A young Mark Twain left Missouri in 1861, crossed the continent by stagecoach, and got his first job as a journalist in the biggest, roughest mining town on the western frontier.
Williams and his partner, George Walker, had been knocking about the minstrel circuit for three years, playing medicine shows and hoochy-coochy joints and, most memorably, a rough Colorado mining camp where, accused of being better dressed than Negroes ought to be, they had been stripped of their clothes and were lucky to exit with their lives.
Rough diamonds mined in rebel-controlled areas were sold directly to merchants or were smuggled into neighbouring countries, where they were merged into stocks of legitimately mined diamonds and then sold on the open market.
"Round Conway's patch of rough and mine," Stephen observes, "someone disses you, you punch hard and fast and straight to the face, before they see weakness and sink their teeth into it".
A messy argument about treatment of indigenous people is probably the last thing De Beers needed, with the global diamond business facing a global economic slowdown and only just emerging from another controversy, over so-called conflict diamonds -- rough stones mined in war-torn regions and sold illicitly to finance rebellions and civil wars.
A rusting narrow gauge railway, its sleepers encrusted with sediment, twists its way into the mouth of a rough-hewn mine in a blank stretch of cliff.
I shook hands with "jackeroos", or cowboys, whose hands were rougher than mine, but they were sitting watching with everybody else.
He had grown up rough in a mining town in Montana.
Finally, design an effective rough central area mining algorithm for further analysis and forecast the rough cognitive map.
After decades of just mining rough diamonds, Botswana's capital Gaborone now cuts, polishes and sells the precious stones itself.
