Re: Pegleg's Black Gold Nuggets
Hello all,
I just thought i would post a update since its been awhile. I have been following several leads. But, I think I may understand a little more and maybe able to make sense of some of it. When I first started I didn't know " jack " ( not that I'm a expert or anything now) so I decided to go back and reread some of my material. I went back to Bailey's Golden Mirages, and found a interesting story about a man who says he was a guide with someone who claimed to be " Pegleg Smith ". Bailey quotes a Charles Knowles who was born in 1865 and was about 20 at the time he re-met a man named Price. he's the story:
" I don't you suppose you remember me. You was too young to remember much of anything; but my boy saved your life when you was a kid. My name is Price, an' I'll bet your name is Knowles."
This casual meeting grew into a real friendship and later a partnership. Price and Knowles wintered together at a camp near Cour d' Alene (Idaho) and prospected whenever the weather permitted, and it was there that Knowles first heard the story of the Lost Pegleg Mine. It seemed that, about 30 years before, Price and a man named Pegleg Smith had acted as guides to parties crossing the Colorado Desert from Yuma to Warner's and the coast; but about a month before Pegleg found the mine, Price quit his job as guide and got work in LA. It was there that Pegleg, on his next trip in, showed him the nuggets and told him how he had found them.
He said he had left Yuma with a small party and headed for Warner's by the usual route through Carriso and Vallecito. They made about 2/3 of the distance to Carriso without mishap and camped for the night on New River, a few miles east of the Slough Lakes. They planned to make a early start the next morning and reach Carriso before it became to dark, as there was little moonlight. However, the mules wandered off, and the party was more than 2 hours late getting under way.
About the middle of the afternoon Smith saw they were in for a bad sandstorm, and a hour later it was blowing so hard they could hardly make headway against it. It was almost impossible to keep to the trail, for the blow-sand covered it up or blew away all traces of it in less than a 1/2 hour. The line of the mountains ahead was completely lost,and even the gap to Carriso was so badly blurred that Smith was not sure they were headed for it. In Instead of letting up as it began to get dark, the wind blew harder. At last it quieted a little; but it was not until they began to ascend a gradual slope that kept getting steeper that Smith knew for certain they were off course. They had wandered into one of those long, ramp-like canyons north of the trail they should have followed.
Smith told the party to wait where they were and he would go up a little higher to see if the could cross the hills instead of back-tracking through the sand. He climbed up the ramp for some distance to a small butte; it looked as though it sat on a ridge, so he went to the top. hoping he would get a better view of the country. But all he saw was Bad Lands and would have to take the long way into Carriso. While up there he noticed that the ridge was sort of hog-back made of 3 or 4 buttes connected by saddles.
"Well," Smith told Price, " I started down the shortest way but I stepped on alot o' loose stones that covered the hull hill, an' if I hadn't dug my pegleg into the rocks I'd slid clear to the bottom. When I started again, watchin' where I was goin', I noticed that the stones I stepped on were kinda queer lookin'. They was all round stones, big as walnuts and black as ink, I never saw nothin', like 'em before, so I put a few in my pocket an' went back to the party."
"Late in the evening' we got to Carriso. We was pretty well used up, an' by the time I had 'em all taken care of I was so tired I jugs' rolled in my blanket and went to sleep. I t wasn't till we was well on our way to Vallecito the next day that I had time to look at my black stones. At first they looked like jus' common black rocks; but when I knocked a couple of 'em together, a coatin' of varnish come off, an' I saw they was pretty near pure gold!... I'm goin' back an' try to find the place soon as I can, although I ain't sure how north I was. We had to plod through the sand for hours in the dark, an' it ain't possible to say how fur off the course we was."
This is the guy I think REALLY found the gold, not Thomas L Smith, the noted guide, trapper and stretcher of truths. In this story there is no Marice LeDuke, no burying furs, and 3 buttes ( but hog-backs ). If they started out the "usual" way and they camped east of the slough lakes that would mean that they ONLY headed west and then northwest to carriso. I spent awhile setting the stage stations in goggle earth and you can better understand the route. (see pic)
