The apron that she wore over her dress when she was seriously injured by a Mojave Indian arrow during the 1858 attack on the Rose–Baley wagons is displayed in the Vacaville Museum which also holds an annual "Sallie Fox Day".

Mary subsequently moved with their two young daughters, Sallie and Sophia Frances, to Van Buren County, Iowa where her family were living.

As Rose later wrote: ... some miners who had just returned from California, so fired my imagination with descriptions of its glorious climate, wealth of flowers and luscious fruits, that I was inspired with an irresistible desire to experience in person the delights to be found in the land of plenty.

In mid-May, while resting at Cottonwood Creek, near present-day Durham, Kansas, the Rose wagon train was joined by a party led by Gillum Baley, which had left Missouri in April and also intended to travel to California via the Santa Fe Trail.

Several members of the party, including Leonard Rose, John Udell, and Sallie Fox carved their names into the stone.

In the ensuing battle, Alpha Brown was killed and Sallie was severely wounded when an arrow went through the wagon box and pierced her side.

Having lost most of their livestock and fearful of further attacks, the surviving members of the party had to abandon all but two of their wagons and trek the 500 miles back through the desert to Albuquerque.

[1] Sallie Fox later wrote of the journey back to Albuquerque: All that my suddenly bereaved mother took for herself and five children she put into a flour sack, and we literally had to go to bed when our clothes were washed.

We slowly wended our way back towards civilization, fearful every moment of another attack from the dreaded Indians, and suffering from the distressing heat and lack of water and food.

[1] In January 1859, Edward Smith and his brother assembled a wagon train from what was left of their livestock and set out again for California, taking Mary Brown and her four remaining children with them.

Edward O. Smith's party crossed into California at Fort Yuma, where the local merchants provided new clothes for Sallie and her sisters free of charge.

In 1870, she visited her childhood home in Keosauqua, Iowa, taking with her the dress she had worn during the Indian attack which still had the hole made by the Mohave arrow.

According to one account, when she showed the dress to a group of Iowa schoolchildren and told them its story, one boy asked her if she had survived being shot by the arrow.

[12] When Sallie had first arrived at her aunt and uncle's ranch in Vacaville, she planted four walnuts that she had gathered along the Gila River while traveling with Edward Smith's wagon train.

The dress she wore when she was injured by the Mohave Indian arrow is displayed in the Vacaville Museum, which also holds an annual "Sallie Fox Day".

[8][13][14][15] Much of the published information about Sallie Fox's life is based on the papers of her daughter Edith Allen Milner, who collected and transcribed her mother's reminiscences.