Martha Summerhayes

Martha Summerhayes (1844–1926) was born on Nantucket, Massachusetts, and in 1874, newly married to an infantry lieutenant, followed her husband to the Arizona Territory, then still a raw and dangerous frontier of Apache conflict and isolated desert outposts. Vanished Arizona (1908), written decades later from her own letters and memories, recounts those years of army-post life with a directness and humor unusual in frontier memoirs of the period, and it remains one of the most widely read firsthand accounts of a woman's experience in the post–Civil War Army. She continued to live near military postings as her husband rose to the rank of colonel. She died in Nantucket at eighty-one.