Waterman S. Body (aka William S. Bodey) discovered gold in the area of present town in 1859. There are two theories as to the misspelling of Mr. Body's name... one that the townsfolk wished to avoid mispronouncing the name and used "ie" instead of a "y", but the more plausible reason was that they couldn't spell very well.

Despite their inability to spell, by 1879 ten thousand other hopefuls had also made the same discovery as the town's namesake... Gold! The boom days for Bodie only lasted twenty-five years, but in that period thirty mines had taken an estimated one hundred million dollars of gold out of the ground.

With winters of forty degrees below zero, winds over one hundred miles an hour, killings a daily occurrence, Bodie was a wicked place. The Rev. F.M. Warrington in 1881 described the town as, "A sea of sin, lashed by the tempest of lust and passion." A popular saying of the 1880's was, "Goodbye God, I'm going to Bodie."

But all the bad men and women of Bodie now are gone, and the town has been designated a state historic park. Now you can walk the streets that once glittered with over sixty saloons, a rather complete red light district, with a main street over a mile long.

Even though the town has been blown up with two tons of dynamite and burned down twice, Bodie was the town too wicked to die.