Jabez F. Cowdery

Jabez Franklin Cowdery (11 August 1834 Benjamin Franklin, or Frank, After Jabez' mother's death, his father placed him in a Rochester orphanage. When he was 10 the orphanage indentured him until the age of 21 at a nearby seed garden, but after two years he ran away, travelling by barge and steamboat to New York City, where he became a sailor on oceangoing merchant vessels. In 1850 he came ashore at Sacramento. He briefly joined the Booth family as a supernumerary on their 1852 theatre tour of California, before running away to Downieville to join the California gold rush. He studied at the private library of a man named Langton and qualified as a lawyer in 1859.

Political and legal career

At an Alleghany, California meeting after the rival 1860 Democratic National Conventions, Cowdery spoke in favour of Stephen A. Douglas against John C. Breckinridge. At this time he went by "Frank", from his middle name. Cowdery was appointed city attorney of Downieville in May 1863, served as district attorney of Sierra County from 1863 to 1866, and was also a school director. it was rendered redundant by the federal Shipping Commissioners Act of 1872 and abolished in 1875.

Cowdery was elected to the 1873–74 session of the California State Assembly on the slate of the People's Union, one of a succession of parties briefly dominant in San Francisco, which in 1873 returned 11 of the 12 seats allocated to the city by plurality block voting. He unsuccessfully proposed to end the mandate for segregated schools for Black children, on the grounds that separate but equal schools were not being provided.

At the 1879 Assembly election, Cowdery was one of two Republicans returned, alongside two from the Workingmen's Party, for the four-member 13th Assembly district, comprising parts of San Francisco's 11th and 12th wards. He served as Speaker for the Assembly's ensuing 1880 session, As Speaker he was ex officio a regent of the University of California from 1880 to 1881. defeating H. T. Hammond by 16,514 votes to 16,219. In relation to two court appeals by the city which were pending at the expiry of his term, Cowdery was later paid $100 by the attorney for the opposing side not to offer further legal advice to the city. In 1886, the Supreme Court of California ruled this was professional misconduct and suspended him for six months.

Cowdery wrote and revised several legal manuals. His law library was damaged in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, after which he was on the commission to rebuild San Francisco City Hall. He had two daughters with each wife; the first two died young. The second two were Alice May Cowdery, who wrote for newspapers and magazines, and Ina Louisa Cowdery, a musician, Alice's 1915 account of a cruise from San Francisco to the Panama Canal ends with the Chagres River reminding her of her father: "a little boy of ten, unhappy, rebellious baby, who ran away from his New York home, and wandered to this same gray-green jungle spot".