By Melissa Ruffner
Nantucket, Massachusetts, was the third richest community in the state in the 1830s. The China trade brought silks, teas and porcelains. Whaling produced candles sold internationally as well as whalebone for ladies’ corsets and ambergris to scent lace hankies. Martha Dunham was born into a well-to-do family on October 21, 1846. She had extensive educational opportunities and on March 16, 1874, she married “my old friend Jack.”
John “Jack” Summerhayes was born on January 6, 1835. At the beginning of the Civil War, he enlisted in the 20th Massachusetts and was involved in almost three dozen engagements. He was taken prisoner, escaped, wounded three times and rose from Private to Brevet Major of Volunteers. After the war ended, Jack transferred to the 8th Infantry in March 1869. When he married Martha, the 8th was stationed at Fort D.A. Russell, Cheyenne. After only a few months the 8th was ordered to Arizona Territory. By August 1874, they had been married five months and Martha was expecting their first child.
After twenty-three days of heat, glare and scorching winds as Martha and Jack traveled by steamboat up the Colorado River, they arrived at Camp Mohave (near today’s Bullhead City). Martha wrote in her book, Vanished Arizona: “Our route lay over the…most desolate country…positively hostile…except [towards] snakes, centipedes and spiders.” After two months continuous traveling, they arrived at Camp Apache where they were assigned “half a log cabin” described in the Surgeon General’s Report as “hot in summer, cold in winter, leaks badly in rainy weather, poorly lighted, more than sufficiently ventilated and altogether a miserable kind of shelter.”
On January 27, 1875, a “new recruit” arrived at Camp Apache in the White Mountains of Arizona Territory. Martha wrote: “I had no nurse and the only person able to render me service was the laundress of 5th Cavalry.” Martha continued: “A delegation of several squaws, wives of chiefs, came to pay me a formal visit … [bringing] a beautiful papoose—basket or cradle—such as they carry their own babies in … made of lightest wood and covered with the finest skin of fawn, tanned with birch bark by their own hands, and embroidered in blue beads; it was their best work … These squaws took my baby (he was lying beside me on the bed), then cooing … put my baby in, drew the flaps together, and laced him into it … and finally soothed him to sleep. I was quite touched by the friendliness of it all.”
Apache cradleboard used by Martha Summerhayes for her infant son Harry (Photo Courtesy Melissa Ruffner).
On April 24, 1875, Jack was re-assigned to Fort McDowell. When they arrived at Fort Verde, one of the officer’s wives saw baby Harry in the cradleboard and exclaimed, “Surely this cannot be your baby! You haven’t turned entirely Indian, have you, amongst those wild Apaches?”
When Martha sat down to record the events of her life in the West with Jack and baby Harry, she only meant to share her many adventures with family and friends, never imaging that her manuscript would become a classic in historical literature. She concluded: “…somehow the hardships and deprivations which we had endured become only a memory.”
In May 1997, I met her great-grandchildren–first at Fort Verde and later at Sharlot Hall Museum. As they autographed their names around Martha’s photograph in my well-loved copy of her book, I asked them “whatever became of baby Harry?” They shared with me the story of his long and fruitful life that spanned from the 19th to the 20th century—between the whale oil candles of his mother’s Nantucket to the hydroelectric plants he designed to improve the lives of others. He survived the early trauma of an infancy on the Arizona frontier and inherited his mother’s adaptability and inquiring mind.
But what arrived in the mail a few weeks later from Roger Summerhayes brought tears to my eyes. There was a photograph of the cradleboard still owned and treasured by this family. It was not merely a souvenir of their great-grandmother Martha’s Arizona adventures but it also represents the act of unspoken kindness and concern whose thought were shaped by the shared experience of motherhood.
(Days Past is a collaborative project of the Sharlot Hall Museum and the Prescott Corral of Westerners, International (www.prescottcorral.org). The public is encouraged to submit articles for Days Past consideration. Please contact SHM Library & Archives Reference Desk at 928-445-3122 Ext. 14 or via email at archivesrequest@sharlothallmuseum.org for information.)