Great Trial of the Wham Robbers

A play in two acts based on the actual trial of seven defendants who were accused of the Great Wham Paymaster Robbery, which occurred on May 11, 1889, in Pima, Graham County, Arizona Territory. The accused included gang leader Gilbert Webb, the mayor of Pima and former brother-in-law of Brigham Young, and Webb's son, W. T. Webb, later to rise to Speaker of the House of Representatives of Arizona Territory, became a member of the Arizona Constitution Convention, and was chosen to cast Arizona's first presidential electoral college ballot in 1912. Two of the defendants were grandsons of King Follett, at whose funeral in Nauvoo, Illinois, in 1844, Joseph Smith, the Mormon prophet, preached the famous sermon know as the "King Follett Discourse" in which many strange and wondrous Mormon doctrines were intro ducted to the Mormon Church and the world. The robbery and subsequent arrests embarrassed the Pima community, which saw itself as a stable, law-abiding Mormon colony and the jewel of the Gila Valley. Nevertheless, the Pima community rallied around its denizens in an effort to save them and the community's reputation; after all, everyone was related by blood or marriage to everyone else. In a sense, they were all in it together. The story disappeared for 100 years; only in recent years has the story surfaced again.