Hotel - $$3.00
This Hotel once lived in the mountain gold rush town of Bodie, California.
Bodie Hotel
This Hotel once lived in the mountain gold rush town of Bodie, California. Now the town is a protected State Park with some twenty buildings still standing. It gets snowed in during the winter and is inaccessible.
The following research and web page design is complements of the Sanford Boys, home-schoolers. Thanks for a great job fellas! Let us know if your home-schoolers want to contribute any research/writing to our model pages.
Bodie, California is an interesting place, named after one of its discoverers, W.S. Body (yes Body not Bodie.) The hotel was the center of all the mystery of this old west town. Some parts of town look like something out of the Twilight Zone. It's like everyone just vanished, which is pretty much what happened. That's the really compressed version of the story. If you want all the story keep reading.
In 1856 a group of four prospectors found gold In California north of Mono Lake. After that, nearby prospectors heard of this and came to help mine it, from the goodness of their hearts of course. Then an unexpected blizzard hit them, freezing and killing one of the four founders, W.S. Body. In honor of their fellow comrade they named their mining outpost, "Don’t freeze like Body did." and then shortened it to "Body" That was the name of the little town until a painter from another town misspelled one of the stable signs “Bodie Stables” and that’s the beginning of the town of Bodie.
Several financially backed companies purchased, stole, or killed (whichever you want) claims in the town of Bodie, but none prevailed. They abandoned their mines and the district's first two stamp mills in 1868. The town economy languished for several years after that. The rugged terrain put forth just enough gold to keep a few lucking prospectors hopeful of striking it rich some day. In 1875 a mine called Bunker Hill caved in, revealing gold and silver ore, and attracting ravenous San Francisco speculators. One group of capitalists purchased the claim that had Bunker Hill on it. Their gamble paid off when the company produced $784,523 in gold and silver bullion during 1877. That turned the struggling mining town into a booming one right quick. Fortune seekers came and built ram-shackled houses and stables while the big wigs sold stock to eager investors.
That's how four (minus one) prospectors started a booming, rough, godless, gold town named after Wakeman S. Body who froze his tuckus off in a blizzard.