A STORY OF GOLD

New Zealand Times, Volume XXVIII, Issue 6052, 9 November 1906, Page 5

A STORY OF GOLD

THE RAND CELEBRATES ITS TWENTIETH BIRTHDAY. (“Daily Mail” Correspondent.) Johannesburg, Aug. 27. Twenty-tiro years ago a traveller over the hare uplands which stretch between Potchofstroom. the old capital of tho South African Republic, and Pretoria, the now, might have seen a strange sight. Toiling painfully over tho rough, thin grass-lands came a waggon healing a burden the fame of which travelled from farm to farm from the Vaal to tho Zoutpansberg. Tho load was a 37ft. steel steamer of six-horse power, with two twin-propellers. In front trudged a slight man of small stature. Suddenly he halted his lumbering vehicle, and turned away and descended a kloof, as though looking for someone. Half-way down the little valley 'he came upon a white man watching a couple of natives tugging tho soil from between two granite rocks. Tho man who had been escorting tne steamer chatted to the isolated white man. Presently ho walked to the spruit with him and watched him wash some of the earth in a pan. Then he shook his head and turned and went back to his digging. The.man in tho kloof returned to his digging.

Twelve months later. , after hardships and adventures innumerable, John Thorburn, ex-trapper in tho Hudson Bay Territory, ex-soldier in the American Civil War, ex-slave buyer on a Southern plantation, ex-diamond prospector and trader in South Africa, future adviser to Umbandine, the Swazi King, launched his craft in salt water, near Delagoa Bay. He had carried it 1600 miles across Africa. AN UNBELIEVER.

Three days ago John Thorbnru was telling mo of his journey. But ho is a , poor man to-day. For on that pleasant morning twenty-two _ years ago ho had no faith in the beginnings of the greatest goldfield the world has ever known. On that day he watched Harry Struben panning gold on tho edge of tho 'Witwatersrand. And ho passed on his way doubting. - Ho took his steamer over ground which now gives ,the world gold to the value of £2-1,000.000 a year. He ate a humble meal on the bar© waste, veldt where to-day there is the unceasing hum of tho “ nerve centre,” the hub, of South Africa—the town in which he now lives a poor man. Sitting hero to-day, where the electric trams clang below on thou - way to tho distant suburbs, where huge sky-scrapers tower on sites which a few years ago held only tin shanties whore tho roar of the ever-falling stamps is heard in every quiet moment by day or by night, one can hardly believq it. That all this fine city can have been bare veldt two decades ago seems impossible. ‘But the bard fact remains.- It was on September 20, 1880, that the Witwatorsrand was proclaimed a goldfield. It was in that year that tho township was laid out. A year later optimists talked hopefully of the day when their confidence would be justified to the world by an output of £2,000,000 a year. Tho world in that day produced only £20,000,000 of gold a year. Nineteen years have passed, and the Rand to-day gives more gold a year than tho whole earth in 1887. WHO DISCOVERED THE RAND ?

There is invariably controversy regarding the real discovery of a goldfield. A story is current that the Rand was found by an Englishman back in the fifties, but that the Boers sent him away and concealed the news lest strangers should enter tho land. A more generally accepted statement is that a man named Arnold was the original pioneer; but according to Mr. Banties it was tho finding of a small alluvial nugget by tho late Mr. Baric Minncar on tho farm Kroomdrai, in 1881, that led. to tho first prospecting. But whatever claims are put forward, tho real credit is duo to the brothers Struben. It was their persistent faith which' first revealed the true treasure of the Rand to tho mining world. It was they who set up the first battery of five stamps at Wilgespruit in 1885: and it was men like Bantjes, the finder of the Main Beef ; J. B. Robinson, the developer of Langlaagte; William Knight, who launched the first mine on a big scale ; Percy Whitehead, Doufhwaite, and others who followed their example on a sufficiently large scale, to test the true value of the banket formation upon which _at first there existed such a great, difference of opinion .that Rhodes’s engineer reported against the Rand.

Twenty years ago 1 There were a few waggons and a couple of tents then. There is a municipality valued at £45,000,000 to-day. We are grand and wealthy to-day. But I doubt if we are* any happier. I was talking to a pioneer yesterday, who showed mo a photograph of tho grass hut in which lie lived in 1886. He is well housed now; hut lie talked regretfully of the old days. The romenco of the old days has gone. Mining is prosaic now. It was in 1880 and 1887 that fortunes were made and thrown away. ONE SHILLING A STAND.

When you get out of the train at Park Station to-day and .step into the street, where the huge pile of railway officers towers overhead, you see building plots which were sold in 18S6 for ono shilling .per stand. At that time they lay so far from the town that.no ono cared about them, and Captain von Brandis bought them in at this price, and subsequently sold them at £2O each, and thought ho had done well. To-day they are worth thousands. At the first sale of stands the very centre of modern Johannesburg went for £2o_ a stand, and the entire township could have been acquired for about £20.000. You meet poor men today who have never forgiven themselves for selling for a few pounds land which is now worth hundreds of thousands. Even the weather was different in the Johannesburg of twenty years ago. All the earliest pioneers agree that July and August in the old days were noticeable for the heavy rainfall, and the unanimous testimony of the carlycqmors is that the spruits were full of water so that the name af the "White Waters Range" was. fully justified.

Tho Rand hung fire a little at the start. Tho so-called experts believed that the reef was not deen and that the finds would soon peter out. But when the shafts began to get down and the formation was found to continue, the rush came. In lumbering ox-wag-gons, drawn by sixteen ami eighteen bullocks, in Cape carts w-itb smart

terms of mules, in old buorgies pulled bv worn donkeys, on horseback, and on foot, the cosmopolitan crowd poured in. Two or throe men from the Cape lailways came up in a hansom cab, and for years the historic vehicle plied for hire" in Commissioner, street. EARLY HUMOUR.

It was a curious, happy-go-lucky community in those days. Loafers and wasters there were, as in all mining camps. One hears stories of methods which, to soy tho least, seemed peculiar, such as that of filing a revolver loaded with gold dust into the* Reef, tho sequel being such a remarkable assay that the public rushed in for the shares when the proposition was uoated. Amusements were scarce, and one body of frolickers was reduced to hiring the only mcrry-gc-round and loading it up to three times its capacity with natives, whereupon a stalwart reveller worked the windlass so long and so fast that the entire collection of horses and cars were flung clean out of the machine, and it cost something in there figures to compensate the injured sufficiently to prevent police court proceedings. But there were real workers then, as now, and development went on at an astonishing pace. The long journey from the railhead to the Rand meant tremendous difficulties, but heavy goods and machinery were j ought up. At one time Tangyc's, Ltd., were tho talk of the country, for Imy brought throe 12-ton boilers 150 miles by waggon from Charleston, each waggon requiring seventy-two oxen at the drills and sixty-four at other parts of tho route. Through drought and flood, bad speculations, mistakes, and slumps, the Randitcs held on their way till the perfecting of the cyanide process made the future success of the goldfield a certainty. To-day the gold industry on the Rand is as simple as and no more interesting than coal mining. It resolves itself into a question of working costs. The romance of the old days ban gone. Fortunes to-day arc more easily lost than made.

But in spite of all the mistakes tho Rand is p>*oud of Ms history. In the space of twenty years it has become* the greatest gold-producing centre of the world. In twenty years it has grown from a stretch of bare veldt into the biggest city in South Africa,' with streets which would not disgrace central London;

What will it bo in another twenty ?