Bodie: The Town That Walked Out and Left Everything

In eighteen eighty, Bodie was a boomtown of several thousand people, with estimates of its peak population running as high as ten thousand. It had sixty-five saloons. It had a red-light district, a Chinatown, a Methodist church, and a schoolhouse. It had a homicide rate that Eastern newspapers described as the worst in America, which is where the phrase "Bad Man from Bodie" comes from. Some of that reputation was real. Some of it was amplified by editors who understood what their readers wanted to believe about a California mining town.

The ore deposits that built Bodie thinned through the eighteen eighties. By nineteen twenty, the population was fewer than one hundred people. The last permanent residents left in the nineteen forties.

They left almost everything behind.

The furniture is still in the houses. The dishes are still in the cupboards. Calendars hang on the walls showing years that have not been current since before the Second World War. This is not stagecraft. The last families simply walked out.

California acquired Bodie as a state historic park in nineteen sixty-two. The philosophy of management it chose is called arrested decay. The structures are stabilized against collapse: sagging roofs are reinforced, walls that would fall are supported. But nothing is restored. The paint peels at its actual rate. The wood warps and grays as it would. The window glass, some of it original to the eighteen seventies and eighties, remains wavy in its original frames.

The honest argument for this approach is that restoration would be a lie. Bodie did not end at its peak. It ended by being slowly abandoned. Giving it back its painted storefronts and level porches would be choosing to show you a story that didn't happen, instead of the one that did.

What California State Parks chose to preserve is not a town. It is an ending.