Cheryl Anne Stapp

As Civil War hostilities rapidly escalated in July 1861—and United States Army personnel stationed in California left for eastern...

One hundred fifteen years ago last Sunday, on April 18, 1906—a Wednesday—a devastating earthquake struck the northern coast of California...

Nineteenth century singles had limited ways in which to meet someone to marry, especially those singles who lived in rural areas. This...

Praised as the most delightful first-person account of California’s gold mines, The Shirley Letters is a collection of 23 letters written...

In her own lifetime Eliza Farnham was nationally known as an author, and as an exceptional woman on the leading edge of several social...

Valentine’s Day was not completely unnoticed in gold-crazed California, although females—only 8 percent of the statewide population in...

Although it was the second newspaper published in California, the California Star was the first newspaper published in San Francisco. Its...

During the early, chaotic days of the California Gold Rush, New Year’s Eve celebrations were mostly improvised: lonesome men in out-back...

Christmas was not widely celebrated in our Thirteen Colonies before the 1775-1783 American Revolution, and afterward the holiday fell...

On October 3, 1863, following a Union Army victory at Gettysburg, President Abraham Lincoln announced to “the whole American people…in...

When the only machines were a woman’s hands and arms, and washtubs were filled with hand-drawn buckets of well or creek water instead of...

This week marks the 109th anniversary of the election that awarded California women the right to vote…though initially, it appeared that...

Today, commercial mills are complex, high-tech installations. Long ago, however, skilled artisans hand-carved granite millstones into...

Gold is probably the oldest precious metal known to mankind, and over the course of history has been the cause of countless bitter...

The bedazzled gold-rushers who swarmed into California in 1849 soon complained of many things—inflated prices, low-quality foodstuffs,...

As legend has it, the martini was invented for hard-fisted California gold miners in 1849, only back then it was called a “Martinez.”...

The gold-fevered young men who swarmed into California expecting to get rich quick, soon discovered that finding their fortune wasn’t so...

The thousands of greenhorn gold rushers who invaded California in 1849 were quickly followed by those who came to “fleece” the miners of...

For twenty years southern California had poured money, and millions of printed brochures, into a publicity campaign to attract settlers...

It is still called Bullion Bend. It is a stretch of curving old stage road that once continued on from Placerville, California to Carson...