The Westerners International was founded in 1944 and has over sixty corrals or chapters in the United States, and twenty corrals abroad, with over 4,000 members around the globe. Corrals generally meet monthly for camaraderie and interesting programs on all aspects of Western history.  The award winning Prescott Corral was founded in 1962 as an affiliate of Westerners International, an organization dedicated to the preservation of the real history of the American West.  The Prescott Corral holds a dinner meeting each month with a thirty to forty minute presentation on a selected Western History topic. These programs are very popular, with usually 60 to 100 members and guests attending.  The Prescott Corral archives it presentations with the Sharlot Hall Museum Library & Archives.  This audio recording is one of many programs. 

Westerners Presentation
Title:  Martha Summerhayes
Presenter:  Robert Yount
Audio Number:  3A (Side 1)
Duration:  00:57:28
Date of Presentation: June 7, 1975
Description:  Martha (Dunham) Summerhayes, an intelligent, educated young woman born in the middle of the 19^th century to a proper Puritan family in Massachusetts, married a young U.S. Army officer in 1874, an event that changed her life dramatically, challenging her resourcefulness and willingness to live without many of the elements of civilized life.  Arriving as a bride at Ft. Russell in Wyoming Territory, she soon realized that “women are not reckoned in at all in the War Department” as far as living conditions were concerned.  Her husband’s subsequent posting to Fort Apache in Arizona Territory further tested her ability to cope with the harshest of environments, not without a degree of danger.  A quarter of a century later, having experienced dozen Army posts, Martha Summerhayes decided to write down recollections of her adventures.  The result was her book, Vanished Arizona, now considered among “the essential primary records of the frontier-military West.”