A little while ago I wrote about how gold got above 2000 USD per ounce. As is the case whenever a resource gets in enough people's mind people start to think about prospecting. When prices move a lot you start to see the sorts of behaviors seen in the Gold Rushes. The story of Lasseter's Reef is a great example of the sorts of things that happen when gold mania sets in and the things people do.

The story of Lasseter's Reef is particularly interesting as both a story of group psychology as well as a story about a time in Australia's history. Someone in my family pointed me towards a site that had a really good collection of research and stories about this: https://www.lasseteria.com/

I feel a bit like an explorer looking at this site because the structure of the stories isn't quite in order on the website. You'll notice if you go to the index page everything is ordered alphabetically rather than chronologically. Unfortunately this makes it a bit harder to navigate through the story.

If you go to one of the story pages like the one about bicycles you'll see that the URL and the page has a number, in this case https://www.lasseteria.com/CYCLOPEDIA/25a.htm it's 25a. I wanted to be able to create an index that was chronological order rather than alphabetical. I figured this was a great example of a situation where a bit of programming using a web crawler would be a great way to do this. (if you are interested in how I made this scroll to the end of this article). If you aren't interested in the programming side just see below for a newly created index:

Reordered links for the index

• 1 - ABORIGINALS.
• 2 - ABORIGINAL GOLD.
• 3 - AFGHANS.
• 4 - AI AI CREEK.
• 8 - ALLCHURCH, Ernest.
• 11 - ARGEROL.
• 12 - ARLTUNGA.
• 21 - BAN BAN BALELE.
• 24 - BEAN TREES.
• 24A - BEGINNINGS.
• 24B - BELL LASSETER.
• 25 - BIBLIOGRAPHY
• 25a - BICYCLES.
• 26 - BIG BREAKAWAY the.
• 27 - BIG PUSH the.
• 28 - BLACK HAWK II.
• 30 - BLAKELEY. Fred.
• 33 - BOWLEY'S RANGE.
• 34 - BREADEN, Allan and Johnson.
• 36 - BRIDGE, Leslie G.
• 37 - BRITISH AUSTRALIAN PROSPECTING Co.
• 37A - BROWN'S NAUTICAL ALMANAC.
• 38 - BRUMBIES.
• 39 - BUBBLES and CHARLIE.
• 43 - BUTTONS, Billy.
• 44 - C.A.G.E.
• 45A - CAMERAS.
• 46 - CARNARVON.
• 51 - CENTRALIA.
• 52 - CENTRE MOUNT FIRE.
• 52a - CHARTER to the COMPANY.
• 53 - CHRONOLOGY.
• 56 - CIRCUS WATER.
• 58 - CLIMATIC CONDITIONS.
• 59A - CODED TELEGRAMS.
• 59C - CONSCRIPTION.
• 59b - LASSETTER, Henry Beauchamp.
• 60 - COOTE, Errol. H.
• 67 - DAMPER.
• 69 - DASHWOOD CREEK.
• 70 - Das LASSETER.
• 71 - DAVID, Sir Edgeworth.
• 72 - DELAYS in SYDNEY.
• 74 - DEPUTY LEADER.
• 75 - DERWENT CREEK.
• 75a - LASSETER, DIED of WOUNDS.
• 76 - DINGOES and DOGGERS.
• 77 - DIPLOMAS.
• 78 - YAFFA, David.
• 83 - EARLE.
• 84 - EDWARDS.
• 87 - EHRENBERG RANGES.
• 88A - ENTATA, Rolfe.
• 88B - EQUITY.
• 89A - EUMOS TRIBE the.
• 92 - FALSE TEETH.
• 93 - FIGHT in the DESERT.
• 95 - FIREARMS.
• 98a - FOUR FIFTIES.
• 100 - GEMS from COOTE.
• 103 - GEPP REPORT The.
• 105 - GILES, Archie.
• 106A - GLEANER, the.
• 106AA - GORDON SPRING.
• 109 - GOLDEN HORNETS.
• 110 - VH-UMR.
• 111 - VH-UGX.
• 112 - GOLD SPECIMENS.
• 113 - GRAVES.
• 115 - HAASTS BLUFF.
• 116 - HALL, Pat.
• 120 - HARDING.
• 124 - HOUSTON'S SOAK.
• 130 - ILLBILLA.
• 131 - INVISIBLE INK.
• 134 - JAPANESE FILE the.
• 135 - JENKINS, Jack.
• 137 - JOHANSON. W.
• 138 - JOHNS, Albert Paul.
• 138a - KADITCHA.
• 139 - KENDRICK, Captain.
• 142 - KIT-BAG and PORTMANTEAUX.
• 144 - LAKE AMADEUS.
• 145 - LAKE CHRISTOPHER.
• 149 - LANDMARKS.
• 152 - LASSETER'S CAVE.
• 152A - LASSETER COUNTRY.
• 152C - LASSETER TREES.
• 153 - LASSETER'S DIARY.
• 155A - LASSETER'S FIRST FLIGHT.
• 156 - LASSETER'S GOLD, No Liability.
• 157B - LASSETER'S LAST LETTERS.
• 159A - LASSETER'S LAST SUPPLIES.
• 160 - LASSETER'S LOOKOUT.
• 161 - LASSETER'S REEF.
• 161a - LASSETER'S TIN TRUNK.
• 162 - LEADERS. of the C.A.G.E. EXPEDITIONS.
• 162A - MOUNT LIEBIG.
• 163 - LETTER to CARRINGTON.
• 164 - LEXIUS-BURLINGTON, Charles.
• 165 - LINDSAY David.
• 167A - LIVER and LIVERISH.
• 169 - LOGISTICS and ORGANISATION.
• 171 - MacBAIN'S SPRINGS.
• 177 - MALAGURA ROCKHOLE.
• 178 - MALLARD.
• 179 - MAPS.
• 180 - MARREE.
• 181 - MATTING.
• 182 - MEMBERS of the EXPEDITIONS.
• 183 - MICKY.
• 184 - MORMON PASTOR The.
• 185 - MOUNT CONNOR.
• 185A - MOUNT CURDIE.
• 187 - MOUNT MARJORIE.
• 188 - MOUNT OLGA.
• 190 - MOUNT UDOR.
• 190a - MULLARD, Isaac T.
• 191 - MULLARD'S REEF.
• 192 - MUGS.
• 193 - MULGA.
• 194 - MURDER.
• 195 - MYALLS.
• 195A - NAUTICAL MILES.
• 201 - OLD WARTS.
• 203 - OODNADATTA.
• 204 - OONAH SPRINGS.
• 205 - PAINE, Horace.
• 206 - PANTAS WELL.
• 209 - PERISH.
• 211 - PETROL AND WATER.
• 212A - PIGEON Jim.
• 214 - PITTENDRIGH and HAMRE.
• 215 - POINTING the BONE.
• 217 - POSSUM.
• 219 - PRIVATE INFORMATION.
• 220 - PUTARDI SPRING.
• 221 - QUEST EXPEDITION.
• 222 - ROHEIM, Geza.
• 223 - RADIO COMMUNICATIONS.
• 224 - RELUCTANT WITNESS.
• 226 - RIEFF. Simon.
• 227 - RIP van WINKLE.
• 227a - ROACH. Michael, W.
• 228 - ROBERTS, W. F.
• 232 - RUBIES and THE RUBY RUSH.
• 234 - SALTING.
• 237 - SANDY BLIGHT.
• 237A - SANDHILL GODS.
• 237B - SANDSTONE ROCK RESERVOIR.
• 240 - SEALED ORDERS.
• 241 - SEVENTY EIGHT DAYS.
• 243 - SHAREHOLDERS of C.A.G.E.
• 244 - SHAW CREEK.
• 245A - SLADEN WATER.
• 247 - SMOKE SIGNALS.
• 248 - SNAKES.
• 251 - SOUTH WEST JOURNEY the.
• 252 - SPINIFEX.
• 253 - SPONSORS.
• 254 - STANLEY, Malcolm S.
• 255 - SUICIDE.
• 259 - SULLIVAN'S DIARY.
• 261 - SUNRISE.
• 262 - SUTHERLAND, George.
• 263 - SUTHERLAND HILLS.
• 265 - SYDNEY CROWD the.
• 265B - TALBOT, H. W. B.
• 267 - TAYLOR'S CREEK.
• 271A - THIRD MAN the.
• 272 - THORNYCROFT.
• 273 - THREE SISTERS The.
• 277 - TUCKER, Paddy.
• 278 - ULM, Charles.
• 280A - WARREN CREEK.
• 284 - WATTA MITTA MITTA.
• 287 - WEST AUSTRALIAN STOCK ROUTE.
• 288 - WHELAN, Paddy.
• 291 - WHITE RANGE.
• 293 - WINTER'S GLEN.
• 294 - WONGAPITCHA.
• 297 - YEAR 1911.
• sydmail - LASSETER'S LAST RIDE, First Review
• unordered-cartoons - POSTSCRIPTS to AUSTRALIAN HISTORY.
• unordered-sydmail - REVIEW, LASSETER'S LAST RIDE.

Programming and web scraping

This is a great example of a situation where we can scrape a web page so that we can use a scrip to automate a boring task. I used Python with beautifulsoup to do this. It turns out that a lot of the difficulty here comes from the fact that the original web page HTML is a bit of a mess, just like most data processing tasks in the real work data cleaning ended up being a big part of it.

Here's the Jupyter notebook I used to do this.