Cheryl Anne Stapp

Haste was the imperative to bedazzled gold-rushers, men near-frantic to get to the gold fields and stake their claim on a promising slice...

They are known as the Bartleson-Bidwell Party, or alternatively the Bidwell-Bartleson Party, the first organized group of emigrants to...

Many centuries before European explorers found California—for at least 10,000 and possibly as many as 20,000 years—an indigenous people...

The upstart new style in ladies’ fashions was quite unconventional. Yet it was seen everywhere across America throughout the 1850s...

When California became a state in 1850, its elected lawmakers had a multitude of issues to resolve, not the least of which was to address...

There’s something about the coming of a new year that inspires us to symbolically shed the ups and downs of the past twelve months and...

Merry Christmas, everyone! May your holiday be a joyous one with family and friends. What are you having for Christmas dinner? A big...

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...