Cheryl Anne Stapp

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

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

It was a murder most foul. Twenty-one-year-old wife and mother Millie Lyons was found brutally slain inside her farmhouse in Wooden...

Its name is an Angelized version of an archaic Spanish word for “pelican,” although those birds no longer roost there. Since the mid-19th...

The newspapers reported his crimes and said his name was Charles Mortimer. He was, they said, the quintessential thief and murderer:...

For almost 70 years in the 19th century, San Francisco contained a unique criminal district which was the scene of much viciousness and...

San Francisco’s infamous Barbary Coast began as Sydney-Town as early as mid-1849, so named for the glut of escaped or released men from...

Since the 1890s, California law enforcement agencies had employed women in caretaker positions—as matrons, supervisors, and other...

They say that there were more women of ill repute than there were decent ladies, in California, during the early years of the Gold Rush....

When California became a state in 1850, its elected lawmakers had a multitude of issues to resolve, not the least of which was to address...

The masked highwayman who called himself Black Bart was so clever with disguises and occasional props that he successfully robbed 27...

In the early years of the Gold Rush, the mining camps were terrorized by the bloody exploits of a ferocious bandit named Joaquin...

Dueling was outlawed in California at its pre-statehood Constitutional Convention in the fall of 1849. However, the penalty imposed for...

Perhaps it’s only myth or legend (for sure, certain story elements are questionable), but nonetheless it’s a romantic tale, published as...

Gunplay was so common during the chaotic, early days of the California Gold Rush that many incidents, though duly reported, drew little...

The proverb “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned” is from the 17th century play The Mourning Bride, and means that no one is angrier...

The old mining town in Nevada County is gone now, but Red Dog had its heyday in the 1860s, when the place had nearly two thousand...

Born to respectable, hard-working parents who had come to California as gold-rushers in 1849, Robert L. McFarlane quit the family farm in...

Jared Sheldon, a carpenter by trade, officially received a Mexican land grant of 22,130 acres along the Cosumnes River in 1844—in payment...

In 1818, California was still an outlying province of Imperial Spain, even as New Spain (later, the Republic of Mexico) and other...