Sustainability | A History Of South Africa Gold Rush

Night view of Johannesburg

Johannesburg called the Golden City was quite literally built on gold. When George found out what he believed to be in the Witwatersrand gold ore that he made his claim to the government ZUID Afrikaanse Republiek, which then gave him the mining rights. Strange claims he sold his ten pounds shortly thereafter and disappeared, no one ever heard from him again.

Gold mine

News spread quickly and soon was dusty mining settlement known as Ferreira's Camp filled with Prospectors. It didn 't long before the government realized that this arrangement is going to need to formalize the services and should be installed. The government did not at that time was lying on the sustainability of reef gold and so there was initially invest too much time or money into city planning, this is the reason for the narrow streets in the center Johannesburg old city. Both city planners involved in the development of official resolve its name was Johannes along their common Christian name of the Afrikaans word for city archaic ratified, burg.

Previously Prospectors alluvial gold mining in and around Pilgrims Rest, the most famous of the man named Alec 'wheelbarrow' Patterson after he turned up the pressure all settlement related in a wheelbarrow was he has, he is legend, from Cape Town. The story goes that he got rid of her ass after kickedhim and decided that the wheelbarrow was safer and more technologically advanced. He did not, however, sustainable and alluvial gold a few decades most of the Prospectors moved to the gold reef was discovered on the Witwatersrand.
Gold was the primary reason for the failed Jameson raid and consequently to the Anglo Boer war. Residents of the then Transvaal Province and Johannesburg wanted complete independence from the British colonialists in the Cape; that this was for economic and cultural reasons. It was the residents of this area mostly descendants of the original Dutch settlers and the Huguenots; they spoke their own language and had their own church. The economic reasons were clear enough, they were sitting on one of the largest gold deposits in the world and the British wanted a piece of. Lord Jameson launched a raid on the Transvaal in 1895 and it was interesting misplaced apostrophe on a telegram was partly responsible for the failure of the raid, but the story is' different.

Johannesburg's most famous landmarks are probably making the mine dumps are now permanently on the geography, having more than one hundred years of mining and dumping in the area. Johannesburg is believed that more trees than any other city in the world, calling at 6 million, nearly twice the human population. When South Africa went off the gold standard in the 30's made the city a huge flurry of development, building American style high rise office blocks and sky scrapers.