Person:Richard Mason (14)

the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

Richard Barnes Mason (January 16, 1797July 25, 1850) was a career officer in the United States Army and the fifth military governor of California before it became a state. He came from a politically prominent American family and was a descendant of George Mason, a framer of the U.S. Constitution and father of the Bill of Rights.

Gen. Mason is especially important to the history of California, because as military governor of the occupied territory, he wrote the official report that led to the California Gold Rush.

Mason was "an aristocratic Virginian, a large portly man, six feet in height. He possessed all the peculiarities of a Southerner, accentuated," but he was known to have confined Jefferson Davis to quarters, who was under his command. A Lt. James Abert described him so, "It would be presumption in me to speak of so accomplished and well known an officer; but I cannot refrain from expressing my grateful sense of the kindness and hospitality with which we were received and treated by himself and his amiable lady, and indeed, by all the officers and ladies attached to the command."^[1]

1. ↑ ^1.0 1.1 Richard Barnes Mason, in Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia.