White men first set eyes on Round Valley on an April day. Promptly they killed a couple score of the people who had been living there for who knows how long. Round Valley, where grass…
Posts published in “Essays”
There is nothing more frustrating to a local historian than finding an artifact and not being able to figure where the heck it came from, or when! The Held-Poage Library of the Mendocino County Historical…
Canyon Road is just North of Geyserville. I had been contacted by an owner of a small older vineyard to inspect the vines for disease or insects. It turned out to be a typical older…
Berkeley, CA 4/27/2020 — In 1921, at the age of 39, Franklin Delano Roosevelt felt ill one night after dinner. He went to bed, but woke up the next morning drenched in sweat, weak, and…
Anderson Valley was rather unique in northern California, for while it was bordered on the east by three Mexican land grants and on the west by two land grants, it had been overlooked. It only…
The event that came to be called “The Presidio Mutiny” was a non-violent sit-down in the stockade yard by 27 prisoners to protest stockade conditions and the fatal shooting three days earlier of a fellow…
I first saw her early one morning looking down from the Noyo Bridge in Fort Bragg, California. I was on my way to town and it stopped me in my tracks. I’d never seen such…