“They came in search of gold and dreams of a better life, and here they remain.”  ~Loni Patterson

The year was 1859 and gold was not as plentiful as reports had indicated.  All the easy placer gold on the western slope of the sierra was long gone, picked clean by the 49ers.  The California gold rush was still luring prospectors with the possibility of hitting the mother lode and striking it rich. Then word came to the mining camps that gold was struck in Bodie! People of every sort packed up, lock, stock and barrel and headed for the eastern slope of the Sierra, to the Comstock Lode to seek their fortune.

We must have passed the sign a dozen times over the years: Bodie 13 miles. We always said, “We’ll have to go to Bodie one of these days.” Well, “one of these days” finally came and we visited Bodie. The first ten miles of paved road got us past the point of no return. We couldn’t change our minds now. Not after we’d come so far. So we drove our up-to-this-point-clean Avalon over the washboard dirt road for the next three miles, dodging pot holes and small boulders. We were not disappointed when the ghost town of Bodie came into view. I was expecting a dozen or so remnants of a cowboy town. What we saw was a hundred or more buildings including an entire main street with several saloons, hotels, hardware stores, fire house, churches, a school and dozens and dozens of homes. Astonishingly, the buildings remaining are only 5% of what once stood on the site in 1880 when the population was 10,000 people. We took a walking tour through the town. I recommend the tour booklet (available for 2 bucks) which includes a map and a paragraph of history about many of the buildings.

With the discovery of gold, the town of Bodie sprung up overnight. Gold was being extracted from hard rock mines where the gold is encased in quartz veins deep within the earth. To reach these veins, miners had to sink shafts deep into the ground and work thousands of feet below the surface. Miles of tunnel were dug underground and shored up with timber from the nearby mountains. Miners blasted and dug their way through the mountain, and descended in cage-like elevators, to fill buckets and ore cars with quartz rock. The work was dangerous. Cave-ins, explosions, toxic fumes, and flooding injured and killed many. The mine produced about a hundred million dollars in gold.

Miners, not exactly known for their thrift, would emerge from the mines and proceed to drink away their day’s wages. Bodie had 65 saloons and many brothels in its heyday. It was notorious for wickedness, bad men and “the worst climate out of doors”.  One little girl, whose parents were headed for Bodie, wrote in her diary “Good-bye God, I’m going to Bodie.”

Most folks brought by the lure of gold did not strike it rich, but became merchants, hotel keepers and civic leaders. They earned their living providing a service in their community. With the closing of the mines at the onset of World War II, the school and the post office were also soon closed and the last residents left town. The buildings remain in a state of “arrested decay” each with a rich history of the people who lived, worked and raised their families. And many of them are laid to rest in the Bodie cemetery.

(Thank to my wonderful husband, John Paladini, for this post.)

How do you float a barge over a mountain range? That was the challenge in upstate New York in 1817. Navigating a boat over Appalachian Mountains sparked the spirit of American ingenuity, and the Erie Canal was conceived. A waterway from Lake Erie to the Hudson River that would lift a barge 500 feet would provide a way to deliver goods and produce from rural inland farms to the growing metropolitan cities.

Immigrants from Ireland, England and Germany flocked to America, the land of opportunity, to work on the project. They carved the 363-mile-long, and 40-foot-wide canal using picks, shovels and horse carts as it was before the days of motorized equipment.

We recently took a ride on the Erie Canal out of a little town called Lockport, New York. We learned that the canal has a total of 85 locks. A lock is a chamber the boat enters and is locked in by water gates. The lock is then filled with river water, diverted from upstream, until the boat is raised 25 feet. Once the water level in the lock is equal to the water level of the river, the gates part and are opened. It is amazing that no pumps or any kind of machinery are needed to raise the boat. The simple physics of gravity and buoyancy do all the work. Even the weight of the water pressure holds the gates closed until the pressure on each side of the gate is equal. Then they can be easily opened and the boat or barge can continue on its way. As you travel along the canal you can see many churches and homes built with “free stone” which is the material that was excavated during construction of the canal, free to anyone who wanted it.

Barges were the most practical way to move heavy loads from one place to another. They were pulled along the canal by mules at a speed of about 2.3 miles per hour. They covered about 55 miles in a 24 hour period so the trip took about 6 1/2 days. Later the railroad came, and could haul freight at a speedy 30 miles per hour. Competing for business, the railroad even built “up-side-down” railroad trestles over the canal to limit the height of the load a barge could carry. “Low bridge, everybody down” became a familiar call. Ultimately the canal system couldn’t compete and the railroad became the standard way of hauling freight.

Today the Erie Canal is used mostly for recreation and pleasure cruising. People rent houseboats that are replicas of the early canal boats, and cruise for their family vacation. But the canal was one of the key elements in the early commercial success of the United States and an important step in our nation’s expansion west.

(Thanks to my husband John Paladini for this great blog post.)