By Leo Banks
A Hualapai Indian murderer was hung outside Prescott in 1925. The now-forgotten case was extraordinary for its drama and absurdity. It was a frontier hanging in the age of the telephone and Model-T. The killing of cab driver A.M. Cavell by George Dixon Sujynamie aroused deep passions in Prescott. The white population hollered for the head of the 19-year-old Indian, while members of the Hualapai tribe reportedly held war councils and threatened reprisals if the government went through with the execution.
The murder took place in April on the Fort Whipple Military Reservation. Sujynamie, a stockily built man who spoke in a strange musical voice, had been in love with a Yavapai girl from the Indian camp at Whipple. Sujynamie wanted to marry her, but the men of the tribe turned her against him, in part because he was considered strange, but also because he was Hualapai, a traditional enemy of the Yavapai. In despair, Sujynamie hired Cavell to drive him to his ex-girlfriend's camp. His plan was to murder her, and the men who interfered with their love, then commit suicide. But when he learned the girl was gone from the camp, Sujynamie inexplicably killed Cavell, striking him on the head 15 times with an iron bolt, and returned to Kingman in Cavell's Ford.
He was quickly arrested, found guilty and sentenced to hang. U.S. officials ordered the construction of a gallows stockade at Whipple, north of Prescott, within sight of where Cavell's body was discovered. Fearing that angry Hualapais would burn down the structure before the October 10, hanging, officials hired two men to guard it. Cowboys Billy Simon and Pearly Morris needed the money and didn't count on having to do much more than sleep under the gallows to get it. Simon didn't own a car and rode to Whipple on horseback. Morris drove in his Model-T Ford, a jalopy that only started when shoved down a hill.
The stockade was 20 feet square and situated in a hollow surrounded by high ridges. It had partitions on four sides, a narrow entry door, but no roof. The two men spread their bedrolls inside the walls and set up tarps for protection against the rain. "While there, before we went to bed, we set around talking," said Simon in a 1972 interview. "Then I guess these Indians decided they'd scare us off."
Hualapais lit fires on the ridges around the gallows and began howling, then drove loose horses toward the stockade. In his interview, published in AFFword, a defunct folklore magazine put out by Northern Arizona University, Simon said: "Now these horses had bells on, and they were making quite a racket - the bells were - and we figured out that the Indians were making this racket so's they could get up close and maybe take us, see. "All we had was six-shooters. So I told Pearly Morris, 'Your little car is up there on top of this little knoll, and you get in it, and I'll give you a push, get you started, and then you go up to the sheriff's office and bring back two 30-30s, and a bunch of cartridges.'
Pearly returned shortly with rifles, "so we started having a little target practice, shooting up at where these fires were on the ridges. That put a stop to that."
Two nights before the execution, in what had to be one of the strangest parties ever held, some of Simon's cowboy friends dropped by to celebrate his birthday. They carried a cake with a full complement of candles, hot chocolate and other festive victuals. According to the Prescott Journal-Miner, "The party sat around in the solemn stockade and regaled themselves," while listening to the chants of Wallapais who'd traveled from Kingman to support Sujynamie.
On execution eve, they again packed the surrounding hills, determined to drive Billy and Pearly away. "We could see the light of the big fires and hear them sing this death chant all night long," Simon said. "One Indian in particular was the most persistent howler I ever heard in my life."
The gallows were state-of-the-art, equipped with three starter pedals inside a small shanty within the larger stockade. The pedals were wired to a motor that would start when the correct pedal was pushed, opening the gallows trapdoor. Only one pedal was active and nobody was supposed to know which one. But Billy and Pearly couldn't resist testing them by putting a big rock on the trapdoor. The live one was in the middle.
Three men were asked to work the fatal pedals. One was Billy's friend Roland Mosher, who was part Yavapai Indian. But he refused, saying "Any man that does get that live pedal, he'll be dead inside of six weeks." Gun salesman Bill Stich filled in for Mosher. "I'll step on that pedal. I don't care which one I draw," Stich boasted.
On the streets of Prescott, the goings-on at the death stockade came to be called Mauk's card party. U.S. Marshal George Mauk had the unique idea of issuing signed playing cards as invitations to the hanging, to be witnessed by 52 people. Newspapers made much of the prisoner's coolness, attributing it to his tribe's ancient rituals. They called Sujynamie the "Wallapai mystic," and reported, based on the testimony of Lee Johnston, his cellmate, that Sujynamie spent his time beating a death chant on the walls of his cell. Sujynamie's only white advocate, William Light, superintendent of the Truxton Canyon Indian Agency, called that a lie. "I doubt if Johnston can understand five words of the vernacular of the Wallapai, and those would express the fact that he had liquor to sell them," Light said.
The Superintendent wrote numerous letters in an effort to have Sujynamie's sentence commuted to life. But President Calvin Coolidge denied the request. With carbine-armed officers, including Morris, on the hilltops around the stockade, deputies escorted Sujynamie up the gallows steps. He was smiling and clutching a bouquet of flowers he wished to be buried with.
"Well," continued Simon, who was riding his horse around the stockade, still expecting trouble, "the Indian walked up the 13 steps, and he got on the trap door. The sheriff had a 30-30 in one hand and a bottle in the other, and he was crying. Tears were running down his face." After a final statement, declaring that he held no grudge against the white people who'd gathered to watch him die, Sujynamie was hung. As for Mosher's prediction about the man who got the live pedal, it might've come true, depending on whether one believes there is a statute of limitations on curses. Stich didn't die within months, as Mosher predicted; he lived another seven years.
But he did die young, at age 48, of a sudden heart attack, giving believers in bad spirits reason to believe that Mosher had been right after all.
Leo W. Banks, a Tucson-based writer, is a frequent contributor to Arizona Highways magazine. He also has written several books of history for Arizona Highways' book division. These include Never Stand Between a Cowboy and his Spittoon and Rattlesnake Blues. Banks will be presenting to the Prescott Corral of Westerners in August.
Sharlot Hall Museum Photograph Call Number: (bub8193pf). Reuse only by permission.
This photo, taken in the mid 1920s from the hill that now holds the Prescott Resort, shows the Whipple Barracks and barely shows the region that the Yavapai were living on that was part of the Military Reservation. In 1925, an inexplicable murder took place here. The hanging of the accused happened only a few feet from where the murder took place.