Peg Leg Smith's Legend and the Lost Mines of Jamul

Near the trail head at Peg Leg Mine Road, Mt. McGinty, Jamul, California

The road to the house my parents built winds endlessly into Mexico. It takes you on a journey through the rolling brown California semi-arid desert hills. The narrow drive cuts deep into the hidden underskirts of East County, the local outback region to the polished vacation city of San Diego. "Deep" East County - a hillbilly cousin to the demure debutante towns manufactured during the housing boom of the nineties. The cut-off-shorts wearing relative of the perfectly manicured, pre-fabricated, identical housing plan developments. With each passing mile, the trees become more overgrown; the brush wilder and unrulier; the telephone poles and wires less and less maintained. Horses and emus roam in front yards. Hand-painted, decaying signs instruct visitors that trespassing is "not allowed." The road fades quietly into sleepy Mexico border towns like Tecate, where you pass a lonely Border Patrol stall as the country but not the landscape changes.

A sign along the trail, rusted and blown through with bullet holes.

 

The day I found out I failed my first Bar exam attempt, I drove the long road to the house I grew up in.  

It was a home built literally from scratch by my mother and father.  In the eighties, Jamul was little more than an endless geography of undeveloped highway-side parcels.  Then, rumors of a massive highway connecting Chula Vista to Jamul spurred developers into action.  Hopeful homeowners came in droves to build their dream homes from the raw, untouched land.  It was their miniscule slice of Manifest Destiny - and it attracted those who still wanted a piece of the wild to tame.  Those who heard rumors of untapped wealth and, like prospectors, rushed to the whispers of gold.

My parents took a vacant lot in the middle of nowhere, made a plan, and made something out of nothing.  They manifested a house in the desert.  They didn't have degrees or certificates or titles.  They had ideas and hammers and wood and ambition.  Though none of us own it or have a right to it in any legal sense, that house will always be ours.  It will always be a product of us.  It is unique to us.  It did not come from some housing plan.  It was not pushed out of some mold.  It did not come from a certified architect or engineer or specialist.  It was cast from the mold we made.  It was our dreams turned into solid dimension.

There is a public hiking trail behind the property where I can come and pay the old place a cordial visit whenever I like.  Whenever the call to go home, for sentimentality or solace, beckons me to go to a place where the the mountain top view of the horizon is expansive enough to fit all the thoughts in my head.  

My parents must have hiked the trail with my sister and I a thousand times when I was a kid.  

But that first excursion into the what was then an unknown, overgrown wilderness felt exactly like this:

Soon, nearly every sunny Saturday, my parents guided us through the trail and up the side of the mountain.  We would pack sandwich lunches in the morning, don our best sneakers, and set out for trail like a group of mountaineers.  We grabbed fallen branches as hiking sticks, battling with them like swords until they broke.  We kicked the brittle Yucca trees in half because that Van Damme guy did it in that movie we saw on TNT.

Things along the trail that used to feel foreign grew into characters themselves; unique, inanimate beings with an air of magic in the long outdoor silences.  The lone tree at the top of the trail overlooking the ocean.  The moist silken sand speckled with silver near the dried up creek beds.  The mystery of the rusting, abandoned car half-buried in soil.  The sudden sparkle of quartz underneath the crumbling side of granite on the side of the trail revealed by wild storms.  These became relics of a thousand wonderful family weekends more powerful than photos.  More profound than fancy vacations to faraway places.  Everyone could go skiing in Big Bear or jet to some other country (and they did).  But we had something no one else had.  We had Peg Leg Mine.

And that, of course, is exactly the street name.  Peg. Leg. Mine. Road.

Middle: Peg Leg Smith's Monument in Anza Borrego.  Right/Left: Peg Leg Smith.

The Legend of Peg Leg Smith

That street name deserves a bit of an explanation.  The trail behind our old house leads to a series of abandoned mines.  There are three that I know of; when I was a kid, they were open and you could crawl down into them.  They were littered with old bottles and trash from other hikers.  They became dark after only a few feet; the air inside was stale and old; they could collapse at any minute because they had not been maintained in decades.  They were little more than holes dug into the side of the mountains, half-caved in, and left to nature's whim.  They were good hiding places for things like mountain lions or rattle snakes.

The mines were supposedly opened by Thomas "PegLeg" Smith (1801-1866), a California mountain man who guided early expeditions in the American South West.  He was known as a fur trapper, prospector, gambler, teller of tall tales, heavy drinker, and a horse thief.  What facts are verifiable about Peg Leg are scant and most of his legend is hotly disputed by locals and experts.  What follows here are facts patch-worked together from the rumors and records.

"Peg Leg" Smith was born in Crab Orchard, Kentucky at the turn of the nineteenth century, the same year that John Marshall was appointed Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court.  The same year that third U.S. President Thomas Jefferson was sworn into office and three years before Lewis and Clark embarked on their great expedition.  Peg Leg heard the call to adventure at a young age, running away from home to join a Mississippi flatboat where he would leave with a surly group of men on a trapping expedition.  "Trapping" refers to capturing and killing animals to sell their coats in the early North American fur trade industry, a then-booming trade in which all sorts of miscreants and social misfits could bring home the bacon, literally.  The practice was messy, dirty, and wild.  It was something mountain men did, right up there with brewing moonshine.  Peg Leg made his way through most of what is now Colorado and California by fur-trapping beavers along the rivers and tributaries of the American south west.

As any prudent nineteenth-century fur merchant would, Peg Leg became intimately familiar with various Indian tribes.  He spoke the trade; knew the customs; could barter within the language.  He supposedly took several Indian wives.

Yet, not all of Peg Leg's relations with the Indians were so friendly.  Hence the story of how he became "Peg Leg" in the first place.  He took an arrow to the knee during his travels thanks to an Apache Indian during one of many hostile outbreaks between white settlers and the Apache.  No one wanted to help this mischeivous trapper and his festering wound.  So, about two hundred years before Aron Ralston would amputate his own arm in a hiking accident, a desperate pre-Peg Legged Smith cut off his own infected leg at the knee with a skinning knife.  Much like John Smith, Peg Leg asserts that he was taken in by beautiful Indian women who nursed him back to health, chewing and spitting medicinal berry juice into his leg stump.  When he eventually made his miraculous recovery, he fashioned himself a peg leg out of a tree branch.

Some time around 1836, Peg Leg and his feral troupe got lost in a sandstorm, purportedly while travelling on the Colorado River.  Through the thick clouds of sand, they saw the outline of three mountain buttes.  They climbed to the summit of one to escape the storm.

While sitting at the top of one of the three buttes, Peg Leg picked up an almond-sized black rock.  The entire hillside seemed to be covered in these peculiar black rocks.  Peculiar because some seemed metallic and heavy.  He stashed a few in his pocket, figuring them to be of some value.

When the troupe reached what is now Los Angeles, Peg Leg took his black rocks to experts to see what he could get for them.  As it turned out, the black coating was merely a discoloration known as desert varnish and the rocks were actually gold nuggets.

Herein lies the self-defeating tragedy of Peg Leg Smith.  Upon discovering the true value of his find, he would forever be unable to locate the original three butte mountain where he found them.  He would spend a lifetime telling yarns about his lost black gold.

The story of his black desert gold, however, flourished.  For years afterward, people flocked to the Southern California desert lands to find the lost gold.  Anything that resembled the three-butte mountain was excavated, ravaged for gold or other precious minerals, and eventually abandoned. The hills of Mt. McGinty - the hills upon which my parents decided to build their home - resembled Peg Leg's three-butte mountain and therefore was mined for his black gold.  Miners took a chance on the unknown and dug deep into the mountains, churning out whatever they could find in whatever place seemed like it might be hiding the deceptive black-coated gold nuggets.

The abandoned mines of Jamul are likely not even the location where Peg Leg claimed to see his black gold (in fact, there is a monument to Peg Leg over an hour's drive away in Anza Borrego Springs).  Yet, this place has always been one that attracts dreamers and entrepeuners like my parents - those who, where others see only arid dirt, see where gold might be.  It was the seat of my childhood, and will always sparkle with the possibility of Peg Leg's adventures and gems not yet discovered.  It is a place where all things are possible and one glance from the top of the three buttes reminds me where all of my adventures started, how far I've come since, and how many there are left.

View from the top of the Three Buttes of Mt. McGinty

One of the now-barred caves/mines of Peg Leg Mine Road

Peg Leg Mine Road Trail after being freshly washed out with rain.

The pattern of silt and sand after the rain along the trail.