It is generally accepted in the historical mining narrative that South Africa’s phenomenal era of gold discovery, rushes and mining started around 1873, when extensive and payable quantities of alluvial gold were discovered in places such as Spitzkop, MacMac and Pilgrim’s Rest, in the area then known as the Eastern Transvaal.

Unfortunately, that particular narrative has been popularised, perhaps in an attempt to make South Africa’s mining history more linear and accessible to the general public, at the expense of a number of other, albeit minor, gold discoveries and rushes that occurred across this varied landscape. Indeed, South Africa’s mining narrative is littered with many little-known tales of gold discovery and adventure, some of which occurred even before the country’s great golden era is popularly believed to have started.

Take, for example, the gold discovery and subsequent rush that occurred near the small Karoo town of Prince Albert.

As incredible as it may seem, given the seemingly mineral-barren nature of that monotonous and unforgiving scrubland that is the Karoo, gold was indeed discovered on the farm Spreeuwfontein, some 50 km from Prince Albert, in August 1871.

The anecdotal account has it that the first gold nugget – weighing a substantial 2.5 oz, was rounded and water-worn in appearance, and with a few crystals adhering to it – was dug up by an aardvark attempting to make its home on the Spreeuwfontein property.

News of the discovery spread as far as Cape Town and, inevitably, reached the ears of the colonial government. In fact, the government was so intrigued by the news that the Cape Colonial secretary, Sir Richard Southey (who would soon be appointed to his most notable role as Lieutenant-Governor of the diamond fields of Griqualand West), instructed two well-known geologists, Dr William Atherstone and Thomas Bain, to travel to the district and “investigate the circumstances connected with the reported discovery and to ascertain the probability of gold-bearing rocks existing in that neighbourhood”.

Atherstone and Bain conducted a thorough investigation of the various farms in the vicinity of Prince Albert, including Spreeuwfontein, but found no indication of the existence of auriferous rocks. Atherstone subsequently submitted a report to the Cape House of Assembly in early 1872, stating that he considered the rocks in that district “too young” to host a productive goldfield.

The findings of such a respected geologist carried much weight and served to snuff out any interest that had been ignited in searching for gold in the Gough district of Prince Albert.

For the next 20 years, no further finds were made and, with the phenomenal discoveries made in the Eastern Transvaal and the Witwatersrand, the gold fever that had momentarily gripped the southern Karoo had well and truly migrated north.

However, in July 1891, exactly 20 years after the initial discovery, a shepherd stumbled across a second nugget – this one weighing in at a little over six pennyweights – on the farm Klein Waterval, which was, not unsurprisingly, adjacent to Spreeuwfontein.

News of that discovery spread like wildfire and, within just a few days, a rush was on to the site of the latest gold find.

By the beginning of August, some 500 hopeful diggers had rushed both properties, compelling government to proclaim a large proportion (19 050 morgen) of Spreeuwfon- tein public gold diggings. Following the proclamation, the diggers dutifully staked and registered their claims, which, at the height of the rush, numbered 1 042 and got down to the arduous task of excavating the dry scrubland in search of more water-worn golden nuggets.

In an effort to accommodate the mass of diggers, Lodewyk Bothma, the proprietor of Spreeuwfontein, set about erecting a village, which he named Gatsplaas in honour of the first nugget that had been found in the aardvark burrow. Gatsplaas soon boasted two shops, a hotel and a post office. (Interestingly, a house in present-day Prince Albert, called The Ark, was built from wood initially used to build the hotel in Gatsplaas.)

However, Atherstone was proved correct in his findings, made two decades earlier, for Spreeuwfontein proved to be an unviable goldfield. All in all, only 504 oz of gold was won, at least according to official records, from the 1 042 claims before the finds petered out. (Interestingly, the origin of that gold has never been determined. All that is certain is that, because of the quartz attached to some nuggets, the gold was originally a vein type, was eroded over time and washed into ancient rivers that once traversed the Karoo.)

Thus, the rush was over almost as quickly as it had begun, and by the end of 1892, Gatsplaas and the Spreeuwfontein gold diggings had largely been abandoned. Relics of that particular gold rush are on display at the Fransie Pienaar Museum, in Prince Albert.

While the Spreeuwfontein gold rush does not rank in romance and finds, not to mention magnitude, compared with the bonanza that was the Transvaal gold rush, it does rank as one of the more exciting mineral-rush episodes of the Cape’s history and, if only for that reason, certainly deserves its place in the annals of South Africa’s mining history.