You don't need a time machine to plunge into the atmosphere of the American Wild West. It is enough to go to the foot of the Sierra Nevada in the town of Boudie. Once upon a time during the gold rush, life was in full swing in it. He was the center of crime and lawlessness. But at one point everything changed.
During the California gold rush in the middle of the 19th century, William Bodie was one of the first to go to the Wild West in search of wealth. After several weeks of hard work, he was lucky: he came across the largest gold mine in the Sierra Nevada. Throwing a shovel, Boudie rushed to the nearest village to register the site. After "staking" him officially, he bought a couple of bottles of whiskey in the saloon and went back to the mountains - to get his wealth. Having celebrated the gift of fate alone in a leaky tent, Bodie fell asleep in sweet dreams about the beautiful life that awaited him in the future. But these dreams were not destined to come true in reality. The next morning, William Bodie never got up from his bed: his body could not stand pneumonia, cold and stress.
Such an insidious smile of fate shocked the harsh miners. They named the village that grew near the gold mine after the deceased gold digger. And in 1876, another gold deposit was discovered nearby, and the town of Boudie began to grow by leaps and bounds. In four years its population increased to 10 thousand.
It was fun in Bodie, where you could drink whiskey in sixty-five saloons at any time of the day or night, have fun in the red-light district and forget after a pipe of opium in Chinatown. True, due to hard work, indiscriminate drunkenness and the habit of grabbing a Colt to resolve any dispute, almost a third of the population soon found a place in the cemetery. Murders, robberies, shootings, street fights are common here. Bodey has a reputation for being a "city of sins." A local priest, the Reverend Father Warrington, described this city in a very figurative way: "A sea of sin, lust and lawlessness." The notoriety for this place quickly spread throughout America. The Bad Man from Bodie is a collective image of a terrible criminal with whom parents frightened naughty children.
The flourishing of the town was rapid but brief. Gold and silver became less and less, and a terrible fire at the beginning of the last century destroyed most of the buildings. People just started to leave.
Perhaps it was not only the crisis in the gold mining industry that forced the people of Bodie to leave their city. He was simply permeated with an aura of misery. By the 60s of the twentieth century, there were only five people left who did not believe in any curses. And they paid dearly for it. All of them did not die natural death. First, one of them shot his wife, then three others dealt with the murderer. But his ghost did not allow them to live in peace. And soon the remaining three died from a mysterious unrecognized disease.
However, the city retained its aura even without people. Tour guides first of all inform tourists about the "Bodie curse", which is that any object in this city is deadly. If someone takes even a pebble or a sliver as a souvenir, then he will inevitably be overtaken by a series of all sorts of misfortunes and troubles. And most of the sights here have a shade of tragedy. Like, for example, the grave of "Angel Bodie" - a three-year-old boy who died in a mine that his father wanted to show him.
Of course, tourists do not want to leave without souvenirs. And then they return the things taken away by mail and complain about damage.
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From the book: "The Cursed Places of the Planet." Yuri Podolsky