Archive:William Brocius

William B. "Curly Bill" Brocious (1857-1882) was a western outlaw and member of the Clanton Gang. He is not to be confused with Curley Bill Graham, who was a different outlaw of the same general place and period.

Following the death of "Old Man" Newton Clanton after the Guadeloupe Canyon Massacre in August, 1881, Brocious became leader of the loose-knit cowboy gang. He had earlier been arrested for the 1880 death of Tombstone Marshal Fred White following an incident where Brocious's gun discharged, whether purposely or accidentally, while surrendering it to White and deputy Virgil Earp. Although charged for murder by Earp, Brocious was later acquitted by a jury with a verdict of accidental death (in favor of Brocious was that White himself, before he died from his wound, had testified that he thought the pistol had gone off on accident).

For a time, Brocious worked as a tax collection agent for Cochise County Sheriff Johnny Behan.

In July, 1881 Brocious and Johnny Ringo rode into Hauchita, New Mexico and killed 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 that month Brocious 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.

Returning to Tombstone following the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, Brocious may have participated in the attempt to kill Virgil Earp and the later assassination of Morgan Earp. Again, Brocious was not charged. However, after several stagecoach robberies were committed in the Tombstone area, Brocious was deputized and issued a warrant for Wyatt Earp by Sheriff Johnny Behan and sent to bring back Earp who was hiding in the Whetstone Mountains outside town. Earp, who was also looking for Brocious in revenge for the death of his brother Morgan, encountered Brocious March 24, 1882 at Iron Springs (today's maps show this as Mescal Springs). There, in the gunfight that followed, Wyatt killed Brocious with a double shotgun blast to the chest.

After Brocious' death, his friends probably took the body and secretly buried it on the Patterson farm on the Babocomari River. If so, the gravesite has since been lost. Some claimed that Curley Bill escaped and went to Texas, but he was never seen again after March 24, 1882, despite a $2,000 reward later put up by the Tombstone Epitaph for an authentic interview and sighting of Brocious alive.

As Ben Traywick has pointed out, this was too much money for a man like Brocious to turn down for a chance to tweek the Earps and their supporters in the bargain, especially since he was not wanted by the law for any crime, and had no reason to disappear when he did. But the money was never claimed.

Resources

• Sifakis, Carl. Encyclopedia of American Crime, New York, Facts on File Inc., 1982

External link

http://www.westernoutlaw.com/stories/files/Showdown.pdf . This includes some good quotes from historical documents assembled by Ben Traywick.