Talk:Phineas Banning
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[edit] Very Brief Description of Banning
- "From here a slough or gut of the sea sets up to Wilmington, some six miles through a tide-water marsh, where we found a Mr. Phineas Banning doing his "level best" --- and it was a big "best" -- to build up a nascent city. Formerly, everything was lightered ashore at San Pedro ; but recently, Mr. Banning had introduced steam-tugs, and with these at high tide he carried everything to Wilmington, where he had wharves, store-houses, shops, stages, wagon-trains, and about everything else, on a large scale. He was an enterprising Delawarean, but without much regard for "the eyes of Delaware;" had failed two or three times, but was still wideawake and keen for business; had come to California a common stage-driver, but now ran lines of stages and freight-wagons of his own all over southern California and Arizona, for eight hundred and a thousand miles; had married a native senorita, with several leagues of land, and made her a good husband; was now state senator on the Republican side, and talked of for governor; and, in short, was a good second edition of Mr. Ben Holliday, yet without his bad politics. His town of Wilmington consisted of a hundred or two frame buildings, in true border style, with perhaps five hundred inhabitants, all more or less in his service, or employed at Drum Barracks, the U. S. military post there. A man of large and liberal ideas, with great native force of character and power of endurance, he was invaluable to Southern California and Arizona, and both of these sections owe him a debt of gratitude, which they never can repay. His "latch-string" was always out to all strangers in that latitude; there was no public interest with which he was not prominently identified; and from San Pedro to Tucson, and back again, via Prescott and Fort Mojave, through some fifteen hundred miles of border travel, there was scarcely a day in which we did not see his teams or stages, or touch his enterprises somewhere."
Page 331 and 332, "The great West and Pacific coast: or, Fifteen thousand miles by stage-coach, ambulance, horseback, railroad, and steamer--- across the continent and along the Pacific slope... among Indians, Mormons, miners and Mexicans. By order of the United States government. With a map of entire route and eight full-page engravings. With a chapter of advice to emigrants and settlers." By James F. Rusling, 1877 -- Desertphile June 04 2006
