Maybe Frank Jack Fletcher Turpen, the homeless horseman, was simply born to ride an endless trail that is only his to determine.

The thick-bearded, steely-eyed man, for now, lives among rough-hewn denizens who make camp in the woods behind a Placerville shopping center.

In a land steeped in the folklore of the Gold Rush, he is a regional curiosity.

Local residents see Turpen, 38, trotting down Missouri Flat Road to the McDonald's or the Walmart on Elf, a gray Peruvian Paso-Paso Fino horse he bred and trained.

They watch as he strides a Safeway parking lot with one of his younger fillies, Offset or The Horse With No Name. Wearing a rumpled leather hat, he asks for donations for feed, stuffs coins and bills into his saddlebag and tells people, "God bless."

As he returns to his littered refuge in the woods, Turpen gives fresh hay and alfalfa to his horses. He unwinds with high-octane beer, a tequila shot and marijuana mixed with hand-rolled tobacco.

He also keeps a cap 'n' ball revolver, and readies his fists for intruders who bully fellow campers.

"He was born in the wrong century," said Susan Turpen of rural Herald in Sacramento County. She is the horseman's mother and the only family member to stay in contact since he left on an uncharted journey two decades ago.

"Do I think he is a real cowboy? Yeah. That's the life he lives. He was just born 150 years too late."

Turpen's travels at some point took him to Mexico, where he says he worked as a chili planter and bar bouncer, and his parents bailed him out of jail on a pot charge. He boasted he saved a German tourist from a deadly riptide in Guatemala – a lie, his mother thought, until a thank you note from Europe arrived at the family home.

Even as a kid, restless to ride

More than anything, Turpen says, he is a horseman and a rambler. It's been that way since he was a kid at a family ranch in Wilton and routinely sneaked out at night, mounted a saddle and "rode to hell's half-acre."

In recent years, according to his family and a former employer, he has tamed restless colts and taught horses to separate cattle from the herd at a farm in Calaveras County. He trained Arabian stallions in Vacaville. He worked with wild mustangs in Minden, Nev.

But he seldom stayed long. As fickle as the weather, he packs up his horses, returns to the road, to the wilderness, to survival on his own terms.

"I don't know what I'm looking for," Turpen said. "But if you give up looking, you're never going to find anything.

"The journey is the point. Life is about motion."

From the frigid winter to the scorching summer, his mother, a nurse, has found him with horses in Tuolumne, Calaveras, Amador, El Dorado and Mariposa counties.

He has ridden them up Highway 50 to Lake Tahoe and Highway 88 to Nevada. In El Dorado County, where James Marshall discovered gold at Sutter's Mill in 1848, he attracts piqued attention.

"He is the only homeless person I have ever seen riding a horse," said El Dorado County Sheriff's Sgt. Jim Byers. "My impression is that he isn't there by circumstances. He is there by choice. He is comfortable with who he is."

Last year, California Highway Patrol officers stopped him on an eastbound ramp of Highway 50 on a mustang named Shiner he bought in Angels Camp for $400.

The CHP report said he was riding while intoxicated. It listed his "vehicle" as a "domestic white horse – female." He got three years' probation for public drunkenness.

Turpen faces trial in October for misdemeanor trespassing, allegedly as part of an encampment near an El Dorado Irrigation District reservoir. He says he wasn't there.

Byers said authorities also received calls from residents concerned about the horses Turpen ties up when stopping for a cup of coffee or tobacco at local businesses.

But deputies found his animals watered, fed and content in the woods. "All our checks showed us they are very well cared for," Byers said.

Links his name to animals, lost souls

Turpen, named after an admiral commanding U.S. ships in World War II, said he also has dual saint names – "Francis John" – for "the keeper of the animals and the patron saint of lost souls."

Call The Bee's Peter Hecht, (916) 326-5539.