The gun went off in the dark street, and Tombstone’s town marshal crumpled to the ground, shot through the groin. It was just past midnight on October 28, 1880, and the man who had fired the shot was Curly Bill Brocius, standing drunk and unsteady in the dirt road. Wyatt Earp saw it happen. He moved in fast, brought his own weapon down across the outlaw’s head, and knocked him senseless.

Within seconds the most dangerous drunk in the Arizona Territory was under arrest. Fred White, the wounded marshal, was carried to a doctor. The wound looked survivable at first, and the town breathed easier. The next day White gave a statement that cleared Curly Bill of murder.

But that night the marshal’s condition turned. White died two days after the shooting, and before he went he said what he believed: that the pistol had gone off accidentally, that he did not think Curly Bill had shot him on purpose. Wyatt Earp backed that account. So did a demonstration showing that Brocius’s revolver could fire from half cock, and the fact that when the gun was examined it still held six rounds, only one of them spent.

Curly Bill Brocius had come to the Arizona Territory around 1878, already carrying a reputation as an outlaw, a cowboy, and a rustler. He was known for a mean sense of humor when he was drunk. He was said to have used gunfire to make a preacher dance during a sermon, and to have forced Mexicans at a community dance to strip and dance naked. He was, by most accounts, Arizona’s most famous outlaw of his era, and his name would be tied to the Earp family for as long as he lived.

In the hours after the shooting of Fred White, Brocius had reasons to be afraid. He waived his right to a preliminary hearing, apparently because he feared he would be lynched. White had been hugely popular as town marshal, and the crowd in Tombstone was in no mood for legal formalities. Deputy Sheriff Earp and George Collins moved quickly and got Brocius out of town, taking him to Tucson for trial.

He spent most of November and December 1880 in jail awaiting his fate. In the end he was acquitted, the verdict recorded as accidental death. Wyatt Earp told his biographer John H. Flood Jr.

many years later that at the moment of the shooting he had thought Brocius was still armed. He did not notice that the pistol lay on the ground in the dark until Brocius was already down. Despite having killed other men in his life, and despite the deaths he would be blamed for later, Brocius had apparently liked Fred White personally, and he maintained to the end that the shooting had been an accident. But release from jail did not reform him.

On March 8, 1881, Brocius and his friend Johnny Ringo rode to Maxie, near Camp Thomas in Arizona. A cowboy named Dick Lloyd had gotten drunk while playing poker in O’Neill and Franklin’s Saloon. After shooting and wounding one man, Lloyd rode his horse straight into the saloon where Brocius was drinking. Brocius and several other men resented the interruption.

About a dozen of them, Brocius included, opened fire and killed Lloyd. The saloon’s owner, a man named O’Neill, took the blame for the killing and was acquitted. Two months later, on May 25, 1881, Brocius was drinking heavily with a friend, Jim Wallace, a veteran of the Lincoln County War. Also present was Tombstone Deputy Marshal Billy Breckenridge, an ally of Curly Bill’s.

Wallace began insulting Breckenridge. The deputy marshal shrugged it off and did not react. Curly Bill would not let it go. He demanded that Wallace apologize.

Wallace refused. He got up and left the saloon. Brocius followed him out. Feeling threatened, Wallace turned and shot Curly Bill, wounding him in the cheek and the neck.

Marshal Breckenridge arrested Wallace, but the court ruled he had acted in self-defense. The most serious trouble came after the gunfight at the O. K. Corral on October 26, 1881.

On January 6, 1882, Brocius robbed the Tombstone-to-Bisbee stagecoach. The next day he robbed the Tombstone-to-Benson stage. Deputy U. S.

Marshal Wyatt Earp gathered a posse and rode out after the men, but lost them in the Chiricahua Mountains. Then came the killing that changed everything. On the night of March 17, 1882, Morgan Earp was assassinated in Tombstone. Curly Bill Brocius returned to town that same day.

Pete Spence’s wife, Marietta Duarte, named him as one of the men who took part in the murder of Morgan Earp. But Justice of the Peace Well Spicer threw out her testimony. It was hearsay, he ruled, and she could not testify against her husband. Without her statement, the prosecution had no evidence.

All charges against the Cowboys were dropped. Three days later, on March 20, 1882, Deputy U. S. Marshal Wyatt Earp killed the outlaw cowboy Frank Stilwell in Tucson while guarding his brother Virgil, who was on his way to California.

Then Wyatt Earp declared war on the Cowboys and began hunting them down. Curly Bill Brocius was near the top of his list. The irony was not lost on either man. Eighteen months before the gunfight at the O.

K. Corral, Wyatt Earp had testified in Brocius’s favor in the Fred White shooting. He had even protected Brocius against a mob that wanted to lynch him. Now the two men were on opposite sides of a blood feud, and Wyatt was coming for him.

They met in the spring of 1882 near a water hole in the Whetstone Mountains, outside Contention City. Some accounts place the exact date on March 24. Wyatt Earp’s party, which included his brothers’ allies and several other lawmen, rode into the area and found the Cowboys camped near the spring. Brocius saw them coming.

He seized his weapon and began firing at Earp. Wyatt Earp returned fire with a shotgun. He pumped a load of buckshot into Brocius’s stomach, nearly cutting him in half. Curly Bill fell backward into the water at the edge of the spring.

The Cowboys returned fire, but miraculously every shot missed Wyatt and his party. The lawmen shot a couple more of the Cowboys before the rest retreated. William “Curly Bill” Brocius was dead. One of the wildest three-year runs in the history of the American West had come to an end at the hands of Wyatt Earp, the man who had once saved him from a lynching and who had once testified in his defense.

The feud that had started with the shooting of Fred White, and that had burned through the robbery of stagecoaches, the killing of Morgan Earp, and the death of Frank Stilwell, had finally claimed Brocius himself, cut down beside a desert spring with his gun still in his hand.