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...

Early on in the California Gold Rush, one new “gold strike” after another sent fortune hunters scrambling farther afield from the...

Most of them are still there, lining tree-shadowed Main Street, and still in operation: the now-historic structures that were built in...

Within a few months, the 1848 gold discovery turned pastoral California into a hotbed of mining and commercial activity. Seemingly...

Today’s Sacramento History Museum, which opened to the public in 1985, is housed in a replica of the city’s 1854 City Hall and Waterworks...

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...

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

Perhaps it’s only myth or legend (for sure, certain story elements are questionable), but nonetheless it’s a romantic tale, published as...

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...

The stage arrived in Oroville right on time that morning in October 1893; yet at the first sight of it, the townsfolk were astounded....

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...

So many legends surround the nineteenth century stage driver Charley Parkhurst that it’s difficult now to separate fact from fiction. In...

The palatial hotel that A. J. Bayley built long ago in California’s gold country still stands, though it’s empty now, and encircled by a...

One hundred fifteen years ago last Sunday, on April 18, 1906—a Wednesday—a devastating earthquake struck the northern coast of California...

Praised as the most delightful first-person account of California’s gold mines, The Shirley Letters is a collection of 23 letters written...

In the spring of 1850—bedazzled by sensational reports coming back from the California gold fields—Margaret and Ledyard Frink excitedly...

Theodor Cordua was the first European to establish a permanent settlement on the site of present-day Marysville, California. Ambitious,...

Many New England stagemen, whose livelihoods there were being steadily squeezed by the railroads, followed thousands of bedazzled gold...