Valley of Gold

“A hundred years ago, when the old South African Republic was about to be declared bankrupt, gold was found in a remote corner of the Transvaal. Diggers from Australia and California, gentlemen adventurers, deserters from the British Army, an unfrocked parson and other strange characters rushed to the scene and called heir camp Pilgrim’s Rest. It was a typical diggers camp where gold was panned in the streams and nuggets were found under rocks. The diggers weighed out their takings in the scales on bar counters. Women were sold for little more than the price of a bottle of gin and highwaymen robbed the coach from Lydenberg. President Burgers used Pilgrim’s Rest gold to mint the famous Burgers sovereigns, today worth more than R 1 000 apiece.

This was the rough-and-ready birth South Africa’s great gold mining industry and the first payable gold found in the country. The author has completely revised the story he wrote ten years ago and in this new version of it presents an exciting chapter of our history.Without the gold that was discovered at Pilgrim’s Rest in 1873, which set the prospectors on the trail, a century might have elapsed before the Witwatersrand mines were born.”