"During the latter half of the seventeenth century, Dutch and French Huguenot emigrants arrived at the Cape of Good Hope, bringing their Reformed Church and establishing trading posts for merchant and naval vessels and soon extending settlements into the arable lands to the north. There was continuing friction with the British, to whom the Cape Colony had been ceded by the Dutch in 1814 at the Congress of Vienna, and the Boers – 'farmers' in the Afrikaans language that evolved from early Dutch -- trekked north, eventually clashing with the British in 1842 at Port Natal, or Durban, and deflecting themselves westward. Later, in the nineteenth century, however, Boer pioneers founded the Orange Free State and the South African Republic (the latter perhaps better known as the Transvaal Republic). Boundaries were set following the brief Transvaal War, or First Boer War in 1881, which ended with the British defeat at Majuba and secured independence for the Transvaal, which the British had annexed in 1877. It was the Boers' good fortune – or perhaps misfortune in hindsight – when, in 1886, vast quantities of gold were discovered in the Transvaal in the area around and along 'the Reef', west and east of Johannesburg.
The discovery of gold caused an inrush of foreigners seeking fortunes or at least employment in the mines. The Afrikaners called them, generically, 'Uitlanders'. Many of them were British subjects and there were also quite a few Americans. The new arrivals agitated for a voice in local government and provoked a raid into the Transvaal along the West Rand on 29 December 1895 by a column comprised of armed volunteers, mostly recruited from the Bechuanaland Border Police and the Mashonaland Mounted Police by Leander Starr Jameson, colonial Administrator of Rhodesia (Chisholm, 1979, p16). The anticipated Uitlander uprising in Johannesburg never took place, however, and some 500 raiders were quickly suppressed by aroused burghers at Doornkop, with 21 fatal casualties and considerable international publicity. The troopers, along with their impetuous leader, were arrested, disarmed and locked up in Pretoria Town Jail. Eight rapid-fire guns and three light artillery pieces taken from them later appeared in Boer hands at Mafeking (Pakenham, 1979, p423)…"
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