Preece's Base Camp.

In 1870–72, Te Teko, now a little township on the Rotorua-Whakatane main road, was Preece's military headquarters. That was long before there was any road for wheels and even for horses, between those parts and Rotorua. page 19 To reach Tauranga, then the chief settlement of the Bay of Plenty, Preece had to go down the Rangitaiki River by boat and get a horse at Matata. That township was quite a little seaport in the ’seventies. Schooners and cutters entered the mouth of the Awa-a-te-Atua there, and military stores from Auckland were often landed close to where the Horse-Shoe Inu stood in later days. Now Matata's barport has long been closed; the place is a backwater, for new outlets for the Tarawera and Rangitaiki Rivers have been opened miles away. The Rangitaiki River was a great water-transport highway in Preece's day. Large canoes and whaleboats worked up the strong river as far as Te Teko, the first of the chain of military posts established by Whitmore in 1869, as a preliminary to his invasion of the Urewera country. Reckoning the river's windings, it was an inland voyage of about thirty miles.

On the Rangitaiki riverbank at Te Teko—using the site of the Maori entrenchment of 1865, the Hauhau Pa which surrendered to Major William Mair—Captain Preece had his redoubt with its little magazine and its guardhouse and the raupo-thatched huts that formed the barracks of his Arawa Contingent. He and Captain Gilbert Mair each led a company of active young Maoris, and it was these two Arawa companies that did most of the rough bush work in the Urewera campaigns from the western side. Mair's headquarters were at Kaiteriria, on the southern shore of Rotokakahi. The old Maori track between Rotorua and the Urewera country went that way.

A frontier officer, especially an officer commanding native constabulary had a curious variety of duties and responsibilities. Preece and Mair formed roads, built bridges, planted crops, and organised boat and canoe transport service, in addition to the work of feeding their troops, keeping discipline in the Maori camps—always a difficult task—obtaining sufficient rations for expeditions, and painfully extracting from the Government the cash and equipment necessary for the maintenance of the force. The actual marching and fighting were the least of the leaders' troubles; a brush with Te Kooti came as a huge relief and pleasure.