210 THE DIAMOND MINES OF SOUTH AFRICA
was from £1 to £2 10s. Half
a crown (sixty cents) was often paid for a small cabbage or a handful
of onions. Choice forage for the horses and mules was almost as costly
as vegetables. A bundle of five pounds of unthreshed oat hay was sold
for as high as 2s. Dry cut fuel was as high-priced as forage. Bundles of light sticks sold from 9d. to 1s. per bundle, and £3
was charged for a load of good firewood. There was a considerable
forest growth on the hills near the Vaal River, and many thickets on
the ridges nearer the camps, but the cost of cutting and hauling was
so great that many diggers contrived to make their fires of dried
bullocks' dung (buffalo chips as they were called by the emigrants
crossing the American plains), as they had learned to do when crossing
the karroo.1
Market
auctions were the common and popular mode of selling food and ordinary
miners' supplies. Criers swinging bells rang up the drowsy camps for
the early morning market, where meat, eggs, butter, fruit, and
vegetables were offered from wagons and stalls in the open market
squares. These sales and gatherings of bidders and lookers-on formed
one of the liveliest camp scenes, especially on Saturday, when
thousands of whites and blacks flocked to the auctions, surrounding the
stands with dense masses of jovial bargainers. How strange and curious
to a newcomer's eye was the market show, — carcasses of big brown
shaggy wildebeests hanging up in line with sides of beef, antelopes
with slender legs stretched out stiffly among the slaughtered sheep and
lambs, strips of biltong and freshly killed kids, little long-legged
hares, party-colored bustards, red-wing partridges, red-legged
plovers, guinea fowl, ducks, geese, and other wild fowl, mingled with
the poultry from country farmyards ! Here were lines of huge
tent-covered wagons filled with hides, and wool, and meal, and wood,
driven to market by the stolid Boers or Hottentot servants grinning
from ear to ear. Potatoes, and beets, and carrots, and onions, and
cabbages were piled in heaps, tempting the last shilling of
scurvy-haunted men. The gobbling of turkeys, the crowing of cocks, the quacking of 1 "The Diamond Diggings of South Africa," Payton, 1872
Flickr
Stumbleupon
Scribd
