Politics, journalism and other businesses were top interests for the Daniels family in Vancouver.
A street west of the downtown section is named for the Daniels.
William B. Daniels, born in Ohio in 1817, crossed the Plains about 1853 and settled with his wife, Sarah, in Yamhill County, Oregon Territory. The 1860 census shows him as a farmer. He also was active in Republican politics.
A son, Thurston, said his father’s mind was more speculative than practical except in politics, “where he excelled in judgment and shrewdness.
In the early 1860s, when the discovery of gold sent miners rushing east of the Cascade Mountains, President Abraham Lincoln appointed Daniels secretary and acting governor of the new Idaho Territory.
He served there a short time, then returned to the west side. He ran the weekly Vancouver Independent, and sold the business in 1878, when he became partners in a law firm with N.H. Bloomfield. When Bloomfield was named Superior Court judge. W. Byron Daniels continued his law business alone. He also served as city councilman, state legislator, city attorney, mayor, county school superintendent and school board member. W. Byron Daniels died in 1900.
Thurston Daniels, another son of W.B. and Sarah, was longtime publisher and editor of the Register, a weekly newspaper at Vancouver. Later he was a lieutenant governor of Washington State in the early 1900s and involved in various business ventures.
A fourth son, Horace Daniels, was the captain on a steamboat. He died in 1882.
George Hubert’s children totaled four. Two of these carrying on the Daniels name were Horace Daniels and Gilbert Daniels.
Horace active in various civic projects went to work for the Commercial bank and later the U.S. National Bank.
He was president of the Clark County National Bank when it merged with Seattle-First National Bank in 1947. In 1951, he retired from his final bank job, manager of the Clark County branch of Seattle-First National bank, which had moved into its new offices in 1950.
Horace’s brother, Gilbert, was a bank employee, and later president of the Wintler Abstract Co. and later Fletcher-Daniels Abstract Co.