Bodie’s Gold: Tall Tales and True History from a California Mining Town

Preface

, xi Tales of my wild Uncle Marion, many told by Marion himself, enlivened my relatively ordinary childhood. A visit to his Sierra home was like a visit to a fabulous adventure book: full of scary fun, but with a guaranteed happy ending. I still recall him rousting me out of my warm sleep at 4 a.m. to plop me into his old Army surplus jeep—no airbags, no seatbelts, no doors. Off we went, careening through the frozen countryside to his favorite patch of Rock Creek, to teach me proper trout fishing. After a trout breakfast, he took everyone up to Bodie, his former home. That day we weren’t allowed to go into the town (the state park had not officially opened yet), and had to content ourselves with a view from Bodie Bluff. Years later, to pay homage of sorts to my rowdy and influential (on me, anyway) uncle, I visited Bodie again. Uncle Marion was gone, but I certainly felt closer to him at his old house in the ghost town than at his grave in a southern California city cemetery. Bodie gnawed at me. What began as a memoir for the family became a photography project as well. Then, being a technical writer, I had to make sure the “facts” I found were indeed true. I found just enough falsehoods to make me keep digging. You could write a Bodie encyclopedia, if you had the time. The amount of information (much of it of dubious accuracy) is staggering . I had to draw the line somewhere to keep the size reasonable. The result is this book. Several groups of Bodieites have been either ignored or trivialized in the past, and they deserve more serious consideration. The two most numerous groups are the Kuzedika, the American Indians who lived in the area before the European-Americans showed up, and the Chinese. Another group is the people who lived in Bodie after the boom subsided. I have tried to describe some of these lesser-known Bodieites and their presumed perspectives on Bodie life. For each group, I have drawn on different resources. Although the Kuzedika are a recognized tribe, and many Kuzedika people are alive today, there is not much published information about the tribe specifically . They are grouped with the Paiute and/or Shoshone people, whose , preface xii . p r e f a c e original territories are to the north, south, and east of Mono Lake. Information about the people who lived in the immediate Mono Lake area is harder to come by. Many of them moved around the eastern Sierra seasonally, following the food supply, making them even more difficult to pinpoint geographically . I have relied heavily here on information from recorded interviews conducted in Bridgeport by anthropologists in the early 1930s. The quotes from Kuzedika people are from these interviews. The interviewees were Kuzedika in their 80s and 90s, people who grew up before and during the boom time of the Bodie area. The interviews can be found in the Ethnological Collection of the Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley. Some contemporary Kuzedika voiced the strong desire not to have details of their private rituals appear in popular publications; therefore I have not included such information in this book. I found in talking with a number of American Indians (Kuzedika, Owens Valley Paiute, Pomo, and other nations) that there are no universally accepted terms to use when you are talking about the people who were living here before the European-American settlement movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Some prefer the term “Native American”; more seem to prefer “American Indian.” Still others point out that all those terms are Anglo inventions and are therefore irrelevant to their identities. I am not taking on the argument; everyone seems to have a good point. However, I must use some term, and so I have used “American Indian” to refer to all the people living in what is now the continental United States before the EuropeanAmerican settlements began. I use the term “Kuzedika” to refer to the people who were living in the Mono County area when W. S. Bodie first arrived; it is their own name for themselves and is therefore indisputably correct. When I quote from or refer directly to newspaper items from that time, I use the term “Paiute” where it was the term used in the newspaper. For information about Chinese Bodieites, I have relied on Bodie newspaper articles from that...