Jabez Franklin Cowdery (11 August 1834[1] – 9 October 1914[2]) was an American lawyer and politician who represented San Francisco in the 1873–74 and 1880 sessions of the California State Assembly, serving as Speaker in 1880.

[1] 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.

[4] In the Civil War he worked for the Internal Revenue Service and as a court commissioner in California's then 14th district (covering Placer and Nevada counties).

[11] 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,[12] which in 1873 returned 11 of the 12 seats allocated to the city by plurality block voting.

[24] 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".