Amy M. Johns was born in Farmington, Iowa, in 1878, and when she was thirteen moved west to the Puyallup Valley with her family. She attended grade school in Auburn, Washington, then known as Slaughter. After her family moved to Sumner in 1891, she began attending Whitworth College because the public school had only three years of high school. At eighteen she passed the teachers' examination and received a certificate to teach third grade. She taught in Sumner and Fern Hill until she married Harry Roger Ryan in 1902. They lived in Spokane twenty years, then returned to Sumner where she lived until her death in 1967. She began writing at seventy years of age and continued until a few weeks before her death at age 88.

Her vivid memory of the past, her extensive research, and the personal interviews with other old-time friends and relatives, made The Sumner Story possible.