author
Martha Summerhayes
1844–1926
Best known for a vivid frontier memoir, she turned the hardships of army life in the American West into a lively, firsthand story. Her writing brings Arizona’s forts, journeys, and domestic struggles to life through the eyes of an observant newcomer from New England.
1 Audiobook
Vanished Arizona: Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman
by Martha Summerhayes
About the author
Born on Nantucket, Massachusetts, in 1844, Martha Summerhayes grew up in a prosperous family and later spent time studying literature in Germany. She married army officer John W. Summerhayes and, through that marriage, was drawn into the demanding world of frontier military life.
Her best-known book, Vanished Arizona: Recollections of My Army Life (published in 1908), grew out of her experiences traveling and living at western army posts. Readers have long valued it for its detailed picture of daily life in the late nineteenth-century Southwest, including rough travel, isolation, danger, and the work of keeping a household going far from comfort.
Summerhayes died in 1926. Today she is remembered as a memoirist whose personal account helps preserve a sharply human view of army family life in the early American West.