Transformation of the “King Country.”

The face of the King Country to-day is wonderfully transformed. Once upon a time, when we used to ride for many miles on the south side of the Punui without seeing home of man, or any cultivation, only at far intervals a Maori settlement, the great countryside of hill and valley, plain, swamp and forest was a wide-extending waste. As we rode over such places as the Manukarere Plains we set mobs of wild horses madly galloping, and we startled many a fern-rooting page 28 wild pig. Every hill, large and small, was terraced and trenched in the lines of a fortified hold. Everywhere there were potato-pits in the fern, reminder of the day when all these delectable parts of the land were cultivated by a large population. A great silence was over the land; it lay in the transition stage; the Maoris had dwindled and the people were concentrated mostly about the large settlements like Te Kuiti and Otorohanga. Over yonder on the Waipa banks at Otewa the old rebel chieftain Te Kooti had his headquarters, a well-tended place with large areas of food crops. Here and there a patriarchal chief like grand old Hauauru (the “West Wind”), of Araikotore, encouraged his clan to grow wheat and oats beside the universal potato. But it was many a year before the white farmer got a footing in the Rohepotae. The railway preceded settlement; this Main Trunk line had reached Te Kuiti from the north before pakeha farming began across the border.

Now the contrast. The hundreds of thousands of acres that forty years ago had not one white settler are supporting a large farming population and scores of town and village communities. Dairying, cattle raising, wool and mutton growing bring the country wealth. The white population many times outnumbers the Maori.