Bodie Mining District Township
Bobby Bell- March 9, 1914- January 9, 2003- Bodie, (Mono County) California- Bodie Cemtery
~~~Bodie, California was a gold mining town, a boomtown of enterprise where glamorous Mining Companies hoisted gold and silver out of the holes in the ground. Today, the Bodie Mining District is silent, still and in weathered with 140 years of weathering. Very little remains of the Mining operations, or township that made Bodie Mining District of any notation of importance.
~~Lester Edward Bell was born in Lapinee, Ontario, Canada, in 1860. At the age of 15, in 1875, he left Canada with his good friend James Stuart Cain. The two, young and ambitious, young men set out to strike it rich in America. Arriving in Carson City Nevada, they found employment in the lumberyards supplying Virgina City. Not long after the men began courting two sisters, Delilah and Charity Wells, while residing in Genoa. Lester Edward Bell and Charity (“Cherry”) were married and moved to Bodie in 1879. Lester L. Bell was born January 24, 1888.
~~~When the Standard Consolidated Mining Company suspended operations in 1913, the new owner used the 20-stamp Standard Mill to crush ore for the few lessors still living in town. Lessees (more commonly called leasers) were allowed to take ore from the old workings, and pay a specified percentage of their yield to the Mine Owner. The big companies, once sensations on stock exchanges from San Francisco to New York- had already removed the large ore bodies. The “leassors” found enough value in narrow “stringers” and disregard ledges to provide meager livings for their families.
~~~By the late 1920’s the Stamp Mill was being run by Lester L. Bell and his son, Bobby Bell. Where once a steady stream of mine cars and mules brought ore to the mMll, now the individual leasers used their own trucks to haul ore in small batches at irregular intervals to the Stamp Mill. The “milling machinery crushed the rock”, extracted the gold and silver, and turned the metals into bars of Bullion. If the leaser’s ore was “poor quality—which was often the case- there was not much profit after the cost of the milling was subtracted. “The work was dangerous, grubby, and difficult to make a living working “tired old mines claims.”
~~~By 1930, the Bodie Mining District had declined, and Bodie had become a deserted town. Bob Bell and a few other stalwart individuals hung on to their “hopes.” Even though they resided elsewhere in Mono County, the four or five miners would returned from time to time during the summer months to the hills around Bodie to prospect and stake claims to prospect.
Bob Bell would stay in his old family’s house. It had survived the June 24, 1932 fire which had destroyed ninety percent of the residential township.
Bobby Bell ran the Stamp Mill for the last time in 1935. The Bell Lode was a “pocket of sulfide rock and no gold bearing ledge” and some quartz stringers. It was the closing chapter in the Bodie’s long quest for Gold.