Pegleg Smith
Pegleg Smith was one of those frontier characters who seemed to live half in truth and half in tall tales. His real name was Thomas Long Smith, born around 1801 in Kentucky. Like so many restless young men of his day, he drifted west toward St. Louis and joined the fur trade. He learned to trap, fight, and survive in the wilderness, roaming through what are now Colorado, Utah, and California.The nickname “Pegleg” came after a bad accident while he was out trapping—some say an Indian attack, others say he shot himself by mistake. However it happened, his leg was shattered beyond repair. Without any doctors around, he had the limb amputated, supposedly by his own hand or with help from companions. He carved a crude wooden leg and went right back to living rough. The story goes that he sometimes used that peg as a club in fights, and that he could outdrink, outcuss, and outbluff almost anyone in the Rockies.
When the fur trade began to dry up, Pegleg turned to another trade—horse stealing. He joined forces with Ute and Paiute raiders, including the notorious chief Walkara, leading long expeditions into California to steal horses from Mexican ranchos. They’d drive hundreds of horses over the desert and mountains, trading them in Utah or the northern territories for goods and weapons. These raids made him both feared and famous, depending on who was telling the story.
But Pegleg Smith is best remembered for his supposed discovery of a lost gold mine somewhere in the California desert, often said to be in or near today’s Anza-Borrego region. He claimed to have found black-coated nuggets on a rocky butte, then couldn’t—or wouldn’t—find the place again. Over the years he sold maps and stories to anyone willing to pay, though none ever struck it rich. The “Lost Pegleg Mine” became one of the Southwest’s great treasure legends, retold and searched for by prospectors and dreamers ever since.
In his later years, Smith ran a trading post for emigrants on the Oregon Trail, swapping goods and spinning yarns about his adventures. He died in 1866 in San Francisco, still half outlaw, half legend.
Today, there’s a monument to him near Borrego Springs, California, where travelers leave stones at a small cairn and storytellers gather once a year for the “Pegleg Smith Liars’ Contest.” It’s a fitting tribute. Pegleg lived the kind of life that mixed fact and fancy so thoroughly that the two could never quite be separated—just as he probably liked it.
