On October 28, Brocius and friends were drunkenly wandering through Tombstone and firing revolvers in the air. City marshal Fred White pursued Brocius off Allen Street to the rear of a building, where he demanded Brocius's gun. Wyatt Earp came running up, throwing his arms around Brocius from behind just as Curly Bill pulled his weapon from its holster, apparently intending to surrender it. White grabbed the gun barrel, and the weapon fired, the bullet striking the marshal in the left part of his groin. Earp clubbed Brocius to the ground and arrested him. White died a day later, but the shooting was declared accidental. Brocius went free after spending two months in jail, but within weeks he had ridden into Charleston, a Cowboy (that is, rustler) hangout. Brocius slung two belts of cartridges over his shoulder and, with a revolver in one hand and a Henry rifle in the other, shot up the town. No one openly said a word.
On May 19, 1881, Curly Bill tangled with Cowboy Jim Wallace, himself a desperado. Wallace put a bullet through the neck of Brocius. It exited through the cheek, luckily missing all the bones.
In early December, Pima county indicted William Brocius and three others on charges of stealing 19 head of cattle worth $285. On March 25, 1882, the Tc r) published a highly questionable account of the Whetstone Mountains killing of Curly Bill Brocius by Wyatt Earp. Questionable it may have been, but the fact was that no one ever saw Curly Bill again.
.3615- co: COWBOYS; EARP, VIRGIL; EARP, WYATT; GUNFIGHT AT THE OK CORRAL; HOLLIDAY, JOHN HENRY
BROWN, Henry Newton (1857-1884)
Henry Newton Brown was born at Cold Spring Township near Rolla, Missouri, but became a buffalo hunter in Texas during the early 1870s. Around 1876, he worked for The House, the political and financial machine run by Lawrence Murphy in Lincoln, New Mexico. After that he became a cowboy for John Chisum and then joined the Regulators, frequently riding in company with Billy the Kid during the Lincoln County War. When the Kid and several others shot down Sheriff William Brady and Deputy George Hindman on April 1, 1878, questions arose as to whether it was Henry Newton Brown who had created the disturbance at the Ellis Store that lured the lawmen into walking up the street, or whether Brown, with the Kid and possibly six others, had been participants in the execution of the lawmen. Three days after the Brady killing, on April 4, Brown, the Kid, and others were involved in the Gunfight at Blazer's Mill, during which Buckshot Roberts and Dick Brewer died. Brown was also a survivor of the McSween home during the FiveDay Siege in July 1878. Shortly after that, Brown went to work as a cowboy for George Littlefield's XIT Ranch, near Tascosa, Texas.
Brown allegedly did not smoke, drink, or gamble. One person described him as around five feet six inches tall with brown hair and blond mustache. He frequently wore something akin to a business suit, with his trousers outside the boots but a kerchief tied around the neck, cowboy style. He was quiet but sometimes surly and was easily provoked.
Following his stint on George Littlefield's ranch, Brown worked as a deputy sheriff in Oldham County, Texas, as a constable in Tascosa, and in July 1882 as a city marshal in Caldwell, Kansas. He left the last position in January 1883, the grateful townspeople giving him a gold-mounted Winchester rifle.
In March Brown returned to Caldwell, resumed his duties, and killed two men, one an Indian who was ordered to leave town and didn't, the other the
son of a gang leader whom lawmen had chased into Hunnewell, Kansas. On March 24, 1884, Brown married a local girl, Alice Levagood, but on April 30, 1884, he and his deputy Ben Wheeler, with two confederates named William Smith and John Wesley, robbed the bank at Medicine Lodge, Kansas. During the uproar Wheeler shot cashier George Geppert, and Brown killed the bank president, E. W. Payne. In their rush to escape, the desperadoes ignored the money but surrendered to a posse a brief distance from town. Shortly after dark, a mob stormed the jail, which was nothing more than a small house. Following a scuffle, Brown made it to an alley, where a shotgun blast nearly tore him in two. A wounded Wheeler and the other two bank robbers were dragged to a tree and lynched.
See BILLY THE KID; LINCOLN COUNTY WAR; WHEELER, BENJAMIN F.
BROWN, James Madison (?-1892)
Brown's place of birth and early life are obscure, although he likely was born in Alabama and grew up in Texas. He enters historical focus on February 15, 1876, after being elected sheriff of Lee County. Following a fairly quiet initial two months in office, for reasons unknown, several men ambushed him with shotguns, leaving him severely wounded but alive.
Nearly a year later, on May 4, 1877, Brown killed Hugh McKeown, the marshal of Giddings, Texas (the seat of Lee County). Brown did allow McKeown's small son to step away from his father before shooting the man at close range with a shotgun blast to the head. The newspapers muttered something about a feud between the two, although McKeown's name never surfaced in terms of the earlier Brown ambush. Anyway, a jury acquitted Brown.
Thirteen days later Brown killed attorney S. S. Brooks. Perhaps because shooting lawyers wasn't all that serious a crime in San Saba, no indictments were handed down, and Brown never faced a jury.
Brown then legally hanged longtime outlaw and gunman William Preston Longley, better known as Bill Longley. On October 11, 1878, Longley dropped through the trapdoor and from there went straight to the Giddings cemetery.
On January 10, 1880, Sam Sparks followed Longley to the cemetery, Sam being one of the shooters accused of ambushing Brown with shotguns back in 1876. Local opinion had it, however, that Brown had hired two men to kill Sparks. While the evidence seemed sufficient, a local grand jury never acted upon it.
The next shooting fray occurred on April 22, 1881, when Henry H. Wessen attempted to kill his ex-wife. Brown and a posse hurried out to Yegua Creek to seek the old man. The lawmen trapped him in a corn crib, and during a wild gunfight, they shot him to death.
In the meantime, one of Brown's daughters had eloped; Brown apparently killed William Owens, the young suitor. Following this slaying, in November 1884, Brown left office, deciding to make his living thereafter through a stable of racing horses. His animals raced in all the better-known eastern tracks, and James Brown eventually became a "turfman." Folks respectfully referred to him as "Colonel Brown."
On September 3, 1892, Brown shot it out with the Chicago police as they conducted a series of raids on Garfield Park. He killed two officers but was himself slain in the process. He was buried in Oakwood Cemetery at Fort Worth.
.Se6 akO LONGLEY, WILLIAM PRESTON
BROWN'S Park
Brown's Park-after the Hole-in-the-Wall-became the most popular rendezvous for men running from the law. It comprised a rugged, 40-mile-long, sixmile-wide area along Wyoming's Green River, overlooked by the Diamond and Cold Spring Mountains. The Wild Bunch in particular utilized Brown's Park (oftentimes called Brown's Hole). Brown's Park overlapped portions of Utah, Colorado, and Wyoming, which meant that the possibility of lawmen from all three states being in that particular area at one time was small. Tales are still told of how the Wild Bunch would throw parties, particularly around Thanksgiving, inviting the local residents over for turkey and trimmings. The outlaw Harry Tracy, following his escape from a jail in Utah, spent a brief time here in 1898.
.See- (jk0 CARVER, WILLIAM RICHARD; CASSIDY, BUTCH; HOLE-IN-THE-WALL; KILPATRICK, BENJAMIN ARNOLD; LAY, WILLIAM ELLSWORTH; LOGAN, HARVEY; PARKER, ROBERT LEROY; ROBBERS ROOST; SUNDANCE KID; WILD BUNCH
BRYANT, Charles (a.k.a. Black Face Charlie) (?-1891)
"I want to get killed in one hell-firin' minute of action," Charlie Bryant once said. He would get his wish.
His odd nickname stemmed from black-powder burns seared into his face during his youth by a weapon fired perhaps accidentally, or perhaps intentionally. At any rate, he was born in Wise County, Texas, and by 1890 had become a member of the Dalton Gang. On May 9, 1891, he assisted the Dalton brothers in train robbery near Wharton, Oklahoma. Shortly afterward, the gang held up another train, at Red Rock.
Charlie became seriously ill and never arrived with the D
alton brothers in Coffeville, Kansas. The gang dropped him off at a hotel in Hennessey, Oklahoma; it wasn't long before U.S. Deputy Marshal Edward Short got the news that on outlaw happened to be holed up in the hotel. The officer walked in, arrested the suspect, placed him in handcuffs, and on August 3, 1891, locked him in the express car of a train bound for Wichita, Kansas, where the nearest federal court was located.
Bryant seemed so ill that neither Short nor the express messenger paid him much attention. When Short visited the rest room, he handed his six-shooter to the messenger, who merely stuck it in a pigeonhole. Then, as the employee busied himself sorting mail, Bryant eased over and jerked the weapon out of the mail slot, just as Short reentered the car carrying his rifle. Both men began shooting, Bryant emptying the revolver, Short working his rifle lever. Short went down with several bullets in him; he would die within minutes, but not before putting a rifle bullet through Bryant's chest. The slug broke Bryant's backbone on its way out, causing instant death. When the train stopped at Waukomis, Oklahoma, both bodies were laid out on the station platform.
S66 DALTON BROTHERS
BUFFALOED
The term refers to being struck across the head with a revolver barrel. Lawmen were essentially the practitioners of this technique. If done solidly, it had the practical effect of instantly taking the fight out of an opponent. Of course, lawmen risked the possibility of the weapon accidentally discharging and wounding or killing their opponent, or even an innocent bystander. Furthermore, lawmen often ruined their own weapon in the process, an act that could have serious personal consequences, especially if the intended victim emerged unhurt or his friends decided to intervene.
BULL, John Edwin (1836-1929)
John Bull, a gunman and a gambler, was also an Englishman, although when and why he arrived in the United States is uncertain. He wandered from the Great Lakes to Seattle, but his trail wasn't first identified and studied until 1862, during the Salmon River gold rush in California. He was a rather short man with a dark, full beard, and dark eyes. In August 1862 he and a man named Fox rode into Gold Creek, Montana, posing as lawmen in quest of three horse thieves. They captured one, C. W. Spillman, without resistance, but William B. Arnett and B. E Jermagin seemed split as to whether to run or fight; Jermagin stuck up his hands, while Arnett reached for a weapon. Bull killed him with a shotgun. Oddly, Arnett was lowered into his grave still clutching monte cards in his left hand and a sixshooter in the other. Of the two prisoners, Jermagin convinced a miner's court that he was a good, honest fellow at heart, and so he was released. Spillman did not seem repentant, so the miners lynched and buried him alongside Arnett. The name Gold Creek thereafter became Hangtown.
Four years later, in 1866, Bull put in an appearance at Virginia City, Nevada, not as a lawman but as a gambler. There he met another English gambler named, Langford Peel, who had served in the U.S. Army and then entered the gambling profession. Unlike Bull, Peel was tall and slender, with blue eyes and blond beard. He had also killed a man, faro dealer Oliver Rucker, in 1858 at Salt Lake City. The two antagonists had shot each other down with revolvers, then continued firing until their weapons clicked empty. Once both had fallen to the saloon floor, Peel squirmed and crawled over to his still gasping opponent and buried a Bowie knife in his chest. Rucker died.
Peel went to Virginia City, Nevada, reportedly killing at least six people there and in different localities around the state. In 1867, he and John Bull teamed up as gambling partners. The two men for a lot of reasons did not like one another, but they gambled their way through Virginia City to Salt Lake City,
and on to Helena, Montana. There in the Greer Brothers' Exchange Saloon on the night of July 22, 1867, the jealousy between the two started smoldering and then flaming. Remarks were exchanged, the men took to slapping one another. Bull finally yelled that he was unarmed but that he would get armed and return in a few minutes. With that he left the table.
Bull ran to his room, wrote letters to family and friends, scratched out a makeshift will, then went back downstairs, only to learn that Peel had gone down the street with his girlfriend, Belle Neil, to Chase's Gambling Hall. As the two lovers stood together, Bull walked up, shot Peel three times, then stood over the fallen man's body and shot him again, in the head. The murder trial ended in a hung jury, and Bull never faced the judge again. Bull now rode the Union Pacific Railroad from one town to the next, gambling and then moving on. At Promontory Point, Utah, Bull married. His wife bore three of his children; what happened to them is anybody's guess, since Bull was soon back on the road again, spending considerable time in Omaha with gamblers and confidence men.
In 1872, Englishman Tom Allen and German-born Ben Hogan fought in Omaha for the so-called heavyweight championship of the world. Bull backed Hogan, but during the third round, Hogan, who was taking a pummeling, sank to the floor holding his groin and claiming foul. Bull leaped into the ring screaming victory for his man, but only the hand of Allen was raised. Fights started outside the ring, and a man was killed.
By 1879, Bull had reached Denver, where he was repeatedly arrested for gambling and running confidence games. His life continued in that fashion until reaching Spokane, where in 1898 he and Frisky Barnett left the People's Theater in good humor. Yet within a block Barnett had jabbed the lighted end of his cigar into Bull's eye, and both men pulled pistols. When the smoke cleared, a female bystander lay seriously wounded, Barnett had lost a finger, and Bull lay sprawled on the sidewalk with four bullets in him. Barnett paid a fine of $10, the woman finally recovered, and Bull's bullet-mangled left arm was amputated at the shoulder. He recovered.
In 1921, a doctor at Excelsior Springs, Missouri, removed the last of Barnett's bullets from alongside Bull's windpipe. Eight years later, at Vancouver, British Columbia, on September 9, 1929, John Bull died at the age of 93.
BURDETT, Robert Lee (1882-1915)
Born in Travis County, Texas, after an undocumented stint as a city police officer somewhere, Burdett Joined Company C of the Texas Rangers. He spent most of his time working around Fabens, 30 miles downstream along the Rio Grande from El Paso.
During the evening of June 8, 1915, after returning to South El Paso, he and his partner encountered a group of Mexican brr.,--epo€ (laborers) who had taunted them earlier in the day. The now disappeared into an El Paso alley, only to be followed by the rangers, who decided to search them for weapons. At this point the shooting started, and the 32-year-old Robert Lee Burdett stopped a bullet with his chest. His body was shipped home to Austin.
.3$P UARO TEXAS RANGERS
BURNS, Edward (a.k.a. Bymes; Big Ed) (1855?-1930?)
"Big Ed" Burns was an enigmatic frontier personality. On his life there is a paucity of substantiated material, but he has nevertheless his meager place in history as a disreputable conman, desperado, gambler, and all around ne'er-do-well. He is thought to have been born in the Midwest. Later, however, "Big Ed" Burns would find a home near any town along the railroad tracks, as long as there were "tenderfeet" and natural-born suckers in the vicinity waiting to be taken.
His nickname was no misnomer. "Big Ed" stood over six feet tall and weighed over 200 pounds. With his fierce reputation for violence and mayhem and his short fuse, it was surprising that he did not thrash the local Deming, New Mexico, newspaper editor who publicly characterized him as a "notorious top and bottom fiend."
Burns had earned this reputation by using loaded dice to dupe players into betting against the possibility that the tops and bottoms of three rolled dice would total 21. Naturally, real sports were keenly aware that the tops and bottoms would add up to 21 every time-with honest dice. But chumps needed cheatin', or so thought "Big Ed."
Although always at odds with the law and frequently antagonistic toward people of his own ilk (he had difficulties with the Earps and J. J. "Off Wheeler" Harlan), Big Ed by most accounts survived
to old age, dying of natural causes in California during the Prohibition era.
BURNS, J
ames D. (1860-1882)
On August 23, 1882, 22-year-old part-time Grant County, New Mexico, deputy sheriff James Burns arrived in Silver City from Paschal, a copper mining camp in the Burro Mountains. Normally the transplanted Texan (some accounts say he had been a deputy sheriff in Brown County) was well behaved, and he was considered an efficient officer. However, on this occasion James Burns arrived in Silver City in a drunken condition, at a time when the town's peace-keeping duties had temporarily been assigned to Deputy Sheriff Mahony, who was acting in the absence of Marshal G. W. Moore. At Sam Eckstein's Saloon, Burns either intentionally flourished or inadvertently exposed his six-shooter. Whether Mahony made the observation himself or responded to a citizen's complaint is undetermined, but in either event, he approached Burns, advising him to divest himself of the revolver. Burns declined, protesting that since he also was a deputy, he could tote a six-shooter. Mahony left the barroom, presumably to either get help or check on Burns's official status.
Mahony never returned, and Burns indulged in a spree that lasted all night and into the next day. On the following night, August 24, in the Centennial Saloon, Burns fired a shot that attracted the attention of Marshal Moore, who by now had returned to the city. Moore investigated and found a drunken Burns in the taproom gambling with Frank Thurmond (Lottie Deno's husband). Moore ordered the young man to accompany him outside. Burns refused, so Moore recruited Deputy William (Billy) McClellan and reentered the saloon through a side door. When Burns noticed the officers approaching, he jerked out his pistol. Standing nearby, however, was "Dangerous Dan" Tucker, also a Grant County deputy sheriff. All three lawmen now pointed weapons at their uproariously drunk brother of the badge, and had it not been for the intervention of John Gilmo, himself an ex-lawman (and future convict), shooting might have started. As it was, Gilmo talked Burns out of his weapon, and the explosive situation eased.
The Encyclopedia of Lawmen, Outlaws, and Gunfighters Page 8