movement because for one thing it was more accessible and in the second
place there were no really adverse climatic conditions. Thousands died
in the snow and ice of the Yukon trail while only a few hundred
succumbed to fever, exposure to rain, and inadequate food on the Rand.
It resembled the gold rush to California in 1849 more than any other
similar event.

The Rand gold fields, which in 1920 produced half of the world's gold,
are embodied in a reef about fifty miles long and twenty miles wide. All
the mines immediately in and about Johannesburg are practically
exhausted. The large development today is in the eastern section. People
do everything but eat gold in Johannesburg. Cooks, maids, waiters,
bootblacks--indeed the whole population--are interested, or at some time
have had an interest in a gold mine. Some historic shoestrings have
become golden cables. J. B. Robinson, for example, one of the well-known
magnates, and his associates converted an original interest of
L12,000 into L18,000,000. This Rand history sounds like an
Aladdin fairy tale.

What concerns us principally, however, is the American end of the whole
show. Hardly were the first Rand mines uncovered than they felt the
influence of the American technical touch. Among the first of our
engineers to go out were three unusual men, Hennen Jennings, H. C.
Perkins and Captain Thomas Mein. Together with Hamilton Smith, another
noted American engineer who joined them later, they had all worked in
the famous El Callao gold mine in Venezuela. Subsequently came John Hays
Hammond, Charles Butters, Victor M. Clement, J. S. Curtis, T. H.
Leggett, Pope Yeatman, Fred Hellman, George Webber, H. H. Webb, and
Louis Seymour. These men were the big fellows. They marshalled hundreds
of subordinate engineers, mechanics, electricians, mine managers and
others until there were more than a thousand in the field.

This was the group contemporaneous and identified with the Jameson Raid.
After the Boer War came what might be called the second generation of
American engineers, which included Sidney Jennings, a brother of Hennen,
W. L. Honnold, Samuel Thomson, Ruel C. Warriner, W. W. Mein, the son of
Capt. Thomas Mein, and H. C. Behr.

Why this American invasion? The reason was simple. The American mining
engineer of the eighties and the nineties stood in a class by himself.
Through the gold development of California we were the only people who
had produced gold mining engineer