The Prince Albert gold rush

An aardvark turns up a nugget on Spreeuwfontein in 1871; twenty years later a shepherd finds a second one and five hundred people arrive. 1,042 claims yield 504 ounces. The diggers' village was called Gatsplaas.

Spreeuwfontein, 1871–1892

An aardvark digs a hole

In August 1871, on the farm Spreeuwfontein in the Prince Albert division, an aardvark dug itself a burrow. In the spoil heap outside it lay a nugget of gold weighing two and a half ounces, round, water-worn, encrusted with crystals.

Young Lodewyk Bothma thought it was a sheep dropping. He kicked it aside. Then he looked again, decided it was a stone pretty enough to take home to his mother, and pocketed it. She thought it "queer" and passed it to her husband, who put it on a cupboard.

Prince Albert's Civil Commissioner Collard rode out with Dr White to look at the sheep track above a dry riverbed where it had been found. A Khoi man said he had found a nugget too, but that it had fallen out of his bandolier, so that story went nowhere.

Word travelled, as it does. Sir Richard Southey, the Cape Colonial Secretary, a man who four years earlier had held up the Eureka diamond in Parliament and said "gentlemen, this is the rock on which the future success of South Africa will be built", ordered an investigation.

Three men went to look, with a driver named Hendrick: Dr William Guybon Atherstone, the Grahamstown physician-geologist who had identified that first diamond; Thomas Bain, road engineer and son of Andrew Geddes Bain; and Dr E.J. Dunn, the government geologist.

By the time they arrived, Bothma had sold the nugget to Samuel "Saamie" Luttig for £5.50. Nobody in the Luttig family knows what became of it.

Atherstone's verdict, delivered to the Cape House of Assembly in early 1872, was that the rocks were too young to host a productive goldfield. He also suggested the government offer a £5,000 reward to anyone who found a real goldfield in the Cape, "the best and least expensive way of discovering gold in the Colony."

The salting allegation

But Atherstone went further than "too young". He suspected the nugget was salted. Californian or Australian gold planted on the farm. Bain disagreed, and could say why.

Dunn, later sent back by the Port Elizabeth firm Barry and Nephews, was blunter still. "There is not a trace of gold there," he said, and on the nugget itself:

It bears conclusive evidence of having been in human possession prior to discovery. It is well rounded with the exception of the smallest end which has been broken off sharply. This indicates it must have been broken off by human agency — this never occurs in alluvial gold.

So the founding nugget of the Prince Albert goldfields may never have come out of that aardvark hole at all. Nobody has ever settled it. Twenty years of quiet followed.

The second nugget

In 1891 a shepherd named Jan Koevies. Korries in some tellings, picked up a rock with a bit of yellow on it.

He took it to the farm owner, John Müller, who thought a bullet had struck the stone. Müller showed it to Piet du Plessis, who farmed at Zeekoegat. Du Plessis knew what it was. 6 dwt 23 grains.

This time nobody waited for a geologist.

(The shepherd's name survives, which for a Karoo farm labourer in 1891 is worth noticing. Everything that follows, the five hundred diggers, the syndicates, the village, starts with Jan Koevies bending down.)

The rush

By late July there were men on the ground with crowbars, and by 28 July the Colonial Geologist was writing his report from Prince Albert. Three weeks later that report was being read in Hobart, Tasmania.

Mr. Bain, Colonial Geologist, reports relative to the Spreeuwfontein gold-fields, in the Prince Albert division, that finds in the bottom layers of drift sand and crevices of the Waterfall River amounted to 3 oz. 12 dwt. 17 grs. of alluvial gold, including four nuggets, weighing respectively 1 oz. 15 dwt. 10 gr., 4 dwt. 1 gr., 2 dwt. 10 gr., and 2 dwt. 16 grs. In a trial which he made while there with three men he found 7 dwt. 7 gr. in about three hours… giving a total of both finds of exactly 4 oz. of gold.

— The Mercury, Hobart, 20 August 1891

The work was shallow and needed almost nothing: "In crevices of the bed-rock or shoals in the creeks, which are easily prised out in conveniently-sized blocks with crowbars without the aid of explosives, three men in one and a half days got about 3 oz. of gold, including a nugget weighing 1 oz. 15 dwt."

Bain then did what geologists were doing everywhere in 1891, which was to draw a very large circle. Reasoning from the Dicynodon beds, the Karoo's fossil horizons, which he knew well, having spent 1889 working the fossil sites with the palaeontologist H.G. Seeley, he projected the field west towards Bushmanland and east towards King William's Town: an average width of fifteen miles across 8,100 square miles of Karoo.

He came back that year with his son-in-law Henry Miller Oakley, inspector at the Millwood goldfield near Knysna, who had married Bain's daughter Frances. Together they published a considered estimate of the actual gold-bearing reef:

Eighteen square miles.

Bain's own 31-page report, The Nuggets of the Gouph and the Prince Albert Gold Fields, was published by Juta the same year. The press had the 8,100. The report had the 18.

Then the two sentences that tell you exactly what kind of event this was:

Cape Town is largely interested in the new fields. Several syndicates have been formed for the purpose of acquiring claims on the farms when the proclamation shall have taken place, and a large number of gentlemen have journeyed down to the auriferous district during the past week. Men without means are warned from journeying to the scene of the discoveries for the present, or at least until the fields shall have been proclaimed.

And from Beaufort West, the day before: "The excitement here regarding the Prince Albert goldfields is growing. The fields are only 10 hours from Beaufort West over a fairly good road, which the Divisional Council will put into perfect order shortly."

Syndicates forming in Cape Town. A Divisional Council promising to fix the road. The poor warned to stay home.

The ground thrown open

On 4 August 1891, 19,050 morgen of Spreeuwfontein was opened to the public.

That is not a round number, and it is not an approximation. 19,050 morgen 449 square roods is the exact extent of Portion 1 of Spreeuwfontein, cut off the parent farm in 1850 under deed 1850-16-167 and recorded in the Surveyor-General's own deduction table on the back of the 1834 diagram. The ground thrown open to the diggers was a specific, surveyed, titled piece of land.

Five hundred people came. They staked and registered 1,042 claims.

On 20 September 1891, a further 3,898 morgen was added to the public diggings, again exactly the figure the survey arithmetic gives for the Remainder of Spreeuwfontein after Portions 1 and 2 were deducted.

It was never one farm

The rush is usually told as Spreeuwfontein, and that is where the ground was proclaimed and where the town went up. But the prospecting was much wider than the proclamation. Men were also turning over Vrischgewaacht, Hartebeesfontein, Zeekoegat itself, Modderdrift, Ganzekraal and Toornitzkraal, and a good deal of excitement attached to Heuningkop at Leeu Gamka. [SRC-068]

Gold was found on Rietfontein too, granted about 1858 to J.S. de Villiers, who had applied for it because of a strong perennial fountain that had long been a camping and grazing stop on the earliest north–south route. The farm is named for the reed bed at the water. Some of those diggings are still visible on the ground.

And the two main sites were not even the same kind of digging. Spreeuwfontein was alluvial, gold washed into old river gravel, prised out of bedrock crevices with a crowbar. Klein Waterval was shallow excavation into the bedrock itself, on strata carrying abundant quartz veins that may well have been where the gold came from in the first place. Nobody ever found the vein.

Gatsplaas

Lodewyk Bothma, who owned the farm, did what farm owners do when five hundred people arrive: he laid out a village.

He called the place Gatsplaas, gat, a hole, because that is where the first nugget was found. Not the diggings in general: that hole, the aardvark's, twenty years earlier.

He was competing. N.J. Gillet, a Cape Town engineer who had acquired an interest in Spreeuwfontein, wanted to found a town of his own and call it Gilletville. Gillet wrote the guidebook, sold the picks, shovels, mortars and pestles, drills, hammers, portable forges and prospecting pans, and also the folding bedsteads, mattresses, washstands and underwear. It was Gillet who declared:

"There is no word in our language expressive enough to convey an idea of the richness of the Prince Albert Goldfields."

Bothma's Gatsplaas won.

F Brazier, a Prince Albert auctioneer, developed the township. Prince Albert's hotelier Jan Haak put up the first galvanised-iron-and-wood building. Thomas Vinson opened a small shop, a German firm a butchery, Cole of Cape Town a bakery, and Dr Bastable a medical practice. Before long there were two shops, a hotel, a bottle store, barbers, blacksmiths and other trades. Post came from Prince Albert three times a week, then from Fraserburg Road station, and eventually a post office opened. A police sergeant and two constables kept order.

Nobody built a church. Travelling ministers came out occasionally, one was the Reverend Guy Gething of Beaufort West. (Fifteen years later, and a few farms away, Frederick Simon Oosthuizen would build one at Zeekoegat at his own expense, see S003.)

Getting there

Local entrepreneurs competed for the traffic. Jan Haak ran coaches and carts from Prince Albert Road and Fraserburg Road stations and from Oudtshoorn, about £3 3s a head with steep discounts for parties of seven. Three services ran the three-hour trip from Fraserburg Road alone, K Müller, Fuller and Coetzee, and C.W. Barnes's Welcome Line, four to six mules to a vehicle. Haak's route went over the Swartberg Pass, and his mules "seldom lasted longer than a year."

There were no boarding houses, so men pitched tents. Some hung nameboards on them: "Kareeboom Villa", "Mimosa Lodge".

The town that briefly worked

Jas Bryant of the Beaufort West Courier started a paper, The Gough Gold News. Its local office was a tent with a small desk, "the smallest publishing office in the country".

Goodman and Company built a clubhouse, the Spreeuwville Club; sixty men came to the opening and elected Oakley president. It held smoking concerts with solos, duets and recitations.

A Diggers Committee formed. George Goodman, H van der Spuy, DM Arthur, CF Hitge, AC Hirschfield, Van der Byl, and about 160 men signed a petition for official recognition. Among the signatures: H Rich, HE Gold and J Cash.

Syndicates multiplied: the Good Hope Syndicate under H Baxter, a Kimberley syndicate, and the Prince Albert Goldfields Prospecting and Proprietary Syndicate chaired by Herbert Mearns, with Samuel Luttig, Jan Combrink, Jan Haak, Piet du Plessis, A Pocock, PH Louw and J O'Hare the village postmaster among its shareholders.

Among the diggers was Sarel Alers, a bywoner. He reasoned that his family had been poor for a very long time and a find might change his luck. It was worth a try. It didn't work out.

What came out of the ground

504 ounces. That is the official total recovered from 1,042 claims across the life of the field.

At the gold price of the day, roughly £4 5s an ounce, the entire Prince Albert goldfield produced something in the order of £2,100, split, in principle, a thousand ways.

The largest single find was 100 ounces, taken by P.H. du Plessis, the original prospector. Mrs Ruby Muller, mother of Louis Muller, who held Klein Waterval, remembered it differently: "Mr du Plessis sent away samples for which he got a few thousand pounds."

SRC-068 puts a figure on it: £5,000. If that is right, then the man who sold the samples made more than twice what the whole field produced out of the ground, and he did it without digging. Du Plessis stayed an active player to the very end, which fits a man who had already been paid.

And a defence of the 504 ounces

It is easy to read 504 ounces as a farce, and this page has been reading it that way. One line in SRC-068 argues the other side, and it deserves to stand:

The production of over 500 ounces in a five-month period was considerably higher than for any comparable period during the life of the Millwood or Karatara goldfields.

Millwood was a real goldfield with a real town and a mining inspector. Oakley's own field. Judged against it over the same span, Prince Albert was not a fiasco; it was a small field that flared and stopped. What killed it was not that there was no gold. It was that there was not enough, and nobody ever found the vein it had eroded out of.

(The arithmetic wants care. The 504 oz is given elsewhere as the total for the whole life of the field across 1,042 claims. Reading it as a five-month figure and reading it as a lifetime figure are two different claims, and the source makes both on facing pages.)

Some men did well. John Inner and Carpenter took 4½ oz in two days; H du Plessis 5 oz and a one-ounce nugget; J James 4 oz; and a man named Hugo found a nugget that looked like a small bunch of grapes. At £4 an ounce it seemed worth the effort.

By November 1891, barely four months in, interest was already waning. The next year production fell to as little as seven ounces a month. Some turned to blasting, which brought in the celebrated "Kimberley Jock", Mike Kennedy, and a new flameless explosive called Roburite.

By 1895 the golden dream was over and, in the phrasing of the record, "most claims had fallen into the hands of a few poor Coloured men." The post office closed on 31 August 1895 and the postmaster went back to Prince Albert. The Registrar of Claims withdrew in 1896. By 1898 Spreeuwfontein and Klein Waterval were abandoned and closed, and Oakley had long since returned to Millwood.

Atherstone had been right in 1872, and the twenty-year silence between the two nuggets had been the correct reading of the ground all along.

The second geologist, 1893

Atherstone gets the credit for calling it, in 1872. He was not the only one, and the second verdict is worth having because it was reached independently and by a different route.

In 1893, two years after the rush, a consulting engineer named Arthur Robert Sawyer, who had spent two years on the Selati goldfields in the eastern Transvaal, reported to the Cape government on the geology and the gold prospects of the Prince Albert district. He worked north and east of Tierberg, the mountain about 20 km east of the town, and read it as an anticline separated from the main Witteberg range by a syncline.

He got one thing wrong: he took the Dwyka conglomerate for volcanic ash, and only abandoned that after G.A.F. Molengraaff showed it was glacial. He got the important thing right. The prospects, he concluded, were not good. [SRC-068]

Sawyer's report carried what is said to be the longest colour section ever printed in Africa, "Ideal geological section from the Indian Ocean to Fraserburg". Soon afterwards he went north to look at Mashonaland's goldfields for Cecil John Rhodes, and in 1895 the ZAR government put him at the head of the commission that wrote its mining regulations.

Twenty-one years apart, two geologists with nothing in common looked at this ground and said the same thing. In between, five hundred people came anyway.

(A third and fourth report exist and have not been read: the Geological Surveyor Andrew Wyley, and a preliminary survey of the Oudtshoorn and Prince Albert districts by G.S. Corstorphine and A.W. Rogers for the Geological Commission.)

Sixpence for a map of the claims

Gillet was not the only man who rushed into print. Sydney Cowper produced a ten-page booklet, The Prince Albert Goldfields with Map, and sold it for sixpence.

His map is the more useful of the two documents, because it shows how the field was actually pegged. The large claims belong to Danie du Plessis of the Early Bird Syndicate. Around them are small ones with the names diggers give things: Watson's Peg, Eyre's Shaft, Saunders's Shaft. The workings are at Main Creek and One Speck Creek. [SRC-068]

One Speck Creek. Somebody named that after what he found in it.

One last flare, 1905

On 6 February 1905 one of the largest public meetings ever held in Prince Albert filled the courtroom, to discuss a fresh find near Zeekoegat "only five hours ride from town." The Courier took it down almost verbatim, and it reads like a village losing its temper:

NC van der Hoeven: "I fear Mostert and Du Plessis, on whose land the gold was found, aim to ignore us and float a company in Beaufort West." Residents muttered: "Prince Albert will be left in the lurch." F Fischer: "We've slumbered long enough. It's time to be up and doing. We must mine the gold, if we don't others will." S Koch: "We must not be duped and kept in the dark." JN Combrink: "We have had enough of waiting. It has not yet brought us a decent water supply." — cheers

"So ended a dangerously fiery meeting," reported The Courier.

Nothing came of that either.

Afterwards

The name outlived the gold. Forty-eight years later, on 14 May 1939, a district registrar at Prince Albert filled in a Form of Information of a Death for Johanna Maria Magdalena Bothma, a widow of seventy-nine who died of myocarditis and old age at a house in Nuwestraat. In the box marked intended place of burial, he wrote "Gatsplaas, distrik Prins Albert."

She shares a surname with the man who laid the village out, and the informant on her death notice was L. Bothma. Gatsplaas was still an address you could be buried at, long after the hotel and the post office were gone.

The families stayed. The Mullers of Klein Waterval took the amended title to the Spreeuwfontein Remainder on 19 June 1903. J.C. Muller, Prince Albert folio 973, the same day that Varsche Fontein next door passed to J.R.G. Luttig under the consecutive deed number.

And Vredendal, part of this same ground, is where Frans's mother grew up, and where his uncle farms today.

What is left

Judy Maguire, the Prince Albert palaeontologist and historian, has walked both mining sites: "Raw pits in the veld, and very few badly ruined built structures, none of them photogenic, are the only markers of that once exciting historic time… just visiting the sites of these old mines made me wonder just how and where they managed to get enough water to 'wash' the ore. This is a total mystery."

The origin of the gold has never been determined. Because of the quartz still attached to some nuggets, it was a vein gold, eroded and washed into ancient rivers that once crossed the Karoo. Where the vein was, nobody knows.

And there is a ghost. A poker-playing digger is said to come in from the old goldfields to the Swartberg Hotel; others have seen miners' shades working the abandoned shafts at Spreeuwfontein.

Thomas Bain

There is one more thread worth pulling.

Thomas Charles John Bain (1830–1893) had spent 1881 to 1888 driving a road over the Swartberg, the pass that climbs out of Prince Albert and drops into the Oudtshoorn side, built largely with convict labour, at a cost of about £14,500 and, by most accounts, around 150 convict lives. It opened on 10 January 1888.

That same year he was detached from the Roads Department and made geological and irrigation surveyor of the colony. So the man who wrote the 1891 report on the gold at Spreeuwfontein was the man who had just finished building the road over the mountain above the town.

He died on 29 September 1893, his sixty-third birthday.

Four years after the pass opened, in 1892, a fourteen-year-old boy named Almero Jacobus Hitge Oosthuizen drove three schoolteachers over Bain's new pass in a mule cart, and came home by moonlight complaining about the shrieking. (See S001.)

And sixty years after Bain reasoned about gold from the Karoo's fossil beds, a farmer on Zwartskraal in the same district, Roy Oosthuizen, would pick up fossils good enough that a 280-million-year-old shark carries his name: Dwykaselachus oosthuizeni.

A note on the units

• 1 ounce (oz) troy = 20 pennyweights
• 1 pennyweight (dwt) = 24 grains (gr)
• So the shepherd's 1891 nugget, "just over six pennyweights", was about 10.8 grams, a lump of gold roughly the size of a pea.
• The 1871 aardvark nugget, at 2½ oz, was about 78 grams.
• The whole field's 504 oz is about 15.7 kilograms.

Sources

• [DOC-0018] "Prince Albert Gold Fields", The Mercury (Hobart, Tasmania), 20 August 1891, p.3. Bain's report, datelined Prince Albert, 28 July 1891. National Library of Australia, nla.news-article12724926
• [DOC-0011, DOC-0012] SG diagram 432/1834 and its deduction table, the 19,050 and 3,898 morgen figures
• [DOC-0016] SG diagram 1/1903. Klein Waterval as the Remainder; the 1903 amended title to J.C. Muller
• [DOC-0017] Form of Information of a Death, Johanna Maria Magdalena Bothma, Prince Albert, 14 May 1939
• [DOC-0054] Rose Willis & Doreen Atkinson, Zeekoegat: Explorations in the Koup Karoo, Karoo Development Foundation, 2022, the fullest account, and the source for the salting allegation, the named shepherd, the village and its people
• "The Prince Albert goldfields, 1891", Arid Areas Research and Development
• "The Karoo's mini gold bonanza", Engineering News, 21 February 2014
• "History of Prince Albert", Karoo South Africa
• Thomas Charles John Bain, S2A3 Biographical Database of Southern African Science

Relics of the rush are held at the Fransie Pienaar Museum in Prince Albert.

What this story is about

• set on Spreeuw Fontein & Toornits Kraal (Spreeufontein No. 26)
• set on Vredendal (Spreeufontein No. 26 Ptn 1)
• set on Klein Waterval (Spreeufontein No. 26 Remainder)
• about Lodewyk Bothma
• about P.H. du Plessis
• about Thomas Charles John Bain
• about William Guybon Atherstone
• about Jan Koevies (Korries)
• about Dr Edward John Dunn
• about Henry Miller Oakley
• about Nicolas Joseph Gillet
• about Arthur Robert Sawyer
• about Sydney Cowper
• set on Klein Waterval (consolidated)

Sources

Everything this story rests on, with a link to the original wherever one exists. Where a citation is incomplete it says so, an incomplete citation is a research gap, not a formatting problem. If your work is here and the credit is wrong or thin, please tell us and it will be fixed.

1. Newspaper, 20 August 1891 National Library of Australia / Trovenla.news-article12724926view it online →
2. Death notice, deed entry no. 40, 14 May 1939 Prince Albert district registrarB.M.D.2, entry no. 40, 14 May 1939
3. Diagram verso, 432/1834 (verso) Surveyor-General / Deeds e-portalSG Dgm 432/1834 (verso)
4. Local history, 2022 Karoo Development Foundation38pp cameoview it online →
5. Thesis, 2003 Universiteit van Stellenbosch (SUNScholar)MA thesis, Departement Geskiedenis; studieleier Dr M Burden; April 2003; handle 10019.1/53526view it online →
6. Spreeuwfontein No.26 original grant diagram (1834) Surveyor-General / Deeds e-portalSG Dgm 432/1834
7. Spreeuwfontein No.26 1834 diagram - reverse: deduction table Surveyor-General / Deeds e-portalSG Dgm 432/1834 (verso)
8. Spreeuwfontein Remainder "Klein Waterval" diagram + amended title Surveyor-General / Deeds e-portalSG Dgm 1/1903
9. Form of Information of a Death - Johanna Maria Magdalena Bothma, 1939 Prince Albert district registrarB.M.D.2, entry no. 40, 14 May 1939
10. "Prince Albert Gold Fields", The Mercury (Hobart, Tasmania), 20 Aug 1891 p.3 National Library of Australia / Trovenla.news-article12724926view it online →

Research notes

The research behind this page, kept separate from it: dated working notes, open questions, and what is not yet settled.