American mining engineer, born in California, the son of Major Richard Hammond. He was educated at the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale, and completed his education as a mining engineer at the Mining College at Freiburg, in Germany, where he graduated with high honors. Returning to California, he was appointed assistant in the department of mining and mineral statistics in the California State Census of 1880. Then he became superintendent of the Sonora silver-mines in Mexico, and was interested in mining properties in the Cœur d’Alene district of Idaho. He worked up a large business, became well known in European investors’ circles, and was president of the Bunker Hill Mining Company.
In June 1893, he left San Francisco to act as expert mining adviser in South Africa to Abraham Barnato. His abilities in the Witwatersrand gold-fields were so marked that his services were secured by the Chartered South African Company as their mining adviser. As such he inspected the Bechuanaland, Matabeleland and Mashonaland gold-fields, and drafted the mining laws and regulations for these districts on the model of the American mining laws. He was described by the London Times as “The greatest living authority on quartz-mining.”
In January 1896, he was one of the leaders of the Uitlander Reform agitation in Johannesburg, and signed the appeal to Dr. Leander Starr Jameson, to come to the Uitlanders’ aid. He subsequently countermanded the request and expressly desired Dr. Jameson to postpone the attempt. Jameson started December 29, 1895, and surrendered at Doornkop, 6 miles from Johannesburg, on January 2, 1896. The leaders of the Reform Committee, including John Hays Hammond, were arrested on charges of high treason, and were for some days confined in a veritable Black Hole, which served as a jail at Pretoria. Hammond was in precarious health, and after much discussion was released on bail. On April 27th he was arraigned before an Orange Free State judge in Pretoria, and, on a plea of guilty, was, the following day, sentenced to be hanged. This excessive penalty was immediately commuted, and on May 20th, was reduced to fifteen years’ imprisonment. On June 11th the sentence was finally mitigated to a fine of $125,000 each on the principal reformers, and banishment, in the case of refusal to abjure civil rights, for fifteen years. Hammond then left the Transvaal and came to England to give evidence in the Parliamentary inquiry into the Jameson Raid.
