Cheryl Anne Stapp

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....

The first major gold rush in the United States occurred in northern Georgia, predating the California Gold Rush by nearly twenty years. A...

Perched on a sheltered cove in San Francisco Bay, the little hamlet known as Yerba Buena (good herb) had been so named by the Spanish...

Friday January 24, 2020, will be the 172nd anniversary of the gold discovery in California. On a crisp winter day in 1848, a carpenter...

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...

Owney may have been just a dog, but 19th century newspapers across the nation delighted in reporting his world-traveling odyssey as if he...

HAPPY NEW YEAR! MAY 2020 BRING YOU SUCCESS IN ALL YOUR ENDEAVORS, HAPPINESS AND PROSPERITY

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...

WISHING YOU AND YOURS A JOYOUS CHRISTMAS DAY FILLED WITH LOVE AND GOOD CHEER

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

Swiss immigrant John Augustus Sutter arrived in the Sacramento Valley in 1839, when California was still a province of Mexico. As a...

President Abraham Lincoln decreed Thanksgiving as a national holiday in September 1863. Prior to that, the observance was sporadically...

California was admitted to the Union as the 31st state on September 9, 1850. That year 27 original counties were created, with Mariposa...

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...

As legend tells us, All Hallows Eve is the night when spirits of the dead haunt the homes and neighborhoods they knew when they were...

Shortly after the close of the American Revolution, Boston whalers began navigating in California waters, hunting the prized sea otter....

Are tall tales accepted as fact just because the story is published in a memoir—and therefore, “must be” true? Consider the smallpox...

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