Women from all walks of life helped make California what it is today. There were the Sisters of Mercy who waded into the smallpox infested hospitals to care for

"The phrase ’seeing the elephant’ symbolized for ’49 gold rushers the exotic, the mythical, the once-in-a-lifetime adventure, unequaled anywhere else but

Americans have long cherished romantic images of the frontier and its colorful cast of characters, where the cowboys are always rugged and the ladies always fra

In a series of biographical profiles, this volume celebrates the lives and achievements of women who made history in the Golden State. Throughout California’s

When in the early 1870s historian Hubert Howe Bancroft sent interviewers out to gather oral histories from the pre-statehood gentry of California, he didn’t c