The Wham Paymaster robbery ( ) was an armed robbery of a United States Army paymaster and his escort on May 11, 1889, in the Arizona Territory. Major Joseph W. Wham was transporting a payroll consisting of more than in gold and silver coins from Fort Grant to Fort Thomas when he and his escort of eleven Buffalo Soldiers were ambushed. During the attack, the bandits wounded eight of the soldiers, forced them to retreat to cover, and stole the payroll.
As a result of their actions under fire, Sergeant Benjamin Brown and Corporal Isaiah Mays were awarded the Medal of Honor while eight other soldiers received a Certificate of Merit. Eleven men, most from the nearby Mormon community of Pima, were arrested, with eight of them ultimately tried on charges of robbery. All of the accused were acquitted, and the stolen money was never recovered.
Background
In April 1889, Special Order 37 directed all paymasters in the District of Arizona to pay troops mustered as of April 30. Major Joseph Washington Wham, a U.S. Army paymaster, was assigned to Fort Bowie, Fort Grant, Fort Thomas, Fort Apache and Camp San Carlos. Wham and his clerk, William T. Gibbon, met a train carrying the payroll in Willcox on May 8. The paymaster performed his duties at Fort Bowie on May 9 and at Fort Grant on May 10.
Early on May 11, Major Wham left Fort Grant with two mule-drawn carriages, a covered ambulance and an open wagon, for the journey to Fort Thomas. The remaining payroll consisted of US$28,345 in gold and silver coins and weighed an estimated .
The commander of Fort Grant had assigned eleven enlisted Buffalo Soldiers from the 24th Infantry and 10th Cavalry to serve as an escort between his fort and Fort Thomas. In addition to the military personnel, there was a civilian contractor who drove the open wagon. The two non-commissioned officers leading the escort were armed with revolvers while the privates carried single-shot rifles and carbines. Wham and the civilian members of the convoy were unarmed. Accompanying Wham on the journey was a black woman, Frankie Campbell (also known as Frankie Stratton), who was the wife of a soldier stationed at Fort Grant and was going to collect gambling debts owed to her and her husband by soldiers stationed at Fort Thomas.
There had never been an attack by highwaymen upon a paymaster within Arizona Territory prior to May 1889. Despite this, there were several factors favoring such an attack. At the time, the territory was remote and had only a small and scattered population. Many residents of Arizona Territory held the U.S. federal government in low regard, feeling it ruled the territory from Washington with little interest in the territorial residents' well-being. Compounding this was that most white residents of Arizona had been either Confederates or Confederate sympathizers during the American Civil War. Decades of hostilities between Washington and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints left hard feelings among the territory's Mormon population. Recent efforts to enforce the Edmunds Act, which made polygamy a felony, had increased anger among this group. Finally, strong racial biases held by the white population against black soldiers may have been exacerbated by Mormon teachings that placed blacks on a "lowly rung of the social ladder". This led to a situation where some area residents could have rationalized that the payroll would have been better spent supporting the local communities instead of in the hands of black soldiers, who were seen as likely to spend it on immoral pursuits.
The road to Fort Thomas went southwest to the town of Bonita before turning north and following the western side of Mount Graham. About from Fort Grant the road entered a pass leading to the Gila River valley. Wham's convoy reached Cedar Springs, in the pass, around noon and swapped their mules for a fresh set that were waiting at the NN ranch. Campbell, whose horse was faster than Wham's wagons, waited at a stagecoach half-way station a short distance further down the road. The station was operated by Mormon polygamist Wiley Holladay. Holladay was away that day, leaving his wives, Harriet and Eliza, to run the place. Wham and his escort reached the station around 12:45 pm, at which time Campbell rejoined the group.
Robbery The site of the attack was about north of the stagecoach station. The road at that point descended from a high ridge through a narrow gorge to a creek bed. The east side of the gorge consisted of a steep, rocky slope rising about above the road with a lower rise on the western side. Along the top of the eastern side a series of breastworks had been constructed by the bandits. In an apparent attempt to make the fortifications appear more daunting, yucca stalks were fashioned to look like rifle barrels and positioned in the breastworks. At about 1:00 pm, the Wham party reached the site of the attack. Campbell, who was in the lead, was attempting to guide her horse around a boulder that was blocking the road as the rest of the party crested a hill. After the convoy halted, Sergeant Benjamin Brown led his men forward to try to move the obstacle out of the road while Corporal Isaiah Mays took a position at the rear of the convoy. As they approached the rock, the group saw evidence that the rock had been deliberately placed in the road. As they then looked up to see where the rock had come from, the soldiers saw two men stand up from a breastwork situated above them. Neither of the two men wore masks and the soldiers later identified their attackers as Wilfred T. Webb and Mark E. Cunningham. Local folklore suggests some bandits may have donned disguises, with one attacker dressed to resemble a local figure named William Ellison "Cyclone Bill" Beck. Cunningham was armed with a rifle. Webb brandished a pair of revolvers and yelled, "Get out, you black sons of bitches!" The bandits then began to fire toward the convoy.
The first volley from the attackers killed three mules and wounded the ambulance driver. The wounded ambulance driver dragged himself to a dry creek bed about away. The bandits apparently held a condescending opinion of the Buffalo Soldiers' fighting ability and thought they could be easily defeated. This likely played a part in the opening moments of the battle with the attackers firing mostly over the heads of the Buffalo Soldiers in an effort to scare them away. It was not until the military escort began to provide a determined resistance that the attackers began to shoot directly at the soldiers. The civilian driving the open wagon abandoned his vehicle as the gunfight began, fleeing to safety. Campbell's horse spooked at the sound of the weapons and threw her before it ran back toward the stagecoach station.
The bandits called Campbell's name and fired a couple shots in her direction before turning their attention elsewhere. Campbell then crawled behind a bush and some rocks located about past the ambulance. She observed the rest of the fight from this position. The soldiers, who had set their rifles down while preparing to move the boulder, quickly grabbed their weapons and ran for cover. Brown and two privates were separated from the rest of the group and forced down the road. After finding cover, Brown, though wounded in his arm, fired his revolver at the bandits that had stood up. After emptying his revolver, he took a rifle from one of the privates and continued the fight. It was not until one of the two privates was wounded, and the sergeant shot a second time, that the three men retreated to a dry creek bed about away. Major Wham initially took shelter behind the ambulance. The remaining draft animals panicked at the sound of the gunfire and dragged both wagons off the west side of the road, damaging their harnesses in the process. This forced Wham to retreat behind a small rocky ledge on the west side of the road. He was joined behind the outcropping by his clerk and most of the soldiers. Wham directed the soldiers' fire while his clerk rendered aid to the wounded. Both men, initially unarmed, later took rifles from wounded soldiers and joined in the fight.
Mays initially returned fire with his revolver from behind the escort wagon. This position soon proved untenable and he joined Wham behind the rocky ledge. While Wham and his men were pinned down there, the bandits maneuvered along the top of the ridge to get them into a crossfire. About 30 minutes after the battle began, Mays, who had assumed command of the escort following the withdrawal of Brown, informed Wham that their position was no longer defensible and that he was ordering his men to withdraw. Wham initially objected to this choice but later admitted that Mays had made the correct military decision. From the rocky ledge, Wham and Mays withdrew to the nearby dry creek bed. There Wham attempted to rally the soldiers to retake the lock box holding the payroll, but after seeing that eight of the eleven soldiers were wounded realized that was not a viable option. With the soldiers located about from their initial defensive position, the bandits continued to fire at them. With the soldiers pinned down, several of the bandits descended the hill and opened the strongbox holding the payroll with an axe. At about 2:30 pm the bandits stopped firing and left in two groups. The first group led a mule carrying what appeared to be a man slumped over it and the second group provided cover for the first.
It was not until around 3:00 pm that the soldiers returned to the ambulance and Campbell left her hiding place. They discovered the nine surviving mules had run off during the attack and their harnesses had been cut to pieces. As the soldiers returned to the ambulance, Harriet Holladay arrived on the scene in her buckboard. She had heard the gunfire and decided to investigate when Campbell's riderless horse arrived at the station house. Upon her arrival she joined with Campbell to provide first aid to the wounded soldiers. Four of the mules were located by the nearby creek bed and the soldiers were able to splice together enough of the harnesses to hitch them to the ambulance. Most of the wounded were loaded into the ambulance for transport to Fort Thomas. Sergeant Brown and one other man were deemed too severely injured to move and were tended by Campbell until the surgeon from Fort Thomas could be dispatched to retrieve them. As the convoy was preparing to leave, rancher Barney Norton, who had also heard the sounds of the battle, arrived with a group of his ranch hands. Wham arrived at Fort Thomas at about 5:30 pm.
Investigation Before leaving the site of the attack, Wham conducted an initial investigation of the immediate area. A valise containing the major's personal items, which had been stored in the strongbox, had been cut open, but the robbers had left the contents undamaged. A second valise, containing payroll receipts from his previous stops, had been taken along with the money. An examination of the breastworks on top of the ridge found one of the fortifications contained over 200 spent rifle casings. Wham also arrested Campbell at the site of the attack, believing she had somehow been involved. She was released a short time later and became an important witness for investigators.