The Bodie Story

By Joseph Cook
Grade 9

The hitching posts are empty. I look across the windswept plain, stopping now and then to rest my gaze on a crooked door, an old plow, or a broken window. I take a breath of the dry California air as I walk towards one of the wooden buildings that are dilapidated after so many years of disuse. As I approach it, I can almost picture what it was like here in Bodie so many decades ago. I close my eyes and lean against the crooked frame of the now empty house and imagine.

“Move that trunk,” yells a man. “The next stagecoach is due in fifteen minutes!”

“We’ve got miners coming in by the droves,” a man muttered.
   
The general store is full of people, some chatting, others buying merchandise. On a side street, two old men sit in rocking chairs, on a porch, playing checkers. The rattle of wagons can be heard, as miners cart in ore and gold. The city shimmers in the late afternoon heat. Bodie is a prosperous town, home to over 10,000 people. Most people came with hope of striking gold in the mines. Some came to run businesses. Gunshots ring out, as two men fight in an alleyway. Fighting in this town is common. A man dies almost every day.
   
I look up at the faded wooden house as I ponder what caused this town to be deserted. As soon as the gold and iron supply depleted, many left the town. A few stayed, but it would never be the same. The Apostle Paul once said, “The love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, for which some have strayed from the faith in their greediness, and pierced themselves with many sorrows.”

Bodie was a gold bearing town and attracted many people. Miners wasted fortunes drinking and gambling. Others wasted their lives in fights over money. A fire struck the last blow to the town, leaving it crippled, and empty.

Source:http://www.bodie.com/