Invasion

In 1833 the explorer Joseph Reddeford Walker trekked east to west across the Great Basin. On its way to "discovering" Yosemite Valley (probably) and the giant sequoias (certainly), the party visited an alkali lake. It is tempting to identify that lake as Mono; historians doubt it, however. The indisputable American entry into the region came remarkably late, in 1852. In June, Lieutenant Tredwell Moore of the U.S. Army went into the Sierra after Miwok Indians who had reportedly attacked prospectors on the Merced River. Following the Indian trade trail through the high country, he learned that Chief Teneiya, the object of his pursuit, had moved on ahead of him, into the Mono Basin. Sometime that summer—the exact date is not known—Moore crossed Mono Pass and descended the abrupt east flank of the Sierra to the Mono Basin floor. The party found no Chief Teneiya; they had some friendly Contact with the Kuzedika, gave the lake its modern name, and sampled some gravels that seemed to promise gold.

In August the Stockton Journal told the story. By fall, one Leroy Vining, after whom the town of Lee Vining was later named, was prospecting in the basin. He had no luck and switched to logging, but other miners struck it rich. A series of gold and silver rushes brought to the basin populations much larger than today's.

Most of the action was north of the lake, in the gaunt Bodie Hills that spread east from Conway Summit. The first boom was in 1857 at Dogtown, on the north slope of those hills, just outside the Mono Lake drainage. The second, in 1859, was nearer the lake at a place called Monoville or Mono Diggings, the first proper town east of the Sierra crest and south of Lake Tahoe. Local streams had too little water to wash the gravels, so ditches were dug to tap Virginia Creek on the north side of the hills—a diversion into the Mono Basin that continues to this day. Then the miners' attention shifted to Bodie, near the crest of the little range in a chilly and windswept bowl. The fourth boom was in silver and produced Aurora, farther east along the range. After a few quiet years, the excitement returned to Bodie and outdid itself. During the early 1880s Bodie was the hub of the region. It was also infamous for gunfights, murders, and prostitution. An apocryphal story has a little girl in Truckee saying in her prayers, "Goodbye, God, I'm going to Bodie."

With Bodie booming, any number of satellite mining districts opened up, especially on the Sierra side of the lake. There were little towns, ambitious while they lasted, up Mill Creek (Lundy Canyon) and near the headwaters of Lee Vining Creek.

At its height, Bodie had a population of well over 5,000. A local agriculture grew up to sustain it. So did a local lumber industry. In 1879 a five-ton steamer was hauled from

Image not available.

The ghost town of Bodie, onetime economic
capital of the Mono Basin.
(Photo by Gerda S. Mathan)

San Francisco to the lake to tow lumber barges across from Lee Vining Canyon. The next year Bodie interests constructed a narrow-gauge railroad around the east side to reach the vast Jeffrey pine forest on the south shore. Extensions were planned to link this local line with other western railroads, but they never materialized.

The birds, too, helped sustain the mining towns. The red-necked phalaropes, known as "Mono Lake pigeons," were hunted for the pot. Egging expeditions went out to Negit and in a few years greatly reduced what had been a large gull population, if contemporary impressions can be trusted. In 1860, gull eggs sold for seventy-five cents a dozen.

As for the lack of fish, the settlers quickly rectified that. Freight wagons with water barrels carried Lahontan cutthroat trout up and down the region, stocking streams. After 1900, hatchery-raised trout of several species were planted; the German brown trout naturalized best and came to dominate in most local waters.

The boom at Bodie was a brief one, but the town flickered on. In 1917 the logging camp at Mono Mills was abandoned, and with it the railroad. In 1932 a fire put a final stop to operations in Bodie itself.

Today, the sites of Dogtown, Aurora, Mono Mills, and Lundy are identified only by historical markers. Monoville is a scatter of scars and foundations; you need a local guide to find it. At Bodie, about one-twentieth of the buildings survive, preserved in Bodie State Historic Park, perhaps the most visited ghost town in the world. In a mod-

Image not available.

For fifty years after 1859, mining was the key
activity in the Mono Basin. (Adapted from a
map created by Thomas C. Fletcher for
Paiute, Prospector, Pioneer.)

ern twist, preservationists have recently worked to prevent further and presumably less picturesque mining in the region around Bodie.