Cheryl Anne Stapp

The California quail, also known as the valley quail, topknot quail, and California partridge, is a prized game bird known for its...

Two hundred and fifty years after Hernán Cortés claimed Mexico and the vast lands north of it for Spain, it came to the attention of the...

Over the centuries many flags have flown over California soil: the flags of nations, explorers, military units, trading companies…even a...

One hundred fifteen years ago last Sunday, on April 18, 1906—a Wednesday—a devastating earthquake struck the northern coast of California...

Nineteenth century singles had limited ways in which to meet someone to marry, especially those singles who lived in rural areas. This...

When explorer John Charles Frémont and his exhausted company of U. S. Topographical Corpsmen reached the Sacramento Valley trading post...

Virginia Reed was twelve when her parents and younger siblings set out for California from their Illinois home in April 1846, traveling...

Praised as the most delightful first-person account of California’s gold mines, The Shirley Letters is a collection of 23 letters written...

In the spring of 1850—bedazzled by sensational reports coming back from the California gold fields—Margaret and Ledyard Frink excitedly...

Twenty-four–year-old Rachel Hobson Holmes boarded the trading vessel Newcastle out of Boston in September 1831. She was sailing for...

In her own lifetime Eliza Farnham was nationally known as an author, and as an exceptional woman on the leading edge of several social...

As hurried plans to rescue the snow-bound Donner Party took shape in early 1847, Johnson’s Ranch was designated as the base of...

The Donner Party was an emigrant company composed of several families who decided to leave the main caravan of westward-bound wagons in...

Valentine’s Day was not completely unnoticed in gold-crazed California, although females—only 8 percent of the statewide population in...

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...

California’s odd shape permits its northern port city of Eureka to be the most westward city in the continental United States—yet its...

If political discord is bad today, it was even worse in the mid-19th century. In that era, heated disputes often led to stabbings,...

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...