Cheryl Anne Stapp

Theodor Cordua was the first European to establish a permanent settlement on the site of present-day Marysville, California. Ambitious,...

The Donner Party became trapped in the snow-bound Sierra Nevada in part because they opted to take the new Hastings Cutoff, instead of...

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...

On this day 174 years ago—December 16, 1846—seventeen poorly provisioned people set out across the snow-blanketed Sierra Nevada on...

Theodore Dehone Judah was the brilliant engineer and visionary who convinced a group of Sacramento merchants, and the United States...

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 Sacramento Valley ranch is long gone, but its colorful history is legend…and its fame still reverberates in the names of streets,...

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

A self-made man from his early teens, Phineas Banning was one of the most colorful, charismatic characters in the history of Southern...

James Wilson Marshall, the celebrated discoverer of California gold, never personally profited from his find though it made other men...

Joseph Goldsborough Bruff is a well-remembered participant in the California Gold Rush. A committed diarist and talented amateur artist,...

For most of the way west in covered wagons, the weather was hot. Because wool breathed and afforded better protection against the sun...

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...

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

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

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

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

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

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