One winters day in 1885 a young man named Harry Filmer stood on a windy ridge and gazed at a tiny camp ahead. It was the Witwatersrand Outspan, and beneath it lay the greatest goldfield on earth.
For the next thirty-five years Harry Filmers destiny was bound up with the turbulent life of the goldfield. He gambled with the great Rand-lords, climbing the peaks of fortune and plunging down into valleys of depression. Six times the fickle goddess Luck poured riches upon him - and six times snatched them away.
This book tells the story of his rapidly changing fortunes, and much more besides. For Harry Filmer was not just a money-maker. Although he was only twenty when the great gold rush began the year after he arrived on the Ridge, he threw himself heart and soul into the service of the city which rose almost overnight upon its slopes.
The chaos in the earliest camps so appalled him that he called the main group of diggers together and organised them, long before any official was sent to do so. As Johannesburg grew, he served for years on the Sanitary Board and later on the Town Council. During the First World War he worked indefatigably in the common cause.
As a family man, financier and public worker, he played his part in all the events of the goldfields early history - the cyanide crisis, the Braamfontein explosion, Stock Exchange booms and slumps, epidemics, and many another episode which helped to make Johannesburg the most exciting city in modern Africa.
