Swiss immigrant John Sutter was not the only eminent foreigner in Mexican-owned California during the sleepily pastoral 1840s decade, although for a while he was the only settler in the Sacramento Valley
The first organized American pioneers to cross the Sierra Nevada Mountains into California was the Bartleson-Bidwell Party in 1841, but to do so they had to abandon their wagons in what today is
Doctor John Marsh is one of California’s early colorful characters, one of many who reinvented themselves in the West–for although he treated dozens of patients (and never lost one), Marsh was never a genuine doctor. Born in 1799