This story has been written and is reproduced with the kind permission of the author – Chris Morgan.

Acknowledgements:

I am appreciative for the help freely given by many in locating and providing information and their encouragement to pursue this investigation.  In particular I thank Scott Wilson and the staff of the Eastern Goldfields Historical Society and the Eastern Goldfields Prospectors Association’s president Cranston Edwards.  I also acknowledge the extensive investigations of Don Pearce, a direct descendant of Sam, who also generously provided some of the family photographs in this document.

Pearce . Prospector

The story of Sam Pearce

Chris Morgan January 2010      mailto:   c49morgan@gmail.com

On the last day of March 1848 in Wingrave, a small village in Buckinghamshire located in the central part of England, Samuel William Pearce was born. He was someone who would go on to make discoveries that unlocked massive wealth and upon which a thriving city would be built and endure.

James and Harriet [nee Edmonds] left England in March 1849 with their one-year old son Sam on the barque Indian. It was an extremely difficult journey due to “the neglect of the superior and the brutal behavior of certain petty officers” and an outcry ensued over the treatment received by the passengers. A public inquiry was held with a slew of charges leveled against the captain, the ship’s doctor and some other officers for atrocities that occurred during the journey with James Pearce being among those speaking out. Both James and Harriet signed a petition of complaint (Treatment of passengers on board the barque Indian – Public Inquiry, 1849).

They reached South Australia in August 1849. James went to work with his brother William, who had a business at the Beehive Corner. From there they went to Burra before moving to Kapunda, a booming copper mining town, where they settled. James prospered in Kapunda where he ended up running a timber and hardware business, Pearce Wincey & Co, for 36 years. He was also involved with the administration of Kapunda Hospital, Dutton Park, and the town council, on which he served as its second mayor (Death of Mr. James Pearce, 1904). Furthermore, he became a member of the SA Parliament and was a very long-term Methodist preacher.

The other children of James and Harriet were Emma, Henry (known as Harry), James, Agnes and Ada. Sam was the eldest and his brother James is thought to have followed him to the goldfields of Western Australia. During Sam’s formative years, and on the back of its mining wealth, Kapunda developed into South Australia’s most important commercial centre north of Adelaide. As a teenager, Sam worked as a clerk in his father’s store doing the accounts, but that was not an occupation remotely consistent with his yearnings. The store he worked in supplied the miners and mining was a subject he would have encountered every day. It was to become a consuming passion of his life.

At 19, Sam married a miner’s daughter, sixteen-year-old Mary Williams. She was the second daughter and fourth of six children in the family. Mary had been born and raised in Kapunda, and had been conducting a school in a back room of the family cottage (Williams, 1935).  Sam and Mary were to have nine children surviving into adulthood and a staggering 11 which did not. Sam and Mary’s children were Florence (known sometimes as May, her middle name), Willie (not William), Violet, Reg, Hubert, Arthur, Rosa (notable for having lived to the age of 105), Daisy and Myrtle.

Mary died in 1907. Sam remarried a year later when he was 59. His new bride was Alice Gilmer Fogg and they had one daughter, Ruth Alice Pearce. His second wife Alice died when their daughter was only 6 yrs old and Ruth was subsequently raised by Alice’s sisters.

In 1870 Sam and Mary moved to Belalie (now Jamestown), a newly opened up agricultural settlement, and for eight years attempted to make a living as agricultural pioneers growing wheat and sheep. This northern country can be cruel and dry, and the Pearce’s eventually joined many others to move on from there. However, he left behind an indication that his heart was in prospecting as his farm was pock-marked with holes from his search for minerals. He built his understanding of geology and a reputation as a skilled prospector and knowledgeable mineralogist in the district as he found copper, silver, lead, manganese, gold, asbestos and magnesite during that period. He was also a dreamer and cheerfully went further afield. For instance, in 1886 and accompanied by his second son Reg who was 14yrs old at the time, he left the rest of his large family behind to go prospecting in South Africa, predominantly in the Transvaal region and in Zululand. He returned from there with some uncut diamonds. One such diamond was a fine five carat stone; one story has it that it ended up in son Willie’s possession, that it was cut and given by Willie to his fiance Eliza upon their engagement. Another version has it that Sam was wearing this diamond in a ring when he went to a pub one evening, drank more than was wise, and he returned home without it. Of course, both accounts could be correct if there were two such valuable diamonds in his possession. Yet another story has it that Sam gave some diamonds to his daughter Daisy but her husband stole and sold them. Whatever the truth, the current whereabouts of those diamonds is unknown.

At another time after his major discoveries of the Golden Mile which are detailed later, Sam undertook to survey part of the Kalgoorlie desert – to do that he first went to India from where he came back with a team of camels and their handlers. He did this with son Willie and some other family members. Willie Pearce spent some time in Kalgoorlie and Boulder where he had a store. There is a small, somewhat insignificant street in Boulder named Pearce Way and it is unclear as to whether it was named after Sam or Willie.

This photo was taken in 1894 and shows Willie Pearce kneeling on the right. Willie was Sam’s eldest son. The sign above the building entrance reads “W. E. Pearce, General Store, Water Sold”. Photo supplied by Don Pearce.

The main story of the gold discoveries has been recounted by Sam himself in at least two publications (Pearce, 1909) and (Pearce, 1929); it began in early 1893 when he was caught up in the Glen Taggart rush in Dashwoods Gully near Kangarilla in the Mt Lofty Ranges of South Australia. Sam was known as someone who would readily join any local rush.

Interest in the Glen Taggart field barely lasted a year after which it reverted to the owner, a Mr McTaggart, who did allow some fossicking for a while. While some had reasonable returns, little success followed the majority who flocked there seeking riches. Initially it did attract a lot of interest after it was thrown open to the public under the Mining on Private Property Act, but that interest soon waned (Gold mining near Clarendon, 1897)

While in Dashwoods Gully, Sam came across William [Will] Brookman and Charles [Charlie] de Rose, ‘new chums’ and old schoolmates whose returns had been scant after several months of toil. Their lack of experience and knowledge had them classified as part of the much maligned ‘white shirt brigade’. However, despite the endeavors of Brookman and de Rose being misdirected, Sam was impressed with their willingness for hard work, their indomitable energy and their outlook that difficulties existed only to be swept away.

Feeling sorry for them, he invited them to join him working his claim as he was confident they would at least find some gold if they did so. They did that and, while they were occupied there, Pearce prospected for a better site for the trio. He settled on one nearby in a hole that had been abandoned but in which the ore body had not “bottomed” [terminated]. To get access they had first to remove some heavy boulders in which Pearce had identified several wiry stringers of gold. He soon found good prospects, so the three of them joined forces at this new site and were able to extract several ounces of gold from it. Due to the heavy sandstone rocks they had to remove, Pearce named their find the Great Boulder Alluvial Claim, a name that would later have huge significance in a distant part of Australia.

The happenstance that brought Will Brookman and Sam Pearce together has been summarised as follows:

“It was a simple kindness shown by him to a mug prospector that eventually brought Sam Pearce to the West… Among the ‘White shirt brigade’ as a section of the budding prospectors was called were W.G. Brookman and C. de Rose, who were not afraid of work but whose labour was greatly misdirected. In taking a bag of dirt about a mile further down the gully to wash, Pearce came across the two tiers washing some dirt on their account, but his experienced eyes showed him that by the way they were handling the dish they would lose all the gold even if they had an ounce to the dish. He offered his help, and thus sprang up a friendship…” (Veteran prospector passes, 1932)

The trio had a visit from a mutual friend, John Dick, who rode up to them and scoffed at their paltry returns. He was making a comparison with what was reputedly being found in the new goldfields of Western Australia. A goldfield was discovered at Hall’s Creek in 1885 and Southern Cross was opened up in 1887, but it was in 1892 that two men – Arthur Bayley and William Ford – made what is credited as the discovery of the first significant gold find in the state, near what is now the town of Coolgardie. The importance of the Bayley and Ford discovery transcended everything that had preceded it and gave a momentum to prospecting. However, gold-seekers waited in the settled districts through summer until the winter of 1893 enabled them to go into the desert. In fact, diggers on the Yilgarn goldfield had been ordered back to Southern Cross by John Finnerty, the mining warden and resident magistrate. Being warden was a position of considerable power. Finnerty was especially concerned about the lack of available water and he was able to persuade the government to provide tanks along the road. Once this was done and following the winter rains Finnerty allowed diggers to resume their claims (Mayman, 1981).

Excitement was raging following confirmation of Bayley and Ford’s discovery and this sensation sparked a rush of gold seekers to the area from far and wide. Dick supposedly spoke colourfully in suggesting they join that rush: “You bloody fools. Why don’t you go to Western Australia where the gold sticks out like raisins in a plum pudding?” (Kennedy, 1953). They were willing and ready to go but they would need backing to get there, and also a fair deal offered to them by their sponsors should they have success.

Will Brookman approached his older brother George to see if he might raise the cash to finance their journey to the west. While George was a very wealthy businessman, unfortunately Will was not and indeed it was bankruptcy which prompted him to try prospecting at Dashwoods Gully in the first place. He had bought into a company manufacturing jams and pickles, Chance & Co, but the company went bankrupt in 1890 (with insolvency proceedings dragging on for two years and with the majority of his creditors being family members) – Will Brookman received most of the blame for the company collapsing (Giles, 1979). The younger Brookman was not well-regarded around Adelaide, in fact he was somewhat notorious for his recklessness and there were those “who talk about him in a manner that shows he does not possess their esteem, and they would not evince much grief if his riches should take unto themselves wings and fly away” (Quiz and the Lantern, 1897).

George Brookman was very wealthy even before the avalanche of money that came his way due to Pearce’s subsequent discoveries. In 1889, he constructed a mansion in Gilberton which he later named Ivanhoe after the mine in the Golden Mile. When Ivanhoe was sold by its then owners in 2016 it set a new SA state record price for a residential property.  George agreed to arrange the backing requested by his bankrupt brother, but on the proviso that the experienced and committed Sam Pearce go as the prospector. There is a view that George may have seen this as an opportunity to be rid of his troublesome and embarrassing younger brother. By this time Sam Pearce had a reputation as “an enthusiastic prospector with a splendid knowledge of mineralogy” (South Australian Register, 1899).

George subsequently formed a syndicate in Adelaide to fund this speculative venture. This initial syndicate was first called the Adelaide Prospecting Party. Besides Sam Pearce and Will and George Brookman, the original shareholders were John Dick (who had encouraged them to go to the Coolgardie goldfields), John White, WEJ Brocksopp, EN Wigg, Colin Templeton, FD Hodge, WB Wilkinson, JM McBride, Dr J Hamilton, George Doolette and Robert McEwin. There were 10 paying shareholders who each contributed £15 ($30) to provide a total capital of £150 ($300) which was considered a very modest amount indeed for such an undertaking.

Despite this being a relatively small amount to put towards the venture, raising these funds was not easy as this was a time of a severe economic depression when many banks and other businesses folded. Nevertheless, gold prices held up and it was the gold discoveries that provided much-needed jobs, with the bullion extracted playing a major role in rebuilding the economy. Besides the financial contributors to this syndicate, five ‘free’ shares or one-third of the entitlement were allowed for the duo to share who were going to go out and look for gold. Sam went off on the basis that his own return would be from the one-sixth ownership through the two and a half shares he was allocated, plus royalties of a one-ninth interest in all he found. To his dismay, he would never receive any royalties and his proportionate ownership would be whittled down as his discoveries became more and more valuable.

Sam Pearce and Will Brookman left Adelaide aboard the P & O steamer Australia on her maiden voyage on June 7, 1893. Their passage cost them £50 ($100), a third of their capital. By coincidence, this was the same day that Paddy Hannan’s party had set off from Coolgardie in their own search for riches. Charlie de Rose did not take up the invitation to join them and instead went to Broken Hill where there was a mining boom of another type and he was keen to learn from that, but later that same year he would meet up with his mates again in the west and play a vital role in developments there.

The Australia landed at Albany in Western Australia and from there Pearce and Brookman travelled by train to Perth. While in Perth Sam had the good judgement to purchase and study a copy of the Acts governing mining in WA. This was a wise move and many others unfamiliar with the regulatory issues suffered because of their ignorance. From there they took another train to the rail head at York where they purchased their equipment, provisions, a spring dray and two horses. The horses and dray cost £75 ($150) so by this time most of their original £150 ($300) for expenses had been used. They loaded their purchases including a heavy iron dolly (a vessel for crushing rock to enable gold to be washed out) onto their light dray. Because their supplies filled the dray, and to spare the horses, they set off to Coolgardie by foot. Sam was a powerful, broad-shouldered man, unusually tall for those days at 183 cm. He was also a keen and capable sportsman. Among his accomplishments are the winning as an 18yo in Kapunda of a footrace for men over 14 stone (89kg) and the taking of seven wickets in an innings playing cricket in Belalie. By way of comparison, Will Brookman was considerably shorter and slightly built.

The two of them walked the entire distance from York to Coolgardie. It was an arduous trek of nearly 500km but they accomplished it in only 12 days. There was a scarcity of water and they tolerated the discomforts associated with trudging over sand and through clouds of red dust. They progressed along a badly cut track, endured hot days and bitterly cold nights.  Pearce examined either side of the track along the way for minerals as they went. They arrived in Coolgardie on June 28, 1893 after passing through Southern Cross and the Gnarlbine Soak, a vital water source for prospectors heading to Coolgardie. It was merely three weeks and one day after leaving Adelaide. Henry Lefroy, an explorer, in 1863 was the first European to come across the Soak, but it had been an important water source for Aboriginal people for a very long time. The next year the Government Surveyor Charles Hunt penetrated that far but it was on his second expedition in 1866 that he enlarged and shored it up with rocks, digging it into the well that was to be used by the many prospectors to come later, including Sam Pearce and Will Brookman.

When Pearce and Brookman reached Coolgardie, they learned of the discovery by Paddy Hannan, Thomas Flanagan and Dan Shea, that had occurred a week earlier about 40km away, where modern-day Kalgoorlie is today. Hannan’s party had been heading to Mount Youle, where gold had been reported (this subsequently was proven to be erroneous), when along the way they chanced upon some gold nuggets scattered on the surface. Hannan registered their claim at Coolgardie on June 17. The Webbs have pointed out the curious fact that, as also happened with Bayley and Ford, the one chosen to register the claim, in this case Hannan, was given all the credit (Webb & Webb, 1993, p. 94). There are well- informed people who are convinced it was most likely Flanagan who found the gold for which Hannan is credited. The same happened in NSW when Hargraves registered the claim of the discovery by Lister and the Tom brothers at Ophir which sparked the first rush in that state in 1851 (Lennon, 2016). It is similarly fascinating that Brookman, the partner who registered the claims, invariably receives first mention ahead of Pearce, the skilled prospector who made the discoveries.

Interestingly, that reward claim registered by Hannan was for their alluvial find but prospector and historian Scott Wilson has recently found that they also pegged a quartz claim at the same time suggesting the trio were interested in more than alluvial finds (Chiat, 2018). The latter lapsed as they did not find any reef gold. Applications for leases were posted up outside the Warden’s tent and anyone could peruse these documents. Many made it their habit to learn whether any new leases had been recorded. It only took a few hours for news of Hannan’s application for his reward claim to spread throughout Coolgardie. Within a day there was a stampede from there to Hannan’s.

Being caught up in the resultant excitement, Pearce and Brookman each obtained their Miner’s Right and headed out to the same area. Firstly, they weighed various options as there had been reports of new finds elsewhere – for example, Mt Youle to the NE of Coolgardie, Siberia to the NNW, Forty-Five Mile to the N and Lake Lefroy to the SE among them. A Miner’s Right was an essential piece of documentation as it allowed the holder to pass and re-pass over land, in order to gain access to Crown land for prospecting purposes. The holder can camp on that land for the purposes of prospecting. Pearce and Brookman obtained theirs in handwritten form from mining registrar Robert Gledden immediately upon reaching Coolgardie. Because of the numbers flocking to Coolgardie in the rush

resulting from the discovery by Bayley and Ford, so many Miner’s Rights had been issued by the time of their arrival that the printed copies were exhausted and the issuer had to resort to handwriting further documents.

Will Brookman’s handwritten Miner’s Right for WA goldfields (£8,000,000 for £1, 1901) above and, below, Willie Pearce’s Miner’s Right issued in February 1894

The declaration of an alluvial gold discovery near Mt Charlotte in Western Australia in June 1893 by Hannan, Shea and Flanagan led to thousands of others rushing there seeking to realise their own dreams of riches and soon the field was covered with miners. This is where the Kalgoorlie of Kalgoorlie-Boulder is today. In the early times, there were two significant ‘camps’ in the area, one commonly called Hannan’s (now Kalgoorlie) and the other Brookman’s (now Boulder). Residents of Boulder supposedly liked to be looked upon as living in the ‘real’ mining township of the Eastern Goldfields (What mining has done to help the State and Empire, 1935).

Pearce had hardly started looking in this same field, Thirty Mile as it was first called, with thousands of other hopefuls when he struck a leader carrying gold. Common usage changed it from Thirty Mile to Hannan’s Find, Hannan’s Camp or simply Hannan’s. Such was gold fever that nearly 750 diggers were on the field within three days of the initial discovery by Hannan’s group. By the time Pearce and Brookman reached there, which was a mere three weeks after that initial discovery, nearly 3,000 gold-seekers were already there and all were oblivious to the existence of the precious reefs nearby.

It took Pearce less than half an hour to find a leader, but he was not especially excited by that declaring that they “had not come all that distance to work a six-inch (15cm) leader” (Macgeorge, 1993, p. 104). The syndicate had tasked them with finding areas suitable for large-scale mining and this did not meet such a criterion. All the attention was on seeking surface gold, but Pearce stood out from the others as he was the one convinced that the white quartz that others were pursuing contained less than sufficient gold. Pearce was scornful of the alluvial finds – he had bigger plans and left Brookman to keep working that site while he went elsewhere looking for something better.

Pearce was intent on finding mother loads from which alluvial slugs are shed. His theory had been that payable gold would be associated with ironstone so he set off in a different direction from the others to look for tell-tale signs. Pearce rather liked the ironstone cappings and other features of the low hills, points which other seekers had either not noticed or appreciated. He was about to put brilliantly into practice an association that the Government Geologist Edward Hardman had reported on several years earlier; “the almost universal association of gold with iron oxides [ironstone] in auriferous deposits is remarkable” (Hardman, 1886, p. 8). In a telling reflection on the short- lived rewards to be gained from alluvial finds around Kalgoorlie with the likelihood of that field being abandoned after a few years and the brilliant achievements of Pearce, Kirwan, in 1934, asserted “had it not been for the prospector’s instinct possessed by Sam Pearce, the Golden Mile might not be discovered to this day” (Kirwan J. , 1934).

Pearce took a track leading south from the camp towards what was then known as Red Lake and, branching off from it, he was filled with anticipation as he came across huge ironstone outcrops. It must be appreciated that others did not share Pearce’s interest in such formations and were even hostile to his endeavours. In fact, all others were completely oblivious to the precious reefs that lay in this area, they scorned him as a ‘wild cat’ for prospecting in a completely different type of country. ‘Poor devil, he’s mad to expect to get gold in that rock’ and ‘goat farm’ were comments heard from the occasional passer-by as he was digging his first shaft.  It is significant how attitudes soon changed and he eventually had so many successes that he was revered by his contemporaries as a born prospector who “had a prospector’s instinct and seemed almost to scent gold” (Kirwan J. , 1936). Many similar comments can be found from other sources about Sam Pearce’s supposed ‘nose for gold’.

The next morning, he took Brookman out that way again and, going into what was then thick bush, came across what he described as “huge blows of iron”. Sam used his pick to mark a salmon gum tree with ‘P.P’ [Pearce . Prospector]. The next day they made an important move, without telling anyone of their intentions and before daylight they shifted camp to a spot near that marked tree. Their new camp was a little over 5km south of Kalgoorlie and central to what was to become the area known as The Golden Mile, famously regarded as “the richest square mile of country in the world” (Sentinel, 1932).

Such a claim does have merit when it is understood that the deposit was about 2,000 tonnes of metal, which if melted down would be about the size of a standard suburban passenger bus. Initially called by some the Boulder Belt, the term Golden Mile captured the public imagination and became widespread around 1899 with the realisation that the rich geological formation was condensed into one area.  Sadly, this P.P marked tree of huge historical significance was cut down a couple of years later, like most other trees in the area. Today, the major portion of the area that was celebrated as the Golden Mile is a large open cut area officially called the Fimiston Open Pit, initially nicknamed the Big Pit and now known world-wide colloquially as the Super Pit. In a fitting acknowledgement of history, the company operating there has given the link between the Mt Charlotte Underground Mine and the Fimiston Open Pit the name the Sam Pearce Decline.

From this new camp Pearce and Brookman went about one kilometre to the east and came to where Pearce spotted white quartz leaders running east and west. Pearce soon discovered some gold showing in one of them. They pegged out an area to prospect, then did some digging. The bush around them at that time was so thick with sandalwood, salmon gum and black oak that they had little fear of being observed by others. The gold there held out but did not seem to widen as they were hoping. Pearce left Brookman to keep digging out the quartz and he traced the leader further east and over a well-wooded hill (later to be called Pearce’s Hill) looking for a more promising site. After about half an hour he came across what he was looking for – a place where the leaders intersected with a north/south formation of quartzite and iron enclosed in diorite walls, and found rough gold in one of them.  Pearce pegged out the area in his own name.  He opened up 13 holes on five different reefs through the claim and found gold in all of them (The Discoverer of the Great Boulder Mine, 1895). He was ecstatic, describing the find at this junction as “gold showing freely in every stone broken or picked up”.  He gathered about 25kg of the gold-bearing  rocks and carried them back to Brookman where he dropped them at his feet in great excitement. He told Brookman to stop working where he had been digging as he had found what was needed to make the expedition a great success. At this little hillock Pearce had found the Ivanhoe reef. The significance of this particular discovery far dwarfed anything previously found in the Western Australian goldfields up to that time.

Incredibly, it was merely a month since Pearce and Brookman had left Adelaide. In that short time their meagre capital had dwindled to only £7 ($14). Brookman, the ‘clerical manager’ as Pearce and others dubbed him, went to Coolgardie where he registered the claim and continued onto Southern Cross to telegraph the Adelaide shareholders. He reported Pearce was anticipating an extremely high gold yield of 3 to 4 ounces per ton, an assessment which subsequently proved accurate. This was a round trip of about 450km. Such a difficult journey would not have been taken lightly – it was a long trek across dusty, sandy, almost waterless country. Back in Adelaide, they of course were excited to receive the report. Nevertheless, the directors were cautious and wanted verification so they wired a knowledgeable third-party, a Captain Oats, to go to the Ivanhoe and report back with his independent appraisal. Interestingly, he was known to the general public as Captain Oats not because of any military bearing but due to his status as a mining captain, a head miner. William Oats was the manager of Fraser’s South mine in Southern Cross and he had smelted the first gold on the Eastern Goldfields. A well-respected mining identity, he was to become the first mayor of Southern Cross and later became a member of the Legislative Assembly and then the Legislative Council in WA. He accepted the invitation to inspect the discovery and when he did so, he stated that in his view Pearce had underestimated the value of the find. He confirmed to the shareholders that Pearce had discovered permanent payable gold in large formations or dykes, rather than in the white quartz lodes. In reporting his observations, he had high praise for Pearce when he said “I wish to speak in commendation of the excellent work done by your prospector and the ready manner in which he has grasped the particular conditions of this field”.

The Adelaide Prospecting Company moved quickly and soon after the first promising reports were received it lifted the number of shares from 15 (10 paid at £15 each with the other 5 ‘free’ shares for Sam Pearce and Will Brookman) to 100 at £25 each with 50 being offered to the public. Only weeks later it was reconstructed as the Coolgardie Gold Mining and Prospecting Company (Western Australia) Limited with a nominal capital of £5,000 ($10,000) comprising 1000 shares at £5 each, which were soon selling for £70 each (Macgeorge, 1993, p. 65). These moves had been made without the knowledge or consent of Sam or Will and had the effect of drastically reducing their proportionate entitlements.

After only 5 years, and further restructuring, the capitalisation of the company had grown to £9,275,750 and had made the two Brookmans millionaires (Wild Cat column, 1898)

The Ivanhoe’s first main shaft with windlass, 1893

Supplied: The Eastern Goldfields Historical Society Photograph by J J Dwyer

The rapid development of The Ivanhoe mine is highlighted from this 1899 photo

While Brookman was away on his journey to the Telegraph Office at Southern Cross, Pearce continued working the Ivanhoe shaft. After a fortnight alone, his spirits had declined due to loneliness, a lack of drinking water and an absence of cash to buy anything [Brookman had taken all the cash with him]. At the end of the day and in the twilight, and perhaps partially out of boredom, he left his shaft and went for a walk to see if he could locate a new reef. To do that he carefully followed the north/south ironstone outcrop from the top of the hill and came to a point where he spotted a little bit of slate and diorite sticking vertically about 15cm out of the sand. In the fading light, he was able to see a glint of gold showing in the crevices.  Crawling on the ground he was thrilled to find several weathered stones containing gold. With his pick he pried a small block up and hurried back to his camp where he placed it under the pillow on his bunk.  Pearce knew he had found something very special.

After a sleepless, anxious night Pearce took a post and placed it about 150m north of his find. To this post he nailed a legal notice taking possession of 24 acres on behalf of the Coolgardie Gold Mining and Prospecting Company of Adelaide [this was a company that had been formed by those in Adelaide to succeed the original syndicate]. The usual size of a mining lease was 24 acres which is a little under 10ha. To secure a lease a peg, really a post, had to be placed at each of the four corners of the area selected. The posts they used were about a metre high and a notice would be attached to one of them. This notice stated that the person doing the pegging was in the process of applying for a gold mining lease. Ten days from the posting of the notice were allowed for this application to be made to the Warden’s Court. The Warden’s Court was usually a tent in which the Mining Registrar sat, and rent and survey fees had to be paid. A lease would be issued in the first instance for 20 years with a right for renewal. An annual rent had to be paid and there was a requirement for it to be worked constantly with not less than one miner for every four acres held, although exemptions could be sought.

Will Brookman returned that same morning having completed his assignment associated with the Ivanhoe find. His prospecting partner excitedly showed the piece of gold-rich rock that he had hidden beneath his pillow. Brookman was astounded and they eagerly went and completed the pegging out of their claim. Pearce was invited to name it – he chose to call it The Great Boulder in honour of their earlier South Australian claim (Macgeorge, 1993, p. 108).  Upon sinking where Pearce had identified the very rich leader, they found it opened out into a large reef. A letter written by Brookman to the syndicate on July 15, 1893 told them of the discovery and another letter was sent a fortnight later with confirmation and further detail. Once again Will Brookman set off to the telegraph station to wire the good news of this latest find to Adelaide with the recommendation that it would pay to crush for gold. The telegram which went only a short time later showed they clearly understood the significance of what Pearce had found:

Have discovered an immense iron hill with very rich reefs running through, from one of which assays as high as 300 ounces to the ton have been taken. Have dollied 30 ounces of gold. Estimate the value at a quarter of a million.

The camp where Sam Pearce and Will Brookman were located on the Great Boulder claim in 1893

The Great Boulder lease was registered by Warden Gledden at Coolgardie on August 30, 1893 [Lease No. 16E] with Brookman having prepared the paperwork earlier on August 13. This site quickly unfolded into such an enormously wealthy and significant find that the rapidly establishing adjacent town acquired the name Boulder acknowledging the prominence of this particular find. The township of Boulder, adjacent to Kalgoorlie, was gazetted in 1896. Pearce’s discoveries were such that a lot of confidence for the long-term future quickly developed in the community with an observer noting that the “public buildings seem to have been erected with the idea that the rush for gold was no mere flash in the pan” (Barkla, 1936). In 1989, the shires of Boulder and nearby Kalgoorlie amalgamated to form the City of Kalgoorlie-Boulder and this nomenclature maintains the association with Sam Pearce’s naming of that tremendous find.

The lease application for the Great Boulder claim submitted by Will Brookman on August 30, 1893. Photos supplied by Scott Wilson of the Eastern Goldfields Historical Society and sourced from original documents in the State Records Office in Perth

Pearce and Brookman sent off a bulk sample of around 35kg for analysis and all involved were elated when the results came back showing very high concentrations of the precious metal. It became an imperative to raise more funds in order to hire labour to exploit the claims and this was the task of the syndicate members back in Adelaide. The financial base to develop the leases was widened. The next company they formed from Adelaide, the Associated Gold Mines of Western Australia Ltd, absorbed the original claims. Eventually George Doolette was despatched to London to raise more capital by floating the biggest claims there. The Ivanhoe was sold in London for £750,000 ($1.5m) which puts into perspective the payoff for shareholders from the initial capital of £150 ($300) raised by the original syndicate. After a mere 17 years since Sam Pearce’s discoveries were pegged, the original tiny investment had yielded returns of £30,000,000 ($60m). They continue to yield great returns to this day and it has been estimated that if another Golden Mile was discovered today it would have a value of $100 billion (Fagan, 2018).

Pearce continued in a methodical manner to look for further discoveries.  They came in quick succession despite others now looking for similar success. Pearce’s other finds included the Great Boulder East (plus Great Boulder South, Great Boulder North and Great Boulder Extended), Lake View (plus Lake View South and Lake View Extended), Royal Mint, Iron Duke, Iron Monarch, Associated Mines (originally the Adelaide North, South and East mines), Australia (plus Australia North and Australia East), Bank of England and the fabulous Golden Horseshoe. It needs to be appreciated that while the lode was rich and wide, the gold there was far from obvious and locating it required great prospecting skill.

Another prospector, the Canadian Larry Cammilleri, also felt that the quartz was not carrying sufficient gold and looked for the same association with ironstone as Pearce had so successfully done. In October 1893, a couple of months after Pearce’s early discoveries, Cammilleri came across and pegged the rich Brown Hill lode.

This body of prospecting success by Pearce was staggering. Making so many claims was unprecedented and Pearce’s knowledge of the Mining Acts proved crucial in him being able to do this. It is recorded in his own account (Pearce, 1909) and verified by others, as soon as Will Brookman returned from Coolgardie after registering one claim Pearce was able to show him another that he had pegged out and had ready for registration. Brookman became well acquainted with the pathway to registering leases. Each journey to register a lease in Coolgardie was a round trip for Brookman of about 80km of walking. It was often asserted that Pearce and Brookman were kept so short of money that on several occasions Brookman had to walk to Coolgardie from where he wired to Adelaide for money for food and other necessities (Kirwan, J, 1927). When the wealth began to flow he was able to acquire a couple of horses and that made this journey much easier. All in all, the syndicate took up 19 of the leases they pegged out over an area covering about 200ha, mostly within a mere four months since the duo left Adelaide.  This all occurred so quickly that by the end of 1893 six important mining companies were formed on the back of Pearce’s discoveries and more than a century later his finds were still producing a large proportion of the Golden Mile’s annual gold yield.

A special report in an Adelaide newspaper of the period laid rest to any thought that Sam Pearce was merely a lucky prospector:

“It was undoubtedly a happy chance that these pioneers elected to settle at Hannan’s [Kalgoorlie], but when it was considered that the Ivanhoe is quite a distinct reef from the Boulder, and of an entirely different character, that there is a space of some hundreds of yards between the Ivanhoe lodes and the Lake View Consols, and that both are separated by distance from the Australia Blocks, it becomes apparent that

‘luck’ was a microscopic element in the selection of these particular areas for development. The prospectors proceeded about their business in a systematic way. Mr Pearce made careful tests of every claim before acquiring the lease, and referring to the Australia Blocks his prophetic declaration that ‘possibly at some time the whole hill will be treated, as I have found gold in the borings of the country’, stamps him as a practical geologist, whose theories are founded upon an intelligent interpretation of experience.” (South Australian Register, 1899)

Developing those leases was far from automatic. ‘Expert’ mining engineers visited the site and, making a huge blunder, condemned every single one of the leases as being worthless. They had never previously encountered gold in such formations.  Some decades afterwards a newspaper reflected that from when Pearce sought gold below the ironstone caps he “had to fight prejudice, envy, taunts, scorn and often downright slander” and that when he “announced to the Brookman brothers that he had made an immense discovery it is well-known to all early pioneers that the guffaws that went up among the old school of Ballarat, Bendigo and Castlemaine quartz reef mining men, who believed in silica and nothing but silica, were loud, long and objectionable.  Up till then it was sacrilege to mention gold that was not in some way connected with glittering white quartz, and as the Great Boulder outcrop resembled everything but that formation Sam Pearce had to combat the apostles of the said school and thousands of their supporters” (Peeps at People, 1932)

The so-called expert assessment was that the syndicate members had been swindled and that Sam and Will’s glowing reports had been massive exaggerations. When this report reached Adelaide, it caused panic among syndicate members. They sent a telegram to the prospectors to abandon what they were doing and sell all of the leases. Pearce and Brookman were dumbfounded and furiously protested by both telegram and follow-up letters saying it would be madness to dispose of the claims. Their protests convinced George Brookman that the prospectors’ reports were honest and accurate, and he in turn was able to persuade the other syndicate members to persevere. It was to the syndicate’s great benefit that they did:

“…the experts who visited the locality, unfamiliar with the formations, universally condemned the shows. The shows, however, have since conclusively condemned them. Had the promoters not possessed a more intimate knowledge of the character of the formations than the experts who reported upon them they would, in the face of such evidence, have relinquished their hold upon the ladder of success.” (South Australian Register, 1899)

As more and more claims were made there was an ever-increasing requirement for capital. George Brookman was the key to raising the necessary funds from city-based investors but the supply of those funds did not always make it to the goldfields when needed. When this was the case Pearce and his partner dollied some gold to use as currency and keep the working of the claims going. At one time, George Brookman personally guaranteed an overdraft needed for the enterprise to persevere.

For a lease to be payable it had to have high grade ore. Ore samples had to be assayed and the yield of ore assessed before progressing with the development of a mine. The evaluation was not always straightforward and accurate. On one occasion Pearce had some ore from one of his new leases that he had subjectively appraised as being a very rich 10 ounces to the ton. Around 20t of ore was crushed, put through assaying machinery, but it registered as producing only one ounce per ton. It was a disappointing outcome and caused despondency but Pearce challenged the assessment, blaming the poor quality of the water used in the extraction process for the disappointing outcome:

“You hardly got any of the gold. Impossible to get the gold with the water you used – like thick pea soup. It will be misleading. There is gold there, much gold”

There was no other assaying plant available for them. They decided to do a rough test themselves on some of the tailings from the previous assay, involving burning off mercury and an amalgam on a shovel. Once they did this, they found the remnant left to be gold, showing that Pearce was correct in that gold had been missed during the first testing. When properly assayed, the ore was shown to be yielding at Pearce’s prediction of 10 ounces per ton.

Charlie de Rose, their friend from Dashwoods Gully times, re-joined them as did some others. The company gave de Rose the task of supervising the transportation of plant required for mine constructions – machinery such as boilers, battery stamps and engines. The first battery was sent by rail to York, but a train derailment left it smashed beyond repair. A further impediment followed when the police closed the track to the fields because of a lack of feed and water along the route. De Rose arranged for teams to lay down dumps of chaff, oats and water in a series of depots all the way to their leases and this gave them the means to take the second battery to the field. This proved very expensive as the teams used to establish the depots used up much of the supplies they were carrying.

Will Brookman had a supervisory role in the constructions and their first battery commenced on the Lake View site in October 1894. Gold production was high from the outset. Of course, there was great excitement from the beginning and, with the experienced Pearce getting a positive result so quickly, early on Brookman filed an optimistic report back to Adelaide. The two Georges, Brookman and Doolette, were sufficiently convinced by this report of the potential for success that they decided to form a second syndicate to strengthen and extend their interests. They called this second grouping the Lefroy Coolgardie Syndicate and it was closely tied to the first syndicate which at that time was known as the Coolgardie Syndicate. This move raised a further £250 ($500) mainly to support the sending of an additional three men to join those two already in the field. The three young men sent out following the formation of the Lefroy Coolgardie syndicate were Dorham [Dorrie] Doolette (son of George, who was the Chairman of both syndicates), Alexander [Alick] Macgeorge and Bruce Henderson. Their brief was to work alongside Pearce and Brookman, peg more leases and buy existing leases of promise from others. This trio had arrived after the first eight or nine leases had been pegged out by Pearce with Will Brookman’s assistance. They were tasked with following in Pearce’s footsteps and hopefully peg out some more rich leases.

In his manuscript prepared some years after Pearce had passed away, Alick Macgeorge was to claim credit for himself for the discovery of the Golden Horseshoe. It seems a dubious assertion. He claimed that Sam Pearce only advised him to look for gold where that discovery was made. Pearce’s account was published in 1909 and therefore open at the time to challenge by any contestants to his version of events. It was not challenged. Pearce claimed that the Golden Horseshoe was his find and that Alick Macgeorge and the others in his group assisted him with the pegging out. There seems no contention that following pegging out, Pearce put down a drill hole where he expected the reef to be and set off an explosive charge. The scattered quartz was found to be rich in gold.

The evidence seems to be with Pearce’s version. One account has it that Pearce pegged out the claim and had it registered in 1893 but, distracted by his prospecting activities [most likely in Norseman], he neglected to pay the rent and the lease was forfeited. In 1894 Macgeorge reapplied for it (King, 1973, p. 14). It seems that there is general acceptance that it was Pearce who should be credited with this discovery (Sentinel, 1932).

There is no shortage of those who seek to write their own histories. For instance, the Kalgoorlie Miner carried a piece about one mine manager who had asserted that he was the first to find gold on some particular claims, however

“gold was struck on all…before he came on the scene…Sam Pearce, to whom all credit for development is due, gets not a word” (Mining Notes, 1903

The Great Boulder battery, built December 1893

To his credit, Macgeorge later wrote that it was Pearce’s close and painstaking scrutiny of the surface that led to him identifying so many small veins; the gold was always fine and would be peppered on the schist face with what was known as ‘mustard gold’, different from any gold formation previously known in Australia. He was adamant that all the gold bearing outcrops had been found by Pearce alone and, while Brookman’s work was invaluable particularly in relation to the development of Pearce’s discoveries, none of the finds could be attributed to Will Brookman (Macgeorge, p. 18).

“The systematic way in which Mr Pearce went to work, testing the various lodes and lines of country around Kalgoorlie… undoubtedly enabled the Syndicate to avoid many dangers, and to take a straight course to fortune” (South Australian Register, 1899)

Unfortunately for Pearce, his fellow shareholders back in Adelaide had come up with new business structures that not only expunged the additional one-ninth reward for everything he found, thereby dishonouring the foundation arrangement made with him, but also diminished the proportionate shareholding of the prospecting duo. There were few company law requirements in Australia at this time. Mining syndicates and companies could be formed, restructured, sold or dissolved quickly and with apparent ease.

With their two and a half shares apiece in the original syndicate that had a total of 15 shares, Sam Pearce and Will Brookman each originally held a one sixth shareholding. It was reported that years afterwards, “poor Sam Pearce had sued the syndicate for his sixth share, but the money beat him and he retired beaten and penniless” (Peeps at People, 1932)

Of course, none of this restructuring was done in consultation with Sam or Will and they only found out well after new configurations had been put in place. It is indisputable that more capital needed to be obtained with some urgency in order to do the mining, buy the equipment and pay employee wages, but it is shameful that Pearce in particular was so badly treated. It was observed “members of this small syndicate reaped millions in dividends and share interests but Pearce’s share was insignificant compared with the nature of his discoveries” (Sentinel, 1932) and “although Pearce expected a specified interest in his discoveries, his proportion was a miserable one compared with the fortunes won from the area” (Sentinel, 1936).

It is galling that those who took the risks and endured the hardships, did the work, found the gold and were most worthy of reward would be treated so poorly and reprehensibly. It needs to be appreciated how dangerous it was and that the personal risks were high with medical services in remote fields non-existent. Many prospectors perished due to disease, accident, malnutrition or thirst. The conditions facing these prospectors were reported at the time as follows: “Cut off from the antidotes supplied by civilisation and science, the brave pioneers died in scores by the trackside, in the comfortless tent, or amidst the weird surroundings of the lonely bush” (Rise and progress of the Coolgardie Gold Mining and Prospecting Company, Limited : registered 2nd August, 1894, 1899). Many others took their own lives. Men searching for gold have often seemingly irrationally been driven by hope and have endured hardships generally thought impossible under other circumstances. Unfortunately, a great many of them paid a dreadful penalty for their resoluteness with subsequent travelers sometimes finding their bodies rotting in the bush.

While Pearce was aggrieved that he did not receive the prescribed one-ninth of all he found and that his degree of ownership of the enterprise had shrunk, others became extremely wealthy on the back of his discoveries and attained social eminence, with two of them later knighted, namely the two Georges – Will Brookman’s older brother and the senior Doolette.

According to Perth’s Sunday Times, in an unflattering piece it claimed George Brookman only visited the WA goldfield on one occasion and writing “a cheque for £10,000 ($20,000) to erect and equip a mining annex to the Adelaide University resulted in [his]knighthood” (Notes and Comments, 1927). George Brookman was prompted to travel to the goldfields because of shareholder concerns and arrived on Christmas Day 1894. The shareholders were becoming agitated because at that particular moment their capital was disappearing without any returns coming back to them. To his credit, George was supportive of the syndicate representatives in the field, backed them against those who feared failure, and took initiatives to raise the funds for them to continue. George arrived in the goldfields just in time for the clean-up of the first run of the battery – it produced 300 ounces of gold. Fears allayed, he returned to Adelaide at once.

When George Brookman returned from the goldfields, he was in the process of reporting to the syndicate about the first clean-up from the newly installed battery. He was telling them that it produced 300 ounces of gold when a telegram from Charlie de Rose was delivered to him. It told of the success from the second run of the battery. Almost immediately another telegram arrived from the manager of the Kalgoorlie branch of the Bank of WA reporting that the gold had been lodged with him. Within 30 seconds, George had the room to himself as everyone at the meeting had bolted across to the Stock Exchange to buy any shares which were on the market. George Brookman was already affluent at the time of the gold discoveries but these made him incredibly wealthy and opened may doors for him. He was prominent in Adelaide and spent a decade in the South Australian Legislative Council, the upper house of parliament. He was also a benefactor of the University of Adelaide and a member of its Council, a major financial contributor to the erection of the School of Mines and Industries, a member of the

Adelaide Stock Exchange, had directorships of the Bank of Adelaide and the Mintaro Slate Company, was chairman of the SA Electric Light and Motive Power Company and its successor, the Adelaide Electric Supply Company, and had a huge block of offices built – the Brookman Building. It is galling that Brookman Street is a major thoroughfare in Kalgoorlie but there is no equivalent there for Pearce.

The Brookman building, Adelaide, 1907

In his epitaph it was written “Sam Pearce will go down in mining history as the man who found fortunes for others, but received very little himself”, … “although he expected a specified interest in his discoveries, his share was insignificant compared with the wealth that was unearthed from the area” and “members of the syndicate which employed Pearce reaped millions in dividends, and share interests, but he received a miserable proportion” (Veteran prospector passes, 1932).

It does seem that both Brookmans were adept at self-promotion and ensured their own roles in the discoveries in the Eastern Goldfields of WA were well broadcast.  They did not do likewise for Pearce. While the parts played by the Brookmans were indispensable and deserve recognition, and not wanting to diminish their roles in any way, it remains that what they did was supportive in nature to the work of Sam Pearce whose activity was the core.

Pearce’s contribution is undoubtedly greater than either of the Brookmans because it was his prospecting that discovered the gold that has sustained Kalgoorlie-Boulder and provided massive returns. The Brookmans skilfully represented their own interests but not Sam’s, and it was they who had far more social prominence and financial prosperity. Will Brookman made huge amounts from providing advice to other mining companies based on his experiences alongside Pearce and from his other activities in the mining industry. The language he used in the early telegrammed reports back to Adelaide could give the impression that it was he who was making discoveries out in the field and that he was providing the assessments of the yields from the discoveries – we know that in fact it was Pearce who was doing all the successful prospecting and doing the assessments and that Brookman was the conduit for this while Pearce continued with the work in the field.

The way these business processes were typically done at the time was for the directors to create a new company and put a call on existing shares held in the old company on the basis that more capital was needed. If the call was not met then those shares would be forfeited. Such calls may not be met either due to shareholders not having the funds to meet the call or shareholders being unaware of the calls. Of course, where communications were poor as they were to these new goldfields, which had a complete absence of a mail service, it is not surprising that prospecting shareholders in remote Western Australia would be unaware of such machinations taking place in Adelaide and London.

Records held in the State Library of South Australia show that Pearce and Will Brookman threatened legal action when they found out about the business structural changes and the effects on them. In the original Adelaide Prospecting Company they had a shareholding equivalent to one third of the total interests between them. This had progressively been slashed by the various reconstructions to a much smaller proportional holding, leaving them outraged and seeking reinstatement of their original position. In November 1893 a compromise was reached whereby Sam Pearce and Will Brookman were to share between their two selves 10% as cash or shares of the earnings from the leases controlled by this company, other than at the Ivanhoe and the Great Boulder. Subsequently there was yet another reconstruction and this one resulted with them having a shareholding which discharged all claims they may have had.

Nevertheless, Will Brookman soon became rich and rose to prominence. A large workforce was needed to work all the leases and do the mining. It became his task to deal with that and for that he was richly rewarded while Pearce continued with the prospecting. Before long, Brookman had engaged a workforce of more than 300 workers. The workforce grew exponentially and within 10 years there were more than 17,000 men employed by the gold mining companies on the Golden Mile (The Golden Mile: Thirty-Six years of Production, 1929).  The area rapidly developed and a description of the field decades later indicates the great industry:

“Hundreds of thousands of pounds’ worth of plant is working ceaselessly, crushing rich ore torn from the bowels of the earth. There is the sullen roar of machinery on the surface, and hundreds of feet down a network of shafts steadily extends as the feverish winning of ore goes on. Poppet-heads, with their spinning wheels shooting the ore to the surface loom up everywhere” (Barkla, 1936)

The enormity of the discovery is evident to people today when it is considered that 3,500km of shafts and tunnels extending 1.2km underground have been dug in the Golden Mile since 1893.  Will Brookman prospered and in 1895 he was able to discharge fully the earlier bankruptcy that brought him looking for gold in the first place. He went on to acquire control of some 800ha of mining leases for himself in different fields including 19 leases south of Kalgoorlie. As a millionaire, he lived an opulent lifestyle and bought much land, acquired a country estate, a seaside cottage and a private yacht. He lived in a town mansion with a suite of liveried servants. He was lionised in financial circles and seen as a leader by mainly gold- rush migrants hostile to the government of the time. He had 30 company directorships both in London and Australia [many were later stripped from him], became Lord Mayor of Perth for a short time [the failure of his venture to smelt ores at South Fremantle and subsequent arrangements with his creditors made him ineligible to hold office; he was the only capital city mayor to be omitted from the honours list on the opening of the Federal parliament in 1901], gained membership of the Legislative Council in WA [but never made an inaugural speech and the seat was declared vacant due to his non-attendance]. An incorrigible speculator, his failed business ventures and a plummeting stock exchange broke him and he was forced to sell his considerable assets to meet his debts. Sadly, his wife’s desertion of him only added to his ill health and personal turmoil, with his life ending miserably at the age of 50.

Pearce was especially wounded over how he and his mates were treated regarding the Golden Horseshoe mine. This mine produced massive wealth and provided some folk, particularly in Adelaide, with enormous riches but Pearce and the others with him when he found the reef received a pittance. The narrative starts with Pearce receiving a letter from one of the directors to say that an additional company had been formed for the purpose of finding gold and that Pearce, Will Brookman and the three men who carried that letter of introduction to him – Dorrie Doolette, Alick Macgeorge and Bruce Henderson – had each been given a paid-up share. Dorrie, Alick and Bruce had agreed to travel from Adelaide after having been assured all those in the prospecting group would be ‘well looked after’ should they make valuable finds.  It was a huge thrill to make the discovery of the Golden Horseshoe but a bitter disappointment to find out later that this company too had been restructured, without their knowledge or consent, and that none in the prospecting group remained as shareholders. Due to the way the syndicate had been restructured, Pearce’s total return resulting from him discovering the Golden Horseshoe, a strike which would provide others with immense wealth, was insignificant.  He wrote that he “received a cheque for £4-18s [about $10]. This is all I received for finding the Golden Horseshoe. I have since regretted that I did not frame it and present it to the Adelaide Museum” (Pearce, How I found the Golden Mile, 1909)

The Lefroy Coolgardie Gold Mining Prospecting Company held four claims and its directors decided to sell its properties in London. The enormous capital inflow had been disseminated by the time of the half-yearly meeting in June 1894 where the balance sheet showed a credit to the company of a mere £44.19s.1d ($90). This did not go far when distributed across the original shareholders and proved disastrous to the prospectors as these holdings produced fabulous wealth for the new owners.  Pearce explains how he missed out on the rewards of the Golden Horseshoe discovery:

“through having other exploring engagements I lost sight of the claim for some time” (Pearce 1929)

These other exploring engagements, on behalf of the syndicate, took him to Norseman in 1894, around 200km south of Kalgoorlie-Boulder. He had returned to be with his family in Adelaide in December 1893 but went back to Western Australia early in 1894.  He opened up the Esperance Bay route to the Dundas field.  Some gold had been found in the Norseman area with many reportedly prospecting from the top of a camel, but that was not Pearce’s style. He believed in being on foot with a pick and geologist’s hammer in hand. He had been making for a range of hills beyond the Mt Benson mine when he came across a ridge of quartz in the midst of teatree scrub. Hammering a piece off, he saw it was a glassy quartz that formed the cap of the reef but there were no colours in it. A little further along he saw some stone which had disintegrated from the reef and, breaking off a piece, he found it to be full of fine gold. That piece was assayed at 100oz to the ton, a remarkably rich find (The golden west: Norseman line of reef, 1895). Pearce’s discoveries in the Norseman area included the Leviathan, the very rich Lady Mary (named by Pearce after his wife) and the Daisy mines. He also made a flying visit to Lake Lefroy, about 100km away and it was there he discovered what became known as the Christmas mine (The Discoverer of the Great Boulder Mine, 1895).

One hundred and twenty-five years later, there is nothing in Norseman whatsoever that has been erected or named to honour these discoveries by Pearce.

The Lady Mary Mine at Norseman. The gold was discovered there by Sam Pearce in 1894

Nonetheless, Pearce still did very well. A man prone to impulsive decisions, he sold the shares he had to gain an immediate windfall and for a while he was extremely well off. Had he held his shares longer he would have reaped far greater and ongoing riches through their increasing value and the stellar dividends they yielded. As it was, he was able to buy the accouterments of the wealthy including a mansion that he extravagantly furnished. Extraordinarily to many, rather than relax and enjoy the comforts he was able to acquire, he succumbed once again to the lure of prospecting only a relatively short period after his first taste of luxury. One journalist speculated on his love of prospecting that “if there was a gold mine to be opened up at the North Pole, Sam would want to go there” (Sassiety, Scandal, Suppositions and Statements, 1897)

He took his family on a world tour – for him it was a prospecting tour – which resulted in using up most of what he had. Money slipped easily through Pearce’s fingers.  His two-storey mansion ‘Stradbroke’, was described as a 19th century gentleman’s seat in the Mt Lofty ranges, close to Adelaide with extensive gardens, a vineyard and orchard. This was a stark contrast to the modest houses, mostly huts, which Mary, Sam and their children had before. The land they purchased for Stradbroke Estate, or Stradbroke Park as Pearce liked to call it, is referred to in land title documents as portions of Sections 293, 294, 339 and 346, Hundred of Adelaide. The 67ha land area of Stradbroke Park was bounded by Stradbroke, Morialta and Montacute Roads in Rostrevor, South Australia. Stradbroke had been built in 1840 by Thomas Forrest with its original name Waldend being changed four years later by new owner Frederick Bayne who doubled the size of the house and named it after the Countess of Stradbroke in Suffolk. The Governor appointed Bayne as the Sheriff of South Australia but soon afterwards he disappeared amid speculation of misappropriation of funds and the house was sold. There were two more owners before Pearce and two others afterwards. The last owner was a racing identity and it was his horse King Ingoda that was born at Stradbroke. In 1922 King Ingoda won both the Adelaide Cup and the Melbourne Cup.

Stradbroke, circa 1900, the mansion purchased by Sam in 1893 and sold in 1902. It was demolished in 1966.

Warburton (1988) has it that it is Sam out front on the right standing with a man thought to be one of his brothers. However, others claim that Sam is not in this photo and instead it is his son Willie there

The furnishing of Stradbroke.  Photos supplied by Don Pearce

In a spending spree, Pearce lavished funds on his beloved family – buying son Willie Pearce a seat on the Adelaide Stock Exchange and for two others he purchased blocks adjoining Stradbroke, building them each a house. It is neither surprising nor coincidental that he named these two blocks ‘Kalgoorlie’ and ‘Boulder’.  Willie Pearce had returned to Adelaide in 1897 after struggling with difficult conditions in Kalgoorlie where he was a storekeeper.

The Pearce’s lit Stradbroke with electricity from the first privately-owned generating plant in Adelaide. This was at a time when residents used gas, candles or oil to light their houses and there was no street electricity.

One of the houses built on Stradbroke land by Sam Pearce for the use of his family members. Photo supplied by Don Pearce
In her insightful book Old Stradbroke (1976), Elizabeth Warburton describes how they poured money into developing and improving the estate including the planting of 2,200 orange and lemon trees, 300 other fruit trees and 4,000 grape vines. They installed windmills and built a five megalitre reservoir giving them the capability to irrigate all their plantings and the gardens. They also built a gardener’s cottage.

Besides these and other property purchases, Pearce outlaid a lot of money on his wife and daughters and procured an ocean-going yacht (The Enchantress) for himself. His yacht was substantial having originally being built for the very wealthy businessman and pastoralist Sir Thomas Elder and it was over 14m and weighed 20t. He lavished hospitality on guests. All the money soon went, as did Stradbroke. The Pearces sold their mansion in 1902, after only seven years there. At first, they moved next door into the house on their Boulder block but moved on from there after only short period. Mary passed away in 1907. Stradbroke Park was subdivided in 1910 and in 1966 the house was demolished. The present-day Leabrook Drive in Rostrevor follows the bank of Fourth Creek and passes through sections 294, 339 and 346. The whole estate has been subdivided into what is now suburban housing and the Stradbroke school now stands on part of the grounds. The house they built on the Kalgoorlie block may still remain, it was named by a subsequent owner as ‘Glen Rest’.

Four generations – Sam Pearce’s 80th birthday. Sam is with his eldest son Willie, Willie’s daughter Alice and her first two children Yvonne and Valmai [photo source: Yvonne Pearce Brown]

To Sam Pearce, money was for spending, for living the high life, rather than be used as a basis for securing a comfortable future. He spent recklessly buying French brandy and champagne by the case, backing racehorses, and occasionally showing off in what was a typical wealthy miner’s manner of lighting his cigar with a five-pound note, an amount which at that time would buy goods today to a value of over $700.

Such a profligate lifestyle could not endure and he ended his days in poverty. The lack of gratitude to Sam Pearce is a recurring theme. Back in 1926, The Sunday Times newspaper in Perth carried a piece asserting “in spite of all the old battler had done for mining not a penny pension was paid to him by the WA Government” (Peeps at People, 1926). Another correspondent, in 1938, was similarly struck by the unfairness writing “Paddy Hannan… lived for a long time on a State Government pension; Sam Pearce, who actually pegged the main leases of the Golden Mile, got little out of it” (Barkla, 1936).  Pearce eventually was granted a modest pension from the South Australian Mining Department in a belated move to assist him.

His final years were spent in very modest circumstances in Beach St, Grange in Adelaide and he passed away on New Year’s Day in 1932 at the age of 83. He was buried in Payneham cemetery. Sam’s mother Harriet was also buried in Payneham Cemetery as was Mary, his first wife. Sam Pearce does not actually have a headstone of his own, nor an inscription for him on his mother’s. The reference to him on Mary’s headstone is all that exists. His site lease expired in January 2006 and the area where he was buried has been ‘redeveloped’ with a new burial sitting above his. Mary’s headstone with its inscription of Sam has been relocated nearby. Currently there is no plaque or other notation to inform visitors of the significance of the man buried there. The Pearce association with Payneham Cemetery was probably due to the family’s religious affiliation, that is Wesleyan Methodism. The cemetery was a former Primitive and Wesleyan Cemetery administered by the local circuit of the Methodist Church.  It was transferred in the 1990s to a private trust known as the Payneham and Dudley Park Cemeteries Trust and is not a municipal cemetery.

He has been described as a man who not so much dissipated a fortune but rather as someone who flung it across several continents (Warburton, 1988). His ill-fated and hugely expensive North American sojourn drained his moneys and curtailed his grandiose lifestyle. Yvonne Pearce Brown, one of his great granddaughters, told this writer her family spoke to her of his love of adventure and new quests. She said that when Sam travelled it was often with a “very big entourage”. She reported that her red-bearded, deep-voiced great grandfather was well known for going into Glenelg’s Jetty Hotel and bellowing “Pearce’s shout!” – behaviour far removed from his conservative Wesleyan upbringing. He was a generous man throughout his life, and it seems somewhat reckless with his assets, as this shouting of the bar even occurred in his old age when pension day came around, well after his fortune had disappeared. He was not only generous with his money, he was generous in his advice to other prospectors as to where they might look to do better. Despite the deep injustices that befell him, he was known as a friendly man who retained a positive outlook.

If the question is asked as to how good a prospector was he, the answer would have to be very good indeed. No matter how skilled they might be, no-one is going to find a bonanza each time they go out. However, the manner and the number of instances of prospecting success by Sam Pearce are strong indications that there was far more than good luck involved in his discoveries. This respect among fellow prospectors for his abilities and observational skills has been well documented. One eye-witness event was recounted years later by Alick Macgeorge:

“[We] were sitting in the shade of a tree just east of the Blue Gap, Sam Pearce told me the surface rocks on the east side of the area were different from those on the west side, and pointed out where the line of contact ran. Years after, when trained geologists examined all the mine workings in detail and drew the differences

between the rocks… the line of contact they determined was nearly identical with that traced by Pearce when there were no mine workings and nothing but the accuracy of his observant and experienced eye on which to depend. I always considered this a great feat on his part as, to a less observant man, the surface rocks, much weathered as they were, appeared the same.” (Macgeorge, 1993, p. 20)

In their discussion about the large number of carefully selected leases acquired by Pearce and Brookman, Martyn and Audrey Webb emphasise this impressiveness that the blocks “were located on different and separate lines of reef running roughly parallel to one another…The credit for this highly discriminating set of choices, which must go almost entirely to Sam Pearce, cannot be ascribed, even by the wildest stretch of imagination, to either luck or chance: this was prospecting of the first order” (Webb & Webb, 1993, p. 255). Furthermore, they put the roles and contributions of the two men into perspective: “Pearce was a most careful worker. He systematically explored the area, looking for the main lodes. For his part, Brookman made good use of the labour which had to be employed in fulfilment of the labour conditions, by putting the men to work cutting costeans and digging pits from which immediately saleable gold, as well as useful geological information, was obtained” (Webb & Webb, 1993, p. 263). Clearly, Sam Pearce was no ordinary prospector. It was reported that “what he doesn’t know about the geology of almost every State of the Commonwealth and its auriferous, stanniferous and other iferosues is scarcely worth knowing” (Peeps at People, 1926) and that he learned metallurgy “to know the value of all minerals, precious and base, to be competent to value lode or reef matter, and to be as far as was humanly possible one who could foresee values ahead” (Peeps at People, 1932).

Prominent WA prospector and historian Scott Wilson has described the way Pearce and Brookman combined: “Pearce’s ability and speed in identifying the prime positions is an outstanding testament to his skills as a prospector. Through Brookman, they also had the ability to fulfil the numerous conditions and expenses required under the Mining Act of the time, without which they would not have been able to acquire the land they did.” (Wilson, 2018) Pearce never lost the urge to go prospecting and continued doing so into old age. In his home country, he prospected in every Australian state. In his mid-70s a syndicate commissioned him to go searching for the famed Lasseter’s lost reef, which meant enduring tough conditions once again and travelling into Central Australia. He did find alluvial gold in the MacDonnell Ranges but not the fabled reef. On another occasion one granddaughter recollected visiting him in a tent on the Deloraine goldfield near Adelaide when he was  nearly 80 and finding him stirring his dinner pot with a monogrammed claret ladle. The marking of that ladle went back to when the Pearces moved into Stradbroke when they commissioned a valuable cutlery set with items emblazoned with their SW & MP monogram

Using the windfall from selling his original shares, Sam Pearce eagerly went overseas with his family in tow and prospected for gold, silver and rubies. This took him to the Yukon in the Klondike region in Canada’s north-west bordering Alaska, to California’s gold fields and to Arizona, and into Mexico’s western sierras. The Klondike venture was a dreadful disaster – Pearce installed his family in a big stone house in Vancouver, bought plentiful supplies and equipment, hired an overseer to manage it all and set off with a large party with the aim of blazing a new, more direct trail through the wilderness. Warburton (1988) has it that mosquitoes swarmed them and sixteen horses had to be put down because of blindness. Worse still, an avalanche buried some of the party. Pearce limped home in poor shape. It was a huge financial drain on his resources and he directed his son Willie (the Adelaide stockbroker he had left behind to manage his affairs and move with his own family into Stradbroke while he was away) to send substantial funds over to Canada.

Not deterred, he took his family on journeys though the United States and even purchased, and expensively furnished, a house in one of San Diego’s citrus groves. In letters back to son Willie he called it his American Stradbroke. The money was fast running out and Pearce eventually sent the family home while he lingered in Mexico to do further prospecting there. This was a grand adventure but it did not restore his lost fortune and, when he finally returned, his properties were progressively sold off to meet debts.

At Mannum on the Murray, 1928: Willie Pearce and his father Sam, Arthur Weston with the oars, Elaine and Iris Pearce (daughters of Willie from his second marriage to Alice Tucker), and Alice Weston (daughter of Willie from his first marriage and wife of Arthur) [photo source: Yvonne Brown]

Many informed people over the years have remarked upon the wrongful lack of proper acknowledgement for Pearce. For instance, back in 1926 The Sunday Times in Perth reflected on how “some prominent and usually well-informed newspapers in the East had been giving credit to the finding of the Golden Mile to Charlie de Rose when it was indeed Sam Pearce who should be given full credit” (Peeps at People, 1926). Trevor Sykes, a highly regarded historian and financial journalist, has challenged the strong cult of Paddy Hannan in Kalgoorlie. Sykes argues that the alluvial field Hannan’s party found was not an especially rich one, it petered out in a few years and it is not part of the rich reef associated with the Golden Mile. He is among those who have pointed out that the real wealth of the area is due to the vision and courage of Sam Pearce and asserted that it is an injustice that he has not received the recognition he deserves (Sykes, 2000). Sykes, in his address for the Mining Hall of Fame, asserted that “Hannan’s discovery petered out in a few years. It was Pearce’s that ensured Kalgoorlie lived for a century. I’ve always felt it something of an injustice that the main street and even the beer of Kalgoorlie was named after Paddy while poor old Sam has been consigned to the dustbin of history”.

This is consistent with the conclusions of other researchers such as Martyn and Audrey Webb who deduce “Although all honour goes to Paddy Hannan and his mates for having made the first find, the credit for having discovered and opened up Kalgoorlie’s fabulous Golden Mile – on which the real prosperity of Western Australia is based – must go to two South Australians, William Gordon Brookman and Sam Pearce… [and] it was Brookman and Pearce’s discovery of what eventually turned out to be a cubic mile of rich gold-bearing formations, hardly distinguishable at the surface, and not Paddy Hannan’s surface alluvial find, that marked the real beginning of Kalgoorlie-Boulder as one of the world’s most important and long-lived gold mining centres” (Webb & Webb, 1993, p. 1).

Historians located on the goldfields have come to the same conclusion. The Eastern Goldfields Historical Society (EGHS) recently were able to uncover mining records which showed Pearce and Brookman “were the real, unsung heroes in the creation of what we know as Kalgoorlie-Boulder today” (Neeson, 2018). The EGHS had trawled through old telegrams, newspapers from London and original sources to decipher the timeline of Pearce and Brookman and have, in the words of its president Scott Wilson, been able to “cement their exact role in the creation of the Golden Mile and consequently Kalgoorlie-Boulder”. In seeking “to set the record straight”, he urged the community to pay tribute to Pearce and Brookman who blazed the trail and unlocked the prosperity that Kalgoorlie-Boulder and beyond has profited from for 125 years (Neeson, 2018).

It seems that two key elements are indisputable – one, that it was the first claim reported by Paddy Hannan that flamed the initial rush to Kalgoorlie and two, it was Sam Pearce who discovered the formations of the Golden Mile that have sustained Kalgoorlie-Boulder for the last century and a quarter. The mines of the Golden Mile have in more recent years been consolidated into what is now called the Super Pit and from that area pegged out by Pearce and some others 60 million ounces of gold to the value of around $90 billion dollars have been extracted since the discoveries of 1893.

Pearce and Hannan were both key contributors to the Australian mining industry and it is fitting that both are inductees into the Australian Prospectors and Miners Hall of Fame http://www.mininghalloffame.com.au/. Paddy Hannan has, so far, been afforded almost all the limelight surrounding the Kalgoorlie-Boulder discoveries but it is to be hoped that the role  of Sam Pearce will eventually be fully marked and celebrated to at least the same extent  and in a form worthy of the significance of his extraordinary discoveries to Kalgoorlie- Boulder, Western Australia and the nation. The evidence of the vital input to the prosperity of so many others by Sam Pearce is overwhelming. At the time of writing, he is not recognised in any way in Kapunda where he grew up and married, there is no acknowledgement of him where he is buried in Payneham, and there is no recognition of him in Norseman where he made other valuable discoveries. These are all huge oversights.

While Kalgoorlie Consolidated Gold Mines (KCGM), the operator now mining the area occupied by the Golden Mile, has readily acknowledged Pearce’s significance, it is astonishing that the City to date has done relatively little. To its credit, KCGM has named its onsite administrative area the Sam Pearce Offices and has named the connection between the open pit and the underground operations the Sam Pearce Decline. Eventually both those will disappear. On the other hand, the City has been highly remiss. There is no statue of Sam Pearce, no major thoroughfare, no significant park, no suburb, no library (he read keenly), no sporting arena (he was an accomplished sportsman), nor other major public building in his name. Suggestions that have been made for appropriate recognition in Kalgoorlie-Boulder include building a museum in his name on the old Golden Eagle Hotel site in Boulder, the renaming of the School of Mines in his honour, having a statue of him at the south west intersection of Lane and Burt Streets looking up toward where the great mines of the Golden Mile were, and a significant and permanent display of his achievement, perhaps as a montage, on that intersection or else at the railway station.

To this day in the city built on the back of Sam Pearce’s discoveries, there remains a puzzling blockage to providing a substantial permanent memorial that recognises his contributions. Flummoxed for other possible explanations, there is a strong suspicion within the local mining community that because the omission is so profound that resistance to full recognition could only have been political. Surely not, but if it is the reason, then why? Is it merely an oversight, an oversight that has lasted for a century and a quarter? Again, surely not. One explanation has it that the resistance in the past is speculated to be based on a presumption that the City’s considerable investment made in immortalising Paddy Hannan would be undermined by bringing the far more significant discoveries of Sam Pearce to the attention of the public. That seems ridiculous, it does not follow that by making more of

Sam Pearce then less is made of Paddy Hannan. So why is there this apparent indifference and unwillingness to act meaningfully? Why has he not been properly celebrated and remembered? Will this belatedly be addressed in meaningful, lasting ways which recognise his importance to the City? When will those in a position to do something embrace the imperative to act on this?

The gold discoveries by Pearce were in the late 19th century yet it is arguable that only in much more recent times have first steps towards redressing this gross oversight been commenced. The City of Kalgoorlie-Boulder gave 2016 Walk of Fame Awards to Samuel William Pearce and William Gordon Brookman and in 2018 erected signage near the Super Pit where their role is noted – these are good starts which need to be followed through with something permanent and substantial. The Eastern Goldfields Historical Society has been studious in researching the opening of the goldfields there and has presented its findings of the vital role of Sam Pearce to the community. It should not have taken a century and a quarter for Kalgoorlie-Boulder to embrace the memory of Sam Pearce in at least a small way and much more should be done. The complete neglect in Kapunda and Norseman is something the authorities there need to address. It seems that such is the lot for Sam Pearce – a complex character, very much a rover and adventurer not to be constrained, the superlative prospector who discovered the fabulous Golden Mile.

This bracelet reputedly is from some of the first gold that Sam Pearce discovered in the Golden Mile. It has been passed down the family’s female line and is currently in the possession of great, great granddaughter Anne Cutting. It is in safe keeping held in bank security. Engraved are the initials E.E.P. – Eliza Ellen

Pearce, the first wife of Sam’s son Willie. The bracelet carries an inlaid garnet, perhaps found by Sam either when he was in California or Arizona [photo: Anne Cutting]

A plaque commemorating the work of Pearce and Brookman appears in the Walk of Fame which is in the footpath of Hannan Street, Kalgoorlie-Boulder [photo: Chris Morgan]

Rosemary Morgan (a great, great grandchild of Sam Pearce) representing the family at the presentation of the Walk of Fame Award for Sam Pearce, Centennial Park, Kalgoorlie-Boulder on Australia Day January 26, 2017. The plaque is being unveiled by Rosemary and Mayor John Bowler [photos: Chris Morgan (left & centre), Jarrod Lucas ABC Goldfields (right)]

While references to Paddy Hannan abound in Kalgoorlie-Boulder, there is a notable deficit in the City of recognition of Sam Pearce [photos: Chris Morgan]

This photo was taken prior to the removal of the headstone by the cemetery authorities and was provided by them.

The only reference to Sam Pearce at his burial site in Payneham Cemetery was on Mary’s headstone. This headstone has been removed by the cemetery authorities from the gravesite to a few metres away adjacent to Marian Rd where several such headstones are clustered for display purposes. Sam was buried in Mary’s plot and was never given a headstone of his own. This plot location was in the Church Trust section, Allotment 212 S& C, Path 45. There is no plaque or other indication at the cemetery to inform visitors of the connotations of the site.

KCGM, the company now mining the site, values the prospecting of Sam Pearce for discovering the Golden Mile lodes. Photos below are of minerals on display in the Sam Pearce Offices [photos: Chris Morgan]

Photos supplied by KCGM: minerals on display in cabinet in the Sam Pearce Offices

Small section of a map showing various mines in the Golden Mile held by the Eastern Goldfields Historical Society [photo: Chris Morgan]

Marriage Certificate for Sam and Mary Pearce; they were married in the family home on July 8, 1867

The Golden Mile, pictured here in 1895, was known as the richest square mile on Earth. Supplied: Eastern Goldfields Historical Society

A goldfields camp – Willie Pearce is sitting on the right with his pipe. Supplied by Don Pearce

The Great Boulder mine in 1896. Supplied: Eastern Goldfields Historical Society/Photographer Greenham and Evans

The original mining tenements pegged on the Golden Mile superimposed over a bird’s eye view of the Super Pit. Supplied: Eastern Goldfields Historical Society

Miners underground in the Great Boulder mine in 1898. Supplied: JJ Dwyer/Eastern Goldfields Historical Society

Kalgoorlie-Boulder Mayor John Bowler (R) speaks at the unveiling of signage commemorating the 125th anniversary of the Golden Mile. Eastern Goldfields Historical Society president Scott Wilson is at left. It is noteworthy that photos of Pearce and Brookman are included in the signage. Photo: ABC Goldfields, Jarrod Lucas

I am appreciative for the help freely given by many in locating and providing information and for their encouragement to pursue this investigation. In particular I thank Scott Wilson and the staff of the Eastern Goldfields Historical Society and the Eastern Goldfields Prospectors Association’s president Cranston Edwards. I am grateful to Don Pearce, a direct descendant of Sam, who generously provided some family photographs used in this document.

About the Author

Chris Morgan has a Bachelor of Science in Agriculture, a Graduate Diploma in Education and a Masters degree in Education with Honours. He had a long academic career as a senior lecturer teaching in the agricultural business management field with the University of New England, the University of Sydney and Charles Sturt University. His major professional interests were in teaching practice,

educational design and the use of technology in supporting adult students at a distance. He received several significant awards from universities and the profession recognising his work in these areas.

He developed an international reputation culminating in being invited to a university in Hong Kong to be its Visiting Scholar for a semester.

The author’s wife Rosemary is a great, great granddaughter of Sam Pearce and he had heard the occasional mention by her family of Sam’s discovery of the Golden Mile. When Chris and Rosemary did a trip in 2012 across from their home in central NSW to Kalgoorlie-Boulder, he hunted for some detail about Pearce and the discoveries he made expecting it to be readily available. He was amazed to find so little.  He undertook to find out more and this document is the product of his investigations and his attempt to redress the situation.

Bibliography

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Moya Sharp

Owner at Outback Family History

My name is Moya Sharp, I live in Kalgoorlie Western Australia and have worked most of my adult life in the history/museum industry. I have been passionate about history for as long as I can remember and in particular the history of my adopted home the Eastern Goldfields of Western Australia. Through my website I am committed to providing as many records and photographs free to any one who is interested in the family and local history of the region.

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