An earlier story featuring Peg Leg Smith touched on his career as a mountain man and fur trapper, and his introduction to stealing horses and mules in California, escaping via the Old Spanish Trail.
Smith was not the only one engaged in the thievery, and one particular joint venture in 1840 is as wild and wooly as any criminal enterprise in the history of the American West.
Historian Edward Leo Lyman wrote in The Overland Journey from Utah to California that “Probably the greatest of all horse thieves in the history of the West was Wakara, a Ute Indian chief from central Utah.”
Pegleg Smith knew Wakara well, and counted among his wives some of the Ute’s kin. “When Wakara and his tribesmen joined forces with Old Bill Williams, Pegleg Smith, and other mountaineer associates, the result was probably the most extensive horse-stealing escapade ever documented.”
Stealing The First 1,200
Reports claim the thieves stole some 1,200 mules and horses at the Mission of San Luis Obispo alone, including the best saddle horses. Other unwilling suppliers of stock included Mission San Gabriel, San Bernardino, San Juan Capistrano, and elsewhere.
“Sources concur that the thieves gathered at least three thousand head of good horses and mules through the series of well-planned raids,” according to Lyman.
Authorities organized a posse to track down the rustlers and recover the livestock, pressuring men to join and even recruiting prisoners from the jails. Accounts vary as to how and when the posse clashed with the rustlers, but there is some agreement in the broad strokes.
Fearing being overtaken, the rustlers assigned some of their 25 or so men to drop back and hinder the pursuers.
They met an advance party from the posse at a watering hole in the Mojave Desert (sources disagree as to exactly where). When the Californians stopped to water and rest themselves and their horses, the rustlers stole their mounts.
The unhorsed posse members rode back toward San Bernardino and met up with the oncoming additional posses, numbering some 75 to 100 mounted but poorly armed men.
They caught up with the rustlers days later, most likely at Resting Spring in the Mojave. Taken by surprise, the rustlers left camp in a hurry, driving away what horses they could, but abandoning camp equipment and other gear.
Bones In The Desert
The Californians and their mounts were too tired to go on and they abandoned the chase, believing the thieves would perish in the desert. Already, the posse had encountered the carcasses of nearly half the stolen horses—some 1,500 head—along the trail. The bones littered the Mojave Desert for years.
Pegleg Smith later boasted about the raid and his part in it.
Horace Bell recorded his brag in Reminiscences of a Ranger and quotes Smith as saying, “I went down into the Spanish country and got them [horses] . . . They cost me very dearly . . . three of my squaws lost brothers, and one of them a father, on that trip, and I came near going under myself. I lost several other braves, and you can depend on it that I paid for all the horses I drove away. Them Spaniards followed us in a way that Spaniards were never before known to do.”
He Raided For Years
Smith was accused by California authorities of raiding for horses and mules again in 1841, according to LeRoy and Ann Hafen in The Old Spanish Trail: Santa Fe to Los Angeles. Pegleg reportedly led “a motley gang of Frenchmen, Utes, Americans, Saguanosos, Sozones, [thieves of many nations].”
Pegleg Smith says he stopped raiding for California horses following the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which made California U.S. territory.
Horace Bell reported him saying, “I never make war on my own people, and in driving off Spanish horses I might be brought in contact with my own country-men, and you know that would not by any manner of means do.”
Smith took up ranching on the Bear River not far from newly established Salt Lake City, but soon sold out to the Mormons.
He is said to have discovered a rich deposit of gold in the California desert somewhere between Yuma and Los Angeles, but could not find the place again, nor has anyone else. There is some disagreement among historians about whether the Pegleg Smith of the lost mine is the same man as our horse thief.
That man, Thomas L. “Pegleg” Smith, died in a San Francisco hospital in 1866.
R.B. Miller can be reached at WriterRodMiller@gmail.com
