Meanwhile, the Transvaal State, or South African Republic as it called itself, was passing through an infinite variety of more or less painful experiences. The region possessed by the Boers north of the Vaal is a great tract of fairly fertile and level land broken here and there by rugged hills. The climate is varied, but upon the whole pleasant and healthful. Its wheat-producing capabilities are famed throughout South Africa. Coffee and tobacco also thrive. But cattle-raising was and is the primary pursuit of almost the entire white or Dutch population. The Boers of this region did not arrive there all at once, or found their State upon conditions of mutual interest and a basis of common principles. Their one tie of union, their single basis of co-operation, was hatred of the English. Whether trekking north from Cape Colony under Potgieter and fighting the Matabele for a country to live in; or leaving Natal in utter disgust at the proposed free institutions of the new British administration; or crossing the Vaal from the Orange River Sovereignty to escape from even friendly relations with British communities; they were, and remained, the most implacable, the most ignorant, the most isolated and unmanageable of the emigrant farmers. At first the Boer population numbered only some sixteen thousand, and in 1837, after the destruction of Moselkatze and the Matabele power on the south side of the Limpopo, an unsuccessful attempt was made to form a common government. A little later four republics--Pochefstroom, Zoutpansberg, Lydenburg and Utrecht--were established, but without much effect so far as practical government was concerned. A period of wild license followed, and was marked by much cruelty towards the natives as well as anarchy and strife amongst the farmers themselves. [Sidenote: Transvaal Under Pretorius]