Cheryl Anne Stapp

The masked highwayman who called himself Black Bart was so clever with disguises and occasional props that he successfully robbed 27...

In July 1849, as hordes of gold-rushing men were swarming into California, a French hairdresser arrived in San Francisco and immediately...

Years after the railroad came to Ione, the stagecoach was still a primary transportation mode in Amador County, and horses used for...

President Abraham Lincoln decreed Thanksgiving as an official national holiday in 1863. Before then, New England and other regions...

Its official name was The Central Overland California and Pike’s Peak Express Company, but that was too unwieldy, so everyone just called...

In the early years of the Gold Rush, the mining camps were terrorized by the bloody exploits of a ferocious bandit named Joaquin...

His namesakes are Stanislaus County, and the Stanislaus River. He was Chief Estanislao, famous for leading bands of armed Native...

All Hallows Eve is next Sunday, when centuries-old pagan beliefs insist that ghosts and goblins haunt old graveyards at the Midnight...

Does a life filled with adventure and diverse occupations beget a physically vigorous, mentally alert old age? That was certainly true of...

In October we start thinking about trick-or-treaters, and making plans to deck our porches with jack-o-lanterns and other Halloween...

Women were scarce in Gold Rush-era California, a mere 8% of the state-wide population in 1850, and only 30% ten years later, in 1860....

Families who trundled overland in covered wagons during the 1840s, hoping to build a better life in the West, didn’t always know to be...

In centuries past, and as global knowledge expanded in the Age of Sail, any attractive land that was scantily occupied and poorly...

What made some pioneer wagon trains successful, and others not? Partly luck, of course. But more than that, good fortune turned on the...

A number of modern structures in California’s southland bear the name of a family who settled there in the long-ago days when the Spanish...

Thousands of people poured into California during the 1850s: gold miners, merchants, farmers, families, professionals and tradesmen of...

Hundreds of Sacramento seniors still remember the acres of hop fields that stood tall along Fair Oaks Boulevard when they were kids....

Yet another new governor—in fact the sixth governor that authorities in Mexico City had appointed since 1822—arrived at Monterey, the...

Once an intriguing fable captures the collective human mind, it is very hard to dismiss it—especially if the stark truth is less...

Wine is big business in California. In 4,763 wineries large and small throughout the state, California vintners produce 87% of America’s...