Bodie- Winter Months!

Infant Son- John McMillan, Infant Son- George McMillan- Brothers buried in Bodie Cemetery.

~~~Miners, Women and Infant Children are interred in each of the three separate Cemetery Distinct sections of the Bodie Cemetery. Family plots hold siblings. Single, granite grave monuments have had family members names “added” over two decades time. Parents “wooden markers” have been replaced by their children. (This is only known because it is  engraved on the stone- ERECTED BY WIFE and CHILDREN.) 

~~~By puzzle piecing  the graves in the Cemetery with the “unrepairable, boarded-shut dilapidated buildings” in Bodie, the history of the Bodie Mining District has a richer context. Eight  months out of the year, daily life at the remote, mountain 8,400 elevation was miserable, an uncomfortable —-freezing bitter cold, windswept  place. 

~~ A location with no Sanitation- Outhouses,  No cold or hot running water, No indoor plumbing, only “wood burning heating,”  and cooking on a wood burning stove.

~~Everything that came in-and-out of the Mining Town, (including the gold-bullion leaving,) whiskey, food, firewood and people, came  packed in-out by  Freight-Wagon pulled by a “twenty-mule team”. Due to heavy snowfall or a blizzard, the roads to  and from Bodie were usually  impassable. The blizzards made it impossible to leave the town. The town “closed-down” even in the dark-daylight-hours weeks of Winter and early Spring months. After snow-storms, slush and mud prevailed in prominence all over the town. Difficulty in maintaining “Firewood storage” also complicated the “months of Winter”- freezing conditions, wind chill- also required keeping “Wood Storage” inside, covered-shed and near the house.

~~The Bodie Cemetery has only “full- body burials”- (No cremations ). During the frozen winter months, the corpses were kept “in storage” until the sage-covered ground thawed.  Blasting the frozen-ground was part of digging a grave. The “death date” might have been during a Winter month. The actual day the Casket was lowered into the ground, covered over, and a “proper gravesite ceremony” could have varied, up to  six months later.  The Snow melting determined everything in Bodie!!