Cheryl Anne Stapp
Faint Hoofbeats from the Past
Its official name was The Central Overland California and Pike’s Peak Express Company, but that was too unwieldy, so everyone just called...
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California's Olden Golden Days
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Cheryl Anne Stapp
- Sep 21, 2022
- 2 min
Susceptible to Seizure
In centuries past, and as global knowledge expanded in the Age of Sail, any attractive land that was scantily occupied and poorly...
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Cheryl Anne Stapp
- Aug 31, 2022
- 4 min
Cement Craze
Thousands of people poured into California during the 1850s: gold miners, merchants, farmers, families, professionals and tradesmen of...
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Cheryl Anne Stapp
- Aug 17, 2022
- 3 min
A Good Man
Yet another new governor—in fact the sixth governor that authorities in Mexico City had appointed since 1822—arrived at Monterey, the...
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Cheryl Anne Stapp
- Jul 20, 2022
- 2 min
A Spectacular Gateway
Famed explorer John Charles Frémont, the leader of several U.S. Army Topographical Corps mapping expeditions across the West, gave the...
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Cheryl Anne Stapp
- Jul 13, 2022
- 5 min
Affair of Honor
Dueling was outlawed in California at its pre-statehood Constitutional Convention in the fall of 1849. However, the penalty imposed for...
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Cheryl Anne Stapp
- Apr 19, 2022
- 3 min
Serving California by Sea
In the Age of Sail, not everyone who entered California’s harbors came to settle. In the early 1820s, the ships of many nations began...
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Cheryl Anne Stapp
- Apr 13, 2022
- 3 min
Pony Brings News of Ft. Sumter
By April 1861, California had been a state of the Union for only ten and a half years. As yet, no telegraph lines connected it with the...
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Cheryl Anne Stapp
- Mar 30, 2022
- 4 min
A Remarkable Life
She was a woman of remarkable qualities; a woman who rose from being an uneducated young bride going west in a covered wagon in 1844, to...
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Cheryl Anne Stapp
- Mar 16, 2022
- 2 min
Her Fight for Education
Elizabeth Thorn Scott Flood was the capable, determined 19th century woman who paved the way for desegregated education for children of...
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Cheryl Anne Stapp
- Feb 23, 2022
- 3 min
Rev. Thomas Starr King
San Francisco’s First Unitarian Church congregation gaped at its new pastor with a mix of curiosity and consternation. Could this small,...
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Cheryl Anne Stapp
- Feb 9, 2022
- 3 min
The Kindergarten Movement
By 1884 California was leading the nation in educational innovations with its system of pre-grammar-school schools, based on ideas...
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Cheryl Anne Stapp
- Nov 10, 2021
- 3 min
Land Laws: Land Grants vs. Homesteads
During the centuries it belonged to Spain, and the few decades it was a province of Mexico, California had no homestead laws that gave...
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Cheryl Anne Stapp
- Nov 3, 2021
- 3 min
Early & Ongoing Partition Troubles
California’s north-south cultural split began as early as 1821, the year Mexico won its independence from Spain and acquired the province...
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Cheryl Anne Stapp
- Sep 8, 2021
- 3 min
Creating California's Counties
In the aftermath of the Mexican-American War, California existed in a state of political limbo. The peace treaty, signed in February 1848...
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Cheryl Anne Stapp
- Aug 4, 2021
- 2 min
Invasion at Monterey!
In 1818, California was still an outlying province of Imperial Spain, even as New Spain (later, the Republic of Mexico) and other...
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Cheryl Anne Stapp
- Jul 14, 2021
- 1 min
Protecting the West in the Civil War
As Civil War hostilities rapidly escalated in July 1861—and United States Army personnel stationed in California left for eastern...
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Cheryl Anne Stapp
- Apr 21, 2021
- 4 min
The 1906 San Francisco Earthquake
One hundred fifteen years ago last Sunday, on April 18, 1906—a Wednesday—a devastating earthquake struck the northern coast of California...
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Cheryl Anne Stapp
- Apr 7, 2021
- 2 min
Mapping the West
When explorer John Charles Frémont and his exhausted company of U. S. Topographical Corpsmen reached the Sacramento Valley trading post...
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Cheryl Anne Stapp
- Mar 10, 2021
- 3 min
Rachel Larkin, Diplomat's Wife
Twenty-four–year-old Rachel Hobson Holmes boarded the trading vessel Newcastle out of Boston in September 1831. She was sailing for...
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