Not every California resident cruises the fast lane. The desert tortoise, which is able to travel up to one-fourth of a mile per hour, prefers to stay put. Also called gopher tortoise, it spends about 95 percent of its life in burrows it digs to escape the soaring heat, and freezing cold, of its habitat—the Mojave and Sonoran Deserts of southeastern California and elsewhere. The desert tortoise, named the official State Reptile of California in 1972, is characterized by a h

The name sounds like this business must have been a saloon—and one that tolerated fairly loose moral standards, at that—but the truth is even more interesting. What Cheer House was a hotel with high standards that catered to male clientele only. Women, even the wives or daughters of the registered guests, were not allowed to enter; and the sale of liquor on the premises was strictly prohibited. Built by its owner Robert Bline Woodward, the three-story hotel opened July 4

Fur trappers were the first non-Indians to discover the vast blue expanse of Mono Lake, formed at least 760,000 years ago. Situated due east of Yosemite National Park, it is famous for its many pillars that rise above the surface, a type of calcite limestone rock called tufa—described by one guidebook as “great towers of cemented cauliflower”—and for its Artemia monica, a tiny species of brine shrimp, found nowhere else in the world. Mono Lake is cradled within an endorheic—t

In mid-1860s America, everyone longed for a faster mail service over its entire continental distance, San Francisco to New York. The idea that this faster mail service might be accomplished by a lone horseman dashing across America’s arid plains, fired wild enthusiasm and high hopes. The new express service, dubbed the Pony Express as a shortened version of its actual name--the Central Overland California & Pike's Peak Express Company--launched on April 3, 1860, when the firs

The election scheduled for October 10, 1911, was a special one, in which male voters were being asked to approve three potential amendments to the California State Constitution. One of them had already aroused months-long controversy, angry debate, and opposition: Proposition 4, if it passed, would grant women the right to vote. The other measures, Propositions 7 and 8—both of which provided for ordinary California citizens to participate more fully in the processes of their

Women were scarce in gold rush-era California—a mere 8 per cent of the state-wide population—when the first federal census took place in 1850. Ten years later, the female portion of the population had only increased to 30 per cent. This scarcity added immeasurably to every woman’s perceived value in society, regardless of her physical attractiveness or temperament, or whether she was married or single. Actually, the lopsided male-female ratio situation predated the gold rus

Fanciful sketch of Charley Parkhurst driving stage, while conversing with world traveler, writer, and minister to China, J. Ross Browne. So many legends surround the nineteenth-century stage driver Charley Parkhurst that it’s difficult now to separate fact from fiction. In that era stagecoach drivers—called “whips” after the long-lashed tools of their profession—were the kings of the road, glamorous figures revered for their exceptional skills and their nerves of steel. Many

Jose Forner The scaffold was erected on the summit of Russian Hill, a site that offered a spectacular view of San Francisco Bay; and—more to the point, considering the practicalities of an 1850s-era execution—it already held the decades-old graves of Russian sailors who had died while surreptitiously hunting sea otter in the Bay, during the Spanish period. The grave of another lawless sinner would almost be appropriate. José Forner (or Forni), the condemned, was allowed the

Last Saturday, January 24, 2026, marked the 178th anniversary of the gold discovery in California, an event that caused the largest migration in the history of the world up to that time. What did God think as he watched James Marshall pick up a few shiny flakes from the earth? Hard to say, because no churchman was present to offer an interpretation; in fact, organized religion in California, on that cold winter day in January 1848, was in a state of confusion. The United

In all of Lake Tahoe’s 22-mile length and 12-mile breadth, its 191 square miles of surface water and 72 miles of shoreline, there is only one island. Named Fannette Island, it is a smallish, sparsely timbered, brush-covered mass of granite that rises 150 feet above the water, amidst the spectacular scenery of Emerald Bay. Massive glaciers scoured the Sierra Nevada during the Pleistocene Epoch, carving deep canyons here...depositing vast amounts of soil and rock there...crea

Getty Images Some would have celebrated quietly, of course; but New Year’s Eve December 31, 1925, was a bash for everyone in the Golden State who wanted to party hearty, despite Prohibition. The 18th Amendment was the law of the land; yet with several California counties defiantly “wet,” a thriving underground scene of speakeasies and private house parties characterized the holiday’s revelry. Too, nineteen-twenty-five was mid-decade of the Roaring Twenties, an era known fo

Christmas will be here a week from tomorrow, celebrated with loved ones and good cheer despite all the tribulations of our modern times. As Christmas 1852 rolled around, the impact of the California Gold Rush—good and bad elements alike—was still a monumental social and economic influence, even though the invasive swarms of gold-fevered opportunists from all over the world had commenced four full years earlier. California had been admitted to the Union two years past, but t

As busy as they were at establishing 21 missions, the Franciscan priests sent to California in 1769 by a Spanish king, still found time to teach the native Indians to play the lute, violin, trumpet, metal triangle, and to sing Christmas carols in Spanish. At Mission San Jose and possibly other missions as well, Indian neophytes enacted a church play at Christmastime. Under Mexican rule, secularization of those missions—which began in 1834—disrupted ordinary customs that had b

What are you thankful for? A week from tomorrow, we will celebrate our national Thanksgiving Day, officially proclaimed as such by President Lincoln in 1863. Prior to that, each region, mainly in New England and other northern states, had sporadically, and at different times, observed days of feasting and merriment after the autumnal harvests. Before California became a state of the Union, even before its production of vegetables and grains amounted to much, its residents

The L a Brea Tar Pits (foreground) with the Pavilion for Japanese Art beyond, in Hancock Park, in Los Angeles’s Miracle Mile district. Photo by Joe Mabel The City of Los Angeles boasts many ritzy districts. One of them is a genteel, affluent residential neighborhood developed in the 1920s, about six miles east of today’s downtown skyscrapers; a neighborhood of luxurious homes featuring sundry distinctive architectural styles. Historically, its well-preserved mansions sit o

A partial view of the former Rancho Refugio's 12,147 acres For practical reasons, the newly-minted United States of America adopted British common law, a legal system based on precedent and judicial decisions. One characteristic of common law was the tradition of primogeniture—the right of succession of the eldest son. Another was that married women were not recognized as “persons” in their own right, qualified to own property or anything else. Upon marriage, a woman became h

In the early years of the California Gold Rush, the “soiled doves” who flocked westward did so in the expectation of more opportunities...

View of hiking trail & Griffith Observatory, downtown Los Angeles in the distance. Photo by Brian Schmidt Sprawled over 4,310 acres, for...

Portsmouth Square, San Francisco For certain, those thousands of young men infected with gold fever suffered from culture shock when they...

Enjoying wine at a family gathering in Anaheim c. 1860 Nowadays we think of it as the home of the Magic Kingdom, the place where...