The Project Gutenberg EBook of Vanished Arizona, by Martha Summerhayes

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Title: Vanished Arizona
Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman

Author: Martha Summerhayes

Posting Date: August 7, 2008 [EBook #1049]
Release Date: September, 1997

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VANISHED ARIZONA ***

Produced by A Team of Arizona women

VANISHED ARIZONA

Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman

by Martha Summerhayes

TO MY SON HARRY SUMMERHAYES WHO SHARED THE VICISSITUDES OF MY LIFE IN
ARIZONA, THIS BOOK IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED

Preface

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.

I have not attempted to commemorate my husband's brave career in the
Civil War, as I was not married until some years after the close of that
war, nor to describe the many Indian campaigns in which he took part,
nor to write about the achievements of the old Eighth Infantry. I leave
all that to the historian. I have given simply the impressions made upon
the mind of a young New England woman who left her comfortable home
in the early seventies, to follow a second lieutenant into the wildest
encampments of the American army.

Hoping the story may possess some interest for the younger women of the
army, and possibly for some of our old friends, both in the army and in
civil life, I venture to send it forth.

POSTCRIPT (second edition).

The appendix to this, the second edition of my book, will tell something
of the kind manner in which the first edition was received by my friends