Cheryl Anne Stapp

Legends of lost treasure are always intriguing, aren’t they? California history has several legends of “lost” mines of gold and other...

A dark-eyed beauty, Francisca Carrillo was born in San Diego when California was still a province of Imperial Spain, and raised in the...

The courageous folks who braved the overland trek to California in the 1840s knew they had to take enough food to last six months. After...

He turned out to be one of the lucky gold rushers . . . though it can certainly be said that he made his own luck. Three-plus years after...

When he died October 1, 1876, James Lick was the wealthiest man in California. From his deathbed in Lick House—the sumptuous San...

It was supposed to be the realization of a dream: a dynamic new town laid out on a low bluff overlooking the Sacramento River, where a...

The self-proclaimed Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico, was a colorful citizen of San Francisco from the...

Hubert Howe Bancroft is one of the most famous names in western America, as the man who became one of the first important and respected...

The intrepid individuals who traveled 2,000 miles overland from the Missouri frontier to California in the 1840s had very few waystations...

In 1849, California’s Gold Rush population, statewide, was 92% male. As reported in the Eastern press, the state of affairs in that...

The mighty smith of folklore was the blacksmith, who worked with iron and steel and whose hammer wielded more force than his fellow...

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

In the early years of the Gold Rush, the mining camps were terrorized by the bloody exploits of a ferocious bandit named Joaquin...

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...

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...

What made some pioneer wagon trains successful, and others not? Partly luck, of course. But more than that, good fortune turned on the...

She was a woman of remarkable qualities; a woman who rose from being an uneducated young bride going west in a covered wagon in 1844, to...

Her real name was Meriam but everyone called her Mary. She was a Donner Party survivor, fifteen when she was rescued from a...