Benjamin Franklin Coons, mer­chant, was born in St. Louis, Mis­souri, in 1826, the son of David and Mary Coons. He led wagon trains to Santa Fe in 1846, 1847, and 1848, and by Sep­tem­ber 1848 had estab­lished him­self as a mer­chant in El Paso del Norte and else­where in Chi­huahua. Coons bought ranch prop­erty near El Paso del Norte from Juan María Ponce de León in 1849 and leased the main build­ings and six acres to the United States gov­ern­ment for $250 dol­lars a month as the site for the first mil­i­tary post in the area. He then pro­ceeded to build a tav­ern, ware­house, sta­bles, and store just west of the army post. Hop­ing to cap­i­tal­ize on the poten­tial mar­ket, he estab­lished a part­ner­ship with Lewis and Groes­beck of San Anto­nio in 1850. Finan­cial dif­fi­cul­ties began almost imme­di­ately, how­ever. The first wagon train, plagued by unscrupu­lous dri­vers and a scarcity of water, took nearly five months to travel from San Anto­nio, and most of the ship­ment was ruined as a result. Also, that sum­mer Coons absorbed a loss totalling nearly $18,000, hav­ing accepted sev­eral bills of credit that later proved to be forgeries.

He went to Cal­i­for­nia in late 1850, regained a mea­sure of finan­cial secu­rity, and returned to El Paso early in 1851. Unfor­tu­nately for him, when the United States troops left Coons’ Ran­cho in Sep­tem­ber, 1851, Coons lost his most reli­able source of income and was soon forced to default on his prop­erty pay­ments. His ranch repos­sessed, he returned to Cal­i­for­nia to seek yet another for­tune. He appar­ently achieved some mea­sure of suc­cess herd­ing sheep, moved back to St. Louis in 1856, and mar­ried Sophie Delor in 1859. Later cen­suses listed him as a farmer and team­ster. Coons died in St. Louis on Decem­ber 14, 1892. The Franklin com­mu­nity (later renamed El Paso) and the Franklin Moun­tains are said to have been named for him.