He and his copper arrived at just a handy time to save South Australia.

It had got mashed pretty flat under the collapse of a land boom a while before." There it is again; picturesque history -- Australia's specialty.

In 1829 South Australia hadn't a white man in it.
In 1836 the British Parliament erected it--still a solitude--into a Province, and gave it a governor and other governmental machinery.
Speculators took hold, now, and inaugurated a vast land scheme, and invited immigration, encouraging it with lurid promises of sudden wealth.
It was well worked in London; and bishops, statesmen, and all ports of people made a rush for the land company's shares.

Immigrants soon began to pour into the region of Adelaide and select town lots and farms in the sand and the mangrove swamps by the sea.

The crowds continued to come, prices of land rose high, then higher and still higher, everybody was prosperous and happy, the boom swelled into gigantic proportions.