Cheryl Anne Stapp

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

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

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

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

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...

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...

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...