert Martin, a member of the Jesse Evans gang in New Mexico during the mid-to-late 1870s, with whom Billy the Kid briefly rode.
Because of the timeframe, location, and his friendship with Martin, Curly Bill Brocius may have been a member of the Evans gang as well, but none of these origins have been confirmed.