Benjamin Mayfield

Benjamin Mayfield (1831–187?) cowboy, miner, killed the outlaw John Mason.

Benjamin Mayfield, the second son of American pioneer farmer William Mayfield and his first wife, was born in Illinois in 1831. His father moved the family to Texas in 1837, where he and his older brother John grew up in Washington County and his brother Thomas Jefferson Mayfield was born in 1843. There his mother died sometime before his father was married to his second wife Mary Ann Curd on March 16, 1848.

When Benjamin was 18, in 1849 his father moved the family again to California, with a U. S. Army wagon train but were sent back to avoid the danger to civilians from the Lipan Apache on the trail and they then took a six-month trip by ship from Galveston around Cape Horn to reach California. After they landed at San Francisco, William took his family to the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley, then Mariposa County, now Tulare County to a place at the confluence of Sycamore Creek with the Kings River, (about 1.5 miles above modern Trimmer, California). There Ben and his older brother John helped his father build a cabin, put in crops and began mining.

Mary Mayfield died in December 1850, and in 1851, William Mayfield left eight-year-old Thomas to be raised by the Choinumni, the friendly Yokut tribe living across the river from his cabin, while he and his two older sons left to engage in mining and raising cattle for the next 10 years. With his father and brother Benjamin ran cattle and horses through most of the San Joaquin Valley, captured wild horses on the west side of that valley and fought Monache on the east side, his father becoming well known throughout the valley.

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