Cheryl Anne Stapp

A self-made man from his early teens, Phineas Banning was one of the most colorful, charismatic characters in the history of Southern California—who definite...

Driving a stagecoach required superlative skills: a quick eye, a steady nerve, a skillful hand on the reins, and a thorough knowledge of horses. George Frazi...

James Wilson Marshall, the celebrated discoverer of California gold, never personally profited from his find though it made other men rich. For a time Marsha...

Every town or village was vulnerable to fire during the early Gold Rush years, and few escaped its ravages. Thousands of prospectors in the camps and communi...

Joseph Goldsborough Bruff is a well-remembered participant in the California Gold Rush. A committed diarist and talented amateur artist, he left reams of han...

For most of the way west in covered wagons, the weather was hot. Because wool breathed and afforded better protection against the sun than cottons or linens,...

Sacramento’s Water Works Building was the city’s answer to its need for a reliable water supply system that could prevent a small fire from becoming a catast...

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...