William
Cowper Brann was a firebrand of a journalist, an iconoclast
whose last dispatch took the form of hot lead, ushering
his assailant to kingdom Come.
— by Dale L. Walker He
frothed and shrieked in the pages of a little weekly journal
he launched in Texas and did it with such sustained brilliance
and provocation that an irate reader shot him dead on a
busy street in Waco on the evening of April Fools’ Day,
1898. Brann was born in Coles County in Southern Illinois
on January 4, 1855, the son of a Presbyterian minister
and farmer who named his son after an 18th-century English
religious poet. At
age 13, after a few years of country schooling, Brann left
home and worked as a bellboy, house painter, railroad fireman,
manager of a traveling opera troupe, and printer’s devil.
In 1877 he married Carrie Belle Martin in Rochelle, Ill.,
near Chicago. Their 20-year marriage produced three children,
daughters Inez and Grace, and son William. And
Much More.........
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