On the morning of March 24, 1882, Wyatt Earp rode with his posse through the Whetstone Mountains of Arizona Territory, hunting the men he blamed for his brother’s murder. They had been tracking the Clanton gang for days, moving through rough country, when they came upon a water stop. There, according to Earp, stood Curly Bill Brocius and a band of outlaws from the gang that had terrorized Tombstone for years. In the confrontation that followed, guns came up.
Earp insisted that Curly Bill fired first, the bullet tearing through his coat, missing him by inches. He raised his shotgun and returned fire, striking Curly Bill and dropping him on the spot. It was the revenge he had sworn to take—the death of the man many believed had been behind the assassination of Morgan Earp. But almost no one believed the story was that clean.
William Brocius, known across the frontier as Curly Bill, had only appeared on the Arizona border a little over three years before that day. In that short stretch of time, he built a reputation that made him one of the most dangerous outlaws in the Southwest: a cattle rustler, a leader of a violent gang, a drinking man with a short fuse, and a cold-blooded killer. He arrived in Arizona in the latter part of 1878, likely from Missouri or Texas, and his first known job was driving a herd of cattle to the San Carlos Indian Reservation. After that work was done, he found temporary employment as a ranch hand on the reservation.
The job did not suit him, and he soon drifted to Tombstone, the booming mining town already notorious for lawlessness and violent tendencies. For a man of Curly Bill’s temper, with his savage moods and his fondness for liquor, Tombstone was the perfect place to land. The nickname required little imagination. Every account of Brocius mentions his thick, curly hair.
He was tall and powerfully built, with a face covered in freckles. A photograph that some claim shows him, though its authenticity has never been documented, hangs in the Bird Cage Theatre Museum in Tombstone, displaying those unmistakable curls. His descendants have offered two other portraits, but neither has been verified either. The written accounts of his day focused on that wavy hair, but they had far more to say about his character.
Curly Bill had a peculiar, dark sense of humor and a bottomless appetite for whiskey. On one Sunday morning, during a sermon, he forced a preacher to dance awkwardly by firing shots at his feet. At a public dance, he drew his gun and took control of a group of Mexican men, forcing them to strip and perform before the gathered crowd. Both incidents were reported in the local newspapers at the time.
Not long after arriving in Tombstone, Brocius found himself in serious trouble. On the night of October 28, 1880, Curly Bill and his drunken companions were recklessly firing their guns into the sky in a narrow alley. Fred White, the town’s first marshal, rushed to the scene to put an end to the disturbance. Inside a nearby saloon, Deputy Sheriff Wyatt Earp heard the commotion and stepped out to investigate.
Earp later claimed he heard Marshal White order Curly Bill to hand over his weapon. What happened next was disputed, but the outcome was not: as the gun changed hands, a shot went off, and Fred White was hit. Earp acted quickly, grabbed Brocius, wrestled with him, and placed him under arrest, charging him with the marshal’s murder. White received medical care and initially seemed to improve.
In fact, he was well enough to give a statement absolving Brocius of intent. But his condition turned, and the marshal died later that night. The town of Tombstone held Fred White in high esteem, and Wyatt Earp insisted that Brocius face trial for murder in Tucson. During the proceedings, the court heard the marshal’s recorded testimony, in which White stated his belief that the shooting had been accidental.
Wyatt Earp himself took the stand and agreed, saying the shooting looked like an accident. The judge acquitted Brocius of the murder charge, and he walked free. Though a later disagreement with Wyatt Earp created a strained relationship between the two men, this particular incident did not spark the famous feud that would follow. The Clanton gang had long made Tombstone its base of operations.
Newman “Old Man” Clanton led the criminal outfit with his three sons, Billy, Ike, and Finn, along with the McLaury brothers, Tom and Frank, and a rotating cast of outlaws. Curly Bill Brocius was tied to the gang at various points, though he was not present for the famous gunfight at the O. K. Corral in October 1881.
Months before that bloody showdown, in July 1881, Curly Bill and another gang member, Johnny Ringo, hunted down and killed Isaac and William Haslett in New Mexico. The Haslett brothers had earlier killed two members of the Clanton family during a botched robbery of a general store. In the period leading up to the O. K.
Corral gunfight, Curly Bill and his crowd were in the middle of a criminal rampage. Weeks earlier, they carried out a savage ambush in San Luis Pass. Brocius led the attack on a party of Mexicans, killing six outright while the other eight were tortured and murdered. When Old Man Clanton was killed in another bloody episode shortly after the San Luis Pass attack, Curly Bill took over command of the notorious Clanton gang.
Although he was not directly involved in the O. K. Corral exchange, Curly Bill Brocius found his gang shattered by it. He mourned the outlaws who had been killed by the Earp brothers and was understandably furious.
In early January 1882, he carried out a robbery targeting two horse-drawn wagons leaving Tombstone. In response, Wyatt Earp raised a posse and set out to arrest members of the Clanton gang. Tensions between the Clantons and the Earps had come to a boiling point, and lawmen in Tombstone now felt threatened at all hours. On the night of December 28, 1881, around 11:30, Virgil Earp was walking back to his room at a Tombstone hotel after an evening at a local saloon.
As he passed a vacant lot, three gunmen hiding in an unfinished building across the street opened fire. Virgil was hit in the back and the left arm. Despite the severity of his wounds, he made it to the hotel and survived. But the damage to his arm was permanent—he would carry the disability for the rest of his life.
On the evening of March 18, 1882, Morgan Earp was playing billiards in a Tombstone saloon when attackers, said to be linked to the Clanton gang, fired through the window. Wyatt Earp, who was also in the room, somehow avoided being hit. Morgan was not so fortunate. A bullet struck his spine, and he died shortly afterward.
There was no solid evidence directly tying Curly Bill to either the shooting of Virgil or the killing of Morgan, but the town widely assumed the Clanton gang was responsible. For Wyatt Earp, that was enough. The two attacks set off the Earp vendetta. Wyatt gathered a group of lawmen with the stated goal of bringing the outlaws to justice.
But he had grown tired of corrupt judges who kept releasing criminals, and he privately wanted vengeance more than due process. The posse left Tombstone and tracked the gang through the countryside. On March 24, they came face to face with Curly Bill and his men at a water hole in the Whetstone Mountains. Both sides found themselves confronting each other in open ground.
Guns were drawn, and, by Earp’s account, Curly Bill fired first. The shot missed, leaving a hole in Earp’s coat. Earp responded with two precise shots from his shotgun, striking Curly Bill and inflicting a fatal wound. But doubts surfaced almost immediately.
No witnesses came forward to support Earp’s version of events, and his own men had fled during the exchange. Historians have long questioned the accuracy of Earp’s story, noting his habit of embellishing details to cast himself as a hero. There was also the matter of the body. The location where Curly Bill supposedly fell did not match Earp’s account.
According to some, the outlaws returned to the water hole after the shooting to recover the corpse and buried it in a secret spot along Babocomari Creek. The other members of the Clanton gang who were present that day openly contradicted Earp’s story. They insisted the confrontation was a fabrication. They claimed that Curly Bill had grown tired of the outlaw life and wanted to end the feud with Earp.
They said he had decided to leave Arizona in search of a quiet, anonymous existence. Some suggested he moved to Mexico, where he allegedly married a Mexican girl. Others in the gang offered different stories, claiming Brocius had gone to Texas, or Colorado, or Missouri, depending on who was asked—living out his days under an assumed name. Even the two rival newspapers in Tombstone took sides in the dispute.
The Tombstone Epitaph presented Earp’s account of Curly Bill’s death as undisputed fact. The Nugget, on the other hand, reported that Brocius had been miles away from the water hole on the date Earp claimed to have shot him. In a bold move, the editors of the Nugget offered a generous reward of one thousand dollars to anyone who could deliver Brocius’s body to their office. Not to be outdone, the Epitaph raised the stakes, offering two thousand dollars for anyone who brought in “Curly Bill” alive.
No one ever came forward to claim either reward. So did Curly Bill Brocius truly die at the hands of Wyatt Earp? The definitive answer may never be known.
The mystery surrounding his fate has only deepened the legend of an outlaw who remains one of the most fascinating figures of the American West.
