Kimberley, where gold was discovered in the eighties, was the first of the Western Australia fields, and it proved a disappointment. The prospectors there were working along dispiritedly when in 1892 a man rode into the town of Southern Cross with great news. He brought with him ten thousand dollars’ worth of nuggets and dust picked up in two days in a desert region that the aborigines called “Goldarda.” There are still old-timers to tell of the scenes that followed. In two hours the price of a horse rose from ten dollars to two hundred and fifty dollars. Camels could not be had. Dogs, cows, and goats were at a premium. So was anything on wheels, from buggies to baby carriages. Some men set off with wheelbarrows. In a day or two Southern Cross was practically deserted, and its inhabitants were trekking across the hundred and twenty-five miles of desert that lay between them and the new strike at Coolgardie. They did not even know the location of the water holes along the route. Many were two or three weeks on the way and arrived with tongues swollen and lips cracked and blackened from thirst.
In parts of Western Australia, where water cannot be had, gold is dry-blown. The soil is first sifted for nuggets and then the metal is separated from lighter waste by means of bellows.
More than ten thousand camels are used in the dry back blocks, especially in the mining districts of Western Australia. Sometimes it may cost five dollars or more to give one a real drink.
In a few weeks the news brought men from all parts of Australia; in a few months it attracted them from all parts of the world. Capital became interested. The Wealth of Nations mine at Coolgardie, from which three great nuggets were taken at once, but which later proved only a low-grade mine, was discovered by an Indian camel driver who was paid two dollars and a half for his find. The owners of the camel took out more than a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of gold and then sold the mine for seven hundred thousand dollars. The original Coolgardie claim yielded more than two and a half million dollars in its first ten years.
In 1893, when the Coolgardie claims were giving out, a grocer of Adelaide formed a syndicate of fifteen people with a capital of less than a thousand dollars. The prospectors they sent out turned up the riches of the famous Golden Mile of Kalgoorlie. Five years later, when the syndicate was disbanded, it voted its original capital as a bonus to its secretary. The value of the shares, based on its holdings at the Golden Mile, was then more than thirty-six million dollars. At that date the syndicate had produced seventeen tons of gold. The money distributed to the Adelaide shareholders was close to five millions in cash, besides upward of seventeen millions in stock.
The great handicap in the Kalgoorlie, Coolgardie, and other desert mines was lack of water, which then cost about as much as gasoline does now. In the Coolgardie fields water brought as much as twenty-five and fifty cents a gallon, and there was a regular business of evaporating and condensing salt water from the lakes and wells to make it fit to drink.
It was impossible to get enough to wash out the gold, which had to be dry-blown. That is, the soil spaded from shallow trenches was first sifted for nuggets, then thrown into the wind and expertly caught in iron pans. It was tossed up again and again to get rid of the lighter waste. Later on bellows worked by hand or foot power were used, and still later fanning mills were introduced. I am told that in those early “roaring nineties” one could see above the mining camps in the desert a red cloud of dust. This “hell cloud,” as it was called, hid the miners from view, and out of it came the sound of laughter and curses, and the roar of the gravel raining into thousands of iron pans.
Although at that time the whole of Western Australia had only about as many people to pay its taxes as Des Moines has now, the government did a great deal to help get water for the miners. In the Coolgardie district it built a number of tanks, bored artesian wells, and installed condensers. Kalgoorlie now has a reservoir with a capacity of five million gallons. It is fed by a stream through a steel pipe as big around as a barrel and three hundred and fifty miles long. The water comes from a point near Perth and is lifted by a series of pumps to a height of about thirteen hundred feet. The Western Australia government sells it at an average rate of seventy-five cents a thousand gallons; in the early days water used to cost sixteen times as much. Without this pipe line Australia’s best gold mines would have to be abandoned, and the cities of Coolgardie, Kalgoorlie, and Boulder would sink back into a forlorn desert. Nowadays, as one of the old prospectors put it, “Water? They waste it! At Kalgoorlie, they even bathe in it, at twenty-five cents a head!”