Some of the earliest women to come to Arizona from the East Coast were military wives. When they arrived, they weren’t always prepared for the life they found here.
Arizona writer Laoise O’Shea documented what some of their lives were like in the harsh desert recently on Substack. Her goal was to write about women in the early days of our state and she remembered a certain historic diary she had read.
Full Conversation
LAOISE O’SHEA: I was trying to figure out what to write about, and I remembered this diary that my grandfather had given to me over Christmas, and it was called “A Vanished Arizona,” and it was about Martha Summerhayes and her story. And I started reading it and was amazed at how strong she was and the struggles that she went through living in Arizona.
LAUREN GILGER: Right. So, tell us about Martha Summerhayes. This is quite a story, but, you know, like a lot of women probably around that time, she came from the East Coast with her husband, who was in the military, kind of ended up in this place that, you know, she probably never thought she would.
LAOISE O’SHEA: Absolutely. I think what’s interesting about her is coming into Arizona, she actually had this idea that it would be kind of glamorous because she spent time with her family in Germany and spent time with the military in Europe, which was kind of lavish in a way. And so she had this idea that going to Arizona with her husband in the U.S. Army would be the same, but she was sorely mistaken and arrives and was — it was a very big culture shock. It was definitely not what she had expected coming over.
LAUREN GILGER: OK. So, you’re reading her diary. What year are we talking about here? Give us the setting.
LAOISE O’SHEA: So, we’re talking 1871 to 1873, before the railroad came here, which was one of the stories that stuck out to me is she arrives at the Port of Yuma and she has to go with her husband to Fort Whipple with other soldiers, and she talks about getting there. And she goes, “Well, they started marching.” And I had to reread it for a second and go, “Marching from Yuma to Fort Whipple? OK.” And that’s just one of the examples of some of what she had endured.
LAUREN GILGER: Right. So, she’s sort of tagging along in this kind of wild world to her. Tell us just about — like diaries are so interesting, right? Because especially historic diaries, tend to be super detailed. ... What they ate, what they wore, what they did, what they saw. I mean, what was her life like? What was the day-to-day?
LAOISE O’SHEA: Well, she basically would follow her husband from different — like Fort Whipple and to other parts of Arizona. And so part of it was spending time outside when they would march to different places. And I mean, she would be in a wagon, but still, very, very harsh. But her day was almost like a — I would say a housewife at the time, but without a lot of resources. So, she had to learn how to cook without a lot of items maybe in the East when you had a mother nearby or another woman nearby, perhaps. She had to figure it out on her own. And so she was able to gain insight from some of the Native Americans, for example. She gave birth and didn’t really know what to do with child rearing, and so at one point, the Native Americans actually taught her how to carry her baby in a cradleboard. ... And so there’s this part where she leaves Fort Whipple and went to some other fort, and when she was there, the women almost laughed and were shocked at the cradleboard. They’d never seen that before. These are women that also came from the East.
LAUREN GILGER: Sure. Yeah. So, that’s interesting. Like, she was kind of on her own and turned to the Native American women to sort of teach her how to be a wife and a mother, which was kind of the role of many women at the time.
LAOISE O’SHEA: It was. And and just gaining insight from them and just, who do you go to? And you’re alone, not knowing how to raise children and how to cook and how to do these things and having little supplies, and probably the solace and the peace that she got from that, from interacting with them.
LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. You talk about in this essay also other women in that era. Tell us what they had to say about their own lives.
LAOISE O’SHEA: Absolutely. So, there’s this book called “Doing What the Day Brought,” and it’s a really wonderful book. It includes interviews of women that came from the East to the West. I believe the time is about late 1800s to the 1920s, and it was compiled by some [University of Arizona] professors, so it’s a local book. But there’s a couple different things.
One woman talks about how they were able to fight against kind of that isolation that the desert brings in, and she says, “If there was a newlyweds in the neighborhood, very often they would go over and teach her their specialty in cooking. They would leave the recipe for her, which was very thoughtful and very nice. And if anyone was sick, they took care of them at home. The neighbors took care of anyone who was ill.”
LAUREN GILGER: So, it was a community effort.
LAOISE O’SHEA: It was, absolutely.
LAUREN GILGER: That’s a very stark contrast, I think, to motherhood today, which you make in this piece as well. ... What did you see there? Like, what struck you about reading this? Were you jealous in a way?
LAOISE O’SHEA: Yeah, I was. I mean, I went into motherhood not knowing a whole lot, and just like a lot of mothers these days, I wasn’t raised around children. So, it was very shocking to me. And if I had a group of women that would come into my home and just show me friendship, I think it would have brought me so much joy and would have put me at ease, absolutely. ... Really what I gathered from reading a lot of different kind of excerpts of this is it was survival.
LAUREN GILGER: So, you draw this interesting contrast, right, between this very harsh, kind of Wild West world in the Sonoran Desert in this kind of settler era in the West and these women coming from the East Coast in their fancy dresses and layers and corsets and all these things, right? I mean, this probably wasn’t an easy place to live in that way. They did adapt.
LAOISE O’SHEA: They did. They did. And they found their way, and we read it with Martha Summerhayes, we read it with these other women. Another thing that they did is, sometimes — some people don’t know, but the West was actually more progressive than the East, mainly because more women had to take on maybe some of those masculine roles.
So, for example, there’s another excerpt from “Doing What the Day Brought” where a woman talks about herding cattle. She goes, “I would get on my horse and bring in the cows from the pasture. I helped milk the cows and brought the cans to the house. Then I helped feed the calves and take care of them. I loved to be outside.” So, not only is she adjusting to it and adapting, but she loved it.
LAUREN GILGER: Not the kind of traditional feminine role they probably would have been playing in New York or Philadelphia or something.
LAOISE O’SHEA: Definitely different.
So, talk a little bit about, I know you’re from Cave Creek, your family is from there, and you kind of have deep roots here. How do you think about the desert?
LAOISE O’SHEA: Yeah. So, Cave Creek, if you haven’t been, small town, probably 10, 15 years ago, when I would go into Phoenix and say: "I’m from Cave Creek. I’m 30 minutes away." People wouldn’t even know where it was. So, a little different now. But, you know, it’s beautiful when you’re up there. I was surrounded by Spur Cross and Black Mountain and the Blue Wash waterfall and these beautiful sunsets and these homes that almost live in cohesion with the desert. And so growing up, I was able to appreciate the desert from that feminine standpoint of it being beautiful, full of mystery.
There’s a quote by Barry Goldwater that said something like, “If I had a mistress, it would be the Grand Canyon.” And I view it a very similar way. ... I find, yeah, I find the desert is just, I’m enamored with it and I still am. And that’s why I feature it in a lot of my writing, and being in Cave Creek and being around the beauty of that made me fall in love with it.
LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. OK. Well, we’ll leave it there. That is Laoise O’Shea joining us to talk about her piece on the mothers of the desert. Laoise, thank you so much for coming in. Appreciate it very much.
LAOISE O’SHEA: Thank you so much. Appreciate it.
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