a
good strike—so good that although the Widow Visser charged two pounds a
month for digging rights, instead of the ten shillings customary along
the Vaal, diggers flocked to the farm and cheerfully paid up. At one
time as many as fourteen hundred men were working there. Twenty-eight
hundred pounds a month is a good income, and Mrs. Visser didn't have to
do any digging on her own.
North
and west of Jagersfontein, on the border of the Orange Free State,
there were three farms: Buitfontein, Dorstfontein, and Vooruitzigt
(which means "forward-looking"). All were part of the same large tract
of land—just under sixty square miles. The city of Kimberley stands on
what was Vooruitzigt, the northernmost of the farms. It was
Dorstfontein, the middle farm, that was the first to yield diamonds—in
September 1870. There, in a hollow called Du Toit's Pan, or, as it was
later spelled, Dutoitspan (a pan is a shallow, flat-bottomed,
clay-lined depression), they found the now familiar yellow earth, and
in the yellow earth they found diamonds thickly strewn close to the
surface and even, after a heavy rain, open to the sky, waiting to be
picked up. There was a terrific scramble for Dutoitspan, and hundreds
of diggers staked out claims. Financiers arrived on the scene, and a
syndicate of them bought the farm, for twenty-six hundred pounds, but
they didn't change the by then established rules of digging; they
continued to lease out digging rights and to leave all problems of
policing to the Diggers' Committees. Then, in November, diamonds were
found on Buitfontein, just to the south, and it quickly went to another
syndicate, for two thousand pounds.
Vooruitzigt, a sixteen-thousand-acre farm, was owned by two Boer brothers named de Beer—or, as practically everybody ex-
