Arthur Robert Sawyer
No dates recorded
Connection to the Koup
Took part in something recorded here: Arthur Sawyer tells the government the district's gold prospects are not good (1893).
Names
- Given
- Arthur Robert
- Surname
- Sawyer
The formal baptismal name and the name a person was actually called are both kept, and neither is derived from the other. Spelling drift between records is evidence, not noise.
A life in the record
-
1893
event
Arthur Sawyer tells the government the district's gold prospects are not good
Two years after the rush and twenty-one after Atherstone, a consulting engineer off the Selati goldfields reached the same verdict by a different route, reading Tierberg as an anticline against the Witteberg beds. He was wrong about the Dwyka conglomerate, which he took for volcanic ash until Moleng
Stories
- subject The Prince Albert gold rush
What we don't know
- No birth date is recorded.
- No death date is recorded.
- Neither parent is recorded, so this person is not attached to the tree above them.
- No dated record ties this person to a specific piece of ground.
A sourced gap beats an unsourced fill. These are the open questions on this person, stated rather than papered over.
Sources
- Rose Willis & Doreen Atkinson, "Zeekoegat: Explorations in the Koup Karoo" (2022) Karoo Development Foundation38pp cameo
Research notes
[SRC-068] Consulting engineer, previously two years on the Selati goldfields in eastern Limpopo. Reported to the Cape government in 1893 on the geology and gold prospects of the Prince Albert district and concluded they were NOT good. Read Tierberg, about 20 km east of Prince Albert, as an anticline separated from the Witteberg beds by a syncline, and took the Dwyka conglomerate for volcanic ash, a reading he abandoned after G.A.F. Molengraaff showed it was glacial. His report carried the longest colour section ever printed in Africa, "Ideal geological section from the Indian Ocean to Fraserburg". Went on to Mashonaland for Cecil John RhodesM, and in 1895 headed the ZAR commission that drew up its mining regulations.
These are working notes, not finished prose: they carry the reasoning, the corrections and the things still marked to verify. They are kept here so the page itself can read as what is known.