Throughout all of military history, there are few instances in which rifle marksmanship has played such a significant role as it did in the Second Anglo-Boer War at the turn of the 20th century. The prowess of the Boer burghers (citizens) at long-range shooting stopped the juggernaut of the British Empire in its tracks (at least for a time) and astonished observers around the world. While the majority of the unpaid Boer militiamen, serving in small mounted units (commandos), were armed with the most modern of repeating bolt-action rifles, and firing smokeless powder cartridges, quite a few of the burghers were also armed with an interesting array of obsolescent firearms.
In order to put these arms in context, it is necessary to take just a moment to delve into the causes of the conflict and to give a very brief overview of the course of the war. Strict, God-fearing Calvinists, the Boers (farmers) traced their roots back to an outpost of Dutch (and later also French Huguenot) settlers established at the southern tip of Africa in the 17th century to resupply Dutch ships on their voyages to and from the Dutch East Indies. The British seized the Cape Colony (named for the Cape of Good Hope) during the Napoleonic Wars, and shortly thereafter, tensions rose between the British and the fiercely independent Boers. By the 1830s and 1840s, groups of Boers were moving northward into the interior of Africa by ox-drawn wagon trains (much the same as was seen in the American West at that same time), in order to live their lives as they saw fit. After defeating hostile native tribes, they eventually established two independent republicsthe Orange Free State and the Transvaal (also known by its official title of the South African Republic)finally out of the reach (or so they thought) of the British.
This Mauser bears an Orange Free State O.V.S. marking. A very few of the rifles included in a Chilean contract also bear this marking, in addition to the Chilean crest.
British imperialism, however, was in full swing during the Victorian period, and the British kept grabbing more land from the Boers, even briefly annexing the Transvaal in 1880, only to be defeated the next year by the Boers in what became known as the First Anglo-Boer War. Whereas the discovery of diamonds in 1867 had begun to change the face of the Boers rural and simple life by the 1880s, the discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand, near the Transvaals capital in 1886, doomed the Boers hopes of maintaining their way of life. As was seen in California in the 1850s, in Australia in the 1860s, and would later be seen in the Klondike in 1898, thousands of foreign adventurers flocked to the new city of Johannesburg. They brought with them all of the vices of a boomtown, and they threatened to overwhelm the Boer culture by a sheer weight of numbers if given the franchise to vote.
In a series of manipulative moves, the local British imperialists, with the tacit support of the British government in London, pushed the Boers into an untenable position, while drumming up support from both Conservatives and Liberals in Britain by invoking imperial benefits to backwards cultures, as well as hypocritically accusing the Boers of mistreating the native peoples, among other supposed transgressions. Ostensibly, the British demand was to gain the vote for the Uitlanders (Outsidersmainly British) working in the mines, although it was really the mine ownersnot the minerswho wanted the vote. However, the real aim was to control the Boers, and although he had offered a number of concessions, by the summer of 1899, the Transvaals president, Oom Paul (Uncle Paul) Kruger could truthfully tell the British negotiators: It is my country that you want.
