Knysna, on the extreme
southern littoral of Cape Colony, to the far Marico River.

Well, Jan Steyn built himself a house of Kaffir bricks, beaconed off his
farm, and settled down for a year or two to get things into shape.
After that time the wandering spirit overcame him again, and, leaving
his farm in charge of a near relation, he put his family into the big
tent-wagon and trekked away each season of African winter into the
hunting veldt. Jan Viljoen and other neighbours followed the same plan.
Elephants were inordinately plentiful, tusks were magnificently heavy,
and a good trade in ivory could, in those days, be done with native
chiefs. Jan Steyn's wife and family--six in all--always accompanied him
on these expeditions. The tough _vrouw_ refused to be left behind, and
where she went the family went also. So that from her earliest years
the little Jacoba remembered always the strange, wild life of the
hunting veldt, the voice of lions and hyaenas by night, the great
camp-fire, the return of the hunters laden with the hard-won spoils of
chase, the dark groups of Kaffirs carrying in the long gleaming tusks of
ivory. Like her mother, Jacoba as she neared her teens, could load a
gun, and upon occasion, even knew how to discharge it.

By the year 1855, the Transvaal elephant-hunters were trekking very far
afield in search of ivory. Livingstone's discovery of Lake N'gami in
1849 had opened up a new region, teeming with the great tusk-bearing
pachyderms, and a few Boer hunters began to filter gradually into the
deserts towards the Lake and the Chobe River. Among these were Jan
Viljoen, Piet Jacobs, and Jan Steyn. And so it happened that in 1859
the Steyn family for the fourth season had reached the south bank of the
Botletli, better known as the Lake River, which runs south-east from
Lake N'gami.

They had had a terrible struggle across the thirst-land lying between
Shoshong, the Bamangwato Stadt, and the Lake River. More than once it
seemed that they must have left their wagons behind in the desert; but
they had somehow battled through, with the loss of three good trek oxen.

It was within an hour of sundown when they rose the little swelling of
the plain, just where you strike the river, and drew up their wagons by
the big thorn tree for the night N'gamiland hunters will know that tree;
it bears the initials of most of the wanderers who have passed that way.
Jacoba Steyn was but a girl of seventeen then, but