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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 7, Issue 4 (August 1, 1932)

Two Frontier Towns

page 26

Two Frontier Towns.

I had been reading, in one of those American magazines that specialise in out-of-doors subjects and recollections of the frontier era, an account of some of the wild old towns of the cattle-ranchers and the gamblers and gunmen. A photograph of that renowned resort, Dodge City, Kansas, in the year 1878, seemed strangely familiar. That one-sided street of timber shanties, false-fronted stores and eating-houses and boarding-houses, some buildings with verandahs, some without; that “dirt road,” those horses standing at the hitching-posts, the four-horse wagons and the bullock-teams—how I knew them, though I had never seen Dodge City. And then I remembered. Many of our rough raw townships I had seen; they would call them cities in the U.S.A. But one above all was the exact replica of Dodge City. It was Taumarunui in the first year of its life as a town—its first year as head of the North Island Main Trunk, before the north end and south end met.

There, happily, the resemblance ended. Taumarunui was not shot up periodically by belted cowboys in ten-gallon hats. It got its “eddication in a peaceful sort of way,” as Truthful James would have said. There were no Wild Bill Hickoks, no Crooked Kids, no frontier ruffians to spread the fear of the six-gun and the bowie-knife. There was not even a faro lay-out. Yet Taumarunui and the Main Trunk camps as one saw them in the process of construction had their own little diversions. The hop beer dispensed was of gratifying O.P. quality, and if a game was desired there were hundreds of lads ready to oblige you at two-up. A much-travelled toiler who had come far to swing pick and shovel on the Ongarue banks said that it looked a child's game, but that it sure was loaded.

And now that I think of it, there were men among the thousand or so who had worked on the building of the Main Trunk (under that excellent engineer, Mr. J. D. Louch) had seen life in the actual American Far West. There was the unmistakable brand of the rover on them; they had worked in all kinds of callings, from lumbering to cattle-droving. They knew the Missouri and the Colorado, the plains of Texas, and the deserts of Arizona. In two of the canvas-and-slab camps that stood in the lee of the rimu groves where the newly-formed line went down from the Poro-o-Tarao tunnel to the pumice banks of the Ongarue, there were names of several far-famed U.S.A. “wild” towns rough-lettered in charcoal on whares.