Colonel Warren now made a detour, suspecting the enemy to be lodged in a mountain situated to the northeast, and distant from the Griqua Town road some twenty miles. Here he only found groups of chattering monkeys, instead of the Griquas he expected. The rebels had fled! [Illustration: TAIKOON PASS. ] After remaining a few days in Kimberley to settle some urgent matters connected with the government, Major Lanyon proceeded to Bechuanaland, where he was joined by Colonel Warren, and where after the battle of Taikoon and other smart engagements the rebellion was finally crushed. I may here say that the rebellion among the natives who were once, it must be kept in mind, the owners of the soil, arose with the white man from difficulties mainly respecting land, and from the dissatisfaction generally felt by a large proportion of them with Colonel Warren’s previous decisions in this regard, which had driven them to utter despair; for it was not until entreaties and even tears had failed to have any effect that they resorted to rebellion. Colonel Warren was by nature hasty beyond description, autocratic to a degree, and bigoted in the extreme. The manner in which the natives had been treated both by Stockenstrom in the land court and afterward by Warren was freely commented upon by colonial statesmen. Mr. R. Southey, formerly lieutenant governor of Griqualand West, gave utterance to the following significant words in the Cape house of assembly, when speaking on the subject: “So gross was the injustice sustained by these people in the land court that had I been a Griqua, I too would have rebelled.” Mr. H. B. Roper, now chief of the detective department and police commissioner of Kimberley, then the resident magistrate of Hay, was accused in an official dispatch by Colonel Warren of having been the sole cause of this war through his magisterial judgments, and every endeavor was made by interested officials to throw the entire blame of the war upon him. This official’s record books were subjected to the private scrutiny of the attorney general by the magistrate who succeeded him, who by this means wished to curry favor with the powers that used to be, but, although his sentences were found to be decidedly severe, they showed no taint of what could be construed into injustice, and the sinister scheme with respect to him fell through. When Colonel Warren became acting administrator of Griqualand West, he published in the government _Gazette_ the names of a commission which was to sit at various places and inquire into the causes of the war, but it never sat once. And why? Because it was found to be indubitably certain that the answer to every question as to the cause of the rebellion would be “land.”