158 THE DIAMOND MINES OF SOUTH AFRICA
up
at Gong Gong, Union Kopje, Delport's Hope, Forlorn Hope, Niekerk's
Rush, Blue Jacket, Waldek's Plant, Larkin's Flat, and other placer
diggings, extending from Hebron twenty miles northeast of Klip-drift to
Sefonell's, sixty miles west.1 It has been estimated that
ten thousand diggers, white and black, were stretched along the river
in this string of camps, and in roving parties of prospectors.2
Any possible reckoning of the extent of a rush of thousands, which
nobody could measure exactly or tried to measure, was of course a rough
guess, but it seems probable that this guess was not very far from the
fact. Such an influx of restless adventurers, pouring along a river
line in a
thinly peopled territory in the heart of South Africa, as heedless as a locust swarm of any
questions of state sovereignty, or native tribal reservations, or
mineral right titles, was certain to raise a rumpus, if any official
authority in South Africa undertook to drive them away, or exact heavy
license fees, or even to hold them down under strict laws rigorously
enforced. The Australian gold fields had furnished some highly
significant object lessons enforcing this certainty, but the little
Boer Republics were not disposed to learn any lesson from the
experience of English Colonies.
The
South African Republic claimed the diamond placer border north and
west of the Vaal as part of its territory, but it was content, at
first, with the bare assumption that the diggers on the northern and
western bank were within the confines of its domain, without caring to
assert its right of control by any marked interference with the free
proceedings of the diggers. It did not regard the upturning of gravel
on its border line as any menace of serious intrusion within its territory, and the
1 "Among the Diamonds," 1870-1 87 I.
2 "South African Diamond Fields," Morton, 1877.
