Under such leaders as Carel Johannes Trichard, Andries Potgieter (the man after whom the town of Potchefstroom in the Transvaal is called), Gerrit Maritz, and Piet Mauritz Retief (after whom the town of Pietermaritzburg in Natal is named), the people gathered themselves together in families, men, women, and children, and, selling their farms and movable property for whatever they could get, in-spanned their great ox-wagons, and, taking with them such of their flocks and herds as they could remove, left their birthland for ever, and moved northward, sometimes in large bodies amounting to two hundred souls. Crossing the Orange River, which was then the boundary of the Cape Colony and beyond which the British control did not extend, they entered the country, which is now the Orange Free State, and crossing the Caledon River moved still northward towards what is now the Transvaal. Most of these men came from the eastern and midland districts of the Colony, and were the descendants of the men who had already resisted the rule of the Chartered Dutch East India Company and endeavoured to found their own republic in the midlands; men in whom the self-governing republican instinct, inherited with their Dutch blood and sucked in with their mother's milk, was strong as probably in no other race on earth, unless it be the Swiss. With the exception of Piet Retief, few, if any, of them were from the old districts of the Western Province. Among those in Andries Potgieter's trek was one Casper Krüger, from the Colesberg district of the Cape Colony. He took with him all his family, among them a lad, just over ten years of age, later known as Paul Krüger, President of the South African Republic. Fully to describe the sufferings, struggles, and wanderings of these people, before they succeeded in founding their republic in the Transvaal, would far exceed the limit we have set ourselves. But to understand the Boer of to-day and the problems of to-day we must very rapidly glance at the march of the fore-trekkers.