Other editions of book Vanished Arizona;: Recollections of the Army life of a New England woman

Martha Summerhayes (1844-1911), 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. Accommodations at Cooley's ranch were not up to the standards that Martha Summerhayes had grown used to, as a member of a rich family back in Massachusetts. She also found the fact that Cooley had two wives to be quite shocking, and she complained publicly about those two matters in particular. Her complaints were published in 1908 in an autobiography named Vanished Arizona. After her autobiography was published, Martha Summerhayes became a celebrity, receiving fan mail from hundreds of people, specially military men and students that valued her view of military life.

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In 1874 when Martha Dunham Summerhayes came as a bride from the coast of Nantucket to Fort Russell in Wyoming Territory, she learned the hard facts of army life at Forts Whipple, McDowell, Apache, Yuma, Lowell and a summer in Ehrenberg, all in Arizona. She also spent time in other parts of the country where Santa Fe was her favorite. Her enthralling story told by actress Jane Merrifield-Beecher, gives episodes of traveling the Colorado River, using the red river water for bathing, rearing a baby in the isolation of the forts without the amenities she was use to in Nantucket and surviving the desert heat. This is three hours abridged.

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...I have written this story of my army life at the urgent and ceaseless request of my children. For whenever I allude to those early days, and tell to them the tales they have so often heard, they always say: "Now, mother, will you write these stories for us? Please, mother, do; we must never forget them." Then, after an interval, "Mother, have you written those stories of Arizona yet?" until finally, with the aid of some old letters written from those very places (the letters having been preserved, with other papers of mine, by an uncle in New England long since dead), I have been able to give a fairly connected story...