It was only nine in the morning and Benjamin, or Big Ben as he was called by the diggers, was quite drunk, with more than a tot or two of whiskey under his belt already.
Coupled with the previous night's intake, well, it didn't take much to bring back the fuzziness in his head. And he wasn't the only one. The bar had already drawn a crowd of around a dozen rough and ready men and the volume of the voices and the cussing was increasing steadily.
Old Jim was slumped over in a chair in the darkest corner, a string of drool disappearing into his dirty and substantial beard. Tommy was staggering towards the door that led out back to the "rooms", obviously on his way to see if any of the girls were open for business yet. It looked like it was going to be just another typical day in the sprawl of tin shacks and canvas tents that had sprung up on the edge of the mountain escarpment in an area known to the early hunters as Die Duiwel's Kantoor. Until "Fiddler" Jack Findlay burst into the saloon, that is.
The door flung open, allowing a blinding ray of morning sunshine into the dimly lit interior, and Jack began to shout incoherently. He wasn't drunk - well, not on booze anyway - but as he calmed down they began to understand what he was saying.
"So and so has just hit a big reef down in the valley," was the nitty-gritty of his message, and not even a fire could have cleared the room quicker. Even Old Jim reacted in an instant, and 10 minutes later 80 percent of all the able-bodied men left in the settlement were tearing down the mountain, picks, spades, pans and scant few other belongings in hand, the lust for gold running through their veins even stronger than whiskey.
While totally fictional, this little story illustrates what life must have been like in Kaapsche Hoop during the 1880s. Reports of gold finds on the escarpment edge and in the valley of the Ngwenyana ("Little Crocodile") River date back as far as 1874, though evidence of digging and prospecting by local tribes pre-dates even the arrival of the European diggers. In 1882 a prospector by the name of Tom McLaghlan discovered a source of gold in an insignificant dry creek bed, about 300m long, close to what would become the ramshackle new rush mining town (this discovery is widely attributed to McLaghlan, but prospectors B Chomse and Charlie The Reefer also had some role in it).
News of the discovery spread, as it did in those days, and the diggers arrived. Nothing substantial was found, however, but the signs of ancient diggings by local tribes and the general "feel" of the place led the prospectors to continue searching for the mother lode. Well, some of them anyway, as the likes of those in the saloon story above did nothing more than wait around for somebody else to strike pay-dirt.
To condense history somewhat, the prospector known as Charlie The Reefer subsequently found a reef on the farm Berlyn, and the rush of diggers arriving from all over the region, many from the Pilgrims Rest area, resulted in the formation of the settlement at Die Duiwel's Kantoor, or The Devil's Office, an agglomeration of diggers' shacks, canteens and numerous stores on government-owned land adjoining the Berlyn farm.
And dramatic and sinister as the Duiwel's Kantoor name might seem, one can partly understand it when walking through the vast field of sandstone rocks between the town and the edge of the escarpment, especially in misty conditions.
Bizarre shapes loom out of the murk, some resembling giant anvils where perhaps trolls forge irons for their slaves; others resemble giant, grotesque skulls and there's one rock that looks exactly like the chalk-outline cartoon character that we used to see on television some years ago.
Of course, today it's a much more benign place than it was during the diggers' days, when other settlements were several days' wagon drive away, wild beasts still roamed the area and superstitions ran strong. The sinister-sounding Duiwel's Kantoor name didn't stick, however. According to one story, a homesick prospector from the Cape thought that the finger of escarpment sticking out into the sea of mist in the valley below looked like the Cape, and gave it the more likeable name of Kaapsche Hoop, Hope of the Cape.
In May 1883 things changed for the hapless Kaapsche Hoop diggers when the two Barrett brothers, Charles and Benjamin, bought the Berlyn farm, obtained sole working rights and evicted all others from their concession.
The diggers' revenge, if there was any, came through the fact that there were ultimately no significant financial gains made by the Barrett's Berlyn Company. It grew initially on the backs of those working Charlie the Reefer's find, but this eventually petered out.
The serious prospectors began working in the "Valley of Death": the Kaap River Valley below the escarpment. The first strike was made by Ingram James, who found alluvial gold in a small creek known as the North Kaap, and it wasn't long before a wandering prospector came across them.
Days later diggers began arriving en masse, having deserted Kaapsche Hoop, and soon Jamestown was established. While this discovery was still not the mother of all lodes, Jamestown was the first settlement in the Kaap Valley. This gave prospectors a foothold in the wild valley and they began to prospect in earnest.
The establishment of Barberton and the discovery of the major gold on the Witwatersrand meant a permanent end to the interest in Kaapsche Hoop as a gold rush town and by the late 1890s even the town's newspaper, the North Kaap Telegraph, was no longer being printed. Nelspruit, 25km away from Kaapsche Hoop, sprang up as an agricultural service centre early in the next decade and also drew attention away from the forlorn hamlet.
Today Kaapsche Hoop, though still small, has experienced something of a revival. No, gold has not been rediscovered, but its quaintness - some might say strangeness - draws visitors from Nelspruit and even from as far away as Joburg and Pretoria.
After moving to Nelspruit a few years ago I decided to visit the village with an article in mind, and my first thoughts were that between the one dirt street and handful of bars, tea rooms and quirky antique shops, there just wasn't enough to write about. Yet, after frequent visits, my interest in and fondness for Kaapsche Hoop have grown with all the fervour of a 19th century mining town.
So much of what appeals to me about Kaapsche Hoop is the intangible history, the peeling back of time to reveal the events that gave birth to the town. And sometimes this history spills over into the tangible, empirical realm: for example, the occasion on which a herd of the famous Kaapsche Hoop "wild" horses drew me off the path I was on and there I saw piles of stones and dirt next to a small dry stream bed, and I suddenly realised that 126 years ago some hard-worn men must have sat and chatted while toiling for gold on this very spot.
As interesting as the history may be, the details contain a bit of an El Dorado-like glint: there for the taking but always just beyond reach, such are the differing versions and the discrepancies I've come across, with further research producing just as many questions as answers.
It's only 25km or so away from my front door and often on a Saturday morning my wife and I will head up the hill for a morning walk followed by "koffie en koek" at one of the local eateries.
Sometimes I'll take my camera along, as the area lends itself particularly well to landscapes, other times it'll be the binoculars and notebook for another South African Bird Atlas Project II submission, and yet other times there'll be nothing more on the agenda than a bit of fresh air and exercise or a brief escape from the heat of Nelspruit.
Always, though, there's the history somewhere in my mind, and between scanning the sky for birds and keeping an eye out for a promising landscape shot, I search the ground in hope of stumbling across something - an insignificant pile of stones or the handle of an old spoon - that will tell me more about the story of this hamlet on the escarpment edge and the hard, rough and rootless men who came here seeking their futures and fortunes.
- Thanks to Reinette van Niekerk for help in the research and for showing me some of the off-the-path historical features, and to Janie Grobler of the Barberton Museum for supplying some photographs from the archives.