Silent & Still- Eternal History
The silent and stillness….BODIE CEMETERY - the hillside scars of mining are all that remain.
The history of Bodie, (Mono County,) California is the history of the BODIE MINERS’ UNION membership.
The history of the founding of the BODIES MINERS’ UNION, is the history of Bodie, (Mono County), California.
With the exception of two things, the Graveyard and the old mining machinery, the isolated and remote 8,379 ft elevation landscape, is unchanged from a 170 years ago. Unclaimed by the harsh winds, freezing or below-zero -temperatures, or Winter snow storms,- neither the Graveyard, or the “collapsed mine shafts” have reverted completely to unrecognizable dust.
The permanent man-made “land scars” made purposely after the discovery of gold bearing ore, are still in full evidence.
The Bodie Mining District was organized July 10, 1861. (It extended five miles in each direction of the Bodey Claim.”) The District recorder put down July 19th, for himself and others “eleven claims of 250 feet each on the Tucker quartz vein, that being the length of a claim in 1861.”
The complete SILENCE of the dynamite blasting and loud Stamp Mill machinery- that could be felt and heard 2 miles in distance are only relics.
Relics of rusted metal remains. Only industry reminders of “the dominant forces of energy” it took to achieve mining gold-bearing ore.
The once-town of Bodie, known only to the men, who drilled, blasted, and tunneled—- has completely reverted “to stillness and quit”- without markings or witness to any “industrial-mining industry.”
A 170 years has passed in time- …and today over a century later-Bodie is just an isolated, high mountain location, that once was a very significant industrial-mining “boom-town” in Mono County.
Bodie is a “State Historic Park.” with unmaintained traces of its “place in history”- with the Bodie Graveyard, “unchanged, silent and still”- telling the only “Written Story of Bodie” with its carved inscriptions of those “who lived, and died in the mines in the Mono County Bodie Mining District.”
The BODIE MINERS’ UNION and its “eternal history” is interred in the Bodie Cemetery.