Benjamin Davis Wilson, or Benito Wilson, as he was usually called, who owned a good part of the most beautiful land in the San Gabriel Valley and who laid out the trail up the Sierra Madre to Wilson's Peak, was one of our earliest settlers, having come from Tennessee _via_ New Mexico, in 1841. In June, 1846, Wilson joined the riflemen organized against Castro, and in 1848, having been put in charge of some twenty men to protect the San Bernardino frontier, he responded to a call from Isaac Williams to hasten to the Chino _rancho_ where, with his compatriots, he was taken prisoner. Somewhat earlier--I have understood about 1844--Wilson and Albert Packard formed a partnership, but this was dissolved near the end of 1851. In 1850, Wilson was elected County Clerk; and the following year, he volunteered to patrol the hills and assist in watching for Garra, the outlaw, the report of whose coming was terrorizing the town. In 1853, he was Indian Agent for Southern California. It must have been about 1849 that Wilson secured control, for a while, of the Bella Union. His first wife was Ramona Yorba, a daughter of Bernardo Yorba, whom he married in February, 1844, and who died in 1849. On February 1st, 1853, Wilson married again, this time Mrs. Margaret S. Hereford, a sister-in-law of Thomas S. Hereford; they spent many years together at Lake Vineyard, where he became one of the leading producers of good wine, and west of which he planted some twenty-five or thirty thousand raisin grape cuttings, and ten or twelve hundred orange trees, thus founding Oak Knoll. I shall have occasion to speak of this gentleman somewhat later. By the time that I came to know him, Wilson had accumulated much real estate, part of his property being a residence on Alameda Street, corner of Macy; but after a while he moved to one of his larger estates, where stands the present Shorb station named for his son-in-law and associate J. De Barth Shorb, who also had a place known as Mountain Vineyard. Don Benito died in March, 1878. [Illustration: Maurice Kremer] [Illustration: Solomon Lazard] [Illustration: Mellus's, or Bell's Row From a lithograph of 1858] [Illustration: William H. Workman and John King] [Illustration: Prudent Beaudry] [Illustration: James S. Mallard] [Illustration: John Behn]