Bodie's Heros: Wrapping Up at the Church

Happy Christmas Eve!

I hope you got your shopping done and are wrapping up the gifts because I am going to be wrapping this Bodie one up.

Yesterday, I showed the Ella Cain house. This shows you that Ella's place, to the left, was right in front of the church.
The last time I talked about the church, and also in the video, I mentioned how the 10 commandments were eventually stolen from it. Here is how it looked with them.

This is the picture I used in the last blog about this.
Finally, one of my dad's old pictures looking to the north of Bodie.

This ends this series on Bodie. As I said when I started this, although I do like this ghost town, there is so much out there online and in print that I really do not feel like I will, or need to, revisit this town on this blog again. If there ever is then I will come back and edit something into one of these blogs I have done in the past. One thing I think I have mentioned before is that Bodie usually is one of the coldest places in California and sometimes the whole U.S. As I write this the place is probably snowed in from all the snow the Eastern Sierra has had.

Bodie's Heroes (Youtube Version)

The music for the three videos from Incompetech: Smoking Gun

Bodie's Heroes: The Two Cain's

I thought I would briefly mention two Bodie persons.

This is James Stuart Cain:

This was his nice place. He owned and invested a lot in Bodie. He was into everything from mining, lumbering, banking, etc. In fact, you can see in the Hell's Heroes movie his name is on the window of the bank as Cain & Sons.
One of Cain's sons was David V. Cain. David eventually married Ella Cody.
This is where they lived. Ella went away to school then eventually came back to be a teacher at Bodie. She went on to write The Story of Bodie and The Story of Mono County. I have seen her gravesite in Bridgeport and thought I had a picture of it, but cannot find it at this time. I will come back here with it in the future.

Bodie's Heroes (Youtube Version)

Bodie's Heroes: The School

I wanted to be sure to mention some things about the school at Bodie. Here is an old picture with the students out in front.
While it was used as a school it was the highest elevated school in California at an elevation of 8,300 ft. The original school was burned down by a bitter student not too long after it first opened in the late 1870's. This building you see was originally a living quarters, but was adapted into the school. The school in Bodie started off with a small amount of students, but eventually had over 600 students enrolled during the boom town years of the late 1870's to early 1880's. The average attendence was just over 100 students a day though. The reason being many families had chores to be taken care of around home, or they had to work to support their familes as well.

These pictures are a bunch I took a few years ago. The following are through the glass windows.
When I was young I remember looking through these windows and seeing the math problems on the chalkboard. You may want to click the picture above to see it at a bigger size for this. There are a couple of basic math facts that are obviously wrong. I had always wondered if those were just put up intentionally like that. My dad always told me that as far as he remembered they were always like that.
The teacher's desk above. A little further back in the classroom below.
I thought I would throw in a picture my dad took in the 1950's of the school looking north.

Around 1943 the school ended its program since most had moved away from Bodie. There was really no one left to teach.

Bodie's Heroes (Youtube Version)

Bodie's Heroes: The Jail

This is the final phase of my most recent, and hopefully, last series on Bodie. This is the jail:

John Wayne was here in the early 1970's for a tv special. You can see him standing outside the jail.
This is the barred window he was looking in.
This would be the perspective John Wayne had above looking into the jail.
This is from the other side of the jail. You can see how I got here in the video.
This picture was taken in the museum and shows the key to the jail.

In the video I mentioned the only hanging that took place in Bodie by a vigilante group. There were only three vigilante uprisings in Bodie. If you want all the details then you need read the book listed below by Roger McGrath. I will just give a quick summary based on his book which is my favorite Bodie book.

The problem in this one was the jealousy of Thomas Treloar regarding his wife Joanna and Joseph DeRoche. Thomas and Joanna had been married for two years, but DeRoche had known Joanna for many years prior to her marriage. DeRoche also had a family that was living in Chicago while he was working in Bodie.

There had been some jealousy prior to the night of January 13, 1881. Thomas and Joanna had many verbal fights and on one occassion Thomas hit Joanna which caused him to be convicted of assault during the first year of their marriage. On this January night at the special event in the Miner's Hall he told her to stay away from DeRoche. Later that night Thomas saw them dancing together, but was warned not to stir up any trouble there. Thomas and DeRoche had some words and Thomas left.

At the end of the dance Thomas came back for his wife, but he and DeRoche left together. It was at this time that DeRoche shot him in the back of the head while walking down the street. Two witnesses saw what had happened. This is where things got a little strange because DeRoche claimed that he was being attacked at the time. Since the two eyewitnesses saw him kill Thomas no one was going to buy that story.

DeRoche was arrested and put in the Bodie jail. Like a lot old west violence, if you killed a bad man no one would really care, but the problem is DeRoche had killed a person that many in town had some sympathy for. Thomas had fallen down in a mine and was thought to have some brain damage. So, he was not really considered a threat.

The law enforcement in Bodie realized that vigilante activity might happen so they took DeRoche out of the jail cell and transferred him to the deputy's own room in town. During the night DeRoche found a way to free himself of the shackles and escaped. When people of Bodie heard the story of this and the murder they were infuriated. Vigilance groups were formed and sent to find DeRoche.

It would take a few days for this to all play out, but DeRoche was found eight miles away hiding with a family. He was brought back to the jail. They started the legal proceedings, but later in the day the hundreds of citizens were ready to take justice into their own hands. They did not like the idea of the possibility of DeRoche getting off on this one. That night the vigilante group, Bodie 601, came to the jail and got DeRoche. The law enforcement did not even try to prevent it. They set up the hanging spot right where Thomas Treloar was murdered. DeRoche accepted his fate bravely, and he was hanged.

Bodie's Heroes (Youtube Version)

McGrath Roger. Gunfighters, Highwaymen, & Vigilantes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984)