These
discoveries were greatly magnified in the fever of speculation excited
by the opening of the diamond beds, and companies were formed in Natal
and England to develop these gold-fields, while daring adventurers
pushed still farther on, to the region north of the Limpopo, seeking
the traces of the ancient mining works that were known to exist. Upon
the report of the discovery at Lydenburg some fifteen hundred
prospectors flocked to this field, and a year or two later gold was
found in the Kaap Valley, fifty miles south of Lydenburg. The returns
from the placers were hardly tempting enough to hold the gold seekers,
and conflicts with the natives, followed by the outbreak of the war
with the South African Republic in 1880, were further discouraging to
any development in this region. After the war the exactions imposed by
the South African Republic upon the prosecution of mining in the
Lydenburg district were a check to outside prospecting.
In
1882 an Australian digger, Charles Durnin, found some very rich patches
of gold-bearing ground on the Kantoor plateau in the Kaap Valley, and
the rush to the Duivels Kantoor and Moodies brought to pass the first
considerable undertaking of gold quartz mining in South Africa. Some
gold mines showing great richness of ore were soon developed in this
district, and the bustling mining town of Barberton marked the centre
of a field which was thought to be of marvellous promise.
Unfortunately the booming of the district ran to a pitch of insane and
fraudulent speculation that was greatly damaging to the reputation of
this field of investment, and gold mining undertakings in South Africa
would commonly have been reckoned as "bubbles," had it not been for the
uncovering, at this juncture, of the astonishing riches of the Rand.
Nearly
twenty years before, the famous elephant hunter, H. Hartley, after
marking the gold-bearing ground in Matabele-land and the region of the
Zambesi, made his home on a farm in the Witwatersrand, unconsciously
settling on the face of deposits of gold far more marvellous than any
tradition of King Solomon's mines. Hartley died without any vision of
the treas-
