The compilers, Edward W. Gifford and Gwendoline Harris Block, were both associated with the University of California, Berkeley, Gifford as a professor of anthropology and director of the Museum of Anthropology and Block as an editor in the Department of Anthropology.
Albert L. Hurtado, who provided an introduction for this edition, is an associate professor of history at Arizona State University and the author of Indian Survival on the California Borderland Frontier, 1819–60 (1988), winner of the Ray A. Billington Prize for American frontier history.