“I can see no evidence whatever of the precious metal in the district indicated,” Mr. Stutchburg, the Government geologist, reported. But Hargraves was so earnest and so insistent that the geologist made a second visit and watched Hargraves wash out a dozen pans of dirt, several of which showed a string of colors. Moreover, half a dozen men who had caught the trick from “the forty-niner” were panning on the creek and showing colors in pan after pan. The geologist was forced to admit the gold was there. The news was reported in the press. The stampede was on! What a Government geologist said or thought did not matter now; he was brushed aside like a chip in the wind. Within a few days four hundred amateur miners were milling around the spot where Hargraves had washed his historic pan of dirt. Before Hargraves’ find was fully accepted, two new fields were discovered, one on the Turon River and another on the Abercrombie, and these were followed almost immediately by the “Kerr strike.” At a little sheep station on the banks of the Merro River, a “blackboy” horsebreaker, idly chipping at a quartz boulder, struck harder than he had intended and split the rock, revealing to his astonished gaze a core of solid gold bigger than his fist. Two other similar boulders were promptly broken up, bringing to light even larger chunks of solid gold. One of these, had it remained unbroken, probably would have been the biggest sample of native gold in the world. The news ran through Australia like wildfire. Within a few weeks from almost every point of the compass reports of new discoveries were coming in, one on the heels of the other. There were: Clunes on July 8th Buninyong on August 8th Anderson’s Creek on August 11th Ballarat on September 8th Mount Alexander on September 10th Broken River on September 29th Four of these discoveries became great producers. Mount Alexander, for instance, produced more than ten thousand ounces of gold in the first fifteen days of existence. Any man with a spade and tin dish could be a successful miner. Indeed, few knew anything of mining, shown by the fact that many claims were abandoned and re-abandoned only to yield fortunes to second and third comers. One such abandoned claim, the “Poor Boy” at Eureka, yielded a nugget of pure gold weighing over six hundred ounces. In another instance, a pillar of earth, left as a support in a deserted claim at Bendigo, calved a nugget weighing more than five hundred ounces.