W. H. (William Henry) Rhodes

Born in Windsor, North Carolina, in 1822, William Henry Rhodes became a lawyer, judge, poet, and newspaper writer whose life took him through Texas and eventually to California. He often wrote under the pen name "Caxton," and his career moved between law and literature in a way that gives his writing both polish and a lively sense of real-world conflict.

Rhodes is most often remembered today for The Case of Summerfield, published in 1871 in a San Francisco newspaper. The story's blend of invention, suspense, and speculative ideas has led later readers to see him as an early science fiction pioneer, even though he also wrote poems, essays, sketches, and humorous pieces.

He died in 1876, the same year Caxton's Book, a collection of his writings, appeared. For modern readers, his appeal lies in that unusual combination of Western history, literary ambition, and early imaginative fiction.