Ghost towns, those problematic faves. I’m a fifth-generation Californian, which means, among other things, that I love the open road, and if my route takes me remotely near a ghost town, I can’t help but go. Part history text, part Disneyland ride, part crime scene, part ruin—all bolstering a whitewashed version of the California dream.
This article appears in Issue 29 of Alta Journal.
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My all-time favorite is Bodie, situated 13 miles off the lonesome 395 down a dirt road (not accessible in winter unless you have a snowmobile) in the great windswept bowl of the eastern Sierra. This was once one of the largest towns in California and one of the most murderous towns in the West. Its heyday was short-lived but exuberant. Founded in 1859 by prospectors, Bodie had swelled to 8,000 people by 1880 and was all but abandoned after the Great Depression hit. Visit it today, though, and the story you learn is that of its brief, gilded boom: the era of stagecoaches and stagecoach robberies, when men dug gold from the ground in hunks, when the red-light district hummed all night and all kinds of grifters, gamblers, ne’er-do-wells, and down-on-their-luck-ers tried to make it rich.
But this is a story it tells mostly through ruins. For Bodie is all just remnant buildings, evocation, and dust—a museum of its former self administered by the California Department of Parks and Recreation and funded in large part by tax dollars. As the parks department likes to put it, Bodie has been “preserved in a state of arrested decay.”
That’s the thing about ghost towns: their liminal state—just enough of a physical framework of the past to imagine it into life—both evokes and perpetuates the mythic. In this space, history can remain kitschy and larger-than-life and good old-timey western fun. Any preservation project is a project of messaging. It answers the question: Which story of the past do we want this space to tell?
When I was growing up in the 1990s, California history was taught as a matter of great pride. We learned about the early explorers, the Spanish missions, the pioneers and the prospectors and the boomtown barons—all heroic features of a wondrous state built from grit and dreams.
Our teachers took us on field trips to Sutter’s Mill, where gold was discovered; to an old miners’ camp north of Calistoga, where we searched for Native American arrowheads as if they were curiosities to be pillaged; to a ghost town outside Nevada City, where, together with the place’s remains, we conjured this glorious, sanitized past. The missions? No mention of the widespread abuses or enslavement that took place there—for they brought Christianity and beautiful architecture to this otherwise barren state! Native Americans? They were people who had foraged acorns a long, long time ago and who’d sadly mostly died away. (A violent lie, of course, on multiple levels: California is home to the largest number of Indigenous people in the country, in spite of the rampant disease, forced labor, and genocide their forebears faced at the hands of newcomers of European descent.)
In the years since I was a student, the state history curriculum has undergone a much-needed makeover, but I still wonder how my daughter—a sixth-generation Californian—will learn about her state, her ancestors, her past.
Ghost towns are both exercises of the imagination and narrations of the past, for they invite us to picture the lives once lived among the ruins while also closely guiding what we envision. In this way, they serve as monuments to early California—not to history. The ghost town is an artificial memory of the past, yet it is what becomes remembered.
History, after all, is not merely a set of facts but also their interpretations. For instance: Bodie was a place of tremendous environmental degradation, where Indigenous people were murdered and displaced from their homes, and where Chinese workers were horrifically exploited for their labor. But look at the cans on those shelves from when the people up and left! the ghost town shouts from the other direction. Check out these spooky gallows!
We’re blessedly living in an age of toppling and reckoning. One might argue that ghost towns are our state’s most enduring and beloved agents of public memory. But perhaps the most interesting story that these ghost towns tell is that of the gap between popular history and the truth. We have a mandate to seek out ghost towns’ ghosts—not those from synthetic storybooks, but those that have been bound and gagged and pushed out of the frame.•
Lauren Markham is a fiction writer, essayist, and journalist. Her work most often concerns issues related to youth, migration, the environment, and her home state of California. She is the author of The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life and A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging.
