Today�s Lafayette is a modern East Bay suburb with a long and intriguing history of people, agriculture, and commerce. The story began in the summer of 1846, when Elam Brown and 13 families left St. Joseph, Missouri, in wagon trains and embarked on a sixmonth journey west to establish new homes and lives. By February 1848, Brown and his family had purchased the Rancho Acalanes in Contra Costa County from a San Francisco financier and had established the settlement that would later became L...

Today, the Caldecott Tunnel connects Alameda and Contra Costa Counties, located in the San Francisco Bay Area. The original two bores of this tunnel opened in 1937, the same year as the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge, and changed Contra Costa County from an area of small rural communities into one of growing suburbs. But this was not the first tunnel to connect these counties. The Kennedy Tunnel, opened in 1903, was accessed by steep and winding roads and located several hundred feet abo...

On December 28, 1894, the day before the fourth anniversary of the massacre at Wounded Knee, Lakota chief Two Sticks was hanged in Deadwood, South Dakota. The headline in the Black Hills Daily Times the next day read “A GOOD INDIAN”—a spiteful turn on the infamous saying “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.”On the gallows, Two Sticks, known among his people as Can Nopa Uhah, declared, “My heart knows I am not guilty and I am happy.” Indeed, years later, convincing evide...