There was no official response to this well-warranted suggestion, for it had hardly been penned when the news of a great discovery aroused such excitement, followed by such a rush to the field, that no government exploration was needed. In March, 1869, a superb white diamond, weighing 83.5 carats, was picked up by a Griqua shepherd-boy on the farm Zendfonstein, near the Orange River. Schalk van Niekerk bought this stone for a monstrous price in the eyes of the poor shepherd -- 500 sheep, 10 oxen, and a horse -- but the lucky purchaser sold it easily for 11,200 pounds to Lilienfeld Brothers, of Hopetown, and it was subsequently purchased by Earl Dudley for 25,000 pounds. This extraordinary gem, which soon became famous as "the Star of South Africa," drew all eyes to a field that could yield such products, and the existence and position of diamond-beds were soon further assured and defined by the finding of many smaller stones in the alluvial gravel on the banks of the Vaal.
Alluvial deposits form the surface on both sides of this river, stretching inland for several miles. In some places the turns of the stream are frequent and abrupt, and there are many dry water-courses, which were probably old river-channels. The flooding and winding of the river partly account for the wide spreading of the deposits, but there had been a great abrasion of the surface of the land, for the water-worn gravel sometimes covers even the tops of the ridges and kopjes along the course of the river.
This gravel was a medley of worn and rolled chips of basalt, sandstone, quartz, and trap, intermingled with agates, garnets, peridot, and jasper, and other richly colored pebbles, lying in and on a bedding of sand and clay. Below this alluvial soil was in some places a calcareous tufa, but usually a rock of melaphyse or a clayey shale varying in color. Scattered thickly through the gravel and the clay along the banks were heavy bowlders of basalt and trap which were greatly vexing in afterdays to the diamond-diggers.
For a stretch of a hundred miles above the mission-station at Pniel the river flows through a series of rocky ridges, rolling back from either bank to a tract of grassy, undulating plains. Fancy can scarcely picture rock-heaps more contorted and misshapen. Only prodigious subterranean forces could have so rent the earth's crust and protruded jagged dikes of metamorphic, conglomerate, and amygdaloid rocks, irregularly traversed by veins of quartz, and heavily sprinkled with big bare bowlders of basalt and trap. Here the old lacustrine sedimentary formation of the South African high veld north of the Zwarte Bergen and Witte Bergen ranges has plainly been riven by volcanic upheaval. The shale and sandstone of the upper and lower karroo beds have been washed away down to an igneous rock lying between the shale and the sandstone. Along this stretch of the river the first considerable deposit of diamonds in South Africa was uncovered.
For more than a year since the discovery of the first diamond there had been some desultory scratching of the gravel along the Vaal by farmers and natives in looking for blink klippe, and a few little diamonds had been found by the Hottentots, as before noted. But the first systematic digging and sifting of the ground were begun by a party of prospectors from Natal at the mission station of Hebron. This was the forerunner of the second great trek to the Vaal from the Cape -- a myriad of adventurers that spread down the stream like a locust swarm, amazing the natives, worrying the missionaries, and agitating the pioneer republics on the north and the cast.
“Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid or terrified because of them, for the LORD your God goes with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you.”
– Deuteronomy 31:6