The Ghost of Peg Leg Smith.....A Story

Back to The Grind…..Or……Under the Grind

The Ghost of Peg Leg Smith and Goldie, his Trusty Burro

by Ruth Nolan

runolan@aol.com

Back in the gold rush days of the 1860’s, California was flush with rugged men looking for gold. One of the most famous and infamous one of these miners was the notorious Peg Leg Smith, the famous one-legged desert miner who lost his left leg in a mining accident and walked on a wooden peg, which is how he got his name. Legend has it that he struck the mother lode, got super rich, sold his gold in L.A., and disappeared. No one knows just where he found his gold, and some people think it was somewhere way out in the Anza Borrego Desert, 100 miles from Riverside. But, the story that almost no one knows about is that he actually found a huge bag of gold nuggets right here in Riverside, in what is now the basement of the coffee shop, Back to the Grind!

Peg Leg Smith spent a couple of years in the desert, but he got tired of the heat and loneliness, so he decided to head into the Riverside area one day with his trusty burro, Goldie. It was a long trip, across the old Bradshaw Trail, a dirt road that followed an ancient Indian trail from the Salton Sea all the way into town.

Back in those days, all you’d see would be stagecoaches, and maybe a few

Government surveyors looking for the best place to lay down the tracks for the soon-to-be railroad that would link the east to the west. Peg Leg loved coffee too, you see, and his favorite thing to do, besides dig for gold, was to pull off, find twigs, and build a little fire. He’d get out his hand coffee grinder, some beans, and sing songs of gold mining and miners while he ground his coffee, put it onto boil, and relaxed with a hot cup of the stuff. He even swore that when it was hot, a good cup of coffee would cool him down, because it made him sweat! He always gave Goldie the lukewarm leftovers. It took him awhile to get across the desert, because Peg Leg preferred to take turns riding Goldie and walking, because he never knew when he’d see a vein of gold along the way, and he might want to go mine some – and he didn’t want anyone else to know!
Peg Leg came down from the Banning Pass along San Timoteo Canyon, and followed the Santa Ana River down to where Mt. Rubidoux is. Back in those days, the Santa Ana River flowed more than it does now, and there were a number of Cahuilla and Serrano Indian settlements and campsites there. Peg Leg decided to hunker down at one at the base of Mt. Rubidoux for awhile, to cool his body down and enjoy the scenery. That was even before the Mission Inn was built, so there was nowhere else to stay, and Goldie had plenty of cool water, along with Peg Leg’s leftover coffee!

But Peg Leg got restless very soon. Over cups of fresh-brewed coffee, he got to talking to the Indians, and found out that there was huge vein of gold not far from Mt. Rubidoux, right in the downtown area, and right beneath the spot where Back to the Grind coffee shop is today! The Indians weren’t interested in mining it, because they believed that mining into the earth for anything, digging up the ground, made the land out of balance, which affected people in a bad way. They also had seen many men go crazy, looking for gold and finding gold, and they called gold “the yellow metal that makes white men crazy.” They warned Peg Leg to slow down, just enjoy the river and the coffee, but Peg Leg wouldn’t listen. He sharpened his pickaxe, bundled up some dynamite, and made his way over, day after day, to the site, to dig a long tunnel that went down into the dark earth.

Morning after morning he'd pack up his little miner's cart, towed by his Goldie. He loved his coffee so much, remember, that he'd take a big bag of beans, imported from Mexico, with him, and a little stove, and he'd stop and hand grind his coffee for a morning break, at lunchtime, and in the afternoon. He didn't eat much, just made fresh coffee with wood from river-bottom and his little stove and coffee beans, and kept on digging, convinced that he was soon going to find the gold, sell it to the bank in Los Angeles, and strike it rich! When he got tired, he’d pop off his wooden leg and set it off to one side, and when he was ready to start work, why, he’d tap that wooden leg hard on his miner’s cart and little Goldie would come running along, ready to get back to work with the boss.

He dug deeper and deeper. And once in awhile someone traveling by on the railroad survey, or western men, would drop in for a cup of coffee and tell him to be careful. That deep cave was now as big as the inside of a small house, but he didn't listen - he was almost there - he could see the vein of gold just starting to come out. No one else would go down there, they were scared, but he insisted, even when water drip dripped from the ceiling. Peg Leg was really excited, because he could see the rocks looked like gold. He dug deeper and deeper, down what is now the stairway, and made a big hole in the ground, barely supported with logs he cut and carried from the river, and beams from the railroad that was being put through the center of the small town, near where some people were planting orange and lemon trees.

One day, the railroad needed to dynamite a big chunk of hard soil, in order the get the rail lines laid down. The railroad people came and told him to clear out by 10 a.m, that it wouldn’t be safe to be deep in his miner’s cavern. He was having a very busy time that day, working hard, and he got careless, a little too wired on coffee one day, and he forgot to get out before the routine 10 a.m. blast.

And this is where the story gets tricky. The Indians swore that Peg Leg was down in that deep hole, that Peg Leg was in there, when the 10 a.m. blast of dynamite from the railroad-building went off, that he hadn’t come out for hours. And right at 10 a.m., by a weird coincidence – maybe because it was Halloween Day of 1861, October 31 - an earthquake also went off! He may have been grinding some more morning coffee, because he didn’t seem to hear the warning shouts from the people above ground.

Peg Leg didn't have a chance. The dynamite shook, the earth rumbled for a good minute or so, and then everything was quiet. His tunnel was caved in, and the people who ran over to try to rescue him couldn’t hear a thing – they could only smell the aroma of fresh coffee, coming from somewhere underground. Goldie got so cared that he ran off towards the Box Canyon Hills and was never seen again, although children today still swear they can hear him braying on Halloween Night, crying for his master and whining softly because he is so thirsty for some of Peg Leg’s famous coffee!

The scary thing about this story is that when the railroad workers went to dig Peg Leg out, they found everything Peg Leg had taken down there - his miner's axe, his bag of rocks, each hinting at gold dust, his coffee grinder, mug, wooden leg, and pick axe, but they didn’t find any of the giant gold nuggets Peg Leg swore he’d found. Oddly, the hole in the ground was still big, once they cleared out the rubble – all they had to do was dig the tunnel out. But Peg Leg was nowhere to be found, not one body part, just his wooden leg, leaning up against his mining cart. Someone pulled all of his things out, and the tunnel was boarded up, with a big “no trespassing” sign on it, although some kids who moved to Riverside as the town got bigger would hide out down there, eating oranges and playing, but every one of them swore, as the years went on, that they got scared and saw a ghost, a man with one leg, grinning like a crazy pumpkin without teeth, his eyes all lit up, repeating the words, “gold, gold, gold…we’re all rich!” Sometimes there would be a smell of coffee, and sometimes there would be a tapping sound against rocks, until the kids would run out of there, screaming.

Sooner or later, the railroad brought more people to Riverside. Oranges were planted. Citrus became King. No one cared about the legend of gold because people were getting rich in fruit. Trains rumbled through, and actually made the hole beneath the ground bigger. Then, one day, a man decided to build a coffee shop right on top of that spot – he couldn’t really pin down why, and his wife wasn’t sure it was a good idea, what with that big hole in the ground, but he just put a nice, thick wooden floor across the hole, erected a brick building, and called it, “Back to the Grind.” The coffee shop became very popular, and it still is today. there was just something that smelled so good there, even though some of the patrons would swear they heard someone tapping a wooden stick under their feet, from beneath the floor.

Time passed by, as it does, and the Indians were forced to leave their beautiful river settlement, and so the story of Peg Leg and his foolish search for gold stopped being told. More people moved to Riverside, and they started having concerts, music, and poetry readings, many of the events held down in that basement hole – in fact, you can even still see some of the rocks that Peg Leg was digging through down there, behind a panel of glass. It’s all lit up sometimes and it just looks like it has gold in there!

And on Halloween Night - maybe if you're really quiet, and stop to smell the coffee, and look at the rocks that are behind the glass on the side of the wall down there, you will see a man's face, and he's got a cup of coffee in his hand and he's smiling, and he likes to scare kids who are trick or treating by banging his wooden leg on the side of the glass when they're not looking. He's even been known to trip a few kids when they are going up and down the stairs, just to remind them that he is still there. He will never escape, because he got too greedy looking for gold when he was already rich, and when Halloween arrives, he tries to get out but because of the glass, he can't.
And that is the story of Peg Leg Smith, the famous gold miner who kept going back into that tunnel, back to beneath Back to the Grind, trying to strike it rich. His ghost still lives right here in the basement of Back to the Grind, and when it's really quiet, you can hear his wooden leg banging on the floor underneath you. He's trying to get out and go to the next mother lode, but he can't. Always watch where you step – because the story has it that he’s grabbed more than one kid’s leg, pulled him down into the hole, and that kid has never been seen again. A few kids have lost arms and fingers, too, when they’ve gotten to close to the rocks behind the glass! And if you hear a knocking or a tapping when you’re sitting in the store, it is probably the ghost of Peg Leg, trying to tell you his story, and trying to get you to come down, have a cup of coffee with him, and disappear with him down there forever, digging into eternity.