Mark Twain at one time resided in Aurora and engaged in his humorous exaggerations. His cabin there, which even in 1878, when Wasson wrote his _Bodie and Esmeralda_, had become somewhat mythical, was recently located and moved to Reno, Nevada, where it is now exhibited. At any rate, an Aurora cabin was found which might have been occupied by Mark Twain. One part of the original Mark Twain cabin certainly did not reach Reno, according to the _Mammoth Times_ of December 6, 1879. Bob Howland, who had lived with Mark Twain in Aurora, returned to their old domicile in 1879 and took down the flagpole. He had it made into canes, which he distributed among his friends. The truly important activity in the Esmeralda region prompted the building of the Sonora Pass wagon road. The Mono County supervisors ordered that road bonds on the “Sonora and Mono road” be issued on November 5, 1863. The road was projected in 1864 and opened to travel in 1868.[11] Bodie, in the meantime, had not given up the ghost, although only a comparatively few miners occupied the camp. From its discovery until 1877 an average of twenty votes were polled each year. In 1878, however, the Bodie Mining Company made a phenomenally rich strike of gold and silver ore, and the entire mining world was startled. Stock jumped from fifty cents to fifty-four dollars a share. The news swept all Western camps like wildfire, and by 1879 Bodie’s crowd and reputation were such that the little girl’s prayer of “Good-by, God! I’m going to Bodie” was representative of the opinion held by contemporaries. Even W. S. Body, whose body had moldered in a rocky grave for nearly twenty years, was not undisturbed by the activity. In 1871 J. G. McClinton had discovered the forgotten Body grave while searching for a horse. He made no move to change the burial site, however, until some one of Bodie’s several newspapers launched erroneous reports of the whereabouts of Body’s remains. In the fall of 1879 McClinton and Joseph Wasson exhumed the skeleton, exhibited it to Bodie’s motley populace, and then gave it an elaborate burial, not excluding an eloquent address by Hon. R. D. Ferguson. Now these honored bones occupy a grave that is quite as neglected as the sage-grown niche in which they originally rested, but at least they share a place with the other several hundred dead disposed of in Bodie’s forgotten cemetery.