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Updated: May 15, 2025
It was at a kind of veld tavern in the Orange Free State, a shanty in the grass-country between Driepoort and Kroonfontein, where travellers can get a bad lodging, and bad liquor, and worse company. 'Trekkers Plaats' they call the place now. But when my friend was there it was known as the 'Free State Hotel."
But the fatal and grotesque alliance with Panda, which culminated in his installation as King of the Zulus by Pretorius in 1840, and which was entirely inconsistent with the attitude hitherto assumed towards the natives, was the undoing of the trekkers of 1836. Panda's men as native auxiliaries eager to avenge themselves on the common enemy Dingaan were all very well in their way.
"Why," I asked myself, "do our people go to Ramsgate, Southend, Herne Bay, and even Scarborough, when there is such a splendid seaside place as this to come to?" Had a game of single-handed poker with one of the Trekkers, and beat him hollow. Not at first, of course, out of politeness; but at game No. 3 he was nowhere. Bless him, I knew a "trek" worth any three of his.
It was held by the lawyers that the trekkers could not at will and by the simple process of migration throw off their allegiance to the Crown of England, and a declaratory Act was passed under which all British subjects south of Latitude 25, whether within or without the colony, could be arrested and punished.
The story of the trekkers is one of surpassing interest, and must enlist for them the sympathy and unbounded admiration of all. By the middle of the year 1837 there were over one thousand waggons between the Caledon and Vaal rivers truly a notable and alarming exodus; and the Boers then began the work of carving out new countries for themselves.
Early in the century the Boers began to trek away from the sphere of British rule. They were trekkers before that, indeed. Even in the days of Van Riebeck they had trekked away from the crowded parts, and opened up with the rifle and the plough new reaches of country; pioneering in a rough but most effective way, driving back the savage races, and clearing the way for civilization.
The trekkers were turned back at Rhodes's Drift, stopped by the firmness and courage and tact of Dr. Jameson, who met them alone and unarmed; and also by the proclamation of President Kruger, to whom it had been plainly intimated that the invasion would be forcibly resisted and would inevitably provoke war.
Potgieter's Drift, Spion Kop, Pieter's Hill these are names that will live in the memory of every British soldier with Sir Redvers Buller. Of all fights Spion Kop was perhaps the most terrible, as it was the most disastrous. It was called Spion Kop, or Spying Mountain, because it was from this eminence the old Boer trekkers spied out the land in the days gone by.
There is something of the epic in the narrative of those doughty, psalm-singing trekkers who, like the Mormons in the American West, went forth in their canvas-covered wagons with a rifle in one hand and the Bible in the other. They fought the savage, endured untold hardships, and met fate with a grim smile on their lips.
At first the trekkers were left to themselves; then the lands which they had occupied were annexed; then their independence was recognised; and finally, when, at the end of the period, they seemed to be causing a dangerous excitement among the Zulus and other native tribes, the Transvaal was once more annexed; with the result that revolt broke out, and the Majuba campaign had to be fought.
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