The ghost town of Bodie, California. Dreamstime Every morning, it seemed, another man would turn up dead on the dusty streets of Bodie. The "bad men from Bodie," as newspapers in the 1800s called them, were notorious for their profanity, deception, whiskey-fueled rage and most of all, for their cold-blooded shot. Word spread that the gold-mining boomtown ate men for breakfast. Or so the story goes. "The oath of the Bad Man from Bodie is like the cheerful warning of the rattlesnake, and like that warning the blow follows close upon its heels," wrote E.H. Clough in an 1880 edition of the Sacramento Bee.