The Gold Rush
Further information: Witwatersrand Gold RushGold was discovered in the Johannesburg area in 1886, setting off a mass migration of people from all over the world into the settlement to find gold. The new settlement was named after two officials of the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republijk (ZAR), Johannes Meyer and Johannes Rissik, who both worked in land surveying and mapping. It is widely believed that the two men combined their common first name to which they added 'burg', the archaic Afrikaans word for 'fortified city'.
Read more about this topic: History Of Johannesburg
Famous quotes containing the words gold and/or rush:
“I have seen a little of it. I know that it is very malleable, but not so malleable as wit. A grain of gold will gild a great surface, but not so much as a grain of wisdom.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“These people who are always briskly doing something and as busy as waltzing mice, they have little, sharp, staccato ideas.... But they have no slow, big ideas. And the fewer consoling, noble, shining, free, jovial, magnanimous ideas that come, the more nervously and desperately they rush and run from office to office and up and downstairs, thinking by action at last to make life have some warmth and meaning.”
—Brenda Ueland (1891–1985)