THE PIONEER.

Auckland Star, Volume XLVIII, Issue 155, 30 June 1917, Page 13

THE PIONEER.

A STORY OF ENDEAVOUR. (By JAMES COWAN.) (Written for the "Star.") The farmhouse, with its garden and big orchard and stables and stockyard, lies comfortably on a gentle northwardlooking slope, facing the direction of the greatest sunshine, on the old Confiscation Eoindary line. The land here rests with an easy tilt to the north. A few hundr. d yard- in the rear of the willowehudcd homestead there is a steep drop to tin' well-grassed levels that extend to the bank of a clear gravelly river, which on?e was the Aukati border between the settled lands and the wild Maori country of tlie Upper Waipa basin. From this hi .g':it vuii may trace east and West for many miles the geological break in the la nl lacing the south, a long irregular !::.,- of quick descents, sometimes bare, piecipituus banks. The farmhouse is just under tile lee of this tip-tilted table, ai.d t-o c.-capes tin- direct bite oi the wint. r.- ulhcrlies. Not far away is a Maori -liiniiini; hi tn.- half-pakeha, half-native s. it: away down on the- fiat below is another kainga, where the beautiful little river comes round in a shining half-loop. Not >o lone ago ail this country beyond the homestead was a ferny desert, r i.imod over by mobs of wild horses and ... fern-hunting wild pigs. Now the once-l.i.-i'Ut struggling settler's home is the cntre of an industry in which modern methods and modern appliances are em--1 loved to earn the highest returns from a Kindly soil. Tne pioneer settler, to whose courage sn-1 persevering energy the transformation of this part of the outback is chiefly iuc is a Scotsman from a Highland .-hire, whose tongue, after more than 1 all a century's absence, has not lost its tgrecable tang of old Caledonia. He is n«.!l on in his seventies now, but his sane, nctive life in the good open air—helped, ;•• rhaps, by a sanEruine temperament that ileoHned to take a gloomy view of things, .■yen when times were hardest, and a gen- . roiis touch of the wittiness that is tha ~,it ,-, iit c —has kept him physically as v, 1! as menially sound and alert. He is 2-.: vet for a fifty-mile horseback ride ivcr the bark country or for a long day with the l.inn wagon or in the shearing shed. The pioneer is not only the ad- .-:-.:■ iif iiis sons, who are settled on n.-.\ I'.irms of their own. but is rep - :•: .n the light of a shrewd counsellor -v his neighbours, pakeha and Mai ri. It is a patriarchal establishment. Ibis farm. The settler's wife, the best n.ttivc linguist of them all. and the helper of sick -Maoris for many a mile anmi: I. .-:' i:i bas as many grandchildren and -.-' 1 hen of visiting city friends about the easy-going happy old farmhouse as would set up a small schoolIn m-.. The home farm is a thousand acres in ?xt< lit; the sons' farms cover another lour thousand acres or so, and inai'.v cverv acre of this area is producing wealth in fat stock and butter and j c'ut-se and wool. The scrub has been: swint away, deep swamps have been j drained, lush has been felled, the plough j has cone where never plough went before. | Tu-.biv on t!ic patriarchal farms there; are more than 1.500 cattle, mostly Short-] horns, a good-sized flock of sheep, and about 150 horses. There are 200 milking cows, which assure big monthly cheques: but fat stock for the freezing works is the • Teat standby. Horse-breeding, too, pays: quite fifty horses of good pedigree are sold off the place every year. Maori labour is largely employed, but the hardest wor.-i has always been tackled by the pioneer and his sons, manliest types of frontier-reared farmers. Three li'uvr are away soldiering in France and Palestine: the married ones remaining are doinc their part in turning out food to help" fill the refrigerators for the Old Lan-J. Leave that hospitable homestead and go back to the frontier five and fifty THE TRADER. In the very early sixties we find our Pioneer, a brisk youngster with the good Scotch burr still" strong on his tongue, established as a trader at a little settlement on the Lower Waikato River, not very far from where Mercer station stands 10-day. His store is a long raupo sned-." he stocks blankets and prints, three-legged cooking pots, pannikins, bags of sugar, tobacco. Jew's harps, tomahawks, anything and everything that his Maori customers require. He buys flax. pigs, wheat, potatoes, anything that is marketable at Auckland or at Waikato 3 lends. The broad river is alive with big canoes, passing up and down; the thatched store is lively, too. with bartering noisy throngs of tattooed Waikatn«" Not a steamer, not a boat of any white man's build has yet floated on' the breast of the Waikato. The voting Scot is on the border line of that period "" the place where the White Queen's authority ends and the Maori King's begins. Then comes the Waikato war, and the trader's head sits uneasily on his shoulders for a while. Kingite war parties are abroad, and he is one of the first marked for attack by the Waikatos from up river, for, though he is well Ht-ed br every Maori, he is a Queen's pakeha." and that is sufficient. When the troops come up he becomes a military contractor, and he has a corps of friendly Manns to carry supplies up river from the heads for General Cameron's army. He is by this time a firstrate hand with a paddle himself, and sometimes a night he drops into his own canoe, and. running the gauntlet of the war-painted wariors who may be lurkin- on the banks, paddles quietly down river to one or other of his store posts. From the Waikato banks he is witness of the first engagement of the campaign, the fight at Koheroa. where the little shallow -draught gunboats shell the Maori trenches and the Imperial soldiers rush in with the bayonets. THE FVRTHEST-OUT FARMER. The war is over: the lands of the Waikato wntl the garden country of the midWaina have passed to the conquering Queen and nur trader, turned farmer. U now settled on a section of confiscated land just hevond the spot where the final bat;!.- of the campaign was fought, and where a hundred Maori patriots lie buried in the trenches that they held with such desperate courage. Tbe vomi" Scot is now a pioneer in earnest: bfs farm, mostly fern and swamp as vet is the ultimate point ol pakeha life"; ail hevond is the sulky Maori country, charged with perpetual menace The new gold diggings at the Thames call him for a while. When he returns and digs in on his farm the air

is heavy with scares and rumours of raids and massacres; the Hauhau campfires are seen on the hills nightly; the outlying settlers are warned of impending attacks, talk that reminds our settler of the forays of his own Highland forbears. Those were the days when a frontier farmer often took his rifle with him when he went out for his day's work ploughing or fencing or ditching. THE CAVALRY XIGHT PATROL. The most uncomfortably adventurous period on this part of the frontier was in 1573, when the Maoris over the border were thrown into dangerous excitement by Purukutu's killing of a pakeha, Timothy Sullivan, who worked on a newly-bought block at Puahue. Purukutu's grievance was that his land had been sold without his consent, so he shot Sullivan, who had had nothing to do with the transaction, but was simply an employee of the white owners. Sullivan's head was cut off and carried from kainga to kainga. and there was ferocious Hauhau talk of attacking all the out-settlers, and serving them the same way. By this time the pioneer's plucky wife was with him on the original farm away down yonder by the edge of the big 6wamp. Often when she was left alone in the house during the day she imagined how easy it would be for the Maoris to creep up and attack the place, | for the high fern grew almost to the, hack door. The settlers along the border, already armed in a fashion, formed volm.leer mounted corps, and these troops of YVaikato Cavalry, composed of settlers and settlers' sons, many of them old soldiers, put the fear of the pakeha into the Hatihaus. Our pioneer and his nearest neighbour, a settler who had already seen service, were two of the first officers of one troop, a particularly active body of well-horsed, alert frontier stalwarts. Their mobility was their great military quality. Night after night the pioneer's troop, split up into detachments of six or eight men. patrolled the tracks, watched the river fords, reported at the Armed Constabulary blockhouses, and kept guard over the scattered farmhouses. In this way the whole border was patrolled, and to the Maoris who chanced to be abroad a sudden meeting with a silent squad of determined horsemen, armed with sword, carbine and revolver, was a reminder that a Hauhau war-party would not have things all its own way; and so an attack was never made. Sometimes a squad would spend the night in the pioneer's house, on the swamp edge, the most exposed point of the frontier 6alient thrust into the Maori fern. More than once on nights of alarm the women and children on the scattered homesteads left their dwellings and took refuge in the blockhouses, waiting anxiously for the day. Those were some of the episodes that developed the pioneer's native virtues of resourcefulness, courage and self-reli-ance. And these were hard times, harder than any that try the settler's pluck to-day. Markets were far away ■ there were no freezing companies, no dairy produce buyers chasing the farmers with fat cheques. A milking cow fetched barely as many shillings as it would pounds to-day. A fat bullock then brought no more than is now paid for the hide alone. Butter churned by the housewife before the days of the separator was carried on the saddle into the township miles away, and sold for fourpence a pound. The first farm, in which bo many perilous days and nights were spent, passed out of the pioneer's hands, and a fresh start had to be made. It was hard, unremitting toil for many a year. Sometimes there was scarcely enough money to buy grass-seed for the breaking-in of the fern land. Now the pioneer family, a type of the Dominion's best class of men and women, has its reward; and who shall say that it has not earned it many times over!