Golden Years of a Ghost Town

The lust for gold. No risk or sacrifice has been too great for people who have fallen under its spell. California, the Golden State, owes a large part of its early growth to them.

Neither fierce winters and knee-deep spring mud nor gunfights and swindlers could keep fortune-seekers away from the mining town of Bodie in the High Sierras.

“You see that [kind of hardship] and think, ‘Boy, oh boy, am I glad I didn’t live there,’ ” said Fullerton resident Otto Krebs Jr., 64, whose father was the Bodie town doctor in 1910-11.

The Fullerton Museum Center’s new exhibition, “Bodie: Boom Town to Ghost Town,” depicts life at 8,300 feet from the first gold strike in 1859 through the bustling years in 1878-81 to the 1930s. Most of the display items--including photographs, voter registration rosters, stocks and bonds, mining equipment, newspapers, saloon tokens and whiskey bottles--came from the collection of Fullerton schoolteacher Greg Bock.

The ghost town captured Bock’s interest as a boy, and it continues to attract people from all over the world. More than 250,000 have visited Bodie each year since 1962, when it became a state park. The park service maintains the 100 remaining buildings in a state of “arrested decay.”

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Visitors peering through windows (all doors are locked) can see furniture, utensils, merchandise in the local store, coffins in the mortuary and a lesson on the chalkboard of the school, just as residents left them.

“When those towns died, people just up and moved,” said Krebs, who, as a teenager, sometimes helped his father at a mine he owned in the area.

“He told me once it snowed so much he walked out one day onto the second-story balcony of his hotel and walked right out onto the snow, which was level with the balcony,” Krebs recalled.

“People were tough back then,” he added. “I remember him telling me of a miner who walked into his office after a miner’s pickax fell from a ledge into his head. He came in with the ax sticking out of his head. My dad removed it, and the man was back at work in two days.”

Temperatures could reach 30 degrees below zero, and fierce storms and large snowdrifts often made the roads impassable, sometimes for weeks. Winds up to 100 mph gusted through the treeless town. Lumber had to be hauled via a 32-mile railroad from the Mono Lake area for building and to fuel mines.

The wood shortage prompted, in 1892, the first use of electrical power in the United States for industrial purposes at the Standard Mine. The technology was so new that engineers laid the power lines straight, thinking electricity couldn’t turn corners.

As people flooded the town in hopes of getting rich--or taking advantage of those who did--lawlessness ruled. At its peak, Bodie had 65 saloons and a thriving red-light district known as Virgin Alley.

The term “Badman from Bodie” entered the vernacular as word spread of murders, shootings and beatings. The town’s homicide rate, according to FBI statistics logged during the town’s 1878-81 heyday, dwarfs that of any modern city, yet no Bodie court ever delivered a first-degree murder conviction. Lore has it that the church bells, which at burial were rung once for every year of a decedent’s life, were never silent.

Life in Bodie had its charms. During the boom years, a silver dollar was small change. Strawberries and oysters could be bought at the local store, and women in high society wore the latest fashions and hosted lavish balls. Businesses flanked a mile-long main street.

Union miners received the highest pay in their industry and had the first standard eight-hour workday. Production peaked at $230,000 a month in gold or about $3 million annually--that’s in 1880 dollars.

But the vast outpouring of gold and riches, thought by mine owners to be infinite, played out. The pounding of the 125 stamp mills, which crushed large ore to small pieces so gold could be extracted more easily, slowed, and by the end of the 1880s vacant buildings outnumbered inhabitants.

A fire destroyed much of Main Street in 1892 after a clogged hose prevented water from reaching the blaze. What survived after a second big fire in 1932 was preserved through the work of the family of J.S. Cain, who moved to the area in the 1870s and died in the mid-’30s. Cain owned much of the town after winning a settlement from the Standard Mine Co. for drilling on his property. The family turned their land over to the state in 1962, after standing watch for years to prevent the looting and vandalism inflicted on most ghost towns.

Twenty-seven years after the 1932 fire, 6-year-old Greg Bock set eyes on Bodie while on a trip with his aunt and uncle.

“At that moment, I got bit by the ghost-town bug,” Bock said. “We were driving over the bumpy dirt road in my uncle’s Ford Falcon, and I remember seeing the town off in the distance, and I remember standing on a boardwalk knowing that I was standing where there had been gunfights and saloons. It fascinated me.”

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Bock builds his ghost-town cache via paper collectible shows, flea markets, swap meets and western memorabilia gatherings. Families in the Bodie area have given or sold to him much of what’s in his 250-piece collection, most of which is featured in the exhibit.

“I don’t think people really know or appreciate just how much hard work, time and energy goes into getting a collection of this size,” said Steve Love, a collector of ghost-town memorabilia and a teacher from Newhall, at the opening night in Fullerton. “Greg’s done a tremendous job of re-creating the feel of the town and the history of it.”

“It was a great opportunity to work with this collection,” said Lynn Labate of the Fullerton Museum Center, who curated the exhibition. It’s the first time the museum worked with a predominately private collection. “He’s done a wonderful job preserving Bodie history.”

Bock approached the museum with the idea in 1996. The board of directors liked the idea of having an exhibit to tie in with the state’s 150th anniversary of the Gold Rush.

Bodie remains part of a mineral-rich area. Perhaps the final irony in its history is this: To protect the town from what some see as its biggest threat, preservationists recently won legislation to keep out the one group credited with its creation: miners.

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* “Bodie: Boom Town to Ghost Town,” Fullerton Museum Center, 301 N. Pomona Ave. Museum hours: noon-4 p.m. Wednesday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday; 6-8 p.m. Thursday. $1-$3, children under 12 free. Through March 15. (714) 738-6545.