Pegleg's Black Gold

Boone Merrick here. Now, I've told a lot of stories that stretch the truth a little. This one was stretched by a professional, so settle in. His name was Thomas Smith, born 1801, though nobody west of the Rockies ever called him Thomas. They called him Pegleg, on account of the leg he lost back around 1827 — a trapping wound gone bad, a knife, some whiskey for courage, and a carved wooden peg to finish the job. By all accounts he was a mountain man, a fur trapper, a horse thief when the mood struck, and above every other talent he possessed, he was a champion liar. A spinner of yarns so grand that even the folks who knew he was lying paid money to keep listening. And here's the yarn that outlived him. Somewhere out in this desert, the story goes, around 1829, Pegleg climbed a low dark hill — three black buttes, he'd say, though the number wandered depending on his mood — and he scooped up a handful of heavy black pebbles, ugly little things crusted dark as old iron. Stuffed a few in his pockets and thought no more of it. It was only later, so the tale runs, that somebody in Los Angeles knocked the crust off one and found gold underneath. Pure gold, just wearing a coat of desert varnish. Well. You can imagine how Pegleg felt about that. He spent the rest of his natural life trying to walk back to that hill, and he never once managed it. Couldn't find it. Three black buttes in a desert full of dark little hills, and not a one of them his. Some say he honestly forgot. Folks who knew him better suspected there was no hill at all — that the whole glittering business existed nowhere but in Pegleg's marvelous imagination. Didn't matter. He sold maps to it. Sold shares in it. Sold the dream of it to anybody with coin and a hopeful disposition, right up until he died in 1866. And the dream did not die with him. Oh, no. Generations of prospectors have come out into this exact country hunting what they call the Peg Leg — sun-blistered, water-short, certain that the next dark rise is the one. Every last one of them has come home with empty pockets and a heck of a story. And that, friend, is the genius of the thing. By the late 1940s, the local desert characters — chiefly a Hollywood showman turned desert rat named Harry Oliver — took this beautiful lie and built it a home. Put up that rock pile back yonder and posted the sign: anyone hunting Pegleg's gold, add ten rocks to the pile. So every dreamer leaves a little monument to coming up empty. And then they went one better. Every spring this town holds the Pegleg Smith Liars Contest, where grown adults stand up and tell the most magnificent whoppers they can invent, and the biggest liar wins. A whole town that took a tall tale and turned it into a holiday. So no, nobody ever found Pegleg's gold. But look what they built instead. I'd call that the richest strike in the valley.