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Concept
Martha Summerhayes
Summary
Martha Summerhayes (October 21, 1844 – May 12, 1926) was an American memoirist.
She was a Nantucket, Massachusetts, native who later on in life immigrated to Arizona. A well travelled and educated woman, Summerhayes spent two years, from 1871 to 1873, studying literature in Germany. Her passion for writing took her into a career as a writer. She became well known as a writer in Massachusetts, but she usually did her writing during the winter, which, in turn, led to her becoming interested in the warmer weather of Arizona.
In 1873, she married soldier John Wyer Summerhayes, a veteran of the American Civil War.
Wyer Summerhayes was still in the military when the couple married, so Martha further expanded her travels by going with her husband wherever the military sent him when no war was being fought. The Summerhayes arrived at Fort Russell, near Cheyenne, Wyoming, shortly after marrying. In 1874, they were sent by the military to an Arizona that at the time counted with only about 20,000 inhabitants. They stayed at a ranch owned by Corydon Cooley, a White man who had two Indian wives.
Accommodations at Cooley's ranch were quite different from what Martha Summerhayes had experience in the east and Europe. She was also disturbed by the fact that Cooley had two wives. Her observations were published in 1908 in an autobiography named "Vanished Arizona" that details her memories of Arizona and the West before widespread settlement and the experiences of military wives.
Summerhayes travelled, in August 1874, about 200 miles by a steamboat to Fort Mohave from Fort Yuma, enduring temperatures along the Colorado River that soared to 122 degrees.
Soon after arriving at Fort Mohave, the military and their families loaded their belongings into wagons, heading to Prescott, near where Fort Whipple stood. For Martha Summerhayes, the experience of traveling through the desert was both adventurous and frightening; she was not used to using snake protection before sleep, witnessing dogs being eaten to their deaths by these animals, and other experiences.
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