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...

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

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...

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

Famed explorer John Charles Frémont, the leader of several U.S. Army Topographical Corps mapping expeditions across the West, gave the...

In its heyday, Columbia was known as the “Gem of the Southern Mines” for its prodigious output of gold, averaging $100,000 or more per...

Once it was a good-sized mining settlement—a rip-roaring, wild-west boomtown. Today Bodie is a wind-swept ghost town, a tourist...

At 447 miles in length the Sacramento River is the longest river that flows through California, with a watershed that encompasses more...

More than one gold rush mining camp was dubbed “dog town” by its inhabitants—miner’s slang for coarse, thrown-together encampments of...

Teenaged Eliza Marshall emigrated with her family from England to the United States in 1839. They settled in Pawtucket, in the section of...

Mark Twain said he based his short story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” on what he thought, at the time, was a...

Not long after Marshall’s January 24th gold discovery at Coloma, three men stumbled upon a second gold find downriver—which became one of...

On a chilly winter day 174 years ago this month, a construction site foreman named James Marshall picked up a few small flakes of gold...

Whether they came to California overland or by sea in 1849, hordes of predominately young men were joyfully exuberant, for they were...

California’s north-south cultural split began as early as 1821, the year Mexico won its independence from Spain and acquired the province...

In the aftermath of the Mexican-American War, California existed in a state of political limbo. The peace treaty, signed in February 1848...

There is no doubt that Americans have a passion for cheese: in snacks, sandwiches and main dishes. Why, Crayola even named one of its...

Jared Sheldon, a carpenter by trade, officially received a Mexican land grant of 22,130 acres along the Cosumnes River in 1844—in payment...

The California Gold Rush revitalized the stagecoach industry, which was waning in New England by the end of the 1840s, due to the rise of...