Cheryl Anne Stapp
Hunting a Killer
It was a murder most foul. Twenty-one-year-old wife and mother Millie Lyons was found brutally slain inside her farmhouse in Wooden...
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California's Olden Golden Days
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Cheryl Anne Stapp
Apr 173 min read
Alcatraz!
Its name is an Angelized version of an archaic Spanish word for “pelican,” although those birds no longer roost there. Since the mid-19th...
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Cheryl Anne Stapp
Apr 103 min read
Bad Guy Charley
The newspapers reported his crimes and said his name was Charles Mortimer. He was, they said, the quintessential thief and murderer:...
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Cheryl Anne Stapp
Sep 13, 20233 min read
Wicked Drinkeries
For almost 70 years in the 19th century, San Francisco contained a unique criminal district which was the scene of much viciousness and...
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Cheryl Anne Stapp
Sep 6, 20233 min read
The Barbary Coast
San Francisco’s infamous Barbary Coast began as Sydney-Town as early as mid-1849, so named for the glut of escaped or released men from...
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Cheryl Anne Stapp
Mar 29, 20232 min read
Policewoman Alice Stebbins Wells
Since the 1890s, California law enforcement agencies had employed women in caretaker positions—as matrons, supervisors, and other...
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Cheryl Anne Stapp
Feb 22, 20232 min read
A Wicked Woman
They say that there were more women of ill repute than there were decent ladies, in California, during the early years of the Gold Rush....
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Cheryl Anne Stapp
Jan 4, 20232 min read
Men & Women Behind Bars
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...
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Cheryl Anne Stapp
Dec 14, 20223 min read
Elusive Highwayman Black Bart
The masked highwayman who called himself Black Bart was so clever with disguises and occasional props that he successfully robbed 27...
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Cheryl Anne Stapp
Nov 9, 20223 min read
Questionable Circumstances
In the early years of the Gold Rush, the mining camps were terrorized by the bloody exploits of a ferocious bandit named Joaquin...
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Cheryl Anne Stapp
Jul 13, 20225 min read
Affair of Honor
Dueling was outlawed in California at its pre-statehood Constitutional Convention in the fall of 1849. However, the penalty imposed for...
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Cheryl Anne Stapp
May 11, 20222 min read
Foiled Intrigue
Perhaps it’s only myth or legend (for sure, certain story elements are questionable), but nonetheless it’s a romantic tale, published as...
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Cheryl Anne Stapp
Feb 16, 20224 min read
Mother Shoots Daughter's Seducer
Gunplay was so common during the chaotic, early days of the California Gold Rush that many incidents, though duly reported, drew little...
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Cheryl Anne Stapp
Jan 5, 20223 min read
A Close Attachment
The proverb “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned” is from the 17th century play The Mourning Bride, and means that no one is angrier...
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Cheryl Anne Stapp
Nov 17, 20213 min read
He Robbed the Wrong Woman
The old mining town in Nevada County is gone now, but Red Dog had its heyday in the 1860s, when the place had nearly two thousand...
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Cheryl Anne Stapp
Oct 6, 20213 min read
The Terror of Merced County
Born to respectable, hard-working parents who had come to California as gold-rushers in 1849, Robert L. McFarlane quit the family farm in...
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Cheryl Anne Stapp
Aug 11, 20212 min read
The Sloughhouse Graveyard
Jared Sheldon, a carpenter by trade, officially received a Mexican land grant of 22,130 acres along the Cosumnes River in 1844—in payment...
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Cheryl Anne Stapp
Aug 4, 20212 min read
Invasion at Monterey!
In 1818, California was still an outlying province of Imperial Spain, even as New Spain (later, the Republic of Mexico) and other...
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Cheryl Anne Stapp
Jun 16, 20212 min read
Hideaway in Plain Sight
In the 1850s the Mountaineer House was a well-known tavern and busy stage stop where multiple stagecoach lines rolled in daily to change...
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