WINTER DAYS WITH MARTHA SUMMERHAYES

merhayes. That fine Christmas spell was drawing to a close. The forecaster warned of an influx of arctic air moving southward, with snow imminent from the Mogollon Rim north. So in Tucson I rented a car, and headed for the tall timber, hoping to make it to Fort Apache before the snow did.

Why has Vanished Arizona become a classic? Because it was thoughtfully written by a person with feeling, perception, and a corresponding gift of language; by a woman civilized, courageous, and compassionate, whose words go straight to the heart. There are thousands of books on the West, only a mere fraction of which meet these standards of a classic.

My intention was to follow Martha Summerhayes' trail as faithfully as possible, going where she went, from her first entry into Arizona at Yuma in 1874, to her last visit to the Territory fifteen years later at Tucson; and though some of today's highways do not follow the old routes of the army wagons, most of the roads remain the same, albeit smoother, and not as much of Arizona has vanished, as Mrs. Summerhayes feared it had.

It was really the way of life, not the landscape, that she referred to in her title. Writing in 1908, she observed, “Railroad and automobile have annihilated distance, the army life of those years is past and gone, and Arizona, as we knew it, has vanished from the face of the earth.” If I had been completely faithful to her route, I would have chartered a ship in San Francisco and come around Cape San Lucas and up the Gulf of California to the mouth of the Colorado River, and made my way (not in a sternwheel steamboat, as she did, but rather by flatbottomed skiff) to Yuma, Ehrenberg, and Fort Mojave above Needles; thence overland to Fort Apache in the White Mountains, and back to Fort Whipple at Prescott, Fort McDowell near Phoenix, to Ehrenberg again and back to McDowell, to Florence, Fort Lowell at Tucson, and thence to posts in the eastern United States.

Weather forced me to be unfaithful to Martha Sum-

merhayes,

Before I had gone a hundred miles, I found myself wishing I had brought John G. Bourke's On the Border with Crook; and passing through Florence, another Arizona classic set up a clamor in my mind. While staying overnight in Florence, Mrs. Summerhayes had met the writer of that other book I wanted with me-the famous Charles D. Poston, author of Apache-land (1878), an extraordinary poem about the history and geography of Arizona. Here's hoping George Chambers will add it to the Arizona Silhouettes list. “A very agreeable and cultivated gentleman,” Mrs. Summerhayes described Mr. Poston.

Not all of the Florence of her time has vanished. A few stuccoed-over adobes remain, and an olive grove at least a century old, the trees badly in need of pruning. Dated 1891, the courthouse is definitely post-Summerhayes.

If I had taken the left turn at Apache Junction and gone on to Phoenix and up the Verde to Fort McDowell "VANISHED ARIZONA: Recollections of my Army Life" By Martha Summerhayes, published by Arizona Silhouettes, 1730 E. Greenlee, Tucson, Arizona. Cloth, $7.50; leather, $12.50. 33 illustrations, historical introduction, glossary and biographical notes.

If (now an Indian school), I would have seen enormous changes. The basic elements of Phoenix's fame, however, have not changed.

"I was hearing a good deal about Phoenix," she wrote, "for even then in 1878, its gardens, its orchards, and its climate were becoming famous."

Instead I turned right toward Globe and the Salt River Canyon crossing, climbing toward the White Mountains under the approaching weather front. The car heater was purring, the windows rolled up, for snow lay on the ground, beautiful against the red rocks and green pines.

The turnoff at Carrizo on State Route 73 took me back to an unvanished Arizona. That this is the Fort Apache Indian Reservation was confirmed by sight of a pink-blanketed Apache squaw, leading a purple-pantsed boy, and carrying a blue-hooded papoose in a cradleboard. Among the pine trees along the road, Indian families were gathering wood in pick-up trucks to meet their eternal needs of cooking and heating. From wickiups thatched and patchwork-quilted against the cold, and from cabins with TV aerials, woodsmoke flattened out under the low sky, filling the air with its fragrance. In the White River Valley I turned off at Fort Apache, now the Theodore Roosevelt Indian School.

It still preserves the appearance of the Army post where Lieutenant John Summerhayes and his wife Martha were first stationed, in the winter and spring of 1874, and where their first child, Harry, was born. The old parade ground is now the playing field. There is a log building that could have been Major Worth's headquarters. The long stable still stands. Later buildings are of the rose-colored Coconino sandstone.

I stood on the edge of the White River ravine and looked down on the skeleton cottonwoods and willows, and gathered some of the little yellow berries on bushes among the dry grass. It was in this ravine that Martha Summerhayes attended an Apache Devil Dance, andwhich she described with dramatic power. She frankly admired the good looks of Chief Diablo, and forgave the sins of adulterous squaws whose noses had been cut off by their vengeful spouses.

"Poor creatures," she wrote, "they had my pity, for they were only children of Nature, after all, living close to the earth, close to the pulse of their mother."

" She was truly compassionate in her view of the Apaches, who were regarded then as the cruelest of all tribes.

It was here at Fort Apache that her lifelong loyalty to the Army was forged. Let her tell it in her own words: "I was getting to learn about the indomitable pluck of our soldiers. They did not seem to be afraid of anything. At Camp Apache my opinion of the American soldier was formed, and it has never changed."

Her opinion of Indian Agents was also formed here, and it was not a good one. Unfortunately, Mrs. Summerhayes never met John P. Clum, Indian Agent at the San Carlos Apache Reservation to the south of the White River, or her opinion would have been different, for Clum shared her humane outlook.

In the spring of 1874 Lieutenant Summerhayes was assigned to a company at Fort McDowell. The baby was only nine weeks old when they made what Mrs. Summerhayes describes as "A Memorable Journey."

"I heard them say," she wrote, "that we were not to cross the Mogollon Range, but were to go to the north of it, ford the Colorado Chiquito at Sunset Crossing, and so on to Camp Verde and Whipple Barracks by the Stoneman's Lake Road."

I followed her trail through Show Low to Snowflake under a lowering sky that threatened snow at any moment, not risking the turnoff she took to Heber. Beyond there, no roads show on the map even today, which enables us to understand the roughness of that journey in 1874-six cavalrymen, two ambulances, two army wagons, and a Mexican guide-during which an Apachecradleboard was all that saved little Harry from death by shaking. At the rocky ford over the Little Colorado, all of their baggage was soaked. Books were in her baggage-editions of the classic German authors and later at Ehrenberg she unpacked and sought to dry them out in the oven-like air.

It was in this part of Arizona, on the earlier journey up to Fort Apache, that Mrs. Summerhayes encountered the most famous of all the soldiers on the Apache frontier. "One day a party of horsemen tore past us at a gallop. Some of them raised their hats to us as they rushed past, and our officers recognized General Crook, but we could not, in the cloud of dust, distinguish officers from scouts. All wore the flannel shirt, handkerchief tied about the neck, and broad campaign hat."

I pressed on northward to Holbrook and turned west on U.S. 66, through Winslow to Flagstaff, gradually distinguishing the Sacred Peaks from the clouds on the horizon. Snow fell in the night, calling for an oatmeal breakfast before I ventured down Highway 79, the newly opened road which connects with the Black Canyon route to Phoenix. I drove cautiously on the skiddy surface, prepared to put on chains I had in the trunk, if a fall in temperature iced the road. Then came the dramatic drop off the Rim, as ponderosa yielded to juniper. Earlier in Flagstaff I had overheard a native assuring a frostbitten dude, who had come west in search of sunshine, that all he had to do was go thirty miles due south and there he would find sun, flowers, and birds. I soon proved him right.

The red cliffs of Oak Creek and Sedona, and snowcovered Mingus Mountain, were lures in the west. My compass pointed eastward, however, to Stoneman's Lake. Alas, the sticky red clay road leading up to it called for a four-wheel drive vehicle. I didn't risk it. Besides, the Lake is not as Martha Summerhayes saw it. For years it has been virtually dry, and any water in it last winter would have been frozen over. Here is how she described it: "Toward sunset of the next day, which was May Day, our cavalcade reached Stoneman's Lake. We had had another rough march, and had reached the limit of endurance, or thought we had, when we emerged from a mountain pass and drew rein upon the high green mesa overlooking Stoneman's Lake, a beautiful blue sheet of water lying there way below us.

"It was good to our tired eyes, which had gazed upon nothing but burnt rocks and alkali plains for so many days. Our camp was beautiful beyond description, and lay near the edge of the mesa, whence we could look down upon the lovely lake. It was a complete surprise to us, as points of scenery were not much known or talked about then in Arizona. Ponds and lakes were unheard of. They did not seem to exist in that drear land of arid wastes. We never heard of water except that of the Colorado or the Gila, or the tanks and basins and irrigation ditches of the settlers. But here was a real Italian lake, a lake as blue as the sky above us. We feasted our eyes and our very souls on it. Stoneman's Lake remains a joy in the memory, and far and away the most beautiful spot I ever saw in Arizona."

At Camp Verde some of the old-time Arizona has been kept from vanishing in the beautiful little museum, housed in one of the four surviving post buildings. There may be seen army relics, women's gowns, letters and documents, and Apache and Yavapai basket and bead work. The natural setting beneath the Mogollon Rim, in the broad and fertile Verde Valley, is of a beauty Time does not alter. Incense of burning juniper sweetened the cold clear air.

The road over Mingus to Lonesome Valley and Prescott was icy, so I more nearly followed the way around the mountains taken by Martha Summerhayes from Camp Verde to Whipple Barracks, doing in an hour and a half a journey that took her a long day. Fort Whipple

is now a Veterans Administration Hospital Facility, with a properly antiseptic air. I do not believe any of the handsome buildings are much older than 1900.

Although I had left the bad weather when I dropped off the Rim, the north itself remained curtained in cloud. Not a glimpse did I get of the San Francisco Peaks beyond Flagstaff, or of Bill Williams Mountain. On her original trek across from the Colorado River at Fort Mojave (the Fort was completely obliterated in 1942 and so I did not follow her trail there), Mrs. Summerhayes was enthralled by the way Bill Williams Mountain dominated the landscape.

"It seemed to pervade the entire country, and took on such wonderful pink colors at sunset," she wrote. "Bill Williams held me in thrall, until the hills and valleys in the vicinity of Fort Whipple shut him out from my sight. But he seemed to have come into my life somehow, and in spite of his name, I loved him for the companionship he had given me during those long, hot, weary, and interminable days."

From Fort Whipple, the Summerhayes were assigned to the river post at Ehrenberg. Ehrenberg! the place she had recoiled from when they had stopped there briefly en route up river from Fort Yuma to Fort Mojave. "I did not go ashore. Of all dreary, miserable-looking settlements that one could possibly imagine, that was the worst. Being stationed there all through the summer of 1875 did not raise her opinion of Ehrenberg; and if she returned today, I am sure that it would remain low, for it is a ghost town.

I explored Ehrenberg's surviving feature of the 1870's-the graveyard. In her time, it filled Mrs. Summerhayes with horror, for the coyotes used it as a feeding ground. Today it is a huddle of nameless rock cairns, over which highway workers have erected a crude monument, with pioneer relics cemented in its base. Across the river on the lower lands to which water is accessible, Blythe flourishes.

Her revulsion at Ehrenberg's heat and squalor evoked some of Martha Summerhayes most vivid descriptions of desert life, when a newly killed snake's rattlers were her baby's favorite toy. Air-conditioning and refrigeration have made life bearable today on the Colorado Desert, and dams on the river and diverted water have tamed and reduced the savage Colorado of which she wrote with awe and respect.

I took the road on the Arizona side a hundred miles down river to Yuma, passing through the Signal Corps installation known as the Yuma Test Station, and I can testify to the fact the United States Army has not vanished from Arizona. I was also content that the season was winter.

The best vantage point at Yuma is from the hill on which the Territorial Prison Museum stands. From there one can look far up the lazy river, lined with yellow willows in December, and, if the wind is right, get the pungent smell of arrow-weed noted by Martha Summerhaves. Fort Yuma was the first army installation in Arizona, established in 1849. Today only Fort Huachuca remains active. In 1877 Mrs. Summerhayes returned to Arizona, after recuperating from Ehrenberg at her ancestral home in Nantucket; and in chapter twenty-four of Vanished Arizona, called "Up the Valley of the Gila," she waxed lyrical. "The December sun was shining brightly down," she wrote, "as only the Arizona sun can shine at high noon in winter, when we crossed the Colorado on the primitive ferryboat drawn by ropes, clambered up into the great thorough-brace wagon (or ambulance) with its dusty white canvas covers all rolled up at the sides, said good-bye to our kind hosts of Fort Yuma, and started, rattling along the sandy main street of Yuma City, for old Camp McDowell.

"I wondered if I had really grown to love the desert. I had read somewhere that people did I did not stop to question the subtle fascination which I felt steal over me as we rolled along the smooth hard roads that followed the winding of the Gila River. I was back again in the Army. I had cast my lot with a soldier, and where he was, was home to me."

Eighty-three years later to the month, I took the Gila Trail from Yuma to Gila Bend, and experienced the same joyous feelings described by Martha Summerhayes. To breathe that clear, sun-warmed winter air of Southern Arizona is even more precious today to a smog-bedeviled Southern Californian. In her time, emigrants offered prayers of thanksgiving when they crossed the river from Arizona to California. Today the reverse is true.

Time pressed, and at Gila Bend, instead of following her trail into the Valley of the Salt to Phoenix and Fort McDowell on the lower Verde, I turned off to Casa Grande and Tucson, sighting the successive ranges whose essential configuration has not changed in a million years.

In June of 1886 the Summerhayes returned to Arizona from posts elsewhere in the country. "We travelled to Tucson in a Pullman car," she wrote. "It was hot and uninteresting. I had been at Tucson before, but the place seemed unfamiliar. I looked for the old tavern; I saw only the railroad restaurant. We went in to take breakfast, before driving out to the post of Fort Lowell, seven miles away. Everything seemed changed. Icedcantaloupe was served by a spick-and-span waiter; then, quail on toast. 'Ice in Arizona?' It was like a dream, and I remarked to Jack, 'This isn't the Arizona we knew in '74,' and then, 'I don't believe I like it as well, either; all this luxury doesn't seem to belong to the place.'"

Today Fort Lowell, situated east of Tucson on the south bank of Rillito Creek, is long since abandoned, fallen ruinously to a few remnants of the old adobe walls. The great cottonwoods described by Martha Summerhayes are gone. The suburban sprawl continues to cover the valley of the Santa Cruz. There is a strong local movement, however, to restore Fort Lowell as an historical monument.

Adobe crumbles. Wood burns. Stone lasts. Thus the Mission of San Xavier del Bac, Father Kino's Dove of the Desert, stands today as Martha Summerhayes so reverently described it, when she camped for several days outside its ancient walls. San Xavier was my last sight of Tucson, it and the red roofs of the University of Arizona, as the plane rose from the runway and set course for Los Angeles. My winter days with Martha Summerhayes were ended, during which I had driven more than a thousand happy miles over her trail. I held her book open in my hand, meditating on it between glimpses of the earth below, where the winter sunlight was alchemizing the ranges to amethyst; and I gave thanks to her for having written so beautifully of an Arizona as eternal as it is vanishing.

Arizona's STORY AND

Sorry in my blood, and I think that is I do, maybe, you, I, photographer for the “Under-thirties” people regularly phone up the news agencies, and for the shadows themselves who lets us spot the first-timers fellows like myself as lazing back easily-made advancement for him to enjoy.

Since the higher the product, the more people will want it. It fullmoon the saktekumpisar to find the very best of scenery-the most wholly changed and, of course, the most beautiful.

Arizona is where I find in-fills my humanitarian view of residents stand the able through the varied news. Unlike which, photography never exhausts its supply. The first-timers of 1959, anyway, demonstrate their supple mental a little out-of-the-glory of mine. Then that, to