George Harrison & the Witwatersrand — 1886, the Rush That Built Johannesburg

In July 1886, an itinerant prospector named George Harrison was working on the farm Langlaagte, on a long, low ridge in the Transvaal called the Witwatersrand — the “ridge of white waters.” There, in a stretch of weathered conglomerate, he recognized gold. He was right beyond anyone’s imagining: he had exposed an edge of the Main Reef of the Witwatersrand, the single greatest gold deposit ever found, a buried arc of ore that would go on to yield a large share of all the gold ever mined on Earth.

Harrison declared his find to the government of the South African Republic, the Boer state under President Paul Kruger, and was recognized as the discoverer. By tradition he was granted a “discoverer’s claim” on the spot. And then, in the story that has come down to us, he sold that claim for something on the order of ten pounds and walked away — into the eastern Transvaal, and out of the historical record altogether. It is worth being careful here: this account is repeated everywhere, but it is traditional rather than firmly documented. Harrison’s birth, his later life, and his death are all unknown. One tale says he was later killed by a lion; no one can confirm it.

What is not in doubt is what his discovery set in motion. Within months the goldfields were proclaimed open and a tent camp had sprung up on the veld; within a decade that camp was Johannesburg, the largest city in South Africa, larger than Cape Town after two and a half centuries. But the Rand was not a poor man’s diggings. Its gold lay in hard banket reef that plunged thousands of feet underground, and getting it out demanded enormous capital — which meant the boom belonged not to prospectors but to financiers, the “Randlords,” and to the vast army of Black and migrant laborers, housed in closed compounds and paid a pittance, on whose backs the deep mines were built.

The wealth of the Rand reshaped the whole subcontinent. It drew tens of thousands of foreigners — uitlanders — into Kruger’s Boer republic, where they were taxed heavily and denied the vote; it tempted Cecil Rhodes and his circle into the bungled Jameson Raid of 1895–96; and it stoked the rivalry between British imperial ambition and Boer independence until it broke into the Second Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902. The man who started it all, if the tradition is true, sold his share of the richest goldfield in history for about a week’s wages and vanished.