Smith’s Weekly, 26 November 1927, by John Drayton
How “Justice” was Served
Out on the Goldfields.
Niagara was one of the little towns worth a column in the W.A. Post Office Directory of 1899 following Bob Menzie’s strike in September 1894.
The town’s life was short, but while it was alive, it ‘LIVED’.
Menzie’s find was described vaguely in the first announcement as “beyond the 90-Mile.” It was 40 miles beyond that point of rocks, so named probably, because it wasn’t 90 miles from any camp on the map of the Yilgarn. Menzies opened his show, afterwards called The Lady Shenton, in September and in October sent a parcel of rich specimens to the Bank of Australasia for the information of the Perth syndicate that had financed him. On the strength of the samples, in November, a British combine offered £10,000 for the property, and was there with the money, ready and willing to buy “sight unseen.” In those good days of gold, W.A. did not have to borrow money. ‘John Bull’ brought it in with him, and was only too keen to give it away.
Niagara was opened in February 1895. An unusual strike, for the West, for the reef was discovered before alluvial gold was found. The prospectors napped an outcrop, impregnated with gold as rich as anything in the Londonderry. The six prospectors of the show had just been paid £180,000 in cash for the holding, and they had done no work on it, beyond knocking out a tent full of specimens.
Consequently, a rush started immediately after the Niagara men made their announcement. Siberia, the 90-mile, and Menzies provided the first contingent of an army of giants who padded, hot-footed and eager, to a reported strike of gold, with no more than the report to rely on.
The nearest water was at Menzies, 40 miles away, and the only mode of transporting it was the pack camel!
There never was a surplus of water on the field, though bottled fluids were obtainable directly after the camp was established. The whisky was of near kin to methylated spirit, but it was the best to be had there, and the men paid the price and were grateful. Sufficiently primed with it, an otherwise peaceful prospector would challenge a bull camel to a rough-up under ‘Rafferty Rules’. But it had one good effect – it brought ‘The Law’ to the camp. Not in proper form, but in a form nonetheless.
