If there was a central theme to the great California Gold Rush, besides greed, it was movement.

Rumor spread through a mining camp that there was more plentiful gold up the river, or over the hill; so the miners who were wet and tired looked to that more golden pasture, picked up their belongings, packed their tents if they had them, and moved.

Leaving behind what they couldn't move, the miners created a landscape of ghost towns which decayed or burned and sometimes survived.

Bodie, just over the Sierra Nevada Mountains from the Nevada City, Grass Valley gold producing area, is one of the few that still exists. Sort of.

Now a state historical park, only a small part of the town survives, preserved in what is called a state of "arrested decay." The last of its 10,000 residents left 50 years ago.

The high desert country of Nevada became a favored destination of miners as placer yields from the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada Mountains declined.

One small girl whose family was moving to Nevada wrote in her diary, "Good-bye God, I'm going to Bodie."

In 1877 the Standard Mining Company made a hugely rich gold and silver strike near Bodie. Soon the town had sixty saloons and dance halls. Every other building on the mile-long main street was a saloon. Seven breweries worked day and night. Whiskey was brought in by horse wagon, 100 barrels at a time.

Bodie became known as the most lawless, wildest, toughest mining camp in the West.

As it does, the precious metal ran out and businesses were abandoned. Bodie's boom was over in four years.

In 1932 a boy less than three years old, playing with matches, set the fire that destroyed all but the remaining 10 percent of Bodie's wooden buildings.

Back on the western side of the mountains, places in Nevada County like You Bet, named after the town saloon keeper's favorite phrase, can sometimes be found on maps, but not in reality.

W.A. Chalfant sums it up well in the conclusion of his book Gold, Guns, and Ghost Towns.

He writes, "Nature's work of removing the puny intrusions of mankind will advance without interference, and the place will become almost as if it had never been. Bits of glass glittering in the sand, a scrap of rusted iron, a partly filled old excavation, an old ore dump, or the yawning mouth of a tunnel will cause some wanderer to wonder what camp this was. Sagebrush will grow in the soil that fills the ruts of old-time traffic, and the coyote and lizard will have the solitude for their own."

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Copyright Don Baumgart, 2008