DIAMOND MINES OF SOUTH AFRICA 261
sumed
monthly in the compounds 250,000 lbs. of mutton, 200,000 fbs. of beef;
uses 6,000 tons of coal a day; has 2,000 horses and mules, and keeps 12
stallions of the best breeds and 200 brood mares, and this in a country
that a little over thirty years ago was over four hundred miles from
the nearest railroad and port, and was obliged to transport most of the
necessities through an undeveloped country by ox or mule wagons. At
that time coal cost at the diggings eighty dollars per ton; wood, one
dollar and seventy-five cents per one hundred lbs.; eggs were
seventy-five cents a dozen. The first machinery used cost fabulous
prices. A hundred horse-power engine cost forty thousand dollars
delivered in Kimberley. Transportation from Port Elizabeth or Cape Town
ranged from two dollars and fifty cents to seven dollars and fifty
cents per hundred pounds. Wages were also very high. White men in the
mines got from twenty to forty dollars per week; natives five to eight
dollars. In the seventies, as the companies being floated sought to
acquire properties, the price of claims soared until some of them
brought as high as fifty, seventy-five thousand dollars, and even one
hundred and fifty thousand dollars each.
Washing
machines were first used in 1874 and notwithstanding the great cost,
more machines were introduced from year to year, as they were found to
earn many times the cost, in the saving of labor and the increase of
yield and production.
After
the railroads from Cape Town and Port Elizabeth were brought into
Kimberley in 1885, prices fell. English coal could then be had for
forty dollars per ton; wood for fifty cents per hundred pounds. Freight
