Cheryl Anne Stapp
California's Odd Shape
California’s southern border was resolved in 1848 by international treaty after the Mexican-American War, but until 1849 its northern...
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California's Olden Golden Days
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Cheryl Anne Stapp
Nov 25, 20202 min read
A Day of Thanks
On October 3, 1863, following a Union Army victory at Gettysburg, President Abraham Lincoln announced to “the whole American people…in...
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Cheryl Anne Stapp
Nov 18, 20202 min read
The Man Who Engineered Miracles
Theodore Dehone Judah was the brilliant engineer and visionary who convinced a group of Sacramento merchants, and the United States...
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Cheryl Anne Stapp
Nov 4, 20202 min read
Chief Justice Hugh Murray
Hugh Campbell Murray was—and still is—the youngest chief justice of the California Supreme Court the state has ever had. He was...
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Cheryl Anne Stapp
Oct 28, 20202 min read
Laundry Was Quite the Chore
When the only machines were a woman’s hands and arms, and washtubs were filled with hand-drawn buckets of well or creek water instead of...
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Cheryl Anne Stapp
Oct 21, 20203 min read
The Old Rancho del Paso
This Sacramento Valley ranch is long gone, but its colorful history is legend…and its fame still reverberates in the names of streets,...
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Cheryl Anne Stapp
Oct 7, 20201 min read
Women's Right to Vote
This week marks the 109th anniversary of the election that awarded California women the right to vote…though initially, it appeared that...
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Cheryl Anne Stapp
Sep 30, 20202 min read
Hall & Crandall's Stage Lines
Many New England stagemen, whose livelihoods there were being steadily squeezed by the railroads, followed thousands of bedazzled gold...
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Cheryl Anne Stapp
Sep 23, 20202 min read
J. Birch & The California Stage Company
Before the 1848 gold discovery brought thousands of fortune-hunters swarming into a recently-acquired, raw American territory, ordinary...
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Cheryl Anne Stapp
Sep 16, 20202 min read
Dressing the Stones
Today, commercial mills are complex, high-tech installations. Long ago, however, skilled artisans hand-carved granite millstones into...
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Cheryl Anne Stapp
Sep 9, 20201 min read
Surface Glitter
“Placer” is the name given to gold (and certain other minerals) that are near the surface when found in alluvial deposits of sand and...
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Cheryl Anne Stapp
Sep 2, 20201 min read
The Oldest Precious Metal
Gold is probably the oldest precious metal known to mankind, and over the course of history has been the cause of countless bitter...
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Cheryl Anne Stapp
Aug 26, 20203 min read
Mail Carriers Hit Pay Dirt
The bedazzled gold-rushers who swarmed into California in 1849 soon complained of many things—inflated prices, low-quality foodstuffs,...
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Cheryl Anne Stapp
Aug 19, 20202 min read
A New Cocktail for Gold-rushers
As legend has it, the martini was invented for hard-fisted California gold miners in 1849, only back then it was called a “Martinez.”...
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Cheryl Anne Stapp
Aug 12, 20202 min read
Poker Faces in Gold Country
The gold-fevered young men who swarmed into California expecting to get rich quick, soon discovered that finding their fortune wasn’t so...
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Cheryl Anne Stapp
Aug 5, 20202 min read
Gambling in Gold Country
The thousands of greenhorn gold rushers who invaded California in 1849 were quickly followed by those who came to “fleece” the miners of...
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Cheryl Anne Stapp
Jul 29, 20202 min read
First Great Gold Camp on the Feather
In July 1848, a young man named John Bidwell discovered gold on the Middle Fork of the Feather River. His discovery was not by chance....
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Cheryl Anne Stapp
Jul 15, 20202 min read
The Next Big Gold Strike
Several weeks elapsed after the January 1848 gold discovery before people started believing it was genuine…and then events started...
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Cheryl Anne Stapp
Jul 8, 20201 min read
Formerly, The Forks
Downieville sits in a magnificent, rugged, wooded natural amphitheater surrounded by lofty, pine-covered peaks. The town, founded in late...
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Cheryl Anne Stapp
Jul 1, 20201 min read
The 1887 Land Rush
For twenty years southern California had poured money, and millions of printed brochures, into a publicity campaign to attract settlers...
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