Author: William Audley Maxwell

William Audley Maxwell (died 1921) was an American emigrant and writer who crossed the plains to California in 1857 with an ox-team company bound for Sonoma County. He settled in northern California and was living at Ukiah, in Mendocino County, when he wrote this account, signing its foreword there in 1915. He wrote it because no full first-hand narrative of a pioneer ox-team crossing existed, and the descendants of those emigrants were asking for one. Sunset Publishing House of San Francisco issued the book that year, and it is still used by overland trail researchers for its named participants and dated events.