FEBRUARY, 1951 35 CENTS - Desert Magazine of the Southwest

Black Nuggets in the
Valley of Phantom Buttes
Pegleg Smith was a trapper—
one of the Mountain Men
who came into the West 100
years ago and grub-staked
their explorations with beaver
pelts.
FEBRUARY, 1951
John Mitchell believes that the
Pegleg Smith lost buttes of the
black nuggets are located near the
point where the eastern ends of the
Chuckawalla and Chocolate mountains
converge, on the north side of
Salton Sea. John is sure they are
there because he once found the
place and brought away three of
the black nuggets. But he did not
know until many years later that
the manganese-coated stones he
picked up were gold. Here is a new
version of the legendary Pegleg
gold strike.
By JOHN D. MITCHELL
Art work by John Hansen
7HE LOST PEGLEG Smith gold
mine with its piles of black gold
nuggets is one of the celebrated
traditions of the great Southwest.
Much time and money have been
spent and many lives lost in the quest
for this fabulously rich gold deposit
believed to be located in the heart
of the great California desert—the Sahara
of America.
For more than a century prospectors
and adventurers from every part
of the civilized world have searched
these waste lands for some trace of
the "Lost Valley of the Phantom
Buttes" from whence came the many
black gold nuggets brought out of the
desert by the Indians and the few
white men who were willing to gamble
their lives against those twin demons
of the desert—heat and thirst.
Pegleg Smith, early day trapper,
found the deposit while on his way
across the desert to the Spanish settlements
on the Pacific Coast in the year
1829 to market a cargo of furs. But
he was never able to return to it.
Thomas L. Smith was born in 1801
in Garrard County, Kentucky, the son
of Christopher Smith, an Irish immigrant
who fought in the Indian wars
of the Northwest under St. Clair. After
varied experiences on the Mississippi
River, Smith, at the age of 23,
joined a caravan of 80 wagons and
150 men bound for Santa Fe, New
Mexico, to trade with the Indians. The
caravan fought its way across the
great plains then swarming with buffalo
and hostile Indians, scaled the
Rockies and wound down through the
sunset canyons and out onto one of