William Franklin Frakes (1858–1942) was an American rancher, naturalist, adventurer, and writer.
[2] He studied in San Jose, probably at the forerunner of the University of the Pacific, but then left to pursue a life focused on the outdoors.
He traveled to Argentina in the 1890s, where he explored the country, collected animals, and also fought off a bandit ambush (killing two of his attackers).
[3] He introduced the nutria (a large rodent species) to North America from Argentina and set up a nutria farm at his ranch in Elizabeth Lake in 1899 (with the encouragement of David Starr Jordan of Stanford University).
Frakes attempted to domesticate bighorn sheep with mixed results (and corresponded with leading naturalists about the topic and contributed some specimens to the Smithsonian Institution).