For The Madera Tribune Cockfighting has always been popular in Madera. Posing with their birds before a fight in 1905 are, clockwise from top left, John Barnett, Walter Brown, Frank Barnett, and Fred Barnett. John Barnett later became sheriff of Madera County. “Two men arrested in cockfight raid at Madera home.” “Deputies arrest 2 at cockfight.” “Maderan faces cockfighting charges.” These recent headlines in the Madera Tribune give evidence of the persistence of cockfighting

For The Madera Tribune Ed Gwartney. The late Ed Gwartney was a self-described product of the “Okie” migration who never earned a high school diploma but became a pathfinder of new trails in the teaching of history. He was the founder of the James Monroe Children’s Museum, and he has left it to others to build on his passion that created the unique educational laboratory for teaching California history on the campus of James Monroe Elementary School. Gwartney and his family w

For The Madera Tribune Chief Encouragement Officer Carles Beckett. When Carles Beckett graduated from Fresno State in 1967 and began his career in education, he could look back on his first 22 years and recognize that his life had been a series of miracles. Born in Piggott, Arkansas, he spent his first nine years living in a tent in a Buckeye, Arizona cotton camp and in a chicken coop on a chicken ranch in Petaluma, California. In 1954, his father was killed in a car crash,

For The Madera Tribune Carles and Georgia Beckett on their wedding day. It was four in the morning, July 17, 1954, when the woman crumpled to the floor. Her sobbing woke her four children; in an instant they joined her, brokenhearted and weeping uncontrollably. The policeman standing over them watched helplessly. He had just told the Beckett family that their father and husband would not be coming home. He had been killed earlier that day in an automobile crash. The grieving,

For The Madera Tribune Lu Bowman and Otis Teaford are shown here on the day of their wedding in 1914. The husband and wife were inseparable, even while hunting big game on horseback in the high country. Otis Teaford was the son of George Teaford, an early Madera County supervisor. I will never forget that day in 1992, when Bill and Doris Seabury took me to North Fork to meet Lu Bowman Teaford. It was 78 years after she had become the bride of Otis Teaford, Madera County’s kin

Tension was in the air in Madera in 1947. The long-standing exclusion of African-Americans from the City’s swimming pool was being challenged, and the integration attempts weren’t setting well with some of the town’s power brokers, especially the publisher of the Madera Tribune. Howard Clark, whose father had founded the paper in 1892, took umbrage at what he was calling outside interference that sought to upset the “natural tendency toward segregation” of the races, especial

For The Madera Tribune Stagecoaches like the one shown here in front of the hotel at Hildreth, not far from Coarsegold, carried passengers from the mountain towns of Madera County to the Valley. Most of the trips were safely conducted, but occasionally disaster struck, like that time in 1901. It seems so far in the distant past, and yet it hasn’t really been all that long since the only method of transportation from Madera to the foothills and back was in buggies and stagecoa

For The Madera Tribune Hiram Rapelje is shown here, second from the left, posing with the posse that shot train robber John Sontag, who lies wounded on the haystack. Madera County has produced its share of rough and tumble, two-fisted drinking, street fighting pioneers. They pop up all through the pages of local history to spice up the pieces of our past. Very near the top of a list of such characters is Hiram Lee Rapelje, a local stage driver who was as quick with his guns a