MILLIONS WON

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 59, Issue 38, 24 November 1938, Page 6

MILLIONS WON

THE OTAGO GOLD CLAIMS. EVIDENCES OF EARLY DAYS. SEEN BY ASHBURTON FARMERS. (From Our Own Reporter.) ALEXANDRA, November 23. “There’s gold in lliom tliar hills!” The expression accredited to the old American miner as lie pointed out the mountains to the stranger was vividly recalled by members of the Ashburton farmers’ touring party yesterday, when they travelled through one of the most famous of the gold-mining areas of New Zealand. They saw the vast amount of stones and shingle that has been turned over in the last half-century, most of it in the earlier days of the gold fever, in the feverish search for the precious metal. The area is packed with associations of the Americans, the Australians and the Chinese who invaded it in the ’sixties, all bent on one purpose, to dig and make a fortune. Some succeeded and spent their winnings in riotous living; some made fortunes and invested them wisely, and some continued till the end, just missing that big strike of pay dirt that would have brought fame and fortune. On all sides there are groat heaps of shingle, most of it from the sluicing that soon took the place of the panning and crude cradles in which the miners tried out the spoil. Even to-day great sluices are at work tearing down the hill-sides, moving mountains, to win the tiny specks of gold with which the hills are studded.

Relics of the Earliy Days. There are many pathetic evidences of those early days, tumble-down shacks, the remains of the walls of sod huts which housed the miners, abandoned workings on which the owners no doubt started out with high hopes, only to be doomed to that most bitter of disappointments—thwarted hope. Mile after mile one may see where digging had been carried on ; rusted pipes and other metal that had been used to sink shafts and rip the liill-sides. At St. Bathans the party saw the site of the second largest gold claim ever worked in the Dominion, and from which over £3,000,000 in gold was taken before the elusive seam ran so deeply into the earth that .it became too costly to work. The gold seams follow the contour of the ground, travelling in huge waves, now high in the hills, now deep below the surface, and the lower waves have been followed till they cannot payably be followed further.

One tiny, straggling street, flanked on one side by very old buildings, forms St. Bathans township. It has one hotel, a strange little place, with an even stranger bar room—not more than 10 feet long. It is the sole survivor of the 15 hotels which flourished when the township boasted a large population and gold was spent as fast as it was dug from the bowels of the earth. The buildings of St. Bathans have seen better days, as their appearance shows. For the most part they are of cob or sun-dried brick that has stood up to the rigors of the Central Otago winters remarkably well. Lake Formed by Workings. Only about 100 yards from the main street is the immense hole from which the St. Bathans millions came, and the workings inspire awe in the beholder, for they have left a lake of great extent and over 180 feet deep, while its vivid green colour, contrasting with the scarred yellow cliffs a-fiout it, catches the eye long before the traveller reaches the township. The level of the lake is 100 feet below the top of the cliff that drops sheer and treacherous, for to venture too close to the unfenced edge is to court disaster. The township lies at the bottom of. a warm and fertile plain that was reached by the party after they had made a run down a precipitous road. The .work on the great claim was started in the early ’sixties, and was carried on till comparatively recently, and in the interval countless millions of yards of material were moved.

After leaving St. Bathans the party made for the Dunstan Basin, passing on the way the sludge channel from the sluicing claims just out of sight over a low ridge. The water was thick with clay and small shingle that had been washed from the claim, and as far as the eye could see there was a plain of shingle and dirt that had been moved in past years.

Accompanying Mr J. D. Watt (Public Works Department Engineer at xilexandra), a “Guardian” reporter was taken on a little side run to a quaint old settlement called Cambrian. It lies about half a mile off the main road and comprises about six houses, though in other days there was a thriving township there. It was established by a group of Welshmen who came to the diggings at the height of the rush. Its sad-looking houses could tell stirring tales of those early days if walls could talk—tales of rich strikes, of despair; tales of high life and terrible death. Lonely Prospectors. Mr Watt explained that anyone can peg a claim on leasehold land without going to much trouble, but where the claim is on other land the applicant has to go to the Warden’s Court, where the owner of the land, the Public Works Department and others may voice their objections to the claim. The water in the streams is granted to users only under the Mining Act in this locality, and iho grants are made by the Warden's Court. No one is permitted to take water as lie likes, but the whole business of water rights is very complicated. The' famous Old Man Range, on the right of the road, hut many miles away, with Old Woman Rock standing at the peak of the next range of mountains and divided from the other range by the Clyde River, were pointed out as j