OLD TAUMARUNUI.

Auckland Star, Volume LVII, Issue 132, 5 June 1926, Page 5

OLD TAUMARUNUI.

HEART OF THE HAUHAU

COUNTRY.

(By J.C.)

I have been reading, in one of those American magazines which specialises to a large extent in recollections of "the old frontier" type, about conditions of farout early days' life, which prompts comparisons with our own pioneering story in New Zealand. A' photograph of that famous town of the gunmen and cattlemen, Dodge City, Kansas, in the year 1878, seemed strangely familiar. That one-sided street of shanties, falsefronted stores and eating-houses, some buildings with verandahs, some without, that "dirt road," those horses tied up to posts, the bulloek : wagon and the fourhorse wagons — don't we know them, though we never saw Dodge City in 1878? And then I remembered. I had been in many of our new raw townships which they'd call cities in the U.S.A., but one above all was exactly a replica of Dodge City. It was Taumarunui in the first year of its life as a pakeha town—its first year as head of the Main Trunk line. There happily the resemblance ended, j Taumarunui was not shot-up periodically i by belted and sombrero'd cowboys bristling with "six-guns." It "got its eddication in a peaceful kind of way." There I were no Wild Bill Hickoks, no Crooked I Kids, to spread the fear of revolver and I bowie-knife. There wasn't even a faro | layout. Yet the Main Trunk line in Taumarunui's babyhood rejoiced in its own particular brand of—well, not wild lawlessness, but, say' casual indifference to the conventions of Queen Street, Auckland. The "hop 'beer" dispensed had a most gratifying kick in it, and if you hankered after a game you could find any number of husky lads ready to empty your pockets at two-up. It looked a juvenile sort of diversion, but it sure was loaded. And now that I think of it, there were men among that hefty thousand or so of men who toiled on the building of the Main Trunk who had seen life in the real Wild West. In the valley of the Ongarue, as the construction gangs worked down to the Wanganui watersmeet at Taumarunui, I saw "Carson City" and "Angel's Rest" rough-lettered in charcoal on calico signs at two of the canvas-and-slab camps. Taumarunui's transformation from the loneliest imaginable Maori village the very heart of the island, to a place of pakeha hustle and activity, was I suppose, as astonishingly rapid as any. thing in the much-written-of Wild West. When I first rode down that way it seemed a spot as remote from the world as the mountain-walled Valley of Kuatahuna, in the Urewera Coun" try. Horse or canoe was the onlj means of travel to Taumarunui those days. Of course, also, you could walk but, like the genus cowboy, none of us pakeha or Maori, walked' where wt could get a horse, any kind of a horse to cairy us. We camped one night of long ago on the manuka flat, alongside a big maize patch, close to the Maori village of thatched whares where the big town stands to-day. When I was last at Taumarunui I tried to locate that camping spot. It was a rather bewildering task, but, as nearly as I could locate it, the post office stands on it to-day — and a swell post office it is. Churches, warehouses, banks, pretty homes, electric lights, all the comfortable fittings of a progressive town —Taumarunui has reason to be proud of itself to-day. I searched out my acquaintance of old-time, Alexander Bell, the pioneer pakeha of Taumarunui. He is a veteran of the Maori Wars, and an olti sailor, too. Fifty-two years agj he married a Maori chiefs daughter and made this heart of the bush his home. A man of many curious memories. knew Molfatt, "whom the Maoris shot and tomahawked just along the flat yonder, at Matapuna, because he had broken the Kingites' "aukati," their frontier interdict against attempts to buy land or against prospecting for gold. Bell prudently respected the Maoris' prejudices, the Hauhau jealousy of white intrusion. Had he not been diplomatic, also had he not been adopted into the tribe as the son-in-law of a prominent chief, he probably would not be alive to-day. "Ah, , ' the good old soldier-settler, pakeha-Maori says, "I don't like this modern bustle, this clamour, this noisy Ms. I often think of the days when I could go out in the morning, just up the hill yonder, with my double-barrelled gun, and come back with a kit full of pigeons. Where are the pigeons now - ' And I'd far rather hear the tui sing than that railway engine whistle."' Wasn't it the Black Douglas—as we read in the old chronicles—who declared that he'd sooner hear the cricket sin" than the mouse squeak? The Douglas meant the prison when he spoke of the mouse's squeak. My old friend can never reconcile himself to the town that hems him in. I'm sure that if he were a young man again, if those fifty-odd years would roll backward in their flight, and he found a town like this choking off his breath, he'd quickly roll his swag and take his gun and get quickly henco by some dim bush trail. When first I met Alexander Bell, when his shingled cottage on the river's side in its pretty grove of fruit trees was the only sign of civilisation in Taumarunui, he lamented the fact that no missionary every troubled himself about the people in those parts. "I've never seen a parson of any kind come in here, except the Mormon, and he didn't stay. The young people are growing up quite wild without religious instruction of any kind." That complaint certainly can't be laid against Taumarunui to-day. Like most of the country towns, it is, if anything, over-chureiied. A kinsman by marriage of our pioneer pakeha was that fine figure of old Maoridoni, the Chief Topine te Mamaku, who had fought the Queen's soldiers as far back as 1546, in the campaign in the Hutt Valley, Wellington, and who had a hand in the wars of the 'sixties. He was a man of tall, commanding figure, this grey old warrior, an orator and a poet. He was often called by an historic title, "Te Puru o Tuhua" ("The Plug, or Cork. of Tuhua"), the meaning of which was that no war party could invade the upper parts of the Wanganui River without his permission; and he and his warriors "plugged" that bottle-neck, the great avenue from the West Coast to the interior. Tuhua, the name of a mountain on the west side of the Ongarue, was a territorial name applied to the whole of the upper basin of the Wanganui above Maraekowhai and Taumaranui. When Topine lay dying (in the late 'eighties) his people discussed his coming burial, and it -was.proposed to lay him to rest on a high hill just above Tau-

marunui, where other chiefs of the tribe had been buried. But Topine raised a protest from his couch of mats. "No," said he. "take mc to Tawhata, whers I killed the man who ate my grandfather." And this was done. No pakeha Government war party ever penetrated to Taumarunui, even in the ! days when McDonnell's Armed Constabui lary fought and routed Te Kooti under the very shadow of the Tongariro range, where Ngauruhoe then, as now, hurled his fiery ash and rocks high into the skyThat was in 1869, when Bell himself carried rifle and swag on the warpath. This was Te Kooti's refuge-place after his defeat; on the very place where the railway station stands to-day the wounded desperado held council and laid his plans for new campaigns. To some of those old-timers of the Upper Wanganui I talked in the days when their memories of the wars were still clear and vivid. One was a man who had been with Te Kooti all through his three years' fighting—lS6B to IS71 — who had had innumerable adventures after his escape in the schooner Rifleman from Chatham Island with his chief and two hundred other men, women and children. This old scout and warrior is still living; I last saw him at a little settlement a few miles out of Taumarunui. A man we met, too, was a notable fellow in those parts^—the man who tomahawked Moffatt, the prospector and gunpowder-maker. A wild lad he looked, too. With some practice in "fanning a s:x-gun ;, he'd have made a capital sheriff in Dodge City, Kansas, in 187 S.