Recalling Vanished Arizona

Descendants of a frontier Army wife use her published diary as a guide to exploring the beauty of the land

VANISHED ARIZONA

I had a glass of butter sent over from the Commissary, and asked Colonel Biddle if he thought it right that such butter as that should be bought by the purchasing officer in San Francisco. It had melted, and separated into layers of dead white, deep orange, and pinkish-purple colors. I, too, as well as General Miles, had my turn at trying to re-form the Commissary Department of Uncle Sam's army.

Hammocks were swung under the ramadas, and after luncheon everybody tried a siesta. Then, after sundown, an ambulance came to take us over to the Verde River, about a mile away, where we bathed in water almost as thick as that of the Great Colorado. We taught Mrs. Kendall to swim, but Mr. Kendall, being an inland man, did not take to the water. Now the Verde River was not a very good substitute for the sea, and the thick water filled our ears and mouths, but it gave us a little half hour of cooling, which was worth while after the intense heat of the day when we could experience a feeling of being cool, and we found it worth while to take the trouble. Thin clumps of mesquite trees furnished us with dressing-rooms. We were all young, and youth requires so little with which to make merry.

Roger Summerhayes looked out over the pine tree-studded valley bordered by three mesas and shook his head in disbelief. We stood quietly by the side of the road gazing at the eastern Arizona clearing where old Fort Apache lay below us. I glanced toward Roger, hoping to learn what he thought about the place where his paternal grandfather, Harry Summerhayes, was born in 1875. "I had an image of what this place might look like and this isn't it!" he said, then added, "I never expected it would be this beautiful."

Revisiting Vanished Arizona

TEXT BY WAYNE RANNEY PHOTOGRAPHS BY DON B. STEVENSON
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY JUDY MILLER

Roger's triplet cousins, Roz Butler, Nancy Beekman and Libby Ellis, who are also Harry Summerhayes' grandchildren, were surprised as well by the lush green landscape that stretched out before us. As a geologist and educator, I was pleased that the landscape first captured their attention, for I knew, ultimately, the land shaped the story they were about to relive.

Roger's grandfather came into this world at then Camp Apache, the first Anglo-American born there. His mother, Martha Summerhayes (and the great-grandmother of this group), would later write the popular book Vanished Arizona, recounting how an educated and proper New England woman fared in the wild Arizona Territory, where she moved just a few months after her marriage to Lt. "Jack" Summerhayes.

Vanished Arizona not only records the difficulties Martha faced in raising a family there, it also portrays a woman who confronted a land vastly different from all she'd known before and learned how to see its beauty.

I was guiding the four great-grandchildren of Martha Summerhayes, as well as Roz's husband, Jim, and family friend Sally McKeige, on an 11-day excursion to many of the places mentioned in Martha's book. Our trip gave us an opportunity to discover how much (or, as it turned out, how little) Arizona had changed since Martha saw it from the seat of a Dougherty wagon 125 years earlier. We were time-travelers and referred constantly to Vanished Arizona, which guided us from Fort McDowell in Phoenix northeast to Fort Apache in Whiteriver, from Sunset Crossing in Winslow to Beaver Springs near Sedona, and from Fort Verde to Prescott's Fort Whipple, a trek of more than 300 miles.

I'd met Roz and Jim Butler of Queenbury, New York, on an expedition to the Canadian Arctic in 1991. One night, perhaps while keeping a lookout for polar bears, I told Roz I was from Arizona, and she immediately asked if I knew of Martha Summerhayes. "Of course," I had replied. "Didn't she write a book about Arizona?" I looked at Roz somewhat puzzled, trying to make a connection between the massive glacier in front of us and the story of a genteel New Englander in untamed Arizona. Roz told me that Martha Summerhayes was her great-grandmother and that she had always wanted to see the places "Mattie" had written about.

The years passed and I kept in contact with Roz and Jim, guiding them on many other van tours within Arizona. One day along an isolated patch of road on the Navajo Indian Reservation, Roz reminded me of her desire to travel in her great-grandmother's footsteps.

Before too long, we were gathering the Summerhayes clan in Phoenix, not only because its international airport provided a convenient rendezvous point for us but because we wanted to see the nearby Fort McDowell on the Verde River, where Jack and Martha were stationed for about 18 months of their four years in Arizona.

As we neared the fort site (essentially nothing remains of the original post), Nancy, from Schenectady, New York, felt an especially strong connection with the place and her great-grandmother. From a bluff east of the river, she looked down at the valley where the post once stood. “I can’t imagine her out here in those dresses with the heat and all. And that baby!” she exclaimed. “My gosh, she must’ve been a strong soul.”

Earlier, the staff at the Arizona Historical Society had given us a cheerful reception at their museum in Tempe. Carolyn Grote, then AHS librarian, showed us an original 1911 edition of Vanished Arizona. Later, educator Pat Walton introduced us to museum volunteers Vi Meyer of Scottsdale and Megan Reid of Yuma, who “know” Martha Summerhayes — better than just about anyone — through playing the role of “Mattie” in the living-history program at AHS. Meyer and Reid delightedly took to the stage for Martha’s descendants, and performed classic scenes from Vanished Arizona.

Following the dramatic presentation, Roger Summerhayes presented a surprise gift to the society’s museum — the epaulets from Lieutenant Summerhayes’ uniform.

As we left the site of Fort McDowell, the Summerhayes clan experienced parts of Arizona that remain much as they were more than a century ago. I had arranged for them to see an Apache Sunrise Ceremony at San Carlos. Martha wrote with some of her usual, and perhaps unfounded, horror of just such a dance she witnessed one winter night at Fort Apache:

“Arriving at the edge of the ravine, what a scene was before us! We looked down into a natural amphitheater, in which blazed great fires; hordes of wild Apaches darted about, while others sat on logs beating their tomtoms. . . . Upon their heads were large frames, made to resemble the branching horns of an elk, and as they danced and bowed their heads, the horns lent them the appearance of some unknown animal. . . . The noise of the tomtoms and the harsh shouts of the Indians grew wilder and wilder. It was weird and terrifying. . . . It was a fascinating but unearthly scene and the setting completed the illusion.”

We watched an eerily similar scene. In the bright glow of the bonfire, mountain spirit dancers glided in graceful circles to the rhythmic beat of the drums. We felt a link with events that Martha wrote about so long ago. Libby, who is from Nederland, Colorado, said she now understood Martha’s fear at seeing the masked dancers whirl around in an ethereal manner. Any hint of fear, however, was quickly forgotten, thanks to the generosity and kindness of our host family, who invited us to pitch our tents in their compound, although we opted to return to our hotel in Globe.

The Sunrise Ceremony gave me time to reflect on how much of our state remains not-so-vanished. Many times I stopped the van by the side of the road to read passages from Martha’s book, and we noticed how little the view had changed. Of course, having been raised in New England, her idea of beautiful scenery did not include the rough terrain of desert landscapes, and many of her early impressions of Arizona were not complimentary. Unfortunately, she arrived in August at Fort Yuma, where she repeatedly heard the story of the soldier who died there, only to return to beg for his blankets “having found the regions of Pluto so much cooler than the place he had left.”

Martha also complained, justifiably, about Arizona's dreadful roads and having to manage with a 5-month-old baby (the cousins' grandfather Harry) cradled in her arms. In May 1875, she wrote:

“We soon found that the road (if road it could be called) was worse than any we had encountered. . . . We clattered down . . . so near the edge of a precipice that I was frightened beyond everything: my senses nearly left me. Down and around, this way and that, near the edge, then back again, swaying, swerving, pitching, the gravel clattering over the precipice.”

One hundred twenty-five years later — almost to the day — the Summerhayes descendants and I, jammed into a Ford minivan, made our way to that exact spot, a place near Sedona where an old Army road once led down to Fort Verde. As our van lurched violently from side to side, someone yelled from the back seat, “Gosh, is this an awful road. Can we get out and walk?” Not long after, someone pleaded, “Wayne, can you please turn up the air-conditioning? It's very stuffy back here.” We couldn't help but laugh at knowing that Summerhayes still complained about Arizona's roads and heat.

The ultimate joy in reading Vanished Arizona comes from joining Martha as she gradually succumbed to the spell of her once “dreaded and . . . unknown land.” The clear, rarefied air, the sweeping vistas and the exotic ways of the Indians soon became an inspiration and a source of wonder to her. She began to see and understand the subtle beauty and charm of this wondrously varied landscape. One day our group pulled off the road above Stoneman Lake on the Mogollon Rim. Listening to the wind blowing through the ponderosa pines, we read again from Vanished Arizona:

“Towards sunset . . . our cavalcade reached Stoneman's [sic] Lake. We had had another rough march, and had reached the limit of endurance . . . 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 here away below us. It was good to our tired eyes . . . our camp was beautiful beyond description. . . . We feasted our eyes and our very souls upon it.”

We, too, feasted our senses on the glorious pines and fragrant, cool mountain air before making a final stop at the restored post of Fort Verde, the only site still containing buildings in which Martha and Jack may actually have slept. (Old Fort Apache was rebuilt in the 1890s and thus postdates Martha's tenure in Arizona.) Bob Munson, manager of the state historic park and an avid Arizona historian, works with a dedicated team of volunteers, including Dee Adams, who held us spellbound demonstrating what women wore on the frontier in the 1870s. “It used to take me 45 minutes to get all this on, but I'm down to 15 minutes now,” she boasted.

Munson stood in his period uniform and enthusiastically shared his knowledge of a soldier's life, while pulling a piece of authentic hardtack from his rucksack. “In Lieutenant Summerhayes' time, the U.S. Army was patrolling an area twice the size of Europe with a force no bigger than the 1870s New York City Police Department,” he explained. “During that time, the entire female population of the Verde Valley was two [Martha and one other officer's wife].”

As we strolled around the grounds of old Fort Verde, Munson pointed out the path that Martha walked as she formally greeted the post's officers. He mentioned the cradleboard given as a gift to Martha by the Indian women at Fort Apache when her son Harry was born. Roger casually chimed in: “Our family still has that cradleboard.” Abruptly, Munson stopped his narrative and looked at Roger, stunned.

“I thought that cradleboard was lost to time. You mean it still exists?”

“Yep,” replied Roger. “It's been passed down from generation to generation, and it looks just as good as the day it was given to my great-grandmother.”

Vanished Arizona delights all who read it. And Martha's descendants remain equally delighted that so many Arizonans take an interest in their family history. And by retracing Martha's footsteps, they've discovered that the more things change the more they stay the same. AH

ADDITIONAL READING: Vanished Arizona: Recollections of the Army Life of a New England Woman, University of Nebraska Press, is available at bookstores.

Geologist and biologist Wayne Ranney lives in Flagstaff. He has studied and lectured on all seven continents but loves Arizona more than any other place.

Tempe-based Don B. Stevenson has been traveling the back roads of Arizona since 1971. He hasn't found one yet he hasn't fallen in love with.

Judy Miller of Tucson uses many images combined with hand-drawn elements in her digital collages.