The Giver of the Sacred Peaks.

The third chief called Te Heuheu, in direct descent from the first Tu-kino, was originally named Patatai. He was the second son of Heuheu the Great; the eldest son of the chief wife, a young man named Te Waaka —had perished in the landslip.

Patatai was absent in the Rangitoto district of what is now the King Country, at the time of the disaster. When he returned with a large party of Ngati-Maniapoto, to mourn over the awful red clay tomb of his family, he assumed the name Horonuku, which means “Landslide,” or “Swallowed up in the Earth,” in memory of his father. His good old uncle Iwikau died in 1863, and he then took the family name Te Heuheu.

Horonuku went on the warpath at the head of his clan in 1863. He marched off to the Waikato War; and his friend Mr. Grace, on his advice, abandoned the mission station and returned to Auckland, for the safety of his family. “If we are beaten in the war,” he sadly told the missionary, “I may no longer be able to protect you.”

Later, in 1869, Horonuku, against his own wishes, perforce joined Te Kooti in the fighting around the South Taupo country and he narrowly escaped in the battle of Te Porere, where Te Kooti's last redoubt was stormed by the Colonial forces. This entrenchment, overgrown with flax and fern, is close to the present main motor road from National Park railway station past the base of the Tongariro Range. The chief came in and surrendered to Lieut.-Colonel McDonnell a few days after the fight, and Sir Donald Maclean, Native and Defence Minister, had him and his family taken down to Hawke's Bay on a kind of benevolent parole to keep him out of the Hauhau complications until the wars were over; they all returned in 1870.

It is to this chief Te Heuheu Tukino Horonuku that New Zealand owes the nucleus of the wonderful National Park, but the moving power behind the gift was the late Mr. Lawrence M. Grace, the son of Taupo's pioneer missionary. The Native Land Court at Taupo township in 1886 awarded the mountain peaks of Tongariro, Ngauruhoe and Ruapehu to Te Heuheu and his family, because of the intimate tapu associations of the mountains and the Heuheus. The old chief was troubled as to the ultimate fate of his ancestral volcanic peaks. “After I am dead, what will become of these sacred places?” he asked his friend Mr. Grace (who had married his daughter Te Kahui). Mr. Grace suggested that the best plan would be to make them a tapu place of the Crown, a sacred national property under the mana of the Queen. “Yes,” agreed the chief; “let them be a gift to the Government, a sacred gift for ever from me and my people.” And so it was done, with all the necessary formalities, and the mountain tops, an area of 6,500 acres in, all, were deeded to the Crown.

Thus came into being the Tongariro National Park, the area of which was increased from time to time by purchase until it is now a splendid domain of over 150,000 acres.

The Park is a grand memorial to the noble donor and his line, and as is fitting one of the most beautiful of the peaks in the Park bears the family name. This is the North Peak of Ruapehu, which is mapped as Te Heuheu; it is a perfect pyramid seen from the north, a glorious sight under snow.