Cheryl Anne Stapp

In all of Lake Tahoe’s 22-mile length and 12-mile breadth, its 191 square miles of surface water and 72 miles of shoreline, there is only one island. Named Fannette Island, it is a smallish, sparsely timbered, brush-covered mass of granite that rises 150 feet above the water, amidst the spectacular scenery of Emerald Bay.   Massive glaciers scoured the Sierra Nevada during the Pleistocene Epoch, carving deep canyons here...depositing vast amounts of soil and rock there...crea

Getty Images Some would have celebrated quietly, of course; but New Year’s Eve December 31, 1925, was a bash for everyone in the Golden State who wanted to party hearty, despite Prohibition. The 18th Amendment was the law of the land; yet with several California counties defiantly “wet,” a thriving underground scene of speakeasies and private house parties characterized the holiday’s revelry.    Too, nineteen-twenty-five was mid-decade of the Roaring Twenties, an era known fo

Christmas will be here a week from tomorrow, celebrated with loved ones and good cheer despite all the tribulations of our modern times. As Christmas 1852 rolled around, the impact of the California Gold Rush—good and bad elements alike—was still a monumental social and economic influence, even though the invasive swarms of gold-fevered opportunists from all over the world had commenced four full years earlier.   California had been admitted to the Union two years past, but t

As busy as they were at establishing 21 missions, the Franciscan priests sent to California in 1769 by a Spanish king, still found time to teach the native Indians to play the lute, violin, trumpet, metal triangle, and to sing Christmas carols in Spanish. At Mission San Jose and possibly other missions as well, Indian neophytes enacted a church play at Christmastime. Under Mexican rule, secularization of those missions—which began in 1834—disrupted ordinary customs that had b

What are you thankful for?   A week from tomorrow, we will celebrate our national Thanksgiving Day, officially proclaimed as such by President Lincoln in 1863. Prior to that, each region, mainly in New England and other northern states, had sporadically, and at different times, observed days of feasting and merriment after the autumnal harvests.   Before California became a state of the Union, even before its production of vegetables and grains amounted to much, its residents

The L a Brea Tar Pits (foreground) with the Pavilion for Japanese Art beyond, in Hancock Park, in Los Angeles’s Miracle Mile district. Photo by Joe Mabel   The City of Los Angeles boasts many ritzy districts. One of them is a genteel, affluent residential neighborhood developed in the 1920s, about six miles east of today’s downtown skyscrapers; a neighborhood of luxurious homes featuring sundry distinctive architectural styles. Historically, its well-preserved mansions sit o

A partial view of the former Rancho Refugio's 12,147 acres For practical reasons, the newly-minted United States of America adopted British common law, a legal system based on precedent and judicial decisions. One characteristic of common law was the tradition of primogeniture—the right of succession of the eldest son. Another was that married women were not recognized as “persons” in their own right, qualified to own property or anything else. Upon marriage, a woman became h

In the early years of the California Gold Rush, the “soiled doves” who flocked westward did so in the expectation of more opportunities...

View of hiking trail & Griffith Observatory, downtown Los Angeles in the distance. Photo by Brian Schmidt Sprawled over 4,310 acres, for...

Portsmouth Square, San Francisco For certain, those thousands of young men infected with gold fever suffered from culture shock when they...

Enjoying wine at a family gathering in Anaheim c. 1860   Nowadays we think of it as the home of the Magic Kingdom, the place where...

Baptism at Aguaje de la Piedra The year was 1769, and Imperial Spain had been a world power for a little more than three centuries. But...

Nestled among towering peaks, a body of sapphire blue water 12 miles wide by 22 miles long, Lake Tahoe is a place of dazzling natural...

Seeking safe harbor to recondition his ship, English explorer Francis Drake landed in a sheltered cove in what is now Marin County,...

Intensely blue, majestic in size, and surrounded by massive jagged peaks, its landscape of vibrant colors inspires a sense of grandeur....

All that’s left of it now are scarred hillsides, and huge mounds of low-grade gravel called tailings; waste-rock left over from the...

Grateful to have escaped with his life, Thomas Anderson of Nevada City lost no time in filing a criminal complaint with the local police...

It is the largest known discovery of buried gold coins ever recovered in the United States. Known as the “Saddle Ridge Hoard,” it is...

Official confirmation of California’s high-quality, wide-spread gold deposits sent an electric jolt around the world. Thousands of...

Harold von Schmidt was an American painter and illustrator who created western scenes so full of life that one believes he personally...