SOUTH AFRICA: Golden Circus

The greatest gold rush since the Klondike was on last week. But most of the prospectors were the slick, sharp-eyed speculators of the London and Johannesburg stock exchanges. In the “kaffir circuses”—the usually cautious sections of the exchanges where South African gold stocks are traded—the market value of Orange Free State shares zoomed $100,000,000 in 48 hours.

The unprecedented boom grew beanstalk-fast from a 3,022-ft.-deep borehole in a cornfield near the dusty little village of Odendaalsrus, southwest of Johannesburg on the Free State’s sandy veld. A Canadian engineer, G. W. Hicks, employed by Diamond Tycoon Sir Ernest Oppenheimer’s Western Holdings and Blinkpoort companies, brought up the diamond-drilled ore core. It assayed 62.6 oz. of gold to the ton—33 times as rich as the phenomenally prosperous Blyvooruitzicht mine, 120 times better than Canada’s best.

Said the slightly dazed Hicks: “When I took the core from the drill, I could see we had struck something pretty good, but I had no idea it was so fabulously rich.” Hicks drilled his golden hole on a farm called “My Annie,” owned by 28-year-old Gerhardus Johannes Rheeder, who—like most Boer farmers—had long ago sold his mineral rights for a fraction of today’s inflated values.

The strike climaxed years of only moderately successful drilling in the Oden-daalsrus vicinity, may—if the rest of the reef bears out the first core’s promise—prove an old geological theory. Geologists have long guessed that Johannesburg’s famed, rich Witwatersrand and its wealthy western extension are part of a prehistoric geological basin whose opposite curve cuts beneath the Odendaalsrus district and could produce a similar bonanza.

As Western Holdings shares jumped from 72 to 105 shillings and Blinkpoort from 32 to 80, one thing seemed sure—the strike would produce no influx of motley adventurers, only a brief land boom for Free State farmers. Established companies hold mineral rights or options on almost all of the fertile grainlands, and there are few surface outcrops. If, as some Canadian and London experts warned that it might, the single borehole assay proved a fluke, thousands of speculators and small investors might see millions in paper profits disappear as fast as a summer shower on the parched Orange Free State fields.