PEG LEG
SMITH

FOUNTAIN SPRINGS
OLD STAGE ROAD
Ducor, California

I created these web pages just because I was here in 1983.
I can say I walked in the steps of these wonderful explorers.
Vern Bouwman - HISTORIAN!

Over the years, many treasure seekers, folks armed with the latest metal detector and back issues of Desert Magazine, have ventured into the lower deserts of California searching for
The lost gold mine of Thomas L. (Pegleg) Smith.

PEG LEG
SMITH

Peg Leg MARKERs

His tale of riches, repeated numerous times over the years, goes something like this: While on a beaver trapping expedition in Arizona, Smith and a companion reached the Colorado River near what is now Yuma Arizona and from there proceeded across California's desolate and uninhabited southern desert.

They traveled on horse back with bales of hides packed on mules that trailed behind.
They hoped to find a market for beaver pelts in Los Angeles.

All 1827-28 expeditions by Americans were forced by the authorities to confine their trapping to
areas outside of what was then Mexico. During this season, Smith partnered with a group
 trapping the area north of the Platte River in Colorado.
 
It was on this trip that Smith lost his foot and the lower part of his leg. As he tells it,
 "I was ambushed by an Indian and shot in the leg".

After the leg was successfully amputated, the party waited around and when Smith refused to die,
they slung him between two horses and continued on to the north.
Bad weather forced them to take winter quarters near the Colorado-Wyoming border.
Smith emerged in the spring with a wooden stump that he had whittled out of an oak sapling and a new name.