For a while his father, who had previously worked as a merchant seaman out of New York, ran a sloop on the Hudson River belonging to the Schermerhorn family.

He would remain a devout member of the faith until his death, preaching to small gatherings and once marrying a couple on one of his westward wagon trains.

In the ensuing years, Udell and his wife moved many times as he tried his hand at farming and business in a variety of locations in Ohio and Missouri.

He then ran his own stills for another three years but later wrote of his decision to enter the distillery business: I consented to do so; which was a great error in me; though at that time, making and using whiskey, as a common drink, was very popular thro'out the United States.

According to Udell, he had to sell his clothes at Canandaigua to buy enough food for his return journey to Ohio which he walked at a pace of 40 miles a day.

When Udell returned to Ohio after failing to make any money as a miner, they remained in California eventually settling in Allendale, a small town in Solano County.

In 1856, a year after his arrival back in Ohio, he published his first diary, Incidents of Travel to California Across the Great Plains, which detailed the 1850, 1852, and 1854 journeys.

Udell wrote in his diary on 31 August 1858: I was in the worst situation of anyone in the company who had a family, my wife being 65 years of age and so feeble that she was not able to walk, and I had not an ox or hoof left, except an Indian pony which I had kept at my wagon and he was so worn down he could scarcely travel.

[...] There was not half enough provision in the company to sustain us until we could reach white settlements so that in all probability we must all perish by the hands of merciless savages or by starvation.

[...] Indeed, I almost envied the lot of those of our comrades who were left dead behind us, their lifeless bodies to be burned by the savage foe, as is the custom of those Indians.

According to Charles W. Baley in his 2002 book Disaster at the Colorado: Beale's Wagon Road and the First Emigrant Party, Udell's name does not appear in the records of either Solano or Sonoma County after 1872, and his exact place of death is unknown.

The book, based in part on Udell's second diary, is a semi-fictionalized biography of Sallie Fox who as a twelve-year-old child had travelled with the Rose-Baley Party.

[10] This diary, chronicling Udell's first three trips from the American Midwest to California overland by wagon and back again by sea was published in Ohio by the Ashtabula Sentinel in 1856.

[11] Udell's second diary, which subsequently served as the primary source for 21st-century accounts of the ill-fated Rose-Baley Party,[12] was first published in 1859 by the Solano County Herald.