Cheryl Anne Stapp

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...

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....

Haste was the imperative to bedazzled gold-rushers, men near-frantic to get to the gold fields and stake their claim on a promising slice...

In July 1849, as hordes of gold-rushing men were swarming into California, a French hairdresser arrived in San Francisco and immediately...

Women were scarce in Gold Rush-era California, a mere 8% of the state-wide population in 1850, and only 30% ten years later, in 1860....

Families who trundled overland in covered wagons during the 1840s, hoping to build a better life in the West, didn’t always know to be...

Wine is big business in California. In 4,763 wineries large and small throughout the state, California vintners produce 87% of America’s...

Famed explorer John Charles Frémont, the leader of several U.S. Army Topographical Corps mapping expeditions across the West, gave the...

In its heyday, Columbia was known as the “Gem of the Southern Mines” for its prodigious output of gold, averaging $100,000 or more per...

Once it was a good-sized mining settlement—a rip-roaring, wild-west boomtown. Today Bodie is a wind-swept ghost town, a tourist...

At 447 miles in length the Sacramento River is the longest river that flows through California, with a watershed that encompasses more...

More than one gold rush mining camp was dubbed “dog town” by its inhabitants—miner’s slang for coarse, thrown-together encampments of...

Teenaged Eliza Marshall emigrated with her family from England to the United States in 1839. They settled in Pawtucket, in the section of...

Mark Twain said he based his short story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” on what he thought, at the time, was a...

Not long after Marshall’s January 24th gold discovery at Coloma, three men stumbled upon a second gold find downriver—which became one of...

On a chilly winter day 174 years ago this month, a construction site foreman named James Marshall picked up a few small flakes of gold...