Frontier Tennis In The Arizona Territory

First Published December, 2008

Last Updated September, 2022

When people think of the first lawn tennis played in the United States, images of ladies in flowing dresses playing mixed doubles with well-dressed men in neckties on bright green manicured lawns usually comes to mind.

Picture this instead.  A dusty court surrounded by forests of pine trees with men in high black boots wearing suspenders over white undershirts playing mixed doubles with women in the plain attire of a frontier wife.  Add a few curious Apache Indians standing on the sidelines trying to make sense of this foreign game and it would be hard to paint two more diametrically opposed tennis scenarios.

Actually, the second scenario is just as viable as the first when it comes to lawn tennis being played in the United States in 1874, which is the same year Walter Wingfield began to market his newly patented version of lawn tennis to the world.

Martha Summerhayes

While doing research on another topic, I encountered the following oblique statement on the International Tennis Hall of Fame web site, “Tennis was indeed introduced to the U.S. at several locations in 1874, the first documented instance in Arizona”.

Well, having recently moved back to Arizona and possessing a penchant for obscure tennis history, I felt compelled to get to the bottom of this statement and did so. 

What follows is essentially the story of Martha Summerhayes who was a young New England bride who followed her U.S. Calvary officer husband, first to Wyoming’s Fort Russell and then to Fort Apache in the Arizona Territory where, amazingly, she discovered the game of tennis.

There were no railroads in Arizona in 1874, so Martha Summerhayes first had to travel from Wyoming to the Camp Reynolds military base on Angel Island in the San Francisco Bay, which was the staging area for U.S. Army caravans to forts in the Southwest. From there they had to take a steamship south around the Baja of California and up the Gulf of California to where the Colorado River meets the Gulf, which was a total of 1900 miles by steamer. 

They took another steamship 200 miles up the Colorado River to Fort Mojave and then completed their journey to Fort Apache by mule drawn wagon.  The Summerhayes total trip took two months and cost the lives of three soldiers due to the heat and exhaustion.

The details of this trip are important, because this is the same route that the tennis equipment had to travel when it was transported to Fort Apache.  Nothing reached the camp from the East, except mail, and a rider had to travel 100 plus miles on horseback often through hostile territory to a stage coach station in New Mexico to pick it up.  It was almost certainly beyond the capacity of the mail rider to deliver the tennis set to the fort.

Martha and John Summerhayes arrived at Fort Apache to join the Fifth Calvary on October 7, 1874 to find that they now lived in beautiful, but very spartan conditions – officers lived in primitive log cabins above a gorge on the White River.  The fort and the surrounding Fort Apache Indian Reservation had been established in 1870 for the White Mountain and Cibecue Apache Indian tribes who were indigenous to the area.   Geographically, Fort Apache was located about 125 miles northeast of present day Phoenix in the White Mountains.

“After a day or two” there, Martha went to find a neighbor, Ella Baily, and “To my surprise, I found her out playing tennis, her little boy asleep in the baby carriage, which they had brought all the way from San Francisco, near the court”.  Martha received some advice from Mrs. Baily as “she gave her ball a neat left-hander”.

I think it is logical to assume that Ella Baily also brought the tennis equipment from San Francisco, along with her child’s stroller. The only two real options for the tennis set to arrive in California would be on the transcontinental railroad, which opened in 1869, or on a ship directly from England to San Francisco before the set made its way to the Angel Island army base. That is where Mrs. Baily almost certainly was exposed to lawn tennis for the first time, which would make Angel Island one of the first places where lawn tennis was played in the U.S.

The Arizona scenario, while historically accurate, is simply astounding when you consider the remoteness of Fort Apache. In 1874, this part of Arizona was one of the least developed areas in the country and yet tennis had found its way to Fort Apache at the very beginning of its American timeline.  To put this in historical perspective, the legendary Apache warrior Geronimo was arrested and broke out of the Fort Apache stockade in 1881 – seven years after tennis was introduced to Fort Apache.

Fort Apache, Arizona Circa 1880

While stationed at Fort Apache, Martha evidently became not only became a regular player, but an ambassador for the game of tennis, as well.  By 1880, the Summerhayes family was stationed back at Angel Island, which she characterized as a much better posting where they “danced and played tennis”.

In the winter of 1886, they were transferred to Fort Niobrara, a large post with hundreds of soldiers, which was four miles outside of Valentine, Nebraska.  According to Martha’s book, the following summer “a tennis court was made and added greatly to our amusement”.

As John Summerhayes grew in rank their postings became more civilized and eventually he retired as a colonel and they returned to her family home in Nantucket to live out their years.  Martha Summerhayes passed away on May 11, 1926 and was buried next to her husband in Arlington National Cemetery totally unaware of her place in American tennis history as the first person to document the arrival of lawn tennis in the United States.

We will never know for certain who played the first lawn tennis match in the United States in 1874.  It is certainly possible that Mary Ewing Outerbridge, James Dwight and Fred Sears, and other claimants to tennis primacy in the U.S. also began play in 1874. However, no one can claim that they played tennis under more unusual circumstances than the inhabitants of Fort Apache in the year that lawn tennis came to America.

Good Collecting.