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Historically, the river played an important role in the South African diamond rush, with the first diamonds in the country being discovered in alluvial deposits on the Orange. Today, several commercial diamond mines operate along the final stretch of the Orange River and around its mouth.
The settler colonies (mostly British) moving into the interior closer to the extraction plains came into direct conflict with many indigenous people living near the Orange River. By the 1870s the second Diamond rush was underway. [1]
The Eureka Diamond was found near Hopetown on the Orange River by a 15-year-old boy named Erasmus Stephanus Jacobs in 1867. Soon afterward, Schalk Van Niekerk entrusted the stone to John O'Reilly, who took it to Colesberg to inquire as to its nature and value. The stone came under the view of the acting Civil Commissioner Lorenzo Boyes, who on ...
August Stauch (15 January 1878 – 6 May 1947) was a German prospector who discovered a diamond deposits near Lüderitz, in German South West Africa (now Namibia). August Stauch was the third of seven children of a railway worker's family in Ettenhausen, Thuringia. He was a railway employee in Thuringia. Stauch arrived in Lüderitz in 1907.
The first diamond that was ever found was found by a 15-year-old in the south bank of a river (Orange River) during the 1866's and 1867's. Ever since the Kimberley diamond strike of 1868, South Africa has been a world leader in diamond production. [32]
Cecil Rhodes, the founder of the British South Africa Company, got his start by renting water pumps to miners during the diamond rush that started in 1869, [15] [16] when an 83.5 carat diamond called the 'Star of South Africa' was found at Hopetown near the Orange River in South Africa.
The Orange River enters the Atlantic Ocean at Alexander Bay. The Orange River wetland forms the border between South Africa and Namibia. The Orange River wetland is a declared Ramsar site. Fields of green and orange lichen grow on a hill near the turnoff to Alexander Bay town.
The older mining rights held by the Pomona Mining Company were both a blessing and a curse. The German Government of the time started protecting the area only six months after the diamond discoveries, declaring the Sperrgebiet (forbidden zone), a gigantic strip of land 100 km wide, and ranging from 45 km north of Lüderitz all the way to the Orange River. [2]