Posts by Mike McPhate

A century ago, Los Angeles pulled a sensational swindle. Agents from the city posed as farmers and ranchers and strategically bought up land in the lush Owens Valley, 200 miles to the north. Water rights in hand, the thirsty metropolis proceeded to drain the region via a great canal. If the deception weren’t bad enough,…

Long before Disneyland’s arrival in the 1950s, Anaheim was a sleepy town filled with orange groves and governed by long-standing civic and business leaders. Then a group of Klansmen led by a church minister emerged with a platform to create an orderly community that imposed strict rules against alcohol and other vices. In 1924, they…

The Vietnamese-American nail industry originated with an act of kindness by a Hollywood actress in 1975. After the fall of Saigon, tens of thousands of Vietnamese refugees arrived in California. Tippi Hedren, the star of Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds,” volunteered to help at a refugee camp outside Sacramento. The immigrant women, Hedren told Nails Magazine…

California, a place of dizzying size and complexity, has often been impugned as ungovernable. It’s also been a rallying cry for hundreds of proposals to carve up the state since its formation in 1850. Among the most enduring has been the State of Jefferson. It was on this day in 1941 that a group of…

Among those welcoming the predicted rainfall this week will be California’s mushroom hunters. During the wet winter months, the state’s northern forests erupt with some of the most abundant wild mushrooms in the country — golden chanterelles, porcinis, Russulas, and other specimens free for the taking. The antithesis of industrial farming, foraging for food has…

Argentine ants arrived to U.S. shores by steamer in the 1890s. Today they are arrayed in vast colonies stretching from San Diego to Sonoma County and beyond. Warfare at the territorial borders is common, including a miles-long battlefront discovered north of San Diego that’s been strewn by the carcasses of millions of combatants. The losses,…

The figures could belong to a lost tribe, discovered by a wayfaring anthropologist and preserved in photographs through the ages. But the images are no more than 12 years old. Joni Sternbach has made a unique art form of surfing photography using the primitive process known as wet plate collodion. The idea originated as she…

More than a century ago, a group of farmers in the hops fields of Northern California invented a folk language that is still spoken today. Boontling, as it’s called, originated in Boonville, a remote hamlet in the fertile Anderson Valley. How it emerged is murky. By one account, local gossips developed coded words to talk…

When surveyors first laid eyes on Yosemite Valley, they remarked at its “perfectly inaccessible” granite peaks. They could hardly have imagined Warren Harding, a boisterous and hard-partying Californian who — on this day 60 years ago — completed the first ascent of El Capitan. Until then, no one had even considered climbing the nearly 3,000-foot…

In the fall of 2013, Joanna Hedrick was photographing her kids near a ginkgo tree and thought it would be a fun touch to sculpt patterns in the fallen yellow leaves. That was the moment she unwittingly stumbled upon a new calling in life. Joanna Hedrick’s leaf designs have been embraced as a campus tradition.…

Halloween fashions aren’t what they used to be. In bygone California, costumes were often homemade, creepier, and highly politically incorrect. Here’s a photographic tour drawn from the state’s various archives. Siblings — Aiko, left, and Isamu — showed off their Halloween masks in their yard in Los Angeles in 1925. Los Angeles Public Library The…

1Lining the beach in the seaside town of Capitola are two neat rows of whimsical, pastel-colored bungalows. Aiming to fashion Capitola into a second Venice, Canadian oil baron Henry Allen Rispin built the Spanish Colonial Revival style homes in the 1920s on the site of an old fishing settlement. Rispin himself suffered a series of…

One of the worst episodes of anti-Chinese violence in the country’s history happened in Los Angeles on Oct. 24, 1871. A gun battle had erupted between two rival gangs in the Chinese quarter of what was then a small city of citrus groves. Accounts of what happened next are murky. But a police officer who…

The Nimitz House was built in 1900 on Goat Island, now Yerba Buena Island, as a residence for the Commandant of a Naval Training Station. Officially known as Quarters One, the Classical Revival home got its nickname from Admiral Chester Nimitz, a World War II naval hero who spent his last days there. A Bay…

It was Captain Dick’s thirst for whiskey that did him in. One of 19th-century Lake Tahoe’s most colorful figures was an old British sailor with a hardy constitution and missing toes. Captain Richard Barter was hired to tend a stagecoach tycoon’s summer villa on the shore of Emerald Bay. During the snowbound winters, the only…

It was Captain Dick’s thirst for whiskey that did him in. One of 19th-century Lake Tahoe’s most colorful figures was an old British sailor with a hardy constitution and missing toes. Captain Richard Barter was hired to tend a stagecoach tycoon’s summer villa on the shore of Emerald Bay. During the snowbound winters, the only…

When George Townley came to Cal State San Marcos as a young Briton on a study abroad program it changed his whole sense of style. His home university in the north of England was often gray and dull, said Townley, now 22. “So this like vibrant, tropical kind of west culture really stood out. It…