Watching a western and they’re hanging someone in this particular scene. For some reason I wondered if the hangmen were given a traditional pay or if it had to do with how many people they hung.
As a follow-up, if they're paid per hanging, are there any examples of them framing others for crimes so they can get paid more?
There's a widespread misconception that towns in the western territories largely meted out their own improvised justice, but in fact it appears that executioners were usually sheriff's deputies already employed in the local prison facilities. In cases where men were hired specifically to perform an execution, they were almost always firing squads of six men, and often the executions were held in secret to avoid crowd-control problems:
"Sheriff Thomas Fowler [...] was determined to limit the number of spectators, so he staged a ruse. With the help of a deputy, [he] pitched a tent to make the curious believe that the execution was to take place in the jail yard. the deputy then secured a common covered road wagon and loaded a large square tent [....] Six 'crack-shots' of steady nerve, chosen from a field of many applicants, climbed aboard. Each man had with him a long black alpaca shroud fitted to cover him from head to foot and protect his anonymity."^1
Utah favored the firing squad for precisely this reason: there was no single executioner. From 1859 to 1957, all but two of its 38 state executions were by firing squad.
George Maledon (aka "The Prince of Hangmen"), after his Civil War service, was hired as a sheriff's deputy at the federal jail in Fort Smith, Arkansas. The following year he was assigned a special deputation in charge of executions, which made him the chief executioner for the Federal Court of the Western District of Arkansas, a position he held for 22 years.^2 Most executioners of the period appear to have had similar backgrounds. An article by Fred Veil, executive director of the Sharlot Hall Museum in Prescott, Arizona, goes into greater detail about the nature of law and justice in the western territories: "The County Sheriff and his appointed deputies and other staff were responsible for maintaining the peace, investigating crimes, apprehending and arresting lawbreakers, performing executions, serving summons and warrants, summoning jurors for both petit and grand juries and serving as the County Jailer."^3
Sources:
Very Closely Related Question:
I've heard that some hangmen in this area and time period were actually convicts who were offered the position in lieu of their punishment. So that whenever the hangman died, they would just take the next convict and offer him the position. Is there evidence of this happening and if so, to what scale?