necessary
equipment. It was a feverish scramble to get quickly fortunes lying
around loose, soon to be gathered up by the fortunate. It was the
looting of a chest discovered by chance in an out-of-the-way room in a
long-forgotten castle.
Whatever
justice or injustice there was in the action of the British Government,
the Cape Colony police brought order out of chaos, and under the hand
of a strong government, the industry was rapidly developed to
tremendous proportions.
As
in the wet diggings, the claims at Du Toit's Pan and Bultfontein were
thirty by thirty English feet in extent. At the De Beers and Kimberley
they were thirty by thirty feet Dutch measurement, which equaled about
thirty-one by thirty-one English feet. To afford entrance and exit to
the inner claims, the authorities, profiting by experience on the three
other mines, required that a strip of earth running north and south,
fifteen feet wide, be left between every second row, on the Kimberley,
to be used as a roadway, thereby taking 7-1/2 feet from each claim. The
dividing lines, being in earth which might carry anywhere a stone worth
a fortune, were a source of trouble. The claim owner sat at a stake in
the roadway which marked the corner of his claim. Ropes and a pulley
were attached to this by which the earth was hauled up from the
digging. As the workings went down, these roadways became dangerous
walls and finally had to be taken down. A system of haulage from all
parts of the mine by wire ropes and buckets to the reef was then
adopted at all the mines, and they became pandemoniums of creaking
cables and swaying buckets. This haulage system was
