Pegleg Smith’s lost black gold

Documented tale of Thomas L. Smith; Pegleg monument and Liars Contest

Thomas Long Smith was born at Crab Orchard, Kentucky, in 1801, ran away as a teenager to work a flatboat down the Mississippi, and in St. Louis went to trapping furs for John Jacob Astor, in the company of mountain men such as Kit Carson, Jim Bridger and Milton Sublette. Scouting for Alexandre Le Grand's expedition into New Mexico, he was shot in the right knee, and the wound and its infection cost him the leg below the knee. He is said to have done most of the amputation himself before passing out; one account has him using a butcher knife, then whittling his own wooden leg. He learned to ride again, used the leg as a club in fights, and was Pegleg for the rest of his life.

By 1840 the fur trade was in decline, and he turned to horses. In one raid he guided some 150 Ute under Walkara across the Sierra Nevada to run off several hundred head from Mexican ranchers, and with Jim Beckwourth and Old Bill Williams he ran the largest horse-stealing ring in the Southwest until it was broken up in the late 1840s. In 1842 he opened a trading post near Big Hill on the Oregon Trail, in what is now Idaho, selling food, supplies and horses to emigrants. One of them, Amos Batchelder, found him in 1849 a fleshy, shrewd-looking man of about 50, as rough as his customers.

Then there was the gold. Smith said that in 1829, crossing from the Colorado River toward the Pacific coast and looking for water, he came on three low black buttes near a volcano in the desert west of the Chocolate Mountains and picked up small, dark, heavy stones from the top of one. In Los Angeles they assayed as gold nuggets coated in desert varnish. He never found the buttes again. Another account has him driven out of the Chocolates by local tribes, after which he began talking up a find of gold-bearing quartz and sold maps and shares in the Lost Pegleg Mine until he died in a San Francisco hospital in 1866.

His monument in Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, California Historical Landmark No. 750, calls him a mountain man, prospector and spinner of tall tales, and allows that the mine could be within a few miles. Beside the plaque on Henderson Canyon Road is a pile of rocks, each added by someone hoping for his gold. Most years the Pegleg Smith Liars Contest gathers storytellers round a chuckwagon in Borrego Springs for five-minute fabrications he would have admired.