Mountain men and fur trappers have provided a seemingly never-ending supply of adventure stories out of the Old West.
Among those adventurers was one Thomas Long “Pegleg” Smith. His adventures were many and varied, including horse thieving escapades on the Old Spanish Trail.
Born October 10, 1801, Smith ran away from his Kentucky home at age fifteen, making his way to St. Louis, where he hired on as a trapper for John Jacob Astor. In the West, he worked or was acquainted with notable mountain men including Jim Bridger, Milton Sublette, Kit Carson, Bill Williams, Jim Beckwourth, Joseph Walker, Jedediah Smith, and Tom Fitzpatrick.
Smith reportedly trapped and traded among the Sioux and Osage Indians for a few years, then worked as a free trapper in New Mexico and throughout the Southwest, including a stint with Ewing Young’s 1826 foray into Arizona.
The Story Behind The Name
Historian Marshall Trimble tells how Smith acquired his nickname.
“It was in the fall of 1827 in North Park, Colorado, that he was wounded in the left leg. With the help of fellow trapper Milton Sublette and a jug of ‘Taos Lightning,’ he amputated the leg.
Smith himself cut through the flesh, then Sublette sawed through the bone and the wound was seared with a rifle barrel heated in a fire until it was red-hot. That winter, while living with the Ute Indians, he whittled himself a new leg.”
Smith’s wooden leg, Trimble says, was more than just for walking. “He learned to unhook his wooden leg in an instant and use it as a shillelagh in a brawl or a battle with Indians. He became known as the meanest barroom fighter in the West.”
A pouch replaced the left stirrup on Pegleg’s saddle to accommodate his wooden appendage.
In The Old Spanish Trail: Santa Fe to Los Angeles, LeRoy and Ann Hafen report that Smith’s first known encounter with the that trail occurred in 1829.
The “all too meager data” came from Pegleg’s obituary in the San Francisco Bulletin: “In 1829 he joined a company for the purpose of trapping on the Santa Clara and Rio Virgin rivers in what is now Utah Territory. The field had never been visited by trappers before, and in a few weeks’ time they had secured enough skins to make a cargo.”
The obituary continued, “As the season was not half over, it was decided that two of the party should take the spoils to Los Angeles and dispose of them. Smith was one of those commissioned to perform this duty, as it was considered to be extra hazardous.”
Raiding In California
Smith’s visit to California did not end well, according to the Hafens. “About this time an American raider began his troublesome operations in California . . . his notorious raids made the name El Cojo Smit feared throughout the province. This Pegleg Smith is reported to have made his first trip to California in 1829.”
The authors quote H.H. Bancroft’s History of California: “He was ordered out of the country, and he departed, he and his companion taking with them, however, a band of three or four hundred horses, in spite of efforts of the Californians to prevent the act.”
Smith did not soon forget the ease of horse thievery in California, and in later years would take it up in a big way. But he was not the only one to use the well-trodden Old Spanish Trail in the enterprise.
“It soon became apparent to many, mainly from New Mexico, that they could more easily obtain mules and horses by stealing rather than legitimate purchase,” Edward Leo Lyman wrote in The Overland Journey from Utah to California.
“This practice became so extensive that in 1832 the Los Angeles ayuntamiento or city council felt constrained to pass measures to control the situation. The council designated assembly points where all livestock to be driven over the trail would be inspected.”
Cue The Posse
Posses sent out to recover uninspected stock met with limited success and sometimes violence, and the rustlers usually got away with their stolen herds.
Seeking help from the governor, the Alcalde of Los Angeles wrote that New Mexicans had stolen at least 1,000 animals over the preceding three months.
“If the matter is not checked soon everything in the country will be taken away by the robbers,” according to official papers located by the Hafens.
As the profitability of trapping declined over the years, Pegleg Smith, like other mountain men, had to find new sources of income.
Some became guides, others opened trading posts, some kidnapped Indian children to sell as slaves, some prospected for precious metals. At one time or another, Pegleg Smith reportedly engaged in all these activities.
But stealing horses and mules out of California figured prominently on his résumé. But that’s another story—and we will tell it in a future edition of The American West.
R. B. Miller can be reached at WriterRodMiller@gmail.com
