for international trade. A settlement had just been started based on a trading post. He visited again in 1837 as supercargo of the steamship Columbia. This was the first cargo ship to trade between the U.S., via Charleston, and Texas (by then an independent republic) and Mexico. Following the Gold Rush of 1849, Labatt went to California as a merchant, along with hundreds of thousands of other migrants. He also served as the first president of Congregation Emanu-El (San Francisco) in April 1851. One of the founders of the San Francisco synagogue Shearith Israel, he laid its foundation-stone in 1856. Labatt became the Worshipful Master or Postmaster General of the Davy Crockett Lodge, the West's first Masonic Lodge, named after an American pioneer of the Southeast, a name which he helped choose. He had been a friend of Crockett's, as well as Texas president Sam Houston. Active politically, Labatt was elected as an alderman of San Francisco. Marriage and family Labatt's sister Cora was the Queen of Mardi Gras in New Orleans in the Rex parade in 1877. In Charleston, South Carolina, Labatt married Caroline Hyams (born 1802), a sister of Louisiana Lieutenant-Governor Henry M. Hyams and Samuel M. Hyams, Jr. (Asst. Adjutant General & Lieut. Colonel, 3rd Infantry Regt., LA, Confederate Army). They had sixteen children together. One of his sons, Leon L. Labatt (1854-1928), was a Louisiana judge and chess player who won the Louisiana Chess Championship in 1917, and in his lifetime played against fellow Louisianans Paul Morphy and Armand Blackmar, as well as worldwide greats Emanuel Lasker, Carlos Torre Repetto, Wilhelm Steinitz, Johannes Zukertort, Adolf Albin and José Raúl Capablanca. Another of his sons, Henry Jacob Labatt (1832-1900), became an influential attorney in San Francisco, where he was editor of the Voice of Israel, the first Jewish newspaper in the US West in 1856, along with Herman Bien. He had moved to Galveston, Texas by 1869, when he was elected to the Galveston Board of Aldermen and served as the City Treasurer. He was a member of the Texas House of Representatives 1881-1883, became president of the Zacharias Frankel B’nai B’rith Lodge #242 and had a small town named after him called Labatt, Texas, situated in western Wilson County on the San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railway, which was abandoned in the 1930s. He, his wife Eleanor, their children Ellie and Joseph, and Joseph's wife and