Brady Brothers
Two brothers drown, one trying to save the other.
There is a truly tragic marker in Boothill Graveyard. The cairn atop the bodies of the Brady Brothers, John, age 11, and Frank, age 12. To look at the San Pedro as it often is, running low and less than a foot deep, it can be hard to imagine how someone could drown. But there are times when the water runs deep, driven by monsoon rains. We have seen the river run viciously fast and bank to bank clear up to the Interstate 10 and beyond.
The details are not perfect, except that the two brothers drown in the river, one trying to save the other. A desperate tale of heroism gone wrong. The love for a brother that cost both their lives. Boothill Graveyard became their final resting place and a prime example of how not everyone buried there were victims of gunplay and lawlessness.
Their simple marker (Row 9, #5) is all that remain of lives with unfinished promise. Charleston resident, Frank Shearer said that the Brady brothers lived in Tombstone, and were nephews of Last Chance Saloon owner, Carr Stepheson. Other children present purportedly ran from the popular swimming hole to report the trouble to a store in Charleston to Mr. Owen McDernott. The local papers (The Nugget and the Epitaph) had run several stories of the Brady family in 1882 before the drowning, but microfilm didn’t display an article of the drowning itself. But there was a coroner’s report (p.14, 177)*