Cheryl Anne Stapp

Now festooned with a red and silver sign stretched across its front that’s lit with all-around, bright bulbs at night, the famed Silver...

Every California schoolchild learns of the hundreds of pioneers, seeking a better life for their families, who came overland in covered...

The brig Pilgrim at Santa Barbara California’s hide and tallow trade was big business from the early 1820s through the mid-1840s....

Hall Jackson Kelley Dozens of foreigners, mostly men, entered California in the mid-1830s. In the main they were fur trappers, shipping...

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...