The consular agent at Johannesburg is John C. Manion, of Herkimer, N.Y., who represents a large American machinery company. Mr. Manion, in 1896, carried on the negotiations with the Transvaal Government by which John Hays Hammond, an American mining engineer, was released from the Pretoria prison, where he had been confined for complicity in the uprising at Johannesburg. American machinery valued at several million dollars has been sent to South Africa as the result of Mr. Manion's efforts.
In the gold industry on the Randt, Americans have been specially active, and it is due to one of them, J. S. Curtis, that the deep-level mines were discovered. In South Africa a mining claim extends only a specified distance below the surface of the earth, and the Governments do not allow claim-owners to dig beyond that depth. Mr. Curtis found that paying reefs existed below the specified depth, and the result was that the Government sold the underground or deep-level claims with great profit to itself and the mining community.
The consulting engineers of almost all the mines of any importance in the country are Americans, and their salaries range from ten thousand to one hundred thousand dollars a year. John Hays Hammond, who was one of the first American engineers to reach the gold fields, was official mining engineer for the Transvaal Government, and received a yearly salary of twenty-five thousand dollars for formulating the mining laws of the country. He resigned that office, and is now the consulting engineer for the British South Africa Company in Rhodesia and several gold mines on the Randt, at salaries which aggregate almost one hundred thousand dollars a year. Among the scores of other American engineers on the Randt are L. I. Seymour, who has control of the thirty-six shafts of the Randt Mines; Captain Malan, of the Robinson mines; and H. S. Watson, of the Simmer en Jack mines, in developing which more than ten million dollars have been spent.
Another American introduced the system of treating the abandoned tailings of the mines by the cyanide process, whereby thousands of ounces of gold have been abstracted from the offal of the mills, which had formerly been considered valueless. Others have revolutionized different parts of the management of the mines, and in many instances have taken abandoned properties and placed them on a paying basis. It would not be fair to claim that American ingenuity and skill are responsible for the entire success of the Randt gold mines, but it is indisputable that Americans have done more toward it than the combined representatives of all other nations.