In 1875, when U.S. Army wife Martha Summerhayes’s Army ambulance was being escorted through Arizona Territory, from Camp Apache to Camp Ehrenberg (and ultimately Camp McDowell), she recalled, “I wore a small derringer, with a narrow belt filled with cartridges. An incongruous sight…it must have been. A young mother, pale and thin, a child of scarce three months in her arms, and a pistol belt around her waist!” While the exact type of derringer she carried remains unknown, her comment
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