William "Curly Bill" Brocius (1845-24 March 1882) was an American outlaw of the Wild West who led the Cochise County Cowboys gang during the late 19th century.
Biography[]
William Brocius was born in Crawfordsville, Indiana in 1845, and he later settled in Texas. In 1878, he came to the Arizona Territory, becoming an outlaw and a rustler, as well as a tax collector for Cochise County Sheriff Johnny Behan in Tombstone. Brocius became the leader of the red-sashed Cochise County Cowboys outlaw gang, taking part in raids into Mexico; he once forced Mexicans at a community dance to strip naked and dance for him, and, another time, he and his gang killed several Mexican lawmen in a town where two of his men had been killed, violently interrupting a local wedding. He also fought in the Lincoln County War on the side of Lawrence Murphy. On 28 October 1880, after Curly Bill and several of his men fired several celebratory shots in the air at the Birdcage Theater, town marshal Fred White arrived to apprehend them, but, in the ensuing scuffle, Brocius accidentally shot White in the leg, causing Wyatt Earp to pistol-whip Brocius and arrest him. Two days later, White died of his wounds, and Brocius was acquitted after proving that the shooting had been an accident.
Final shootouts[]
Curly Bill in 1881
On 8 March 1881, Brocius and Johnny Ringo got into a scuffle with the cowboy Dick Lloyd at a saloon in Maxey, where Brocius killed Lloyd. On 25 May 1881, Brocius was shot in the face by a friend of Tombstone deputy marshal Billy Breakenridge, but he survived. In July 1881, he and Red Slade ambushed a Mexican trail herd in the "Skeleton Canyon massacre", killing six vaqueros and capturing and murdering the others. On 6 January 1882, he robbed the Tombstone-Bisbee stagecoach, and then the Tombstone-Benson stage the next day. Wyatt Earp gathered a posse and searched for him in the Chiricahua Mountains, but he was unable to locate him. Upon Brocius' return to Tombstone in March, he was identified as a participant in the assassination of Morgan Earp, but the testimony was later recanted. On 24 March 1882, Wyatt Earp and his party stumbled across Brocius and his men cooking a meal alongside Iron Spring in the Whetstone Mountains, leading to a shootout. Earp shot Brocius in the stomach with a load of buckshot, nearly cutting him in half.
Gallery[]
