Jasper was die seun van Jasper van der Westhuizen en Anna Maria Loots.
I
could remember easily enough the time when land in the north West Cape fetched
half a crown a morgen, and farms of one hundred thousand morgen were not
unknown. There was a true story of a trek Boer who camped on a farm with his
flocks for six months before the owner discovered him. You could buy a sheep
for four shillings and wool fetched three pence a pound.
The
old people spoke of more spacious days than ever I had known. I met an
eighty-year- old Prieska resident, Mr. Jasper van der Westhuizen, who was
probably the first white child to be born in the district. His father had come
up from Oudtshoorn in the eighteen- fifties, helped himself to a three thousand
orgen "request farm" free of charge, and bought additional land at a
shilling an acre. In
the
end he and his sons owned nearly a quarter of a million acres.
Oom
Jasper told me that in his youth he often rode a hundred miles through the
Prieska and the present Kenhardt districts without seeing a farm house or
meeting a single white person. It was not until 1870 that the first
mud-building, a police station, appeared in Prieska. (https://archive.org/stream/Karoo/Karoo_djvu.txt)
