For centuries, the mountains and valleys that became the Running Springs area have swelled with natural resources, supplying the hunting and gathering needs of Native Americans who harvested acorns and herbs and hunted deer and other wildlife to sustain themselves through the winters in the valleys below. Nineteenthcentury gold prospectors passed through the Running Springs vicinity on their way to the Holcomb Valley. Lumbermen came to harvest the virgin timber, supplying the construction ...

In 1845, Benjamin Davis Wilson'the future first mayor of Los Angeles and the grandfather of Gen. George S. Patton'led a 20-man posse into the San Bernardino Mountains in search of Native American raiding parties that had been attacking Riverside ranches. But what they found in a particular high-altitude valley were, instead, large and furry. Wilson's men soon roped 11 bears, bringing the creatures into camp, and the valley the Serrano Indians knew as Yuhaviat, or 'Pine Place,' received a n...

Born AgainSan Francisco Bay area stockbroker Taylor Helzer was young, handsome, and--to all outward appearances--normal. But that was before a three-day self-awareness seminar left him convinced he was a new Messiah. In the interest of funding his own church and "saving" America from Satan, Helzer began making and selling Ecstasy and convinced girlfriend Kerri Furman to pose for Playboy. She eventually left him, only to be replaced by naive, gullible Dawn Godman.

Edgar Award Finalist: The "exciting" true story of the abduction of biathlete Kari Swenson and the five-month manhunt to bring her tormentors to justice ( The New York Times Book Review).Former rodeo cowboy Johnny France had been sheriff of Madison County, Montana, for three years when Kari Swenson, a Bozeman resident training for the World Biathlon Championship, went missing near Big Sky Resort in July 1984. Her friends feared that Kari had been attacked b...

A fascinating memoir of a white man who gained access to the private lives of the Blackfeet Indians.First published in 1907, My Life as an Indian is the memoir of J. W. Schultz’s life as a young white man among the Piegan Blackfeet in the Montana Territory. Inspired by the journals of Lewis and Clark and George Catlin’s depictions of Indian life in his paintings, Schultz journeyed to the American West in search of adventure and became a trapper and trader....

An isolated ocean-view village on the dunes above South Santa Monica Bay, Manhattan Beach grew with the arrival of railroads. This quaint, upscale jewel of the Los Angeles County coast has been known for its cottage-style living, the Metlox Pottery Company and the iconic pier. These diverse stories mix the city's controversies, including the still unsolved 1936 murder of Reid Russell, with true tales of pioneering women, controversial politics and the vicissitudes of seaside city developme...

The second-largest Latino-immigrant group in Los Angeles after Mexicans, Central Americans have become a remarkable presence in city neighborhoods, with colorful festivals, flags adorning cars, community organizations, as well as vibrant ethnic businesses. The people from Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama living in Los Angeles share many cultural and historical commonalities, such as language, politics, religion, and perilous migratory paths as wel...

During the 1930s in the United States, the Works Progress Administration developed the Federal Writers’ Project to support writers and artists while making a national effort to document the country’s shared history and culture. The American Guide series consists of individual guides to each of the states. Little-known authors-many of whom would later become celebrated literary figures-were commissioned to write these important books. John Steinbeck, Saul Bellow, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ral...

Los Angeles incarcerates more people than any other city in the United States, which imprisons more people than any other nation on Earth. This book explains how the City of Angels became the capital city of the world’s leading incarcerator. Marshaling more than two centuries of evidence, historian Kelly Lytle Hernández unmasks how histories of native elimination, immigrant exclusion, and black disappearance drove the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles. In this telling, which spans from ...

In the two decades between the Second World War and the Great Alaska Earthquake, Anchorage grew by a factor of 10. Money was, quite literally, washing down the street. The economic boom was so great that all you needed to make a million dollars was a cash register. At the same time Anchorage was one of the few cities in America where organized crime never got a firm foothold. Uptown, downtown, out of town, the locals were clever enough to keep the East Coast families out. Walrus With A Gol...

The award-winning history of the women who went West to work in Fred Harvey's restaurants along the Santa Fe railway -- and went on to shape the American SouthwestFrom the 1880s to the 1950s, the Harvey Girls went west to work in Fred Harvey's restaurants along the Santa Fe railway. At a time when there were "no ladies west of Dodge City and no women west of Albuquerque," they came as waitresses, but many stayed and settled, founding the struggling cattle and mining...

Wyoming is so closely identified with ranching that it is often known as �the Cowboy State.� The prosperity associated with the cattle industry drew wealthy investors to Wyoming Territory in the 1870s and early 1880s. They stocked the range with thousands of cows and made considerable fortunes until the harsh winter of 1886�1887, when the cattle market collapsed. Many of those early ranchers left Wyoming, which opened the door for the establishment of what would become a huge sheep busines...