On 24 December 1846, Ferguson’s shepherd, Joseph Pilcher, realised 270 sheep were missing from one of the flocks in the vicinity of a new station being formed at Telowie. Shepherd, Joseph Coles, and hutkeeper, Henry Gray, subsequently found eighty sheep in a steep gully, where they were yarded in a brush fence. Pero, his wife and child were the only people there. They were skinning a sheep. The following day the Europeans took Pero and his wife and child ‘into custody’ and transported them to Ferguson’s head station. Pero was tried at the Supreme Court for stealing sheep, but was liberated due to a lack of an interpreter.
(See 'The South Australian Frontier and its Legacies' for more details.)