Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 447, page 9 by Various Authors
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established. Natal was thus made a British province in 1842. Many of the boors, naturally enough disliking the new government thus forced upon them, retraced their course over the Drakenberg, back into the upland plains of the interior. Here they were left pretty much to themselves, until the year 1848, when Sir Harry Smith proclaimed the extension of the Queen's supremacy over the whole of the territory situated between the Orange and Vaal Rivers; but, as has been already said, it was not until March of last year that this acquisition was finally sanctioned, and the new colony established by an act of the imperial government.
The Vaal River--sometimes called the Nu Gariep, and sometimes the Yellow River--is the principal tributary of the Orange River; indeed, it is so large an affluent, that some geographers have doubted, as in the case of the Mississippi and the Missouri, which should properly be considered the main stream. These rivers, the Orange and the Vaal, rising near together in the Drakenberg chain, take a wide circuit, the one to the south-west, the other to the north-west, and flow each a distance of about 400 miles before their junction. The territory which they thus enclose is nearly as large as England, comprising between 40,000 and 50,000 square miles. It is inhabited by about 80,000 natives, of various Bechuana, Namaqua, and half-caste tribes, and by some 15,000 or 20,000 colonists of European origin. Over all these inhabitants, colonists and natives, the British sovereignty has been proclaimed. Subject to this supremacy, the native chiefs and tribes are still left to manage their own affairs, according to their original laws and customs. But in order to indicate clearly and decisively the fact, that the royal authority is now paramount in this region whenever Her Majesty's government chooses to exert it, the name of the Orange River Sovereignty has been given to the whole territory.
The portion of this territory which is properly a British settlement--or, in other words, which i