Crossing the Plains, Days of ’57

In the spring of 1857 a company of thirty-seven people, eleven men, ten women and sixteen children, drove eight wagons off the west bank of the Missouri at Nebraska City, bound for Sonoma County, California. Maxwell traveled with that train and set the crossing down almost sixty years later, using real names and the recollections of surviving eyewitnesses alongside his own. He records the fording of the Platte, the ferry at Green River, oxen dying on the alkali water of the Humboldt, night guards and stampedes, a hailstorm that scattered the teams, and the August attack on the Holloway camp that killed six and that Nancy Holloway survived by feigning death. The worth of the book is its plainness: the ordinary daily labor of the ox-team road, kept intact down to the last oxen unyoked at Healdsburg in September.