Here at San Diego, we were about five hundred miles south of San Francisco, and less than one hundred and fifty from Fort Yuma. We had expected to find a stage thence to Fort Yuma; but the line had recently been withdrawn,[21] from want of business, and we were compelled to return again up the coast to San Pedro and Los Angelos. On the evening of Feb. 14th, we accordingly bade good-bye to San Diego, and the next morning, when we came on deck, found the Orizaba at anchor again off San Pedro. This, as I have before said, is the old seaport or landing for Los Angelos, and all the country about there, whence supplies were then wagoned into Arizona, Southern Nevada, and even Utah. The Salt Lake merchants, then barred from the East in winter by the heavy snows on the Rocky Mountains, were in the habit of eking out their stocks by purchases in San Francisco, which they shipped 400 miles down the coast to San Pedro, and from here wagoned them _via_ San Bernardino and Cajon Pass, through Southern Nevada, 800 miles more to Great Salt Lake. Of course, the completion of the Pacific Railroad has changed all this. San Pedro itself, unfortunately, has no harbor, but is a mere open roadstead, where vessels may ride at anchor in fine weather, but when storms come must slip to sea. 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 wide-awake 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 señorita, 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