stream.
"Diggers have their habits," a Kimberley man told me, in the detached
tone of one discussing ants or bees. Most Kimberley people today take
this attitude toward the subject-interested but not involved. "They
hear of a strike somewhere, and they go wherever it is and set up their
camp and plant. If they'd only stay and give it a chance, they would
probably do quite well, but no. They hear of a strike somewhere else,
and —bing!—they're off to the new spot."
By
the end of 1869, ten thousand diggers had reached the Vaal and had
staked out claims along its banks for miles down-and upriver from
Pniel—some on land owned by farmers and some on land owned by
missionary societies but most on land owned, as far as anybody knew, by
no one at all. The diggers paid rent where there was rent to pay, but
they got into endless quarrels over claim jumping. What with the
congestion and the chaos, the diggers soon decided they had better do
some self-policing, and in various localities they established Diggers'
Committees, which started by arbitrating disputes and soon were
thinking up and enforcing regulations of various sorts and issuing
diggers' licenses. What landowners there were gladly left such matters
to the diggers, and before long a semblance of order came into the
fields. The committees set a limit to the size of a claim—this varied,
but ordinarily a claim could be no more than thirty-one feet square—and
they ruled that no man could hold more than two claims at a time. Of
course, two partners could hold four claims, and a group of men could
manage to corner quite a lot of land; a map of the diggings along the
Vaal or, later, in and around Kimberley was not a neat checkerboard but
a patchwork of rectangular pieces of various sizes.
