The reef that built Johannesburg in ten years
In 1886 gold was found on the Witwatersrand and Johannesburg was built on top of it inside a decade. The reef is not a vein you can chase with a pick: it is an ancient buried shoreline, the Golden Arc running from Johannesburg to Welkom, where an inland sea once settled its sand and its gold together. Men had suspected it for years. A Welsh mineralogist, John Henry Davis, brought gold from Pardekraal farm near Krugersdorp to President Pretorius in 1852 and was told to sell it to the Transvaal treasury, then escorted to the border, because the republic feared what a rush would do to it. Pieter Jacob Marais, who had dug in California, recorded another find on the Jukskei in 1853. The republic was right to worry. The rush that finally came in 1886 made the deepest mines on Earth and rebuilt southern Africa around them.
Gauteng, South Africa
See it on the map
Other places on the map within a couple of hours of here.
