Cheryl Anne Stapp

Few things inflame men’s imaginations as the idea of a hidden fortune in gold— so the tale of Pegleg Smith and his lost gold mine has continued to thrill tre...

Best known for her work on the Hearst Castle in San Simeon, Julia Morgan designed more than 700 buildings after becoming, in 1904, the first female licensed ...

She was tiny—less than five feet tall—but determined and confident. In April 1868, she married tall John Bidwell, a prominent California rancher and statesma...

Little Lotta Crabtree— a red-haired, merry-eyed child blessed with an irrepressible laugh— became a box office attraction in gold rush California before she w...

Privileged, headstrong, and in love with an “unsuitable” man, Jessie Benton—the daughter of powerful U.S. Senator Thomas Hart Benton—defied her parents to el...

In the severe Sierra Nevada winter of 1846–1847, while adult members of the desperate, snow-trapped Donner Party clung to their sanity with prayers and diary...

It was February 18, 1847. The winter sun had already dropped behind the mountain peaks, and dusk was falling. A band of seven exhausted, but determined young...

Martinez, California, and the adjacent town of Pinole, date their names, indeed their very existence, back to the days of Mexican rule. Both are the namesake...

The first major gold rush in the United States occurred in northern Georgia, predating the California Gold Rush by nearly twenty years. A deer hunter acciden...

Perched on a sheltered cove in San Francisco Bay, the little hamlet known as Yerba Buena (good herb) had been so named by the Spanish because of the wild min...

Friday January 24, 2020, will be the 172nd anniversary of the gold discovery in California. On a crisp winter day in 1848, a carpenter named James Marshall,...

On January 17, 1847, a living skeleton stumbled into the outskirts of Johnson’s Ranch on the Bear River. His name was William Eddy. He and fourteen others, d...

Owney may have been just a dog, but 19th century newspapers across the nation delighted in reporting his world-traveling odyssey as if he were a person. On A...

HAPPY NEW YEAR! MAY 2020 BRING YOU SUCCESS IN ALL YOUR ENDEAVORS, HAPPINESS AND PROSPERITY

Weary and low on supplies, the Donner Party arrived at the pass through the Sierra Nevada at the end of October 1846; but it was already blocked by early snow...

WISHING YOU AND YOURS A JOYOUS CHRISTMAS DAY FILLED WITH LOVE AND GOOD CHEER

The worst tragedy in the annals of western migration befell members of the Donner Party, who were trapped in the snow-bound Sierra Nevada during the winter o...

Swiss immigrant John Augustus Sutter arrived in the Sacramento Valley in 1839, when California was still a province of Mexico. As a foreigner, he was not eli...

President Abraham Lincoln decreed Thanksgiving as a national holiday in September 1863. Prior to that, the observance was sporadically celebrated, mainly in ...

California was admitted to the Union as the 31st state on September 9, 1850. That year 27 original counties were created, with Mariposa and San Diego Countie...