Читать книгу Abandoned Places: 60 stories of places where time stopped - Richard Happer - Страница 18
ОглавлениеDATE ABANDONED: 1943
TYPE OF PLACE: Gold mining town
LOCATION: California
REASON: Economic
INHABITANTS: 8,000
CURRENT STATUS: Preserved decay
GUNFIGHTERS, GOLD NUGGETS, RAILROADS, OUTLAWS, SALOONS, DANCING GIRLS – IN JUST A FEW YEARS THIS TOWN HAD EVERYTHING THAT MADE THE WEST WILD. THEN, IN THE SPACE OF ANOTHER FEW, IT LOST IT ALL.
Boom and bust in the wild, wild West
Willam S. Bodey came all the way from Poughkeepsie, New York to strike it rich. In 1848 he left his wife Sarah and his two children behind and took a boat around the Horn, arriving in San Francisco along with 300,000 other would-be gold miners.
Unlike the majority of the ‘49ers (as the prospectors who took part in the gold rush of 1849 were known), Bodey actually did strike gold. Ten years after he landed in California he got lucky in the scrubby hills north of Mono Lake. A gold rush started following his claim and the town named after him sprang into existence. Bodey himself saw none of its wealth – he froze to death in a blizzard just months after his big discovery.
After a slow start, the town of Bodie really hit pay dirt in 1876. A rich new seam of gold ore transformed Bodie from an isolated backwater camp into a virtual metropolis. California and Nevada newspapers billed the town as the next Comstock Lode – where a huge discovery of silver and gold ore had created immense fortunes. Soon there were 8,000 people living and working in 2,000 buildings.
Looking east from the cemetery in the 1890s.
Bodie epitomized the ‘Wild West’ town. Its mile-long main street had a Wells Fargo Bank, a jail and sixty-five saloons. Every night the miners and ore workers rushed into town to drink their pay. The air ran with the sound of gunfire as brawls spilled onto the streets and men died in shootouts at noon. Stagecoach holdups were so regular that armed guards soon accompanied the shipments of bullion from the town. Bodie had a thriving cluster of brothels, a railroad, a telegraph station, several daily newspapers and its own Chinatown complete with a Taoist temple and opium dens. The town had nine stamp mills, where ore was crushed for processing. There was a cemetery and even a separate Boot Hill – the graveyard for those who had died with their boots on, i.e. violently.
Mining in Bodie reached its peak in 1881 when ore worth $3.1 million was dug out of the scrubby hills. However, within just a few years it was clear that the seams in the area were fast being worked out. New strikes in Butte, Montana, and Tombstone, Arizona, began to lure the professional miners away with the promise of new bonanzas.
There were still several thousand inhabitants and several working mines at the turn of the century, but by 1910 there were only 698 people left in Bodie, most of them families who had decided to make a go of living in this remote corner. It was a brave stand, but it wasn’t to last.
Only $6,821 of gold was mined in 1914. Three years later the railway was scrapped. A couple of mines limped on for a while but the last pickaxe was swung there in 1942, and the handful of remaining residents departed soon after.
The stage is still set
Most visitors remark how much Bodie looks like a movie set. Very few abandoned places can claim to have a whole cultural genre based around their heyday, but Bodie can. The characters, landscapes and architecture of the ‘Western’ are so familiar to most of us that one almost expects Gary Cooper or Clint Eastwood to step jingling from the saloon. After a little exploration, however, it slowly dawns that, of course, movie sets look like Bodie. This is not a plywood reconstruction, but the real thing, where people lived, worked and died.
The wooden buildings huddle together in the lee of the mountain.
The humanity of some abandoned places can seem remote, almost abstract, but Bodie is so real in its dereliction that it almost feels like a person itself. The buildings are scattered around the landscape, many of them sulking in hollows like children denied a treat. It’s easy to imagine how each individual prospector arrived and grabbed his own little patch, then defended it dearly. It must have been hard to be a good neighbour in a town where it might be the fella next door who bags the bonanza while all you ever dig up is dirt.
Today there are just over 100 buildings still standing, left as they were when the inhabitants headed to pastures new. A Methodist church was built in 1882 and still waits for the faithful today. As families followed the single men to Bodie the wildness of the town was tempered a little. A Roman Catholic church was built the same year, but that burned down in 1930.
The cemetery has about eighty gravestones, and many of the inscriptions can still be easily read. A few have been worn down by the harsh Bodie winters; as those who sleep beneath the stones were worn down too.
The abandoned cars lying around Bodie stem from its popularity as a ghost town – it was billed as such a century before this book was written, in 1915. As motoring increased in popularity, sightseers drove out to see this strange relic of a past that wasn’t all that distant but must certainly have seemed so when viewed from the leather seats of a Chrysler Imperial limousine. Many of these vehicles never made it home again, the rough roads, baking summer days and freezing nights taking their toll on the rudimentary automobiles. Perhaps a few even fell victim to aged gunslingers.
