Corporal Isaiah Mays is buried at the hospital’s “All Souls Cemetery,” where he rests with more than 2,400 other patients and staff. The oldest grave dates to Sept. 6, 1888, when Arizona was just a territory and the hospital was called the Territorial Insane Asylum.

Mays and Sergeant Benjamin Brown, of the 24th Infantry, were awarded the Medal of Honor in 1890 for “gallantry and meritorious conduct” while defending an Army pay wagon against masked bandits near Tucson. 

In a fierce battle with the robbers, several soldiers were seriously wounded. Mays, shot in both legs, walked and crawled two miles to a nearby ranch to sound the alarm. (Mays’ and Brown’s regiment was one of several famous Black “Buffalo Soldier” regiments formed after the Civil War and sent West during the Indian Wars.)

The robbers got away with $29,000 in gold (worth nearly half a million dollars today) that was never recovered.

Mays’ and Brown’s gallantry caught the attention of his superiors, who said the men “behaved in the most courageous and heroic manner.” 

Born a slave in Virginia in 1858, Mays left the Army in 1893 and worked as a laborer in Arizona and New Mexico. In 1922, he appealed for and was denied a federal pension.

Mays was eventually committed to the hospital, which at the time housed not only the mentally ill but also tubercular patients and indigents with nowhere else to go. Mays died at the hospital 1925. Because of a fire in 1935, the hospital has no record of his actual burial site.

For decades after his death, Mays’ grave was marked only by a modest bricklike marker etched with a number. Mays might have been forgotten had it not been for the efforts of hospital staff and a small group of Arizona veterans who identified Mays as one of the state’s recipients of the nation’s highest military honor.

In 2001, Mays finally received a Medal of Honor headstone from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs for his bravery 110 years earlier.

The headstone was unveiled just a few days before Memorial Day in 2001 at a formal ceremony with members of the American Buffalo Soldiers in attendance.