When assayers announced an incredibly rich gold strike in the Orange Free State last June, the shares of Joseph Milne's Free State Gold Areas, Ltd., which had made the drilling, nearly tripled in price on Johannesburg's stock exchange. Milne's paper profits were estimated at from $8 million to $20 million (TIME, June 27) on what was called the richest gold strike in South African history. But the boom collapsed when a police-supervised test showed that the ore was only a fraction as rich as the three previous tests had showed.
The South African government, which was preparing to try Milne...
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