Sixth in a Series: Martha Summerhayes, Frontier Wife

CAVALCADE MARTHA SUMMERHAYES, FRONTIER WIFE

Most of the pioneer women who came to Arizona had little time or inclination to record daily events. A notable exception was Martha Summerhayes, wife of a U.S. Army officer. In her book Vanished Arizona, she left us a riveting account of her life in the Arizona Territory of the mid-1870s.

Born in Nantucket, Massachusetts, Martha enjoyed opportunities of education and travel that included two years' residence with a military family in Germany. Returning to America, she married Lt. Jack Summerhayes, went with him to Wyoming, and was soon en route to Camp Apache in Arizona, "that dreaded and then unknown land."

To get there, the regiment traveled by train to San Francisco, then by ship down the California coast and around the peninsula of Baja California to Port Isabel at the mouth of the Colorado River.

It was August, 1874, when Martha, her husband, and the Army contingent arrived in Arizona. Nothing relieved the discomfort of the 122-degree temperature. Sadly she recorded the deaths of three soldiers from heat exhaustion.

At Port Isabel, the party boarded barges towed by the stern-wheelers Cocopah and Gila which took them to Fort Mojave, a 14-day river voyage of heat, glare, scorching wind, and stale food.

The rigors of the journey were far from over. Now traveling cross-country, Martha learned to prepare meals on open fires during desert sandstorms, to place a hair lariat around her bedroll at night (a practice then believed to ward off rattlesnakes), and to breathe despite boiling clouds of dust, aided by rationed swigs of hot water.

Riding in the first wagon train to pass over a new military trail named for Brig. Gen. George Crook, Martha entered the land of the Apache Indians and experienced physically sickening fear.

Finally, in early October after two months of arduous travel from San Francisco, Martha arrived at her new home in Camp Apache. There, three months later, she delivered a baby boy.

Martha's encounters with the adversities of life are inter spersed in her book with warm human experiences. One sensitive and compassionate passage relates an episode that took place soon after the birth of her son.

Martha was ill and confined to bed with her seven-dayold baby when a delegation of Apache women visited her in the small log cabin the Summerhayes family occupied. Keenly aware of the difficulties of caring for infants in the wilderness, and clearly eager to show their sympathy for the inexperienced new mother, the women brought gifts and a fawnskin papoose basket embroidered with blue beads. Carefully placing the child in the warm embrace of the basket, they drew the flaps together and laced the baby safely within. After soothing the child to sleep, the Apache women left the infant with his mother and quietly withdrew. Today, old Arizona has indeed vanished, and with it have been lost memories of the experiences of countless pioneer women. Fortunately, we have Martha Summerhayes to thank for lifting the curtain of time and allowing us some rewarding glimpses of what life was like when the Southwest was still a remote frontier.