Benjamin Franklin Mathews (1819–1888) was elected Sheriff of San Bernardino County, California, on September 14, 1863, and served from October 1863 to October 1865.[1] Mathews was born April 16, 1819, in Chattanooga, Hamilton County, Tennessee. He arrived in Salt Lake in 1847 with Mormons, from Mississippi. He moved on to California in 1850, where he kept a hotel between Sacramento and Auburn. Mathews came south to arrive in the Mormon colony of San Bernardino, on March 30, 1852. Here he was at various times a teamster, miller, Justice of the Peace and finally sheriff. Unlike many Mormons in San Bernardino he did not return to Utah during the Utah War in 1857.