Proceedings against Brown began in June 1849 and continued in the Supreme Court of South Australia for several months, but were eventually abandoned.

Although the details of the case were known for decades after the murders, distortions of the massacre eventually appeared in print and were embellished by local white and Aboriginal historians.

Two key aspects of these later accounts were that Brown poisoned rather than shot the victims, and that he had undertaken an epic horse ride to Adelaide to establish an alibi.

Historians Robert Foster, Rick Hosking and Amanda Nettelbeck contend that these "pioneer legend" alterations downplayed the seriousness of the crime.

This undeclared and covert fighting between settlers and Aboriginal people in South Australia is considered part of the Australian frontier wars.

He told Moorhouse that, on the day the killings occurred, he and a white man named Parker were walking along a road when they heard shots.

Several difficulties were detailed, including the fact that Parker denied any knowledge of the crime, as did others who were believed to have heard the incident, discussed in Brown's presence.

Brown's co-accused, Eastwood, alias "Yorkie", had fled when the investigation began and had apparently left the colony aboard a whaling ship off Kangaroo Island.

An important witness named Joice had gone to the neighbouring Port Phillip District of the colony of New South Wales, and Leandermin himself, who it appears was being detained at Guichen Bay, absconded and had allegedly been "made away with".

Despite the extremely difficult task faced by the prosecution under these circumstances, the Advocate General ordered that investigations continue and issued warrants for the arrest of those that had fled South Australia.

Effectively, settler solidarity and the law of evidence ensured that Brown was never tried for the murders, despite the fact that those involved in the investigation had no doubt of his guilt.

[8][18] In 1880, while Brown was still alive, the lay missionary Christina Smith wrote a book, The Booandik Tribe of South Australian Aborigines,[19] which was published in Adelaide.

One of these evangelical visits was to the country of the Wattatonga tribe,[a] a group whose traditional lands included the newly established Avenue Range Station.

According to Wergon, "the white men had shown no mercy to the grey-headed old man or to the helpless infant on its mother's breast", and the apparent motive for the massacre was the killing of sheep belonging to a settler in the Guichen Bay district.

While circumspect about naming Brown, Smith essentially recounted important details of the massacre in her book published over thirty years after it occurred.

The police investigate, and Darkie, not wanting to implicate his employer, flees the district on Grantley's prize horse, using his bush skills to elude his pursuers.

Cockburn remarked on the lack of publicity enjoyed by Brown, and explained that he had "received a severe set back" early in his career after being accused of "poisoning a blackfellow".

They surmise that the shooting may have become mixed up in some people's minds with a poisoning that occurred on the west coast of the colony in the same year which also received significant press coverage.

He then spoke of Brown making an epic pony ride from his station to Adelaide, swimming across the Murray, to report to the police to meet his bail conditions.

[30] In 1944, a local historian, J. G. Hastings, wrote a manuscript, entitled The History of the Coorong,[31] which proved influential in the development of the legend of James Brown.

Hastings claimed that there was no mention of the case in police records held by archives in Adelaide, but that instead, the incident had been related to him by residents of the district who had known Brown.

[32] Foster et al. note that this date is highly unlikely, as frontier violence in the district began when squatters arrived in 1843, and was tapering off by 1848 when the murders occurred.

[38] In the same year Hastings' account was reproduced verbatim in Tom McCourt and Hans Mincham's The Coorong and Lakes of the Lower Murray.

They advance the view that even if both incidents did occur, the original story of the shooting murders has been transformed through the filter of the "pioneer legend" into one where Brown is remembered not for committing an atrocity, but for an epic horse ride.

This transformation included the morphing of a cold-blooded shooting into a sly and passive "set and forget" poisoning, where the Aboriginal victims are "complicit in their own demise" by stealing the flour.