From a pauper’s grave to Arlington honors

Cpl. Isaiah Mays’ long journey is almost over. The remains of the Buffalo Soldier, wounded in 1889 defending a government payroll train against robbers and later awarded the Medal of Honor, will be reburied in Arlington National Cemetery on Friday, after being moved from a pauper’s grave in Phoenix.

The story of how Mays earned his medal reads like a novel of the old Wild West - an Army payroll train carrying $28,345 in gold and silver was attacked by 15 to 20 robbers and the funds taken by force on May 11, 1889.

The wagon train, led by Maj. Joseph Washington Wham, had come from Fort Grant and was heading for Fort Thomas, both in the Arizona Territory.

It should have been a routine trip, but it took a decidedly different turn when bandits ambushed the train at Cedar Springs in the Gila River Valley, along an old treacherous trail that ran between the two forts. Because the area was so desolate, it was suspected that the robbers were locals, aware of the payroll train’s schedule. Hiding atop a large rock escarpment, they began firing at the guards.

The gang was able to stop the wagon train by first rolling a large boulder into the path of the wagons and then firing from above on thesoldiers. Thus, the gang had the advantage of height as well as surprise. The wagons had no room for maneuver, and little cover. There were 11 guards on the train, almost all of them members of the Buffalo Soldiers, a black unit. The robbers apparently expected the Buffalo Soldiers would quickly surrender. They were to learn otherwise.

Two of the guards on the train, Mays and Sgt. Benjamin Brown, were shot and wounded in the attempt to defend the train and its cache of gold and silver; other soldiers also were seriously wounded and needed quick attention. Brown was shot in the abdomen, yet did not leave the train until shot in both arms.

The other badly wounded soldier, Mays, shot in both legs, walked and crawled over two miles in the rough Arizona terrain to the nearest help, Cottonwood Ranch.

Eight of the robbers were arrested, but the money, carried away in Treasury Department cloth bags, was never recovered. Its value today would be more than $500,000. Three of the train’s mules were fatally shot in their traces; the others panicked, ripped apart the harnessing, and escaped into the desert.

The robbery was so famous that Frederic Remington did a painting, “Holding Up the Pay Escort.” Eyewitness accounts indicate the robbers had little fear of capture. They casually opened the strongbox, and then divided the spoils. None of the robbers, thought to be residents of the nearby town of Pima, bothered with a mask or bandana to cover their faces.

Eventually, the eight captured men were brought to trial in what would, like the robbery, be a lopsided battle. Even in Arizona in those early days, the fact that these were black soldiers with the federal payroll train was a mark against them. The attackers were white, probably connected to local Mormons of the St. Joseph Stake, and their defense counsel was Marcus Aurelius Smith, a famous lawyer from Tombstone, who used the race factor to his advantage.

After a lengthy trial in the U.S. District Court in Tucson, the accused were acquitted.

A group of the purported robbers’ descendants made a recent trip to the robbery site to try to find more answers to the decades-old argument - if their ancestors really robbed the train, why were they acquitted? One man explained it thus: “Arizona was fighting for statehood. The feds were fighting the [Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints], and so convicting Mormons was not good for statehood, especially on the testimony of blacks.”

Mays’ tale was the stuff of heroes, although his records ultimately were lost, and he died a pauper in the Arizona State Hospital, buried in an unmarked grave in its All Souls Cemetery in Phoenix. He rests along with about 2,400 other patients and staff of the facility, which served both as mental hospital and a place to house tuberculosis patients.

Yet Mays’ story - from his birth as a slave in Carter’s Bridge, Albemarle County, Va., in 1858, to his heroic acts as a Buffalo Soldier in the 2nd Cavalry - had another chapter to be written.

He went to Columbus, Ohio, to enlist in the Army in 1886. Eventually, he found himself serving in Company B, 24th Infantry Regiment, which was one of the Buffalo Soldiers’ regiments, created after the Civil War to fight Indians.

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