Once the most secluded spot in the North Island, Taumarunui has developed in thirty years into a large and busy town. When this century opened it did not exist, except as a Maori settlement, important only because it was at the head of canoe navigation of the Wanganui River. Construction of the Main Trunk Railway brought it into being as a town, and promoted the settlement of the originally wild country of which it is now the prosperous business centre.

“The Place of Abundant Shade” is a translation of the name Taumarunui, which accurately describes that sheltered valley as it was before the coming of the pakeha settler swept most of the tall dense forest from the encircling hills. Local Maori tradition ascribes the origin of the name to a certain incident, the erection of a screen or shade to shelter a dying chief, but the interpretation may reasonably be given a wider topographical significance. The level land on which the modern town is built, at the meeting of the waters that form the great navigable channel of the Wanganui, is a place of comfortable sheltered aspect, well guarded by its pumice-coated ranges from the cold and blustering winds.

The heart of the island, too, is a description which the building of the North Island Main Trunk Railway and the transformation of the well-hidden native village into a bustling provincial town have not deprived of its fitness. It was the loneliest imaginable Maori home when first I saw it; it seemed, and was, very far remote from the great world of noise and money-making and many inventions. It was three days' ride from the nearest white township on the north; it was quite inaccessible from the west; it was a long rough journey from the east, and it was a canoe voyage of a week or more from Wanganui on the South. All the rivers were unbridged; the only roads were horse tracks or bush foot trails. Now, though the scene has been trimmed and softened, the geographical truth remains. Taumarunui, as a rail station, is nearly midway between Auckland and Wellington; it marks practically the centre of the Island for train transport. It is the centre from which several routes diverge for industrial, commercial and pleasuring purposes.

Here, travellers bound down the Wanganui River leave the trains to embark on the most beautiful and novel of inland voyages, the power launch and steamboat cruise of more than a hundred miles. From here the timber milling country, the greatest tract of forest land still available for the saw in the Island, can be explored by several routes, and there is the stepping-off place for the Tongariro National Park, up yonder on the Waimarino plateau.

So Taumarunui may correctly claim for itself, if it likes, the title of hub of the Island. No one will dispute its right.

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.

The Primitive Days.

Taumarunui's transformation from a Maori settlement to a place of pakeha progress and activity was, I suppose, as rapid as anything in the much-written-of Wild West. When I first rode down the Ongarue Valley—it was a two days' journey then from Te Kuiti—the place seemed as solitary and shut-in as a glen in the heart of the Urewera Country. Later on, over thirty years ago, we camped one night on the manuka flat at Taumarunui. Long afterwards I tried to locate that camping-place alongside the pioneer surveyor Rochfort's high-legged pataka or storehouse, but it was a bewildering search, so completely had the scene been changed. It was somewhere near where the Post Office stands to-day.

All was different. The railway station stood where there had been a group of Maori whares roofed with totara bark. Churches, stores, banks, large accommodation houses, pretty homes, had taken the place of maize and potato cultivations enclosed in pig-proof fences of manuka. Electric lights blazed in the streets at night; there were paved footpaths where once narrow tracks wound through the tall manuka. Old Taumarunui had completely vanished, except for a native kainga, considerably modernised, and the shingled cottage of the first white man in this retreat of the Maori the venerable Alexander Bell, old soldier and bush scout, old trader, one of the last of the real pakeha-Maori class.

The “Father of Taumarunui.”

Mr. Bell's neat home, with its little store of goods for the Maori trade, stood page 27 in its grove of fruit trees. The old-timer lives in Taumarunui still, a lone relic of the past; he has lived continuously in Taumarunui since 1874. A man of many adventures and strange memories. He took a chief's daughter to wife, a very handsome girl, of the ancient fair-haired type that is called urukehu. That was in 1870. He was adopted into the local tribe and became their white trader, their pet pakeha, and this friendship saved

“Beauty breaks in everywhere.”—Emerson.
(Rly. Publicity Photo.)
The picturesque upper reaches of the Wanganui River, North Island, New Zealand.

him from such a fate as that which befell William Moffatt, the powder-maker and prospector, who was killed here by the Maoris in 1880, for trespassing in forbidden country. A long story, and curious, the tale of Moffatt's life and tragic end, too long to detail here.

The “Father of Taumarunui,” as Mr. Bell has been called, proudly wore his New Zealand War medal on the day when last I saw him; we had met again to discuss certain passages in the story of the bush-campaigning era. We mutually regretted some of the changes, the inevitable passing of the ages-old charm of seclusion, the forest freedom that once was Taumarunui's. Necessary as was the coming of the rail, a day too long delayed, and the making of a commercial town, there were features of the past that pleased the old-timer best. “Ah,” he said, “I don't like all this hurry and bustle, all this haste to get somewhere, all this noise. I often think of the days when I could go out in the morning, just up the hill yonder, with my double-barrel gun and come back with a kitful of fat pigeons. What shooting we did in those days never seemed to make the pigeons any scarcer. But the coming of all the crowds and the bush-felling and the burning have destroyed the birds that were everywhere in my early days here.” And the veteran lamented, too, the passing of the tui, which used to usher in the morning in all the bush around the valley, and on this Taumarunui flat itself. “I'd far sooner hear the tui sing than those motor cars hoot through the town.”

Was it not the Black Douglas—as we read in the old chronicles—who declared that he would sooner hear the cricket sing than the mouse squeak. The Douglas page 28 meant the prison when he spoke of the mouse's squeak.

I am sure that if time could roll backward in its flight, and Alexander Bell found himself all at once a young man again and a town like this choking off his breath, he would roll his swag and take his gun and get quickly hence by some dim bush trail. But the frontiers-man is alone in a changed world. Taumarunui of to-day prides itself, with good reason, on its spirit of progress, its

In The Heart Of The North Island Bush Country.
(Rly. Publicity photo.)
The Manganui-o-te-ao Viaduct (height 112ft., length 290ft.) on the North Island Main Trunk Line, New Zealand.

good communications, its comfort and briskness, and all its fittings and furnishings that bring it well forward as a live provincial town. It is one of those places that will keep on going forward, with so much country still to be drawn up for production and wealth.

A Tale of Two Scouts.

There is a story of old Taumarunui which I first heard from the late Captain Preece, of Palmerston North, one of the best officers who led Government native expeditions in the last bush wars against the Hauhaus. It was in 1869, just after Te Kooti and his guerilla band had been defeated in the fight at Te Porere, near Mount Tongariro. The wounded desperado and the survivors of his war-party took refuge in the heart of the bush, and recruited at Taumarunui. Here, in this well-hidden spot, he held council and laid plans for a new campaign. The Government forces made expeditions from the east, searching the great trackless forests for their foe. After several fruitless tramps into the wilderness of bush, it was decided to send out scouts and ascertain whether Te Kooti had reached Taumarunui, and if so what he intended doing next. Two men of one of the Rotorua tribes, named Wiremu and Te Honiana, in Preece's contingent, volunteered to go through and pick up what information they could. Armed with carbines and revolvers, they travelled the open part of the track by night and the bush by day, a distance of forty miles, mostly dense forest.

They reached the hills on the east of Taumarunui, somewhere about the place where the hospital now stands, and approached the village that then straggled along the flat, one side of which is now occupied by the railway station and page 29 yards. With the utmost caution they crawled as near as they could through the bush-covered slopes overlooking the marae or open space between the whares, the village square. There they lay hidden nearly all one day, listening to the speeches made in the open air, where Te Kooti addressed his followers and a large gathering of the Upper Wanganui people. They heard him announce his intention to move northward along the west side of Lake Taupo, making for the Patetere country, between Waikato and Rotorua. With this important piece of intelligence the two daring scouts returned to the Government camp at Lake Rotoaira. They had been absent five days.

Lieut-Colonel McDonnell was so pleased with the information the men had gained at very considerable risk that he presented them with the Government carbines they had taken on the expedition. No doubt they deserved greater recognition than that. The information they gathered as they lay in that bushy cover so close to their enemies—they feared that at any moment some Maori dog would discover their retreat and raise a fatal noise about it—enabled the Government forces to intercept the

“And it's oh! for the gleam of the metal ways.”—C. Quentin Pope.
(Rly. Publicity Photo.)
The Auckland-Wellington “Limited” Express passing through the Taumarunui countryside.

Hauhaus presently at Tapapa, near where the present railway line to Rotorua begins the ascent of the range towards Ngatira and Mamaku.

Town and Country To-day.

Those are some tales and memories of the pre-railway Taumarunui. The period of transition from a Hauhau camp and a closed frontier to a lively and ofttimes bacchanalian era as head of the iron road, and so on to its present settled and prosperous condition, was not long-drawn-out; it did not extend over the space of an average lifetime, but it was crowded with the incidents that would make a very readable history.

Now, though the old war-canoes that once swung at the river banks have gone, though the old war parties have passed on, though the railway-makers have been scattered far and wide, there remains some of the bush frontier atmosphere about Taumarunui. The life of the forest that still exists, the life of the hard-toiling bushmen, the even more strenuous toil of the farmer in new country, the wild glories of the great Wanganui River and its bush canyon, all give the traveller every warrant for making the heart-of-the-island town a kind of scenic field base.