It was a clear, warm, and sunny day in July of 1960 when we met Ella
Cain. Our family had come to visit Bodie, that ghost town we had heard
so much about. Bodie had the reputation, and a well earned one, of being
the wildest gold camp in the West and we had learned that there remained
a great number of buildings still standing, that we were wanting to see.
We were on vacation and staying in a cabin at Mammoth
Lakes
so we took the shortest route from that direction which took us up the Cottonwood
Canyon
road off of highway 167, the road to Hawthorne.
This road of course was not paved and very rough, and along the way the
muffler on our Mercury sedan broke loose. This did not make my husband
happy.
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The
Bodie schoolhouse as it appears today.
(Photo by Martin Cole) |
This was before Bodie had become a state park and you could still drive
into town. Luckily we spotted a long piece of wire lying beside the road
and that looked like a good temporary fix for the muffler, so we parked
up on
Green
Street
very close to the school building, and my husband got to work fastening
up the muffler.
While he was working on that I noticed that the school door was open. I
took our children with me and entered into the schoolroom. Mrs. Cain was
seated at the front behind the teachers desk. She stood and welcomed us
and told the children and I to be seated at the students desks. She was
very friendly and asked if we had ever been to Bodie before, and then
she proceeded to tell us some of Bodies history, and also that she had
been teaching here in the early 1900s. She showed us books and globes
and many other items that had been in that room for many years. There
were flags and maps, lunch boxes, and even paper mache Jack-O-Lanterns
left from some long ago Halloween celebration. She seemed to enjoy the
visit as much as we did but we, reluctantly, had to leave. We spent
another hour or two walking around the town till we realized that it was
time to head back to our cabin. We vowed to come again, and that promise
has been kept since we have visited Bodie almost every year for over
forty years. It seems as though every time we come we learn something
new about that wonderful old town.
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Ella
Cain |
The
large two story wooden building with the belfry on top was not the first
school in Bodie. The first was most likely the one opened in March of
1878 on Main Street that was taught by Belle Moore, the wife of Ben
Butler who owned a saloon also on Main Street. [i] Then there was one
located about two blocks higher up on Green Street, it is said
that a disgruntled student who did not want to go to school set fire to
it. This newer one had originally been the Bon Ton boarding house that
had been run in 1879 by Mrs. C.A. Ratjohn. Some of the early
teachers were a Mr. Cook and a Mr. McCarty. The school was of the
one-room type with students of all ages and grades. Some of the older
ones were even 16 or 17 years old. [ii]
Ella
Cain was born in Bodie in 1882 as Ella Margaret Cody,
daughter of Michael Joseph [iii] and Catherine (Shaughnessy} Cody.
She had two sisters, Mary and Katherine, and three brothers,
Ralph, Edmond,
and Mervyn. Her maternal grandparents, James and Margaret (Dunn)
Shaughnessy were both born in Ireland
and immigrated to
Hartford,
Connecticut.
They answered the call of the California
gold rush, and went by boat to Panama
where they crossed the Isthmus on mule back, then went by sailing
vessel to San
Francisco.
Catherine, the first of their six children, who would become Ella's
mother, was born in the little mining camp of Howland Flats, Sierra
County,
in 1862.
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Ella
Cain and Mary Cody |
They
later moved to
Virginia
City
and opened a hotel which burned in a big fire in 1875. In 1879 the
family joined the rush to Bodie. Here Catherine married in 1881 M. J.
Cody. [iv] who had come from
Lake
Geneva
Wisconsin
.
He had been appointed under President Grover Cleveland to be the first
Land Office Receiver in that part of the west. [v] He was
stationed in the Land Office, in 1885-86, which was housed in what is
now known as the Wheaton & Hollis Hotel and Bodie Store located on
the northeast corner of
Main
and Green Streets. His duties were to register applications for
the purchase of government land and to receive money for the sale of the
land. The land office was ordered removed to
Independence
in 1886 and Mr. Cody did not wish to move there so that ended that job
for him. [vi] Both before and after that time he worked in the mines. In
an earlier incident, he narrowly escaped death in an accident that
occurred in the Mono Mine. [vii]
In
1888 Ella's father was elected Sheriff of Mono County, so the family
moved to
Bridgeport,
the county seat, where she grew up and attended the local schools.
When she was 14 she was sent away to school for several years to learn
to be a teacher. In 1900 she returned to Bodie to teach as the
intermediate teacher in the grammar school, which employed three
teachers. [viii] She was only 18 years old at that time. In 1904 she
married David Victor Cain, [ix] son of the Bodie pioneers, James Stuart
and Martha (Wells) Cain.
David
Cain's mother went to
Carson
City
in June 1880 for the birth of her first child. She later had three other
sons and one daughter. Jim Cain started out in the lumber business there
in Bodie. Later a lease in the Standard Mine paid off with a rich ledge,
from that time on everything seemed to go right for Jim Cain, and he
then bought the Bodie Bank. He later was instrumental in getting
electricity to Bodie, and other sites in
Mono
County.
He eventually became the town's principal property owner. The J, S. Cain
house is still standing on the northwest corner of Park and Green
Streets. [x] It is one of the nicest and best kept houses there. It has
had almost constant occupation by the family or caretakers and more
recently park rangers.
Ella
and David lived in a house located on the southwest corner of
Fuller
Street
and
Green
Street,
across
Green
St.
from the
Methodist
Church.
This house had been built in 1873.They had three children Helen, Ruth,
and David Jr. In 1913 before David Jr. was born the family moved to Aurora
to take care of Cain interests there. [xi] They remained there four
years before returning to Bodie in 1917.
All
along during the years Ella Cain lived and taught in Bodie, she felt the
need to write the story of her hometown and she began taking notes
whenever there was a gathering of old-timers. She later did some serious
researching and began working on her first book, The Story of Bodie,
in the mid 1930s and it was finally published in 1956. Her
wonderful collection of photos that were included show many houses and
buildings wearing a coat of white paint that has long since disappeared.
At the time that we met her she was working on her second book, The
Story of
Early
Mono
County
.
These
were the first books written about Bodie and most likely the most
trusted. She said in her books that the ghost town of Bodie will in the
near future become a State Park, as it did in 1962.
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A
window at the Bodie schoolhouse. (Photo by Roger Vargo) |
Ella
Cain died at age 83, on
January
28 1966
in Bridgeport
where she and her family had been living for years after they left
Bodie. She was buried in the Bridgeport
Cemetery
next to her daughter Ruth who had died in 1958. She was survived by her
husband David, son David Jr. and daughter Helen, their families and two
sisters. [xii]
The
town of Bodie had two disastrous fires, one in 1892, and the last one in
1932, both of which destroyed many buildings, both business and
residential. There were other fires too that took out one or two
buildings at a time. Then as the mines played out and the wars came
people began to leave town and it quietly folded up except for a very
few persistent residents. The Cain family ended up owning what was left
and they hired caretakers to live in town year round to be sure that the
remaining buildings were not vandalized. Members of the Cain family took
turns relieving the caretaker for a day off now and then, and it was on
such a day that we came to Bodie and met its most famous teacher and
historian Ella Margaret (Cody) Cain.
Bibliography
[i] >From Bodie
1859-1900 by Frank S. Wedertz
[ii] From Ella M. Cain's book The Story of Bodie. Pg. 183
[iii] Mrs. Cain referred to her father as M.J. Cain His full name,
Michael Joseph is found in a Shaughnessy Family Genealogy by Dick
Kurt
[iv] From Ella M. Cain's book The Story of Early Mono County, pg
iii And pg vi in her Story of Bodie. And also from
Dick Kurt's genealogy Shaughnessy Family Bodie Pioneers
(Dick Kurt is a grandson of Ellas daughter Helen)
[v] pg 185 Story of Bodie
[vi] pg 185 Story of Bodie, and Frank Werdertz book Bodie
1859-1900 also California State Park brochure Bodie
state Historic Park
[vii] pg.190 Wedertz book
[viii] pg iv Story of Bodie
[ix] Story of Mono County pg iii
[x] Location of buildings found in the State Park Brochure and Guide
to Bodie an historical illustrated map
[xi] Story of Mono County pg. iv
[xii] Obituary from Bridgeport newspaper.
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