Though I read a lot of good, detailed, and well-researched histories, I repeatedly find that if I really want to get a sense of the reality of times past, it is necessary to read something that was written by a person who lived at the time, and was an actual witness to great events.

When you do this you instantly cut through the political narratives that color all histories, whether sincere or not. Historians writing generations later bring their own viewpoint to the subject, colored by subsequent history shaped by what the original players did. So, to really understand those original players fairly, you really need to hear their side of the story, from their own lips.

Thus, I was thrilled recently when I came across a used copy of Vanished Arizona: Recollections of the Army life of a New England Woman by Martha Summerhayes. The book covers her memories from 1870 to 1900 as the wife of Jack Summerhayes, an officer in the American military stationed in the western United States, with the bulk of the story centered in Arizona.

This is an amazingly readable book. More important, it tells this story of army life from the perspective of the women who lived it. Most histories cover the battles and important events that Summerhayes’s husband Jack participated in, from defeating the Apaches and Geronimo to establishing the first settlements in early Arizona. Martha Summerhayes instead tells the story from her perspective as a woman living in an isolated fort in the hot desert wilderness of Arizona. The story is riveting, and revealing as well.

In reading her work now, 150 years later during the first half of the 21st century, I noted two important things.

John Wayne and Joanne Dru in John Ford’s
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon

First, the cavalry movies of John Ford from the 1940s were remarkably accurate portrayals of this army life. Movie critics today tend to see these movies as sentimental and self-serving. Summerhayes however proves this wrong. This was really how people behaved in these western forts, with humanity, humility, and amazing wisdom. The goal wasn’t to wipe out the American Indians, but to bring the violent ones either to justice or to heel, so that everyone — whites and Indian alike — could live in peace and prosperity.

And as they did it they tried mightily to recreate the civilized life they had known in the settled east.

I must add that Summerhayes book is not the only original source material on which I base this conclusion. Another great example is Indians, Infants, and Infantry by Merrill J. Mattes, using as his framework the diaries of Elizabeth Burt, the wife of Andrew Bart, who was stationed farther north in the midwest and Rockies at about the same time. She told a very similar tale.

Second, Summerhayes’ story reveals an aspect of the American wild west that is often overlooked. When she first traveled in 1874 to Fort Apache on the eastern end of central Arizona, it took her five months. First she took the Union Pacific railroad from Jack’s previous station, Fort Cheyenne in Wyoming, to San Francisco. Then she boarded a ship that took her down the coast, around the Baja and up the Gulf of California to Yuma. She then changed ships to continue up the Colorado River to Fort Mohave, about halfway up the state on its western border with California.

She had been traveling for 35 days, and had only now landed in Arizona proper. From Fort Mohave she and her husband’s company began a three month journey east, to cross almost the entire state, traveling across the deserts and canyons of Arizona and territories controlled by the hostile Apaches. Summerhayes traveled inside an ambulance, the term then used for what we now call “a covered wagon”.

The main body of the troops marched in advance; then came the ambulances and carriages, followed by the baggage-wagons and a small rear-guard. When the troops were halted once an hour for rest, the officers, who marched with the soldiers, would come to the ambulances and chat awhile, until the bugle call for “Assembly” sounded, when they would join their commands again, the men would fall in, the call “Forward” was sounded, and the small-sized army train moved on.

That was in 1874. When in 1886 Jack Summerhayes was called back to Arizona from a post in Nevada, they traveled entirely by train. The new post was in Tucson, which had been very isolated from the rest of Arizona in the 1870s. For example, in 1877 they had traveled there by wagon from Fort McDowell (east of Phoenix), a journey of about 100 miles that took days, across very rough and poorly marked roads. Now they took “a pullman car” from Nevada to Tucson in about one day. Once there, Martha was astonished by how primitive Tucson had changed in just nine years.

The place seemed unfamiliar. I looked for the old tavern; I saw only a railway restaurant. We went in to take breakfast. … Everything seemed changed. Iced cantaloupe was served by a spick-span waiter; then, quail on toast. “Ice in Arizona?” It was like a dream, and I remarked to Jack, “This isn’t the same 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.”

In a little over a decade, the American wild west had gone from a remote hard-to-reach place with few basic comforts that only received mail twice a week, to a new community of wealth and prosperity tightly linked to the rest of the nation.

Martha Summerhayes

Summerhayes accepts this breath-taking change in manner so matter-of-factly it’s as if she almost doesn’t notice it. She does of course, but to her and her generation, that change was entirely expected. Americans were building a new nation, and they intended to do it as fast as possible.

All in all, Martha Summerhayes’ story is inspirational in its simple courage faced with endless discomfort and difficulty. Army life in the wilderness was not easy, especially for a woman raising two infants. And yet she persevered, and in the end looked back at those hard times with nostalgia. The memories made her appreciate the luxuries of later life. As she said in her conclusion:

I am glad to have known the army: the soldiers, the line, and the Staff; it is good to think of honor and chivalry, obedience to duty and the pride of arms; to have lived amongst men whose motives were unselfish and whose aims were high; amongst men who served an ideal; who stood ready, at the call of their country, to give their lives for a government which is, to them, the best in the world.

Such people should not be forgotten, especially because they made possible the nation we live in and benefit from.