History

Death by Invitation Only A Controversial Sheriff's Execution Etiquette Provokes a National Furor

The boys had been riding the sheriff, and he was getting kind of touchy. Not that their jokes disturbed the office much there wasn't one. Frank Wattron did his business in the back of his Holbrook pharmacy, where he also maintained a saloon and gambling hall.

Besides being sheriff, he was the judge and undertaker and the closest thing the area had to a doctor. Residents boasted he could give cradle-to-grave service.

As for being out of sorts, he often was. Frank Wattron, six feet tall and skinny as a rail, dressed in basic black with a gold chain across his vest, a long black moustache splitting his face, two angry eyes riding under his black hat, a long black frock coat with a gold star inset with a diamond pinned on the front, and a double-barreled sawed-off shotgun dangling inside.

He was known by his fellow citizens to be fearless, generous, and subject to bad moods. He also was the most gifted man at profanity in newly formed Navajo County no mean feat given the local competition. As for his surly moods, they might have been rooted in his insomnia. Or possibly in his treatment for his insomnia: Wattron was an opium addict who swilled goodly quantities of laudanum. Naturally, owning the only pharmacy in town didn't do much to curb his intake.

In the late fall of 1899, he had a problem. He was about to perform the first legal hanging in Navajo County on one George Smiley. The execution wasn't the problem Smiley had murdered his foreman for no good reason in front of the man's wife and children and been Promptly and popularly sentenced to the rope. The newspapers detected little remorse in Smiley and wrote him off as a cold-blooded killer. The problem was rooted in a territorial law that required a sheriff in Wattron's situation to issue an invitation to the hanging to other sheriffs and various legal witnesses. The boys boozing it up in back of the pharmacy kept ragging Wattron about what kind of invitation he was going to come up with, and so one day he sat down and scribbled it out. He shipped it to the Albuquerque newspaper that did job printing on the side and ordered it done up like a wedding invitation with flowing script on fine card stock and a tasteful white envelope. The Albuquerque paper leaked the invitation to the Associated Press, the AP flashed it over the wire, and soon all the Eastern newspapers as well as journals in London, Berlin, and South America were decrying Sheriff Wattron's effort at composition. The invitation read: "You are hereby cordially invited to attend the hanging of one George Smiley, Murderer. His soul will be swung into eternity on Dec. 8, 1899 at 2 o'clock, p.m., sharp.

"Latest improved methods in the art of scientific strangulation will be employed and everything possible will be done to make the proceedings cheerful and the execution a success.

"F.J. Wattron, Sheriff of Navajo County." The Arizona Republican in Phoenix led the denunciation of Wattron. "The coarseness of the language employed by the Sheriff," the paper's editorial intoned, "has given rise to much adverse criticism in the east, and a great injury has been done the territory thereby. The day of Arizona's 'rawness' is passing, and the sooner men like Wattron are made to appreciate the fact the better it will be for the credit of the territory."

Which leads to the interesting question: just who was Frank Wattron?

Born Francis Joseph Wattron in Missouri in 1861, he was orphaned at age 7 and raised in Kansas by his uncle, a Roman Catholic priest who trained the boy also to be a priest. Evidently Wattron's calling for the min-istry was weak, and he took off at age 13. For the next decade, he wandered New Mexico, Arizona, and Mexico and later never was willing to speak of those years.

In the mid-1880s, he showed up in Holbrook, Arizona, with $5, a knowledge of Spanish, and a deck of cards. Frank Wattron was a professional gambler and already subject to dark moods. He proved very good at cards and so belligerent no one wanted to mess with him. So naturally he was made deputy sheriff. When he resigned three months later, the county had to hire three men to replace him. “Wattron takes off his badge,” noted the local paper, “and the shooters will hold a jubilee.” But this respite was slight, and for the next 21 years, Wattron was a central figure in the area, serving variously as sheriff, judge, justice of the peace, doctor (the nearest real physician was 30 miles away), and school superintendent.

In this matter of the public schools, Wattron set a new standard. His only address to the county's teachers consisted of the statement, “On time' should be written over the door of every schoolhouse in the land.” The county's faculty - imagine a new school superintendent, famous for mood swings, standing there dressed in black with a sawed-off shotgun dangling from his waist probably became the most punctual in North America. He was a man who loved learning and music: always reading, buying the first phonograph in Holbrook, often strumming his guitar, and becoming part owner of the Winslow opera house.

He also was fascinated by Indian artifacts, accumulating a collection of 2,981 prehistoric pots that filled his house - a unique assemblage he eventually sold to the Field Columbian Museum in Chicago.

When a new schoolteacher arrived in the fall of 1886, he promptly married her, and they had six children, five of whom survived into adulthood.

By the late 1890s, he had settled his family in Los Angeles, probably for the educational advantages, and periodically took the train west to visit them. Such an arrangement was not unusual among successful men in the territory.

His family later remembered his outbursts of anger, such as the time he dumped a bucket of water on the head of his visiting mother-in-law.

He held to a keen sense of justice.

When the train put off a woman and her children in Holbrook, he took the penniless family to a restaurant and fed them, then to his store so they would be warm. When the husband finally arrived to fetch them and began berating the woman, Wattron delivered yet another of his celebrated exercises in profane language.

Then there was the time he arrested a cowboy for cattle stealing and sent for a lawyer. The attorney took the case on the condition that if he won, his fee would be $100. But when he beat the charges, the cowboy vanished without paying him. The lawyer told Wattron, and the sheriff once again became enraged: he had loaned the cowboy $100 for his legal fees.

And when the local newspaper office burned down, Wattron told the publisher, who did not like him, “You take the train this morning for Los Angeles, get what you need, and I'll back you.” Against this mien of frontier scholar, head of the public schools, local judge, friend of the poor, loomed the other side of Wattron: the man who felt no fear but filled everyone else with it. He was a man who complained of some mysterious pain, and who constantly treated himself with large doses of opium.

Death by Invitation Only

His pharmacy stood next to the Bucket of Blood Saloon, and whenever there was a disturbance there, Wattron entered with his cocked sawed-off shotgun poking through the door first.

Once, when he made such a visit, he caught the tail end of a boast made by a man who said he would kill Wattron. The sheriff announced he could justifiably kill the man on the spot for such a threat, but rather than soil the saloon, he would kill him out in the street.

He hauled the man into the road, made him stand in a circle drawn in the dirt, and for the next hour screamed obscenities at him without, according to local legend, ever repeating a single oath.

At the conclusion of his speech — and Wattron was noted for his perfect elocution — he broke open his shotgun to reveal it was unloaded. He then informed the man that he considered him a coward and literally kicked him down the street and out of town. From such manic outbursts are reputations made.

In the single recorded instance in which another armed man refused to back down from Wattron and his shotgun, the sheriff uncocked his weapon and promptly hired the man as his deputy. Apparently the incident was Wattron's notion of a job interview.

This was the man who became, literally, the global symbol for barbarism in the American West.

After his invitation to a hanging was leaked to the press, and the newspaper outcry erupted in December, 1899, President William McKinley allegedly fired off a telegram of complaint to territorial Governor N.O. Murphy who promptly ordered a 30-day stay of execution for Smiley.

Wattron, ever in a dour mood, commented, "Well, I got a hell of a lot of notoriety, anyway."

But the incident rankled him: the man educated by a priest, the head of the public schools, the man who cleaned up Holbrook and kept the peace, the man who collected prehistoric art, did not take kindly to being a symbol of savagery.

So F.J. Wattron composed a second invitation for the new hanging date of January 8, 1900. This one was printed on white paper with black edging, and the envelope also was edged in black.

The sheriff had decided that since a parody of a wedding announcement would not do, he would compose a parody of a funeral announcement. The text read: "With feelings of profound sorrow and regret, I hereby invite you to attend and witness the private, decent and humane execution of a human being, name, George Smiley; crime, murder."

"The said George Smiley will be executed on January 8, 1900, at 2 o'clock p.m. "You are expected to deport yourself in a respectful manner, and any 'flippant' or 'unseemly' language or conduct on your part will not be allowed. Conduct, on anyone's part, bordering on ribaldry and tending to mar the solemnity of the occasion will not be tolerated."

The two quoted words flip-pant and unseemly Wattron plucked from editorials denouncing him. The invitations were not mailed until the 5th or 6th of January so no press reaction could beat the hangman. This time everything went off without a hitch.

Smiley's last words were, "I have nothing to say except to thank the sheriff and his deputies for courtesies, and I die a Christian."

Once hanged Smiley's body was turned over to Wattron, who took off his badge briefly and became the town undertaker again.

Every 5 or 10 years since then, a newspaper or magazine has revived the tale of the scandalous hanging invitation. The man behind it the brooding man with the shotgun who never actually killed anyone, the loner who collected rare pots, the gambler who ran the public schools, the man who loved music, the family man whose children largely entered the professions that man was obliterated by tales of this one incident. This probably would not bother Wattron. He came from a frontier world that crackled with a freedom we can barely comprehend. I suspect he would look upon people such as ourselves much the way a wolf looks upon a domesticated dog.

By the year of the execution, Wattron's health was broken probably from the hardships of frontier living.

At 7:00 P.M. on August 2, 1905, he died from an accidental overdose of opium. Close friends tried to save him by walking him constantly and administering antidotes, but it was too late. He told them he had a "ticket punched straight through to Hell with no stopovers."

When they found Wattron's will, they discovered he had left simple instructions: "Bury me anywhere." They did the best they could in satisfying his indifference: his grave is in Los Angeles.

Additional Reading: Harold C. Wayte, Jr., A History of Holbrook and the Little Colorado Country, (1540-1962), M.A. thesis in history, University of Arizona, 1962.

Lloyd C. Henning, "Sheriff, Scholar, and Gentleman," speech (and lengthy notes) given July 25, 1940, at the 63rd Pioneer Days Celebration, Snowflake Ward Chapel; copy Arizona Historical Society, Tucson.

Charles Bowden, who has visited Holbrook often for the past 30 years, also wrote about Bisbee in this issue.