Cheryl Anne Stapp

A self-made man from his early teens, Phineas Banning was one of the most colorful, charismatic characters in the history of Southern California—who definitely created the luck that seemed to always follow him. At age 20, after seven years as a longshoreman in Philadelphia, he worked his passage to California via the Panama route. The year was 1851 and the Gold Rush was drawing hordes of young men to the northern gold mines, but Phineas got off the boat at San Pedro, the coas

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 treasure-seekers for the better part of two centuries. Born Thomas Long Smith, but known to all as “Pegleg” from the day in 1827 he began wearing a wooden stump to replace his amputated lower left leg, Smith was a fur trapper in the southern Rockies. He was also a hard drinker, a brawler, a spinner of tall tales, and a ski

Shortly after the close of the American Revolution, Boston whalers began navigating in California waters, hunting the prized sea otter. Merchant ships from several nations prowled the Pacific Coast, but American merchant ships—named “Bostons” by the native citizenry—quickly dominated the trade. At the time, Spanish-owned California was a bucolic place, sparsely populated with Franciscan missions and families who lived on government land grants called ranchos. After Mexico gai

Are tall tales accepted as fact just because the story is published in a memoir—and therefore, “must be” true? Consider the smallpox scenario included in The Personal Narrative of James O. Pattie of Kentucky, published in 1831, and until quite recently accepted by historians as genuine. Pattie, a fur trapper, claimed he had won his freedom from a dank, Mexican California jail cell in San Diego when he agreed to use a supply of smallpox vaccine he had brought from New Mexico