Bodie, California: The Gold Camp That Blamed Its Killings on the Altitude

01A Prospector Who Never Saw His Town

W.S. Bodey found gold in these hills in the summer of 1859. In November 1860, on a supply trip to Monoville, he was caught in a blizzard and died. Lucius Beebe told readers of Ford Times in 1951 that Bodey's skull turned up in the spring. In his account it was refurbished and given a place on the back bar of the Cosmopolitan Saloon.

The camp did not even keep his spelling. A sign painter in nearby Aurora lettered "Bodie Stables," and the error stuck.

02The Standard Strikes It Rich

For most of two decades Bodie remained a modest placer camp. In 1877 the Standard Consolidated Mining Company bought claims, raised a 20-stamp mill and hit a profitable vein of gold-bearing ore. Within three years the town counted 2,000 buildings. Its mile-long Main Street had a Wells Fargo bank, four volunteer fire companies, a brass band, a miners' union and several daily newspapers. Output peaked in 1881 at $3.1 million, and the district eventually yielded more than $30 million in gold.

Contract laborers from southern China were in Bodie by 1878. They were barred from the mines, so they ran laundries, peddled vegetables and kept the town supplied with charcoal and wood. Their Chinatown rose two and three stories and held a Taoist temple among its opium dens and gambling halls. The papers wrote up its New Year celebrations and its large funerals. Several hundred Chinese residents lived there at the 1880 peak.

James Stuart Cain arrived in 1879, aged 25. He was born in Canada, moved to Carson City in 1875 and married Martha D. Wells of Genoa. He started with lumber barges on Mono Lake, carrying mine timbers and fuel wood, then went into wagon freighting. With Thomas Holt he leased the Bodie Railroad and Lumber Company. Later he and Joe Maguire leased a block of ground from the Standard and took $90,000 in gold out of it in 90 days. The Standard would not renew the lease.

03Why Did Bodie Earn Such a Bad Name?

The county's Register of Deaths opens with two names, Bresnan and Blair, after a fight in the street. The wounded man lasted 26 days. Historian Roger McGrath counted 31 homicides in Bodie between 1877 and 1882, and the Sacramento Union called it "a shooter's town." On July 6, 1880, the Union reported that Patrick Carroll had been shot and killed there on Sunday evening.

The Bodie stage was a frequent target, and Milt Sharp and William C. Jones were among the men who robbed it. Wells Fargo put a shotgun messenger, Mike Tovey, on the Bodie and Carson coach. It was held up on June 4, 1880, and again on September 5, when two men stopped it about seven miles from Aurora. Tovey shot one of them and was hit in the arm. He later helped send Sharp to Nevada State Prison for that year's Bodie robberies. Sharp escaped in 1889.

On January 24, 1881, Joseph DeRoche ran down Goat Ranch Road. He was caught about eight miles out, brought back to town and hanged by the vigilance group known as the Bodie 601. Deputy Sheriff John Kirgan lost his job as jailer after a prisoner "left jail" and was later lynched, though he stayed on as a deputy. On March 6, 1881, his horse bolted as he drove a sulky through town and threw him onto the frozen street. He died ten days later, aged 53, and was buried in Bodie.

That June the papers reported a full week without a killing and called Bodie a resort.

One mother wrote to the Methodist minister, the Rev. Francis M. Warrington, to ask whether her son was safe in such a place. Warrington is best remembered for his answer. The son, Israel S. Penfield, went home to Camden, New York, took over his father's antique-furniture business and died at 88.

The camp's most repeated story concerns a miner's little girl who ended her prayers, the night before her family moved there, with "Goodbye, God, we're going to Bodie." In Beebe's telling, the Bodie Free Press fixed the punctuation and printed "Good, by God, we're going to Bodie!"

04After the Easy Ore Ran Out

By 1881, the year production peaked, the easy ore was gone. Wood for the Standard's mill cost more as it was hauled from farther away. In November 1892 Thomas H. Leggett persuaded J.S. Cain to invest in sending power over a long distance to the mill. The Standard's hydroelectric plant at Dynamo Pond, thirteen miles from town, sent 3,530-volt alternating current to the stamp mill, 130 horsepower in all. It was one of the first long-distance electrical transmissions in the country.

In the summer of 1892 a kitchen fire burned much of the town west of Main Street. Bodie rebuilt, but several residents left. In October 1898 the Standard's first mill burned, and a new one went up from 1899. Around 1905 its superintendent was Theodore Hoover, brother of the future president.

J.S. and Thomas Cain sued the Standard, charging that it had taken $700,000 in ore from their claim since 1891. The company closed in October 1913. Cain offered to drop the suit if it sold him its Bodie properties, and in February 1915 it did, for $25,000. He went on to own most of the town and paid guards to watch it. The Bodie Railway was abandoned in 1917.

The fire of 1932 left about 200 of the town's 2,000 buildings. E.J. Clinton, head of a mining company in Bodie, had restored the Methodist church with his own money, and that year he held its last formal service. In 1942 War Production Board Order L-208 shut down gold mines judged nonessential to the war, and Bodie's last mine closed with them.

05What Remains of Bodie Today

California made Bodie a State Historic Park in 1962, and the state keeps the town in what it calls arrested decay. Interiors stay as they were found, with dishes on the tables and bottles on the shelves, and mining machinery rusts where it stopped. The Standard Mill still stands. So do the Methodist church where Clinton held his last service and the house James Stuart Cain built his fortune around.

The park is open year-round, though snow can limit access from November through May. In summer most vehicles can handle the unpaved road in from Highway 270.