word of the find to a few Colesberg friends and relatives who were camping nearby, and these started out for the kopje early
the next morning in what they hoped was complete secrecy. In vain;
though they "inspanned," or yoked their oxen, very stealthily,
neighboring campers spotted them. The leaders had hardly got moving
when a throng was hot on their heels. The New Rush had begun.
By noon on Monday, hundreds of diggers had flocked to the kopje, staked
out thirty-one-foot-square claims, and begun digging furiously. By
this time they knew something about "dry" mining, as the digging at
places like Dutoitspan and the De Beers farm came to be called, to
distinguish it from the alluvial digging along the Vaal, but there was
a great deal that they didn't know. They knew that under the red
topsoil—an inch or two down, five feet down, ten feet down—they stood a
chance of coming to the crumbly yellow earth that contained diamonds;
they also stood a chance of coming to a substratum of rock and shale,
and this, they had painfully found out, was not diamondiferous. So the
luck of the diggers varied. One man might strike it rich right away,
and the man on the next claim might not find a thing. Since each claim
was worked according to the idiosyncrasies of its owner, not all the
diggings sank at the same rate. Some claim owners could afford to hire
native helpers, while others did everything themselves, and naturally
it took the latter much longer to get through the red soil. Two weeks
might go by before a lone digger could prepare his first "wash" and so
discover whether he had a productive claim or had drawn a blank.
Mining experts had learned some of the hazards of open-pit digging at Dutoitspan and the Old Rush, which by now was
