PIONEER LIFE ON THE OLD FRONTIER.
“There,” said Ninian, and pointed to the north, “is the start of
what my father—peace be with him!—used to call the Wicked Bounds,
where every man you’ll meet has got a history, and a dagger in
below his coat—Camerons, Clan Ranald’s men, Clan Chattan, and the
Frasers—it stretches to the Firth of Inverness for sixty miles, the
way a kite would fly.”
—Neil Munro, in “The New Road.”
Looking southward across the Puniu in the Seventies and early Eighties
we who were bred up on the Frontier saw a mysterious-appearing land,
fascinating to the imagination because unknown—a land, too, of dread in
the years of unrest, for there in the hinterland only a few miles from
the border river lived Te Kooti and his band and the hundreds of
Waikato dispossessed of their good lands on which we pakeha families
now dwelt. As far as the eye could range it was a land altogether given
up to the Kingites and the Hauhaus—an untamed country painted in the
dark purple of broken mountain ranges, merging into the vague, misty
blues of great distance, the sombre green of ferny hills and plains,
and the yellow and white of deep flax and raupo swamps. Clear, dashing
hill-streams and lazy, swamp-born watercourses, alive with eels and
wild duck, all carrying down their quota to feed the silently-gliding
Waipa. And over all, from Maunga-tautari’s shapelessly rugged mass
along the curving sector to Pirongia’s fairy-haunted peaks, an aspect
and air of solitude; a suggestion of mystery and waiting for the touch
of man which was to transform that far-stretching waste.
The contrast! On our side the green farms of the pioneer settlers,
roads, villages—each with its redoubt as a rallying-place in
alarm—churches, schools—primitive schools, maybe, in the early
stages—the flag of British authority flying.
So the border remained, the line of demarcation sharply defined by the
confiscation boundary, the southern side inimical, sullen, waiting, for
well-nigh twenty years after the final shots of the Waikato War.
Life on the old frontier, on one of the farthest-out farms, seems a
kind of dream, a fabric of remembrance tinged with a faerie haze,
viewed through the vista of years from these times of new interests,
new manners, changed modes of thought. Memories! One strives to marshal
them into some order, but the most that can be done is to recall the
things that chiefly fixed themselves on the youthful mind. There was
the home on the hill, on the famous battlefield, the garden with its
sweet old flowers, the cherry orchard, the huge almond trees (with flat
stones at their feet upon which Maori children long before us cracked
those almonds)—trees grown in the old days from the Rev. John Morgan’s
orchard—the wild mint that grew in the tiny creek that went rippling
down a swampy gully near the big acacia grove; the dam and the
lake-like pond in the Tautoro swamp; and, above all, the peaches. The
peaches of those happy dream-days on the old Orakau farm!—peaches
vanished, a kind never to be tasted by the present generation. Orakau,
Kihikihi, Te Awamutu, and Rangiaowhia were then the favoured land of
the most delicious fruit that ever this countryside has known.
Peach-groves everywhere, the good Maori groves, trees laden with the
big honey peaches that the natives called korako because of their
whiteness. Tons of peaches grew in those groves, and those wanted were
gathered by the simple process of driving a cart underneath and sending
one of us youngsters up to shake the branches until the cart was filled
with fruit. Some of the best peaches were preserved by the housewives
of the frontier in a way never seen now; they were sliced and sun-dried
on corrugated iron, in the strong heat of the long days, and then
strung in lines and hung in the high-ceilinged kitchen, criss-crossed
in fragrant festoons, until required for pies.
As for the surplus fruit the pigs got it; many a cart-load of peaches
from the groves was given to them, or they were turned out to feed on
the heaps of fruit lying under the trees. Porkers fattened on peaches!
And it was curious, too, to explore some of those old groves of trees,
on the crown of the farm near the road, for there the lead flew most
thickly in the three days’ siege of Orakau, and nearly every tree bore
the curious weals and knotty growths that indicated a bullet-wound, and
a search with a knife sometimes revealed a half-flattened ball or
fragment of one.
There was the bush on the north, covering the greater part of the swamp
between the farm slopes and the high country of Rangiaowhia; even
there, in little islanded oases in the woods and the raupo marsh, were
Maori peach-groves. On the south, a few hundred yards from the
homestead, was the Blockhouse, with its little garrison of smart,
blue-uniformed Constabulary—a tiny fort, but one that came large and
grim enough on the eye of childhood.
The nearest farmer neighbour was the farthest-out settler of all—Mr
Andrew Kay—and very far out and lonely his home seemed, on the verge of
the confiscation boundary. Maoris were more numerous than pakehas; many
a savage-looking and tattooed warrior, wearing a waist-shawl—for the
Maori had not then taken kindly to trousers—called in at the home from
one or other of the large villages just over the border; and native
labour was employed at times on the farms.
That was long before the day of the dairy factory and the refrigerator,
and while living was cheap there was little ready money in the country.
No monthly cheques for butter-fat then; no competing buyers coming
round for crops or stock. When a mob of cattle was ready for the market
it had to be driven all the way to Auckland; and often there was mighty
little profit for all the long hard work. Wheat was one of the staple
crops, and in the early years it was threshed by hand with the
old-fashioned flail and the grain carted to the nearest flour-mill.
There was a water-mill on the Manga-o-Hoi, on the old swamp road
between Kihikihi and Te Awamutu, and further south in the Waipa-Waikato
country there were several wind-mills. I think I recollect two
wind-mills of that old type on the road from Te Awamutu to Hamilton;
one stood at or near Ohaupo.
For many a year after the War periodical scares of a Maori invasion
were raised in the border settlements, from Alexandra and Te Awamutu
around the confiscation line to Cambridge. The shooting of the surveyor
Todd on Pirongia Mountain in 1870, the tomahawking of the farm-hand
Lyon on the Orakau side of the Puniu in the same year, and the murder
and decapitation of Timothy Sullivan near Roto-o-Rangi, on the
Maunga-tautari side, all set alarms going. Every settler was armed, and
the old Militia organisation presently was supplemented and made mobile
by the formation of a fine body of frontier horse, the Te Awamutu and
Cambridge troops of Waikato Cavalry. Well mounted, armed with sword,
carbine, and revolver, able to shoot accurately and ride well, and
thoroughly acquainted with the tracks, roads, and river fords, these
settler-cavalrymen could not have been surpassed for the purposes of
border defence. Formed in 1871, the troops remained in existence until
the introduction of the mounted rifles system in the beginning of the
Nineties, and many hundreds of young fellows passed through the ranks
during that time. In the early years, when the two troops were a real
bulwark for the frontier, Major William Jackson, the veteran of the
Forest Rangers, commanded the Te Awamutu troop; his lieutenants were
Andrew Kay and William A. Cowan (the writer’s father), the two
furthest-out settlers of Orakau. Captain Runciman commanded the
Cambridge corps. Te Awamutu was the usual drill-ground of Jackson’s
troop, and the shooting-butts were on the Puniu side of the settlement.
Some of the isolated settlers supplied themselves with small armouries
of weapons for defence in case their homes were attacked. In our Orakau
homestead there were, beside the cavalryman’s regulation arms, a
double-barrel gun and a Spencer repeating carbine, a novel weapon in
those days, American make; it was the U.S.A. cavalry arm. It held eight
cartridges, fed in a peculiar way, by spring action through the heel of
the butt.
Towards the Puniu, on a lonely hill where a few bluegums mark the site
of a long-razed dwelling, there lived an old soldier who had been a
gold-digger, and he devised a method of winning safety, in case of an
attack, which would naturally suggest itself to an ex-miner. He dug a
tunnel from the interior of his little house to a point on the
hill-side, concealed with a growth of fern and shrubs; there he
considered he could make his escape into the scrub if his assailants
burned his house over his head.
There was another pioneer, a veteran of Jackson’s Forest Rangers, now
living in Auckland. He told me of his preparations for defence on his
section, which was partly surrounded by bush, at Te Rahu, a short
distance from Te Awamutu. There was an old Maori potato-pit, one of the
funnel-shaped ruas, not far from the house, and this he determined in
one period of alarm to convert into a little garrison-hold. He made it
a comfortable sleeping-place with layers of fern and blankets, and
after dark at night he cautiously retired there with his carbine and
two or three other shooting-irons and plenty of ammunition, and spent
the night with an easy mind. His companion was his little daughter—his
wife had died—and there the pair rested till morning. To make his
retreat doubly secure the ex-Ranger had dug a short tunnel from his
rifle-pit, emerging in the fern, so as to have a way of retreat in case
his stronghold was forced. The place was quite an ingenious little
castle; and, as he said, would probably have been secure even had his
home been attacked, for fern grew all about it, and was not likely to
have been discovered except by a dog—and the Maoris did not take dogs
with them on a raid.
The most anxious time on the frontier in the Seventies was the crisis
caused by the murder of Timothy Sullivan by a party of Maoris between
Roto-o-Rangi and Maunga-tautari, on 25th April, 1873. This was an
agrarian murder, caused through rather careless dealings with native
land; Purukutu, the principal in the crime, had not been paid for land
in which he had an interest and which Mr E. B. Walker had acquired on
lease, outside the aukati line. Sullivan was regarded by the Maoris as
a tutua, a nobody; they were really after his employer, Mr Walker, and
others, including Mr Buckland, of Cambridge. It was a savage piece of
work, for Purukutu and Hori te Tumu, after shooting Sullivan—who had
been at work with two companions fascining a swamp—decapitated him and
cut out his heart. This was the last deed of the kind committed in New
Zealand. The following account was given me by the old man Tu Tamua
Takerei, who died recently at Parawera:
“Timoti [Timothy] was killed on the open plain at the foot of the hill.
The Hauhaus cut off his head with a tomahawk and also cut open his body
and took his heart away as a trophy of war. The head was carried to
Wharepapa, where it was left. The heart was carried up country at the
end of a korari stick (a flax-stalk), and was taken to a place near Te
Kuiti. The slayers of Timoti intended to lay the heart before Te Paea,
or Tiaho, the Maori Queen, but she disapproved their action, so the
trophy was not presented to her. The taking of a human heart was an
ancient custom of the Maori; it was the practice to offer it to Tu and
Uenuku, the gods of war.”
This desperate deed was regarded by very many, Maoris as well as
pakehas, as a prelude to war, and intense excitement prevailed on both
sides of the border. The cavalry troops at Te Awamutu and Cambridge
were called out for patrol duty, and the Armed Constabulary posts were
strengthened. Additional blockhouses were built, one at Roto-o-Rangi
and one at Paekuku, to watch the Maunga-tautari side, and a redoubt was
built at the Puniu. The Waikato and Auckland newspapers were full of
war rumours; public meetings were called at Te Awamutu to discuss
defence measures; and all along the frontier the determined settlers
were on the alert. It was many months before the alarm subsided. The
fanatical-minded factions among the King Country Maoris might have
succeeded in raiding some of the border farms, but no native captain
was bold enough to try the experiment in the face of the vigilant watch
of the well-armed, well-drilled troops of frontier horse and the
numerous garrisons of Armed Constabulary.
Formidable on the youthful eye in those lively years of the Seventies
loomed the Blockhouse. This was the picturesque little garrison-house
which crowned the Karaponia hill at Orakau, as if guarding our
homestead that stood a few hundred yards away among its groves. It was
very close to the spot where the British headquarters camp had been
pitched in 1864 at the attack on Orakau Pa. The Blockhouse was a type
of the border outposts built on many parts of the frontier, as far away
as the Hawke’s Bay-Taupo Road, in the Hauhau wars. The building was of
two storeys, and its curious tall shape and its lonely stand on the
hill-crest commanding a look-out over the wild Maori country southward
made it the most prominent object in the landscape. On the ground floor
the building, constructed mostly of kahikatea, was about 16 feet by 20
feet, with a height of 9 feet. The upper storey overlapped the lower
one by about 3 feet all round, and was 12 feet high. The walls were
lined, and the space between the outer wall and the lining was filled
with sand to make the place bullet-proof. The palisade which surrounded
the Blockhouse was 10 or 12 feet high; there was a space of 6 feet or 7
feet between it and the building. In the walls of the top storey there
were loop-holes all round, breast high, three at the ends and about six
at the sides; and there was also provision for firing through the
projecting part of the floor. There were no rifle-slits in the lower
storey, but the palisading was loopholed; these firing-apertures were
about 5 feet apart and breast high. The loopholes were 6 inches high
and 2 inches wide, just large enough to put a rifle barrel through. In
the front the palisading was double, with a curtain of timber covering
the entrance. The front fence was nearly all tall manuka stakes, but
the main palisading consisted of posts 10 or 12 inches in thickness;
manuka timber was used to fill the interstices. On the edge of the
gully at the rear of the Blockhouse the bank was scarped
perpendicularly about 7 feet as an additional protection. To heighten
the warlike face which this little fort presented to the world, above
the narrow gateway there was set a wooden effigy of a sentry. The
figure had been carved by some Maori artist; it represented a soldier,
with wooden rifle and fixed bayonet, in the correct attitude of “port
arms.” It gave a kind of artistic finish to the “pa o te hoia,” as the
Maoris called the Blockhouse, and it loomed very grim and soldier-like
in the eyes of us small youngsters from the Orakau farm. A tall
flagstaff stood in front, and there were a potato patch and a garden
plot, with all the old-fashioned flowers—sweet william, verbena,
sunflower, Indian-shot, pansies, and their like. The married men of the
Armed Constabulary lived outside the Blockhouse, in raupo whares, and
very cleverly the pakeha learned to thatch his house. I remember the
home of an Irish sergeant who lived near the Blockhouse, beside the
main road; it was a snug, thatched dwelling, very neat and pretty;
there was a potato patch, and there was a sweet little flower garden,
and honeysuckle twined about the whare and hung over the door.
The Blockhouse stood no sieges; its loop-holes never flashed the fire
of Enfield or Snider on a yelling horde of Hauhaus. But it is certain
that the existence of this chain of posts along the frontier, with the
vigilant patrol of the settlers’ cavalry corps, prevented the hostiles
from raiding across the border and descending on the out-settlements.
There were many scares, and more than once the wives and children on
the scattered farmsteads were taken in to the redoubts and blockhouses
for the night, while the men of the farms, with carbine and revolver,
watched their homesteads and rode patrol along the tracks leading to
the Maori country and the fords of the Puniu.
They are all gone now, those romance-teeming old blockhouses of our
pioneer days. Like many other deserted posts, the Orakau building stood
there on the sentry hill-top for many a year, rocking in the gales now
that the protecting palisade had gone, until a Crown Lands Commissioner
with no interest in historic matters sold it as mere old timber. Few
people in those years possessed sufficient prescience and sentiment to
help preserve for the new generation of colonists those relics of the
adventurous days.
Of the redoubts, less easily demolished, a few crumbling earthworks
remain here and there. One, I am glad to say, that is very well
preserved is the Armed Constabulary redoubt at Alexandra—now
Pirongia—garrisoned up to 1883. The village English Church stands in
the centre of the work to-day. I give a sketch-plan of this last
surviving example of the old frontier forts.
The year 1881 saw the first definite decision for permanent peace on
the part of the Maoris; it marked the nearing end of the necessity for
frontier redoubts and blockhouses, and it relieved the border of the
Kingite menace which had been an ever-present source of disquiet since
white farmers first set the plough to the confiscated lands. Tawhiao
laid down his guns at Major Mair’s feet at the border township of
Alexandra, and then came a peaceful though martial-appearing march of
the Kingite men through the European settlements and much firing of
salutes to the dead—the “powder-burning of sorrow”—over the
battlefields of the Sixties. Six hundred armed Kingites escorted the
tattooed king and his chiefs, the lordly Wahanui and his shawl-kilted
cabinet of rangatiras, on the pilgrimage to the scenes of the last
despairing fights, and there were amazingly animated scenes in the
outermost villages of Waikato when Tawhiao came to town, riding grimly
in his buggy, and guarded front and rear by his fierce-faced riflemen.
The march was by way of Te Awamutu, and the Cavalry band rode out from
the township along the Alexandra Road to meet the Kingites and play
them through the village. A right rousing march it was, too, for the
tune the bandsmen played as they came riding in at the head of the
procession was “The King of the Cannibal Islands.” It was Sergeant
Thomas Gresham—then a lawyer in Te Awamutu, and afterwards coroner in
Auckland—who suggested the air to Bandmaster Harry Sibley, and that
grizzled veteran of the wars seized on the bright idea with joy, and
chuckled into his clarionet at the left-handed compliment he was paying
his olden adversary. Tawhiao himself was pleased with the liveliness of
the music, and later, through an interpreter, inquired the name of the
tune; and an angry man was he when he was informed that it was “Te
Kingi o Nga Moutere Kai-tangata.” For that same “kai-tangata” was a
tender subject; and dour old Tawhiao had no glimmering of a sense of
humour.
Kihikihi settlement was given up that week to a Kingite carnival of
feasting and war-dancing and speech-making, and the Maori camp at
Rewi’s house and in the neighbouring field rang night and morning with
the musical sound of the Hauhau hymns, the service of the Tariao, the
“Morning Star,” chanted by hundreds of voices. Some unconventional
scenes there were, characteristic of the frontier life. For instance,
there was the pakeha-Maori dance on the main road in Kihikihi that
symbolised the final unifying of the two races. The dashing Hote
Thompson, the King-maker’s son, a fighting man of renown, paraded in
all the glory of Hauhau war-paint in front of his savage-looking
soldiery, and called for a pakeha lady partner to dance “te lancer”
with him, and then out stepped a settler’s handsome wife, and the
accomplished Hote led her through the mazes of the lancers in the
middle of the crowd on the dusty road with as much grace as if he had
been young Lochinvar himself. True, Hote wore only a shawl in place of
trousers, and his face was blackened with charcoal dabbed on for a
haka, but none the less he was a pretty gallant. Had that pakeha dancer
been a reader of Bret Harte she might have recalled the historic dance
on “Poverty Flat”:
“The dress of my queer vis-a-vis,
And how I once went down the middle
With the man that shot Sandy McGee.”
There was no law but the Maori chieftains’ law south of the Puniu River
until after 1883, when Te Kooti was pardoned and a general amnesty to
Maori rebels was proclaimed. For policy reasons the Kingites were left
pretty much to themselves for some time after Tawhiao laid down his
guns at Major Mair’s feet at Alexandra in 1881, and when John Rochfort
and Charles Wilson Hursthouse, setting out from Kihikihi, carried
flying surveys through the Rohepotae, the state of the country from the
Puniu for a hundred miles southward was not very different in
essentials from that of the Scottish Highlands in the period described
by Mr Neil Munro in his adventure romances that carry a tang of
Stevenson’s “Catriona.”
The only occasion on which an offender south of the Puniu was brought
to justice before the chiefs of Ngati-Maniapoto voluntarily opened the
country to Government authority was in 1882, when a long-wanted man was
brought into Te Awamutu under circumstances unorthodox and dramatic.
The Maori was Winiata, who in 1876 killed a man named Packer, at Epsom,
near Auckland. Packer and Winiata had been fellow-servants in the
employ of a Mr Cleghorn, and had quarrelled. Winiata, after tomahawking
Packer, fled to the King Country, and for six years was safe. At last
the Government reward of £500 tempted a big half-caste named Robert
Barlow to make an effort to bring in Winiata. The arrest was
accomplished as the result of a scheme devised by the Te Awamutu
policeman, Constable R. J. Gillies—a very smart and capable man,
afterwards Inspector of Police—and Sergeant McGovern, of Hamilton. At
Otorohanga Barlow met Winiata, whose home was at Te Kuiti, and,
pretending to be a pig-buyer, set about bargaining with the wanted man.
In the night he succeeded in making Winiata and two companions drunk,
and about midnight lashed him to a spare horse, after taking a revolver
from him, and made off for the Puniu. It was an exceedingly risky
undertaking, for Barlow would have been shot had any of the Maoris been
at all suspicious. He took the prisoner to Kihikihi, and with the
assistance of the Constabulary handed him over to Constable Gillies at
Te Awamutu. He received the reward of £500, with which he bought a farm
at Mangere. Winiata was tried and convicted, and was hanged at Auckland
on 4th August, 1882. As for Barlow, he did not live long himself; he
died in a very few years after his King Country feat, and the natives
declared that he had been fatally bewitched (kua makuturia) by a
tohunga in revenge for his capture of Winiata.
Another incident that greatly excited the frontier was the capture and
imprisonment of Mr Hursthouse and a fellow-surveyor by the fanatic Te
Mahuki, or Manukura, of Te Kumi, near Te Kuiti. This was in 1883. The
surveyors were released by Te Kooti and friendly-disposed King natives.
Soon thereafter Mahuki and a band of his “Angels” rode into Alexandra,
which they had threatened to loot and burn; but they were smartly
arrested by Major Gascoyne and a force of Armed Constabulary and Te
Awamutu Cavalry, and were haled off to Auckland prison. [7]
A wilderness that vast country of the Rohepotae lay for many a year.
The cultivations of the Maoris, even the fields of wheat and oats
around such settlements as Araikotore—the patriarchal Hauauru’s
village—or the large patches of potatoes and maize at Tokanui and
Tokangamutu—it is Te Kuiti to-day—gave but scanty relief from the
general impression of an unused virgin expanse of fern prairie and
woody mountain land. At Otewa, on the Upper Waipa, lived the notorious
and dreaded Te Kooti, in outlawed isolation far from his East Coast
birthland, ever since his final skirmish with Captain Preece’s Arawa
force in the Urewera Country in the beginning of 1872. Not until after
John Bryce’s peace-making with him at Manga-o-rongo in 1883 did the
white-haired old cateran venture out into the pakeha settlements.
Then miles away to the west, on the beautiful slopes of Hikurangi,
giving on to the fertile basin of the Waipa and overlorded by the
Pirongia Range, there was the great camp of King Tawhiao and his exiled
Waikato, several hundreds of them, looking down with many mournings on
the good lost lands and the lost battlefields of the Sixties. Later,
they moved down to Te Kopua, yonder by Kakepuku’s fern-shod heel, and
then to Whatiwhati-hoe, the Place of the Broken Paddles, on the level
banks of the Waipa. In the mid-Eighties they migrated in their canoes,
a picturesque tribe-flitting, past Pirongia, down the Waipa and down
the Waikato, back to their old ancestral homes, or what was left of
those homes, on the west side of the Lower Waikato. But they never had
a more lovely or more inspiring home in all their wanderings than those
sun-bathed slopes of rich volcanic land on the high shoulder of
Hikurangi, where the road to-day goes over the range to Kawhia.
Now the once wild country across the border has become the highway of
the motor-car, has become dotted with scores of lively European
settlements, with large towns with electric light and asphalted
footpaths, churches and police stations, tennis lawns and bowling
greens, stock sale-yards and all the other varied furnishings of an
advanced day. Hauhauism is a far-off tale of the past; descendants of
old king-like Wahanui and the one-time followers of the Pai-marire and
Tariao fanatic faiths have fought beside Waikato and King Country white
soldiers on the fields of Gallipoli and France. Yet the names of the
old trail-breakers, the stories of the heroic missionaries, soldiers,
surveyors, road-builders, should not be forgotten by those who look out
from their carriage windows or their cars or from their comfortable
farmhouses on this well-favoured land of the Waipa slopes and the old
Aukati frontier.