Oddballs and travelers called the desert home

Traveling through the forbidding desert by stagecoach, living alone for a decade on a remote mountain top and legendary tales of lost gold mines.

The history of Anza-Borrego Desert State Park is filled with tales of human conquest and the oddballs attracted to the marvels of desert solitude.

Among the most intriguing characters to have visited Anza-Borrego are Marshall South and Peg Leg Smith, but they followed trails constructed by mountain men, explorers and conquering armies.

People visiting the enormous state park today can get some sense of what stagecoach travel was like by following a self-guided 26-mile automobile tour along the Southern Emigrant Trail.

A half-dozen stops along the tour accompanied by short hikes stir visions of the hardships travelers encountered as contemporary footprints stir dust adventurers walked through 100 to 200 years ago.

The footpath that Juan Bautista de Anza and his men built as the first trail through California in the 1770s was eventually adapted by the Mormon Army of the West, battling Indians and the elements.

They were followed by the Butterfield Overland Stageline, a 2,000-mile trip that began in Tipton, Mo., took 24 days, and often saw passengers lose 20 pounds along the way, especially as they crossed the desert.

People camping today in the desert can drive to Borrego Springs to buy equipment when their Coleman stove malfunctions. Things weren't so easy when the Mormon Battalion came through in 1847.

Bringing the first wagons through the area, the soldiers (Mormons) lost their picks and shovels while crossing the Colorado River and had to use axes and pry bars to carve a route through solid rock where the trail entered Box Canyon in what is now the state park.

Box Canyon was still too deep for the stage, so the Butterfield route was built nearby to circumvent the canyon. Stage stations were generally about 20 miles apart (about the distance a stage traveled in a day) and were located in oases, canyons, and by streams where old Indian villages had been.

At Foot and Walker Pass, in the northwestern end of Blair Valley, the stagecoach passengers usually had to get out and walk and sometimes even push, so it could cross the mountain ridge leading out of the dry lake bed.

A reconstructed stage station is near the end of the self-guided auto tour.

Originally built with blocks of sod from a nearby marsh in 1857 and reconstructed in 1934, the Vallecito Stage Station originally offered travelers a bed and water before they crossed the Anza-Borrego desert.

The early explorers were followed by mountain men. Indian fighters, fur trappers and prospectors, men such as Thomas Long "Peg Leg" Smith, who allegedly dabbled in horse thievery and telling tall tales.

Born in Kentucky in 1801, he left home while young and wandered throughout the Old West, traveling through the desert in 1829 with pelts he snagged in Utah.

He emerged from the desert with some rocks he reported finding near the present-day site of Borrego Springs. He claimed the experts in Los Angeles said the rocks were pure gold.

But instead of going back to mine his find, he moved to Idaho and became a horse trader until 1850, when he organized the first of several unsuccessful expeditions to find his mine.

What he found was a rich gold mine, earning drinks and making a living and a name for himself telling stories until dying in 1866 at 53. He inspired legions of gold seekers, but no one found his treasure.

But in 1916, Borrego Springs resident Harry Oliver organized the first Peg Leg Club, which initially organized expeditions to search for the gold and even was rumored to have salted the desert with fake wooden legs to enhance the legend.

Club members met regularly to tell tales and now meet at the Peg Leg Monument annually on April Fools Day to compete in the Peg Leg Liars Contest. The competition is open to all comers.

Contest rules are simple. The story can't exceed five minutes, must deal with gold mining, and can't contain anything which an intelligent person might mistake for the truth.

Desert Steve built the monument on Feb. 12, 1949, by piling up stones into a heap almost 6 feet high and about 25 feet around. A sign nearby notes: "Let he who seeks Peg Leg's gold add 10 stones to this monument."

Long after Peg Leg passed away, the desert solitude lured others to explore its mysteries.

In 1932, the year before the state park was created, Marshall South and his wife Tanya used mostly indigenous material to build an adobe home on top of Ghost Mountain above Blair Valley.

A dry lake bed, the valley had been inhabited by Indians and crossed by stagecoaches. Visitors today can easily reach Indian pictographs and morteros and metates the Indians used to grind seeds to make meal.

Pictographs are painted on rock surfaces while petroglyphs are carved or etched in stone. Both types are found among the 50 examples of Indian art discovered in Anza-Borrego.

The South family lived above the valley for more than a decade, raising three children, using the desert for food, shelter, and building materials, and writing articles for "Desert Magazine." But she eventually left and the family broke up.

Their adobe house can be reached today by hiking up a steep, but manageable one-mile trail. Visitors can see the frame of their home, the underground cisterns they used to store water, the remnants of their sundial, and the outdoor oven they baked bread in.

The imagination wanders over strange terrain while walking on their footsteps, looking at the unusual landscpe that they could see out their front door and feeling the isolation and quiet they lived with.

A decade on Ghost Mountain, like crossing the desert by stagecoach or finding and losing a gold mine, are just a few of the memorable stories the desert tells.