Cheryl Anne Stapp

This Friday marks the 177th anniversary of the California gold discovery, January 24, 1848. On that crisp winter day, a carpenter named...

He knew, when he volunteered to act as courier, that his mission would be a dangerous, wild ride. The assignment: to deliver a message...

WISHING YOU A WONDERFUL HOLIDAY AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR.

In California, and probably much of the nation, the 1880 Christmas season was a welcome return to the norm of years past. Said the...

Christmas Day 1870 was a bit unusual, in that it could be celebrated on either one of two days (or both, according to individual whim)....

Be thankful

Two weeks from tomorrow, we celebrate our national Thanksgiving Day.

California does have its share of ghosts, perhaps because of its turbulent, sometimes violent, gold rush era. All of the ghosts listed here,

Its detractors said it was fraudulent; said it was some sort of diabolical magic. Said it was witchcraft. Nevertheless,...

Frontiersman Christopher “Kit” Carson—a legend in his own lifetime— was in California several times during its Mexican period, as a...

His name was José de Gálvez, and his title visitador-general —which outranked Spain’s resident viceroy in Mexico City—was conferred by...

Early on in the California Gold Rush, one new “gold strike” after another sent fortune hunters scrambling farther afield from the...

Gold was discovered on the American River in January, 1848. By the end of that year, this original gold district had swollen to encompass...

For centuries, the Upper Napa Valley was home to several villages of indigenous people, hunter-gatherers who recognized the beneficial...

It was a murder most foul. Twenty-one-year-old wife and mother Millie Lyons was found brutally slain inside her farmhouse in Wooden...

Adopted by the Second Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, the Declaration of Independence publicly announced to the world the decision...

Dropped into a pre-drilled hole and gently tapped into place, a 17.6-karat golden spike ceremoniously joined the Central Pacific Railroad...

Legends of lost treasure are always intriguing, aren’t they? California history has several legends of “lost” mines of gold and other...

No one really knows who Peter Lebeck was, but we do know that he died in the wilds of the Tehachapi Mountains, the victim of a grizzly...

It was May 1855, and U.S. Secretary of War Jefferson Davis had just realized a years-long goal, to establish an army “camel corps,” for...