Phineas Banning, came to CA in 1853, and started a teamster business hauling cargo from the wharf he built on the "slough" coming up from San Pedro Bay, just across from "rattlesnake island" (today's Terminal Island). The Palos Verde's headlands created a cove away from westerly and northerly swells where ships could anchor, and offload freight to "lighter" up the slough, and up Alameda to LA.

Banning met Captain Beale and the 1852-53 RR survey, complete with Haj Ali and his camels, who had been surveying Secretary of War Jefferson Davis's preferred then "proposed"-"southern Pacific" route, from Texas to CA. Beale found out we'd screwed up in the border we set in the Mexican American War, because the best rail lines were "south of the border", which resulted in the Gadsden Purchase. From this, Banning realized that LA was actually the best rail connection, with the "great" circle ship routes (with coaling in Hawaii) to Shanghai and Hong Kong (remember Perry hadn't even "opened up" Japan to trade yet).

While San Francisco clearly had a superior deep water harbor and anchorage, at that time no one though you could build a RR across the Sierra's, and then the Wasatch or Rockies, and then you still had to deal with worse grades, and all that snow, LA to El Paso had a much lower gradients and no snow to deal with....

So Banning decided to "build" a port at San Pedro Bay, and even built the first road across Beaumont Pass through the one time wagon stop of Banning. He finally built the Los Angeles and San Pedro RR to connect LA to his "port". Banning gradually extended the port, brought over a lot of rock from Catalina, to begin building a breakwater, to protect against the southerly swell, gradually dredged the "channel" to allow deep draft vessels to tie up and unload.

In exchange for the SP routing through Los Angeles, he sold the line to SP. SP finally reach LA in 1876 and today's "Sunset Line" finally reached El Paso and finally the Texas Pacific in 1881 completing the 2nd US transcontinental RR.

Eventually, Teddy Roosevelt chose San Pedro Bay, as the base for the Pacific Fleet (until June 1841, when the fleet moved to a place called Pearl Harbor), and with that todays breakwaters were extended, and added, to shield the whole anchorage.

The rest, as they say, is "history", with the Port of LA-LB now being the biggest port (volume and value) in North America..... Today, we call Banning's fist railroad line in Los Angeles the Alameda Corridor.

Of course, if we had had all of these screaming nimby's, whiny naysayers, and screw loose nitwits on the internet, influencing these things back then, like we have now, we'd all probably still be walkin'...