[1][2][3] After Shafer moved to Los Angeles, he built a "neat $1000 cottage on the hills near Ellis Villa College," where it was noted that "Considerable property has been sold .

[8] As a child, Shafer was unable to get much education at the "log cabin school a mile from his home," which he attended only during the few winter months that he was not needed to help on the farm.

[1] After his death, his daughter Effie said her father was a professor of Latin at the University of Iowa when he came to Los Angeles for a visit and stayed.

[8] Shafer taught in the San Joaquin Valley and then moved to Los Angeles and worked at the first public school in Santa Monica.

[1] In the Civil War Shafer was in the 92nd Ohio Infantry and took part in General William Tecumseh Sherman's March to the Sea and the Battle of Chickamauga.

[1] In 1895 he returned to the battlefield when it was dedicated as the Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park, and two years later he presented to the City of Los Angeles two pine-tree saplings that he had taken from the site—one of them "from a point east of the southwest corner of Kelly field, over which the battle raged and swayed for two days with intense fury," and the other from "west of the tower on Horse-shoe Ridge, where at 2 o'clock of the last day's fight, the reserves of Granger and Stedman turned back the exulting foe just as complete triumph seemed to be within their grasp.

[8] In 1925, Shafer wrote a letter to the Los Angeles Times in which he decried a proposal by Stanford University President David Starr Jordan that a fund be gathered to put John T. Scopes, the Tennessee teacher who was tried for the teaching of evolution.