Cheryl Anne Stapp

Few things inflame men’s imaginations as the idea of a hidden fortune in gold— so the tale of Pegleg Smith and his lost gold mine has continued to thrill tre...

She was tiny—less than five feet tall—but determined and confident. In April 1868, she married tall John Bidwell, a prominent California rancher and statesma...

Little Lotta Crabtree— a red-haired, merry-eyed child blessed with an irrepressible laugh— became a box office attraction in gold rush California before she w...

Privileged, headstrong, and in love with an “unsuitable” man, Jessie Benton—the daughter of powerful U.S. Senator Thomas Hart Benton—defied her parents to el...

In the severe Sierra Nevada winter of 1846–1847, while adult members of the desperate, snow-trapped Donner Party clung to their sanity with prayers and diary...

It was February 18, 1847. The winter sun had already dropped behind the mountain peaks, and dusk was falling. A band of seven exhausted, but determined young...

Martinez, California, and the adjacent town of Pinole, date their names, indeed their very existence, back to the days of Mexican rule. Both are the namesake...

On January 17, 1847, a living skeleton stumbled into the outskirts of Johnson’s Ranch on the Bear River. His name was William Eddy. He and fourteen others, d...

Weary and low on supplies, the Donner Party arrived at the pass through the Sierra Nevada at the end of October 1846; but it was already blocked by early snow...

The worst tragedy in the annals of western migration befell members of the Donner Party, who were trapped in the snow-bound Sierra Nevada during the winter o...

Swiss immigrant John Augustus Sutter arrived in the Sacramento Valley in 1839, when California was still a province of Mexico. As a foreigner, he was not eli...

The pioneers who trekked west in covered wagons in the 1840s knew they had to take enough food to last six months. Trading posts between the Missouri River a...

Have you ever wondered how the westward-emigrating pioneers of the 1840s and 50s managed to get their covered wagons over the cliffs and precipices they enco...