Cheryl Anne Stapp

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

This Friday marks the 177th anniversary of the California gold discovery, January 24, 1848. On that crisp winter day, a carpenter named...

Two weeks from tomorrow, we celebrate our national Thanksgiving Day.

California does have its share of ghosts, perhaps because of its turbulent, sometimes violent, gold rush era. All of the ghosts listed here,

Early on in the California Gold Rush, one new “gold strike” after another sent fortune hunters scrambling farther afield from the...

Gold was discovered on the American River in January, 1848. By the end of that year, this original gold district had swollen to encompass...

Legends of lost treasure are always intriguing, aren’t they? California history has several legends of “lost” mines of gold and other...

California’s Gold Rush-era mining camps and towns were all vulnerable to fire. The only light sources were candles and kerosene lamps,...

Today, January 24, 2024, is the anniversary of the California gold discovery, an event that changed the known world 176 years ago. On a...

For the frenzied gold rushers who traveled to the California gold mines by sea, the voyage itself was truly a great adventure … just not...

During the chaotic early days of the California Gold Rush, the majority of the population were men who were far from home, seeking their...

Most of them are still there, lining tree-shadowed Main Street, and still in operation: the now-historic structures that were built in...

They said it was the greatest gold discovery since James Marshall’s original discovery at Coloma in 1848. In November 1855, following the...

He turned out to be one of the lucky gold rushers . . . though it can certainly be said that he made his own luck. Three-plus years after...

In 1849, gold rushers who went West by sea still had to travel upriver to reach the interior gold regions, after their ship landed at San...

The stampede from America’s Atlantic Coast started in early December, 1848, when President James Polk publicly confirmed that the gold...

It was supposed to be the realization of a dream: a dynamic new town laid out on a low bluff overlooking the Sacramento River, where a...

Within a few months, the 1848 gold discovery turned pastoral California into a hotbed of mining and commercial activity. Seemingly...

In 1849, California’s Gold Rush population, statewide, was 92% male. As reported in the Eastern press, the state of affairs in that...

California suffered its first painful economic readjustment in the mid-1850s, although the many reasons for it were not readily apparent...