Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer

by W. C. Scully

Whilst affecting still to disbelieve in my find, my partners now treated me with more respect. Towards them I assumed a patronizing attitude. They no longer tried to force me to do cattle-herding. Day by day the finds grew richer and more important. So far as I remember, it was on the third day that Government sent officials to verify boundaries and make a general survey of the surface of the mine. Each individual had been, I think, permitted to mark out two claims. But the "rush" had been so swift that very few had been able to avail themselves of this privilege.

A certain amount of "hustling" was attempted; "roughs," who had come in late, occasionally tried to bully those who looked "soft" out of their ground. Being quite a youngster, I was, naturally, the kind of game these gentry were seeking. However, I sought and obtained help among my Kaffrarian friends, so when two glib tongued scoundrels endeavored to claim my burrow on the score of prior occupation, they were soon hunted off. Messrs. Tom Barry and George Ward were entrusted by the Landdrost with the survey. Ward, who had been in the Austrian Army, was an exceedingly handsome man. He was killed in the Kaffir War of 1879, not far from the Taba 'Ndoda.

I think it was on the third day after the rush that Brown, who was the only moneyed man among us, first expressed his full belief in the mine. We were seated under a camel-thorn close to the edge of the kopje, and were just about to begin our midday meal. Brown, who had been unusually silent, put down his rosterkoek and pannikin of coffee. Then he stood up, saying:

"Yes; there are diamonds here, right enough. I'll go and buy another claim."

In about half an hour he returned, looking very hot and ill-tempered as he threw himself down on the sand.

"I'm damned if they're not asking ten pounds apiece for claims," said he; "did you ever hear of anything so ridiculous?"

Within a few weeks it was amply proved that the new mine was one of enormous richness. Day by day large and valuable stones were unearthed. On some sorting-tables the finds ran up to as many as five and twenty diamonds per day. People flocked in by thousands from the surrounding camps. At Du Toit's Pan, Bultfontein, and De Beers claims were abandoned wholesale.

As though by magic the vast plains surrounding "New Rush," as it now came to be called, became populous. A great city of tents and wagons sprang up like mushrooms in a night. There was at first no attempt at orderly arrangement; each pitched his camp wherever he listed. How, eventually, streets and a market square came to be laid out is more than I can explain. I would not like to guess at the number of people and tents surrounding the mine three months after the latter was rushed, but the tents alone must have figured to many thousands. Money literally abounded. I have more than once seen fools lighting their pipes with bank-notes, thus giving the banks concerned a present of the face value. One of the men I saw indulging in this pastime I came across a few years later in a remote goldmining camp. He was then almost starving.

Sanitary arrangements did not exist. Although disagreeable in the extreme, this did not matter so very much as long as the weather was cool and dry, but later, under the summer sun and the then frequent thunder showers, fever began to take its toll. The epidemic was called "diamond-field fever," and was supposed to be a malady peculiar to the neighborhood. But I am convinced that it was neither more nor less than ordinary enteric the inevitable concomitant of the neglect, on the part of a crowded community, of ordinary sanitary precautions.

The character of the population soon changed. At first the ordinary colonist predominated the kind of man who had hitherto led the simple life, in most cases that of a farmer. He was very often accompanied by his whole family. At that time many a farm, especially in the Eastern Province, must have been tenantless, or else left in charge of native servants. But as the fame of the rich and ever richer finds went abroad, a cosmopolitan crowd of wastrels and adventurers poured in from the ends of the earth. However, there never was in those early days anything like the lawlessness that afterwards as much under British as under Republican rule prevailed on the Rand. The great stay of law and order was the individual digger, and this element of stability has always been missing at the goldfields, except in the few instances where alluvial mining has been pursued.