Stampede to Bodie

            STAMPEDE to BODIE

It was 1876 when fabulous gold strikes were reported at Bodie. And as you can imagine, word of the bonanza spread fast in nearby mining circles.

        Alpine County’s Silver Mountain City had enjoyed its own mining boom a decade earlier, hard on the heels of the Comstock Lode discovery in June, 1859. But by the middle-1870s, Silver Mountain’s fortunes were waning. Alpine ore had proven “recalcitrant” – hard to work. Actual assays had failed to live up to all the speculative fever.
 
       Now, Bodie was the latest, greatest thing! By April of 1878, the fresh boomtown was being touted as a “desirable spot for respectable families to locate,” with a population of about 1,500 – “about 600 of whom are out of employment, and of which latter number not over 250 would work could they find work to do.” The new town featured some 17 saloons, 5 stores, 2 livery stables, 6 restaurants, 4 barber shops, 2 butcher shops, one fruit store, one newspaper, one tin shop, a jewelry store, one saddle shop, plus four lawyers, 3 doctors, and 2 drug stores. A bakery and two blacksmith shops rounded out the tally. And despite Bodie’s claim of being a “respectable” place, the number of “houses of ill fame” — a prosperous 15 — almost matched the number of its saloons. (1) 
 
      Given the town’s rapid growth, it was hardly surprising that Bodie and its greener pastures were all the talk of Alpine’s mining community by early 1878 — and that local miners began heading that direction. Bodie was, after all, a mere 50 miles away as the crow flies. Dozens of Silver Mountain-ites found themselves tugged by the golden lure.

       In May, the Silver Mountain newspaper grumbled that Alpine election tallies the following month were expected to be light, as “Bodie has made inroads upon our voters.” (2)
 
      Suspension of mining operations at Monitor only helped fuel the exodus (3), though the paper added smugly, “We may look for a return of some of them next spring.” (4) But by September, Butcher Robert K. Love, once chairman of Alpine’s Board of Supervisors, was driving a band of hogs over the mountains to open a market on the east side of Bodie’s Main Street. (5)
 
        It wasn’t only people and livestock making the move. Entire buildings were disassembled and carted off, to be given fresh life in the growing boomtown. Hotel-keeper William A. Johnson, for example, moved his Markleeville-area hotel to the corner of Main, Mills, and Green Streets in Bodie. The McBeth hotel in Monitor, too, was disassembled, and reincarnated in its new home. Teamster John R. Smith hauled off the Uncapher House near Markleeville, too.

 

                There was a practical reason behind all this schlepping of buildings; despite the town’s two lumber yards, lumber at Bodie was in short supply with so much building going on. (6) Spotting opportunity, Alpine sawyer Eugene M. Bemis hired Henry C. Ginn of Silver Mountain to haul lumber from the Bemis sawmill near Woodfords to Bodie as well. (7)
 
       At first, the emptying-out of Silver Mountain City was greeted with general skepticism. Bodie would prove just a “flash in the pan,” the local paper predicted. “Everyone will be back in the fall.” A column in April, 1878 gleefully asserted that “hundreds of men [were] now footing it away from that well-advertised mining district,” calling Bodie’s excitement “overdone.” One correspondent frankly warned, “tell all who talk of coming to Bodie to speculate without money to stay at home, as the place is overrun with men seeking employment.” (8) 
 
      Eventually, however, even brothers Robert and Alex Folger, who’d kept the Alpine Chronicle’s press humming at Silver Mountain for 14 years, shipped their printing press to Bodie in October 1878. And by 1880, Silver Mountain merchant and sometime Monitor postmaster, E.F. Gibson, had become the proprietor of the Union Market, located above the Bodie post office.

      It didn’t help Silver Mountain’s fortunes that a new road from Monitor to Bodie was opened in October, 1878, cutting 70 miles off the trek and allowing an ox team to make the journey in 2-1/2 days. (9) The writing was on the wall: Silver Mountain City’s heyday was over. But as Silver Mountain shrank, Bodie grew. By that December (1878), those who made the trek discovered themselves in a town of 5,000 souls, two thousand of them working as miners. (10)
 
       Life at Bodie was definitely more exciting; there were suicides, shootings in the streets, dead bodies discovered, clairvoyants to consult. (11) Somehow, one man even found a way to drown himself in a water barrel. (12)
 
       Along with rapid growth, Bodie was also undergoing growing pains. The primitive court house was declared dangerous and such “a disgrace to the county” that a judge ordered the county supervisors to convene and furnish a more suitable building. The local newspaper tartly suggested that a “fresh batch of county officials” was a “bright idea,” too. (13)
 
       Did all those Alpine transplants find happiness in Bodie? Perhaps for a short while, at least. The Folger brothers, who moved their printing press to Bodie in October 1878, didn’t wind up staying long; by 1882, they had moved again, to Bridgeport. But if the experience of others is any indication, life at Bodie would prove far more difficult than many imagined.

       One disgruntled Bodie-ite complained to his father in 1880: “I went up to the cemetery or graveyard [on] Decoration Day and counted 240 graves that had been made within a year, and the majority of them young men, in fact, in the very prime of life from 26 to 40 years of age. Th[is] country is no flower garden, I assure you. . . . I would not give five acres of land in Walla-Walla, Washington Territory for the whole of Bodie or Mono County — mills, mines, hoisting works, and tramways thrown in.” (14)    
 
       “If God will only spare my life to get out of the miserable hole,” the letter-writer continued, “I will pledge Him my sacred word and life that he will never catch me back again.”  

       So much for greener pastures and a golden lure.