Biography of Sidney S. Benton

SIDNEY S. BENTON. – This pioneer of Illinois, California and Washington is one of those facile, multiplex characters that give to our Western life its buoyancy. He was born in the first-named State in 1838, while Chicago was yet in her swamps, and his father was at that city in 1831, when it was a mere Indian trading post, and also at Galena, the home of the Grants, in 1832. His father came out to California with ox-teams amid Indians, and over the usual sage-brush plains, and the iron-stone rocks in 1849. He mined on Feather river in Yuba county, … Read more