This qualitative study explores how the concept of authenticity is constructed, experienced and employed by visitors and staff in the provocative landscape of the ghost town of Bodie, California. Bodie State Historic Park, once a booming gold‐mining town, now greets some two hundred thousand tourists annually and is widely applauded for its authenticity. In this paper, I explore the meaning of this term in its ghost‐town context: while boom‐town Bodie was a bustling commercial center, ghost‐town Bodie appears abandoned and devoid of commercial activity. Thus, authenticity in a ghost town is not tied to the accuracy with which it represents its past. Yet a version of Bodie's past is what both visitors and staff experience: they employ Bodie's authenticity to engage with the mythic West, a romanticized version of the Anglo‐American past that upholds dominant contemporary Anglo‐American values. Bodie's false‐fronted facades and ramshackle miners' cabins call forth these images, familiar to visitors from movie Westerns. Since ghost towns have few or no residents, it is largely through the landscape and the artifacts that are part of that landscape that these mythic images are experienced. Thus, an experience of authenticity is not the end result of a visit to Bodie; rather, authenticity is a vehicle through which both visitors and staff engage with powerful notions about American virtues. In this paper, I explore how the notion of authenticity is triggered by landscape, and examine the narratives about the past that the concept of authenticity enables.

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Though today it is mostly forgotten, scholars have long written of the impact of Helen Hunt Jackson's 1884 novel Ramona, about how it saturated southern California's landscape with new, Ramona-related tourist attractions and ultimately inspired a romanticized false past for the region. In this article, I reevaluate the landscape, the novel, and those scholarly interpretations, discovering what I consider, not simply a false past, but rather a new social memory for the region, one that was felt and practiced by the tourists (and locals) who visited the many Ramonarelated landmarks. In particular, I explore the creation of two Ramona sites, the ''Home of Ramona'' and ''Ramona's Marriage Place,'' and detail how tourism and boosterism here intertwined to create attractions that were both profitable as well as meaningful. Using tiny traces scavenged in archives and private collections-souvenirs, postcards, photographs, and scrapbooks-I demonstrate how fact and fiction blurred to become mutually constitutive as a new, Ramona-inspired social memory became inscribed on the landscape and in tourists' lives.