Lucien Maxwell

Lucien Maxwell was an American frontiersman, trader and landowner whose name became attached to the enormous Maxwell Land Grant in New Mexico and Colorado. Connected by marriage to the Beaubien family, he prospered through trade, ranching and supply businesses around the Santa Fe Trail and became one of the wealthiest private landholders in the nineteenth-century Southwest.

Maxwell’s life connected the fur-trade frontier, overland travel, ranching and the development of New Mexico Territory. Lucien Maxwell was born in Kaskaskia, Illinois Territory and died in Fort Sumner, New Mexico Territory.

Zane Grey’s Fighting Caravans places Lucien Maxwell among the real figures of the Santa Fe Trail world through which its fictional travellers move. Maxwell’s presence connects the adventure to the trading, ranching and overland networks of northern New Mexico, where his household and enormous landholding became familiar landmarks in the nineteenth-century frontier economy.