Old King Country Days

Our jumping-off place that summer morning of long ago was Te Kuiti, a rough shop those days, when it was the Head of the Line, and when the big beyond of the Rohepotae lay wrapped in mystery to all but the Maori owners of the soil and the surveyors, and the tough men of the out-of-doors whose business it was to skirmish ahead of settlement and make the first roads and railways.

Not an acre of King Country land had passed into white farmers' hands, not a pakeha homestead redeemed the wastes of fern and manuka southward of the Puniu River, the old Aukati or boundary between pakeha and Maori. Except for the thin line of the Main Trunk rail pushed a little way into the open fern country from the Waikato side—and that only by sufferance of the tattooed lords of the land, headed by the huge-framed imperious, kingly-looking Wahanui (the “power behind the Maori throne” we called him), the Rohepotae still lay purely Maori. Otorohanga and Te Kuiti were the Ngati-Maniapoto headquarters, and there we used to see the chiefs whose names were writ large in its story of the Kingite wars, swart old heroes who eschewed the trousers of the paleface and stalked free-limbed in blanket and waist-shawl.

Now the white man was coming, and presently his iron rail and his locomotive would make the trail that was to cut through the mana of the Maori. Just now it was the transition period; the pakeha settler was climbing over the wall. We were some of those pakehas, and it was our business to help blaze the way. The “battle of the routes” was on. Aucklanders were mostly in favour of making the railway to Taranaki. Wellington wanted the Central route—the present line. There was a huge gap to fill, right down to Marton. The middle portion of the Main Trunk of to-day was a blank on the map, so far as rail and road were concerned.

There were nine of us who fell in that morning at Harry Tanner's little bush store and accommodation house in Te Kuiti, and each, according to his judgment, picked out a horse from the mob of Maori-bred animals that the packer brought along. We saddled up for the three days' ride to the Big Bush, where the horse trail ended and the long march on foot began. First, there was the Boss, Charles Wilson Hursthouse—called by the Maoris “Wirihana”—the District Surveyor, of whom more later; there was another surveyor, and there was a Minister of the Crown, that gentlest mannered of politicians, quiet, lovable Alfred Jerome Cadman, at that time holding the portfolio of Native Affairs, and later Minister for Railways; there were two Auckland members of Parliament—Frank Lawry and Jackson Palmer; there was a stalwart member of the Auckland Railway League; a chainman-bushman-guide by the name of Julian; Puhi, the Maori packer and axeman; and the narrator, the most youthful of the squad, but used from small-boy days to riding about this Maori country.

Stratford was a hundred and thirty miles away. Our job was to traverse the intervening country, all but unknown, in order to judge of page 43 its suitability for settlement and railroading; and my own special business was to report on it for an Auckland paper.