Thomas Jefferson Mayfield (1843–1928) led a remarkable double life in the early decades of California statehood, living his boyhood as an adopted member of the Choinumni (Choinumne) branch of the Yokuts tribe in the San Joaquin Valley, then rejoining the dominant Anglo-American community throughout his long adulthood.
When he was six, his family came to California by voyage round Cape Horn because violence between Texas settlers and Apache made the San Antonio-El Paso Road land route too dangerous.
For the following decade, Jeff, lived in a village across from his families home at the mouth of Sycamore Creek, on Kings River (now under Pine Flat Lake).
[6] Mayfield was known throughout the region as Uncle Jeff, a pioneer with a store of lore and thus brought to the attention of the visiting oral historian and ethnographer Frank F. Latta (1892–1981).
Latta published them as a series of newspaper articles, and then, after Mayfield's death in 1928, as San Joaquin Primeval: Uncle Jeff's Story, a rather hastily put-together and somewhat shoddy edition that he tried for many years to improve upon.