Goodbye God, I'm Going to Bodie

A Boy’s Journal about Life in a 1879 California Gold Rush Boomtown

by LeAnn Leyden - Hearst Elementary - San Diego USD

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September 1879

“Goodbye God. I’m going to Bodie.” That’s the most famous words ever said about this place I live in. Some calls it lawless and dangerous. That’s only if you get worked up over shootings and killings and other everyday happenings in this boom town. But if anyone asked me, I’d just tell ‘em I like Bodie just as it is, nice and lively-like.

I go by the name William, but everyone here calls me Billy. I’m eleven years old and I’ve seen more of this country than most old folks. I came here with my pa after ma died. He got gold fever and we’re going to be rich. Pa works sunup to sundown in the Esmerelda mine.

Back when pa was a boy, gold was found on the American river. A body could just pick up nuggets out of the streams. Nowadays, the easy nuggets are gone and you have to dig deep in the ground to get the gold or silver. The men now mine together and work for wages instead of gold nuggets, but they can still get rich by owning stock in the mine.

I wish more than anything I was there too, blasting and a-shoveling
instead of sitting in this schoolhouse making fancy letters as pretty as you please. When I heard the cry, “Good Bye God. I’m going to Bodie,” and pa told me it was time for us to head there too…well there wasn’t
no happier boy east of the Sierra Nevada. But now here I am, squashed under this wooden desk, fingers aching from all the ciphering and such, and all I has to say is this: Good Bye God. I’m going to…school.

Today Miz Buell, the school teacher told us to write about where we live. I don’t see no point in that, but I ain’t the teacher. There ain’t nothing too special about this outpost so far as I can tell. It was called Bodie after a prospector who found gold when he was out shooting rabbit for his dinner. They say he froze to death in a blizzard not long after. Don’t that beat all? The old man ended up buried in the hills of gold he discovered.

It’s bare here. Nothing but the wind howling through the scrub brush
and dry hills. But underneath—and once in a while, right on top—gold and silver runs like metal ribbons through the rock. That’s what makes Bodie special. And I suspect as soon as she’s a tapped out, this here will be a ghost town.

For October, it’s dang cold already. But I don’t let on I’m chilled or I’ll be called a sissy and have to fight it out. Tennessee never got like this. The old timers say this is nothing and their bones tell them it’s a gonna
be a bad winter this year. I hope not. Firewood is about as rare as eggs around these parts since the China men and the Piutes have to haul it by mule from Mono Lake.

Pa hopes we can move out of our tent camp into one of the hotels soon. A buck and a half for a real bed and two cooked meals a day—if you can find it. We’ll be living like proper kings soon. We just got to wait for a couple of drunk miners to pick each other off in a gun fight and we’ll be sleeping like royals.

This journal’s a getting to be a regular-like job though it beats me what else there is to tell besides the knifings, card cheats, and fist fights. All that’s mostly interesting to the undertaker. His business is right perky.

School ain’t so bad since I got moved next to the wood stove in the middle of the room. In the morning I stack a pile of logs, nice and tidy-like, for the teacher and she lets me tug the rope to ring the bell.

Some of the bigger boys like to sneak a smoke down by the Union Hall and boast about how they’re going to burn this school house to the ground. I sure hope to be around to see that sight! It is so dry, it wouldn’t surprise me if the whole town goes down too, like a row of flaming dominoes.

Now that I think of it, I’d a be pretty upset to see the U.S. Hotel burn, now that we got ourselves a comfortable room. The bed bugs are tolerable, the rats are almost as friendly as pets. I gotta say, Bodie ain’t a bad place at all to raise a boy.

December 1879

Eureka! I got me a job! I’m a gen-u-wine, bonafide, telegraph messenger boy! After school I get to deliver messages all over town, up to the mines and mills, even to the places young boys ain’t supposed to see—like the gambling houses and dance halls.

Telegraph messenger is the best job a boy could ever want. It could only be topped if I got paid to fish…now that’d be something! As messenger boy, I see a lot of what’s a going on in this boom town, mostly things a boy ought not be seeing. But pa would be happy to know that no one has tried to lead me astray.That’s likely why he lets me keep the job—well, that and the money!

January 1880

I have never seen the likes of this blizzard blowing through Bodie and I hope to never again. I will not forget this rash of storms in all my days. Snowdrifts are piled so high that tunnels snake out from all the cabins. Temperatures are twenty, forty, even sixty degrees below zero. It is hard to describe such cold. Outside, it hurts something fierce just to take a breath. The wind against my skin is like knives. Wet hair will freeze and snap off like a dried-out stalk of wheat. Hundreds have died from illness and exposure. The church bell rings too often, meaning another soul has gone to his maker.

May 1880

Did I tell you about the original schoolhouse that was burned down by a boy who decided he didn’t want no part of reading, writing, and arithmetic? It was two years ago, ancient history in a place like this, and that boy is now long gone. We’re plenty lucky he didn’t burn down the whole town. Most every building here is built of planks sucked tinder-dry by the wind and sun. It would only take one small fire and Bodie would have been no more—just ashes and a few rock and mortar foundations and some rough-and tumble memories.

June 1880

Pa says it’s time to pull up stakes and try our luck up near Carson City. He says the mines here are beginning to peter out and it is only a matter of time before this is nothin’ but ghost town, or a name in a history book. I’m a little sad to leave but maybe pa will let me help him prospect now that I’m older. So good bye God... I’m going from Bodie. May I never forget her.