Native Plants for Healing the Land after Fire

“Destructive fires in California have increased in both number and severity over the last decades. … Recent drought and bark beetle tree mortality has resulted in millions of dead and dying trees … significantly weakened to resist fires.” – Nevada County 2018-19 Fire Safe Guide   “This is California’s new normal,” says Governor Jerry Brown. Contributors to the New Normal warmer and longer summers more homes more people … Read More

Exclusionist State Governor

Peter Hardeman Burnett: California’s First Governor Before securing his position as California’s first Governor (1849 – 1851), Burnett moved his family from Missouri to Oregon on a wagon train. “As a legislator in Oregon, Burnett proposed that all free blacks be forced to leave the state. Any who failed to leave were to be arrested and flogged every six months … Read More

Nisenan Book Review, Culture, Historic Trauma & Healing

Book Review History of Us, Nisenan Tribe of the Nevada City Rancheria by Richard B. Johnson First published August 10, 2018 In his recently published book, Johnson describes the indigenous lifestyle (before white men came to California) in a way that makes the heart long to experience the close family ties and feel the intimate connection with the land. He … Read More

The Diary of a Forty-Niner – A Skillful Blending of Fact and Fiction

In the 1947 centennial edition of The Diary of a Forty-Niner published by James Ladd Delkin, Oscar Lewis, a California historian, researched the origins of the book. Below is his introduction along with his findings. ——— In the voluminous literature of the Gold Rush The Diary of a Forty-Niner has long occupied a position at once unique and puzzling. Almost every phase of the book’s … Read More