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Just Who Was Dwight Whiting, Anyway?

It took a well-traveled man with grandiose plans to transform untamed land into the future El Toro.

The gracious days of the California rancheros were coming to an end. , like so many other Spanish land grant grandees, had lost his holdings—the 11,000 acre Rancho Cañada de Los Alisos—to bankers in Los Angeles.

The bankers decided to divide Serrano’s rancho into 10 sections and, in 1881, several pieces were sold to Los Angeles investors.  But within a few years, the Southern California land boom began to go bust, and the former Serrano property languished.

ENTER THE NEW ENGLANDER

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First, to clear up a frequent misconception: Dwight Whiting was not from England.

He was from New England.

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As historian Joe Osterman states in The Old El Toro Reader, “Many people of old El Toro thought that Whiting was an Englishman, [but] his ancestors came to America in 1634.”  Years later, one of his adult sons would laugh and say his father had been “as Yankee as they come!”

How did the Englishman idea get started? It’s possible Whiting fostered it himself. Or, perhaps, in a region where the former John Forster of Liverpool had married a sister of Governor Pio Pico, become Don Juan Forster of Rancho Santa Margarita y Las Flores, and by 1864 been deemed the greatest landholder in all California—well, perhaps Forster set the stage for any Anglo with a non-Midwestern accent and moxy to be considered British.

Whatever the case, some time during his 16th year, Dwight Whiting made the decision to leave his home town of Watertown, Mass., about 6 miles northwest of Boston. Later, he'd cite asthma as the reason, saying he'd set out in search of a more  healthful climate. But given the eventual range of Whiting's travels, it's probably safe to say he also was on a quest for adventure.   

Here is what Whiting would later state in a published business prospectus, quoted in John Osterman’s Stories of Saddleback Valley:  

"I left Boston, Massachusetts, as a boy in 1870 to regain the health which I had lost through overwork . . . [I traveled] in the Western States, chiefly California, and in so doing regained my health. After a year or two I went to Britain and Europe, thence to South America. In 1872 and 1873 to Central America and Mexico. Subsequently to North Africa, the Orient, India in 1874 and 1875, back to the United States of America, thence to South Africa, 1877, 1878, 1879."

PRESENT FOR THE HOTEL DEL'S GRAND OPENING

Whiting's prospectus does not specifically mention where his travels took him after 1879. But by February 1888, he and thousands of others were present in San Diego for the gala opening of the Hotel Del Coronado.

Upon its debut, the “Hotel Del” was not only the largest resort hotel in the world but also the first to use electrical lighting. This was obviously the type of event that appealed to a sophisticated man of the world such as Whiting.  

But the 34-year-old bachelor's visit to the magnificent hotel's opening ceremonies turned out to be more than just another stopover, for it was at the Hotel Del that he met Judge and Mrs. William Keating, formerly of Halifax, Nova Scotia, and their winsome daughter Emily, who had just attained her 25th birthday. 

For Dwight Whiting, world traveler par excellence, the personal and the financial were about to coalesce into an enterprise that would challenge both his buccaneering spirit and his entrepreneurial savvy. 

Editor’s Note: This story has been revised. An earlier version incorrectly stated Whiting's age when he attended the gala opening of the Hotel Del Coronado. He was 34.

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