HOW THE PIONEERS LIVE.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1756, 1 November 1905, Page 69

HOW THE PIONEERS LIVE.

HARDSHIPS OF THE SELECTOR. MUD-BOUND WHANGAMOMONA. «This is first-class,” said the Driver cheerfully, as the gig bumped from Bide to side, and was finally dragged in desperation right out of the road, on to the stump-covered hank. “ Wait till we get to Mussen’s Cutting and The Saddle. This is nothing to it.” This happened about seventeen miles from Stratford, and the ideas of the Townsman had undergone several modifications in that journey. It was blowing a bitter, sleet-charged gale from the south, and was wretched enough already. But so far there was civilisation close at hand. There was “ made ” country all about. The beautiful green downs of Toko and Oruru, some of the finest dairying country in New Zealand, stretched away to low hills on either side. The road was a good one. Hard metal sounded under the hoofs as far as Toko, and white shell rock for some miles later. More than that, the rail ran alongside the road, and the dairy farmers of this beautiful rolling country could feel comfortable all the year round in alternative means of access to civilisation. “Wait until we get to the roads,” the Driver had been saying, and the Townsman waited, wondering • The cry from Macedonia “ Come and help us!” is only a tradition compared with the wail of anguish that has for years past been borne from the backblocks of Taranaki to Wellington. It was closer and nearer to the heart than the injustices of the Far North. It was a cry from our own backyard, long and persistent, like the cry of an animal in Teal trouble. When, therefore, about the fifteen-mile post on the Main East road, the gig dived off the edge of the shell rock into a wallow of mud, the Townsman felt that he was about to find out something that would be of real value to the dwellers of the cities, something new, and perhaps inconceivable. A TARANAKI ROAD! The reality soon unfolded itself, as a horse of sixteen hands straightened his back and tried to pick his steps, with the lightest of gigs behind him. He was a town horse, and it was a matter of a few minutes before he found that the mud was utterly impartial. It was just as easy to walk where the Driver wanted as where he wanted himself. The feet and wheels of earlier passers had worked up the papa surface into a sticky batter varying in depth from six inches to npwardfe of two feet. It occupied the whole width of the formation, water-tables, and all, and looked strictly impartial throughout. From the appearance of the surface none could tell whether the horse would a footing at three or eighteen inches; whether the trap ■would ride fairly clear or plunge down to the axle. The wheel-marks of predecessors were effaced. But their passage had been a stormy one. There were marks in tcken. The little crater edges standing out of the surrounding pug showed where other animals had trodden. Long shining marks on the side of the cliff showed where vehicles had sought bottom in the water-tables; and skids and slides on greasy patches showed that there was treachery even where no mud was.

The road crosses the Strathmore Saddle in a long rise at an easy grade. Here and thei*e is a patch of absorbent sandstone. Elsewhere is the same persevering river of mud. The body of the trap bangs from side to side, striking the axle each way; the wheels growl against the splash-board each time they drop into a hole deeper than the rest; and every second the horse’s feet, landing in one of the mud-cups made by others, send up showers of mud and water. Now and again we strike a smooth patch of clay from which the •water has run away. The horse makes for it instinctively, only to add a few narks of his own to the yard-long hoofslides that have gone before, while the wheels skid off again into the mud. On a rare patch of sandstone it is possible to trot for twenty yards at a stretch, and then with a shower of mud the horse plunges in again knee-deep. A VICTIM OF THE MUD. Flop! flop! flop! The clay falls off the rising spokes like butter from the blades of a churn, and the feet splash and suck in the mud. For miles and miles there is not an ounce of metal to be seen. Papa is the only thing that happens, and in its natural state this is quite uncompromising. Near the top of the saddle—victim of the mud, waiting for the summer—is a waggon sidetracked in a turnout, resting on its elbow, with one wheel lying on the ground updemeath, and grass growing on the floor. The grass has grown since the road became too bad to move a broken vehicle. On the floor of a bridge, under which the Mangatoki slides full and dark, the Townsman gets breath to look ahead. There are two Maori ponies zig-zagging through, the mud. The riders, splashed with papa to their clerical hats, are clergy, wading back to civilisation from a tour of the back-blocks. Now we are face to face with a five-fopt cutting

and a floor of mud. We do what the King’s Mail does here —leave the road altogether, and try to pick an untrodden track amongst the stum pa on the roadside. Even if stumps, logs, and roots bump tbe cart about at precarious angles, this is better than the road. The horse, at any rate, knows when his feet will find bottom. When the mailcoach did this it had to he held down with ropes to prevent capsizing. A chain or so farther on the fence jostles us hack to where the formation-gangs worked last summer, and with tail out and back straightened, ihe borse plunges in. THE ABOMINATION OF DESOLATION. After a few miles of this the Townsman has lost completely the pleasing expectancy of meeting anybody. He feels as one feels at sea. There is no need to scan a new reach of road for a human figure. There may he a few cattle grazing in the Long Paddo-ck that reaches from here to the King Country, hut that is all. It :is months since stock were moved along the road. The weather has practically closed it since May, and the passengers are a dozen or so a week. Hence we are able to give the whole of our attention to the arrangement of the body for encountering fresh bumps, and rearrangement afterwards. This is not a colourless ride by any means. There is humour in it, for at places where the smooth floor of a bridge allows the Townsman breath to look about, he finds familiar proclamations, printed in black on white calico, signed by Ministers of the Crown, and showing that, in spite of conclusions formed otherwise, this long and weary mudway is in reality a road within cognisance of the Government. It is the Ohura Main road, extending from Stratford to Kawakawa, a distance of 110 miles; and for nearly a hundred miles, from the point where we fell reluctantly over the edge of the shellrock, it .is subject to four square feet of regulations. These set forth that bullocks are not to be used for traction from May Ist to November Ist, but on this very day, October 11th, they are actually being used by authority of the Minister signing the decree! It is set forth that not more than half a ton is to be carried for each pair of wheels, as if anybody who knew would venture to carry as much. In a mass of pains and penalties for the preservation of this mudway, there is not a word about the children cutting up the road by playing marbles or spinning tops on it. It seems as if the accommodationhouse at Strathmore, five miles from the end of the metal, must be quite the end of every thing. Yet there is a troop of Maoris ponies outside waiting to have their packs fixed up for a journey. “Where are they off to?” asks the Townsman. “Aw, just up the road a hit,” is the answer, and an hour later, when lunch has been swallowed, and the gig is on the road again, the ponies can be seen stringing their way along a deviation, to avoid the road itself. . It is evident this is the only road that leads anywhere.

A HIGHWAY OF MUD. PIONEERS IN EXILE. CUT OFF BY ROADS. It has taken three hours to cover twenty miles, only five of which is bad road. The other twenty, lying between Strathmore and Whangamomona., embraces all the places of worst repute. “We had dust flying a couple of days ago,” says an old settler at Strathmore, as the gig leaves. “If a thousand bullocks could ’a gone down, the road’d ’a been as smooth, as a bowling green.” That dust must have come out of the stable-bags, because within a minute after leaving Strathmore the horse was knee-deep in a pug that had been there for many weeks. A sticky, clinging pug it was, that gave place now to black earth* occasionally to yellow clay. The only relief was the black earth. It was absorbent, and came up on the wheels like dust after rain, but it was six inches deep, and made hard going. Time after time, when the fences receded from the formation, we climbed steep banks and threaded a bumpy way amongst stumps and roots. MUSSEN’S GUTTING. This has been a good winter, they say. Last year it was a great deal worse. Even the mail-coach was forced to give it up, and the letters were packed through on burses, as they are packed to-day to the King Country. One night the coach was embedded in the mud sixteen miles from Whangamoniona, and the mailman, Mr P. J. "White,' abandoned it, and started off on foot for Whangamomona, with 1501 b of mail-matter on his back. He became exhausted about a mile and a half from the end, and had to spend the night in a roadside whare. It is a terrible mana that belongs to Mussen’s cutting, three and a half miles from Strathmore. The Townsman had heard its reputation rumbling all along the road from Stratford, and he expected to see terrible beetling cliffs and sliding rock. But it was nothing such.

It was the product of a foolish engineer—a simple cutting a few chains long, and on an easy grade, with no possibility of the water getting away. The horse went at it at a good pace. In a minute he was in difficulty The feet came out of the pug with reluctantgulps j he zig-zagged from bank to bank, tried to get forward by jumping, staggered a bit, and stuck fast. It was easier to move the vehicle than to- get his feet out oif the pug. The gig was lightened, and the horse rested, and theil, with a few spasmodic _ plunges, the wheels began to move again. The Townsman reflected that the dead weight of this load was something more than a suit of pyjamas, and wondered what the settlers who were still many miles ahead did for their stores. PULLING DOWN HILL. “We have to make our loads to suit this half-mile of road,” growled a settler later. “It’s no use putting on a bigger load anywhere than you can take across, here.” There were authentic stories ’ of empty buggies getting stuck, and pulled out by bullocks, of five liorses failing to move a light waggon and horse. When the Townsman crossed the cutting again he had learned to believe these things. His own experience was an indication. When he came down the cutting again it was in a light Courtland waggon, behind a couple of horses that knew all about the road. A swingle-tree had broken in an earlier catastrophe, and lie saw right before him another Courtland waggon twice brought up standing in going down the hill. The horses floundered up to the kneea. and then stuck fast.

and the waggon settled down to thei axles, scraping the surface of the mud with the undergear. It was impossible to choose a track. The waggon hugged the edge of the cutting, and refused to move out. When the Townsman reached the foot of Mussen s Gutting he felt that his experience had been a. unique one —he had never before been, unable to move down hill. . the Coachman, whose interpretation of "impassable” was far beyond the conceptioij of a town-dweller, declared that this cutting could not possibly be navigated again, and he would have to cut the wires, and make a deviation round the hill. the saddle. The Whangamomona Saddle is a thing of beauty comparable with the Otira; but at this time of year all such! sentimental considerations have to be banished. The mudway extends ths whole distance up the Saddle. Near the top the papa cliff lies at an angle, andi avalanches of earth have come down, carrying the road with them into the gulch below. This is one of the liabilities of maintenance that are always entailing expense on the district. Close a,t hand is a corner where a bullock waggon and team fell over, and the nervous owner, in trying to save them, lost as many more. Something happens. A man is encountered. Sitting on a heap of stores on top of a sledge, he divides his time between picking a route for the horse and shepherding the tinned stuffs to keep them from falling off. He is delivering goods for the store at . “ The Gleari-g.’' picking his way up dripping

bush tracks, and secreting them m candle-boxes nailed to posts. It is growing dark, and the rate or 'progress makes the Townsman impatient. Each foot comes down with a single and separate flop. At length Over the summit thickly-bushed hills kand up in the dripping fog. It is hardly realised before the hoofs strike hard road, and the Townsman begins to think his troubles are over. It is the burnt papa road, of which people have long since ceased to speak w.th the timorous fear of experiment. Imagine one of the limestone roads of Hawke’s Bay, ’or the macadam of Otago—but red in colour—and you have a road of burnt 4 papa- It is all that & road should be—a roof to throw the water off and a floor to carry the traffic. It has been down nine years, and is almost perfect to-day, but — 7 —. With a bump and a splash we are reminded that it is only laid in patches, and that twenty miles of impassable mud lie between this and the end of the shell-rock. The horse plunges again, the hoofs splash and uck, and for another hour the worst tortures of the journey are repeated. * IN THE CLEARING. At length, as night closes in upon a ten-hours’ day, we struggle into the clearing at Whangamomona forty miles. Although for twenty miles the road was good, we have only made foot nace throughput. We could have crossed Cook Strait twice, the English Channel half a dozen times, even the Southern Alps once. But we have not crossed a divide of any kind. We have just gone from Taranaki into Taranaki’s backyard or kitchen garden. Is it any wonder that these hospitable people gathered in The Clearing seem distinct and apart—a world to themselves. Many of them have not heen out of The Clearing for a year. As Rangitikei and Wairarapa- look to Wellington, so the settlers ' iin all the valleys from the Waitara to the Wanganui converge on The Clearing at Whangamomona. They are tied down to their holdings, fortunate if they get to The Clearing twice a week for their mails. If they wish to do business they must sacrifice half a week to go to Stratfcrd. And they are amphibious creatures. They gathered from ,a ten-mile radius over these roads to hear a political address, while away down- in comfortable Toko the previous night another candidate shirked the inclemency of the weather. There are seven hundred people in exile whose boulevard is in front of the pest office at Whangamomona.

THE ROAD TO NOWHERE. f *" A-WOUNDED COUNTRYSIDE. t ~ BURIED WOMEN. “This has all got to come down,” - said the Backblocker cheerfully, as he scanned the ragged flank of a spur, and tapped with his boot the papa stratum lying obliquely on the side of the track. It would break the heart of a new chum to travel across the main road from Stratford, and then he set down to make a living out of one of the State holdings into which the country is divided. The hills are not high. The greatest elevation falls considerably below the lowest in the Awarua block, and the general level of the roads in the valleys is about 400 ft. Wherever the Townsman looks he sees that as soon as the sorub and hush is cleared off the hills the surface slides away down into the valleys below. In the foreground of. the wooded spurs that rise one after another right back to the foot of Ruapehu there are innumerable scars and slips standing up to the gaze, and looking more hideous 'than the Wounds in the side of Orongorongo, which arrest the eye from Lambton quay. From the centre of the wound the papa rock peers out, gleaming in the sun. It is blue grey, but it is not slate, although to-day you can scarcely break it with a hammer. Half the face of the country has slid away thus, demolishing fences, burying stock, and leaving a track of ruin behind it. The new chum would wring his hands and fly in horror from such a country. But if he waited, he would find that to-morrow the bare papa face will soften in the weather, and dissolve into dust or pug under the feet; next day it will take seed from stock or wind, and within twelve months of the slip there will be stock fattening on the richest and sweetest of papa swards. That is what keeps the Ohura pioneer pinned down in faith to his holding. He knows that the slide is only a stage of evolution. He has learned to run his fences along the spurs and sky-line, so that they will not be left hanging in mid air, and he is content to wait for the day when the “general post” will be over, and his holding has become a succession of richly swarded downs. A FRINGE OF SETTLEMENT. The Ohura Main road stretches in pride as a highway of mud from Strathmore to the King Country. There is A fringe of settlement right through, *nd those who hold the land know too much of its possibilities to allow it to Blip away from them without a struggle. They are unanimous that there is *wvk -Q. - '

for settlement. The flat land is limited in area, but there is a good deal of downy land and uplands leading up to gentle hills, which are going to be the ideal wintering country of this island. There is nothing that will not carry sheep or cattle, and there, is a very large proportion which will be ploughable. The number of cattle carried by the different valleys which debouch on the Main road is surprising. Practically the whole of the Tangarakau basin leads down to Whangamomona by the valleys of the Moki, Mangarei, Whangamomona, Kohurapahi, and Whitianga; and the catchment includes, perforce, the Mangaowata basin towards the Waitara, and the Tangarakau coalfields to the north. Although at this time of year they are sealed up, every one of these valleys already carries a considerable number of cattle, and the land is not yet nearly clearedThe country is paralysed in the winter, simply because free movement of stock or stores is impossible. Scarcely a wheel has been seen beyond Whangamomona for months past. Shearing is at hand; hut settlers are afraid to muster, if it means leaving the paddocks. This is the kind of thing that happens: A settler mustered four or five hundred sheep, and started for the woolshed. One day he travelled two miles. The road was impossible, and he had to get the sheep across a river one by one on a totara log, travel along behind the busb, and get on to the road again where it was navigable. Sheep that come off this sort of travelling have to go through the dip before they are fit to shear. As for fat lambs travelling, say, thirty miles to. the rail, it is out of the question. These men are cheated out of every margin of profit that offers, but they pay the same taxes as Manawatu and Wairora.pa. Yet one always hears the same remark: “I am thoroughly satisfied with my section.” EXILE AND SERVITUDE.

Whangamomona commenced its civilised-existence as an improved farm settlement. "• “I was working in the streets m Wellington, between the Government Buildings and the police station,” said one of the first selectors. “They were putting down the drains. Things were pretty had then, and Mr Mackay, of the Labour Department, said, ‘ Why don’t you go on the land. Paddy ?’ I asked where I could get land, and he said, ‘ln Taranaki.’ There were seventeen applicants for thirteen sections. I gob my money from the Mayor that night, and left next morning.” This puts in a nutshell the history of the earliest settlement ten years ago. It shows the principal class of selectors, and their utter unpreparedness, and explains many of the things that have happened since..' When the dweller in the city knows what is to follow he will say that the planting of inexperienced men in this isolated spot was a crime. But when he reflects on the labour conditions of ten years ago, he may say it was justifiable. The sections were 100 acres, stretching along both sides of the road, and 1505 of them were taken up either at first or shortly afterwards. To-day there are only thirty-five of the original 'settlers left. It. is a cruel thing to hear of men who have stuck to their holdings for year after year, looking for the day when a railway or a road would bring them hope, being finally comrselled to surrender, and go out heartless and penniless; to see neat cottages empty or the well-grown niacrocarpa hedges sheltering someone else’s calves. It is happening to-day. The Townsman met a derelict riding out with everything in a saddle-bag—heart and all.

“ There’s a new man just come in there,” says the settler, nodding to one side of the road; “ and this poor chap’s in loav water too.” But the sections are not deserted. Those who have hung oa to others are only too willing to get a larger area, and all are occupied. It is a matter of capital. Men cannot be taken off the streets and planted down penniless far from the sound of a railway. It is only good for their character. LOOKING FOR A BACK-DOOR. The oppressive expense of transporting stores through to Whangamomona by way of Stratford induced the settlers a few years ago to look for another way. Eight miles from the Ohura main road there is a full tributary of the Wanganui, the TangarakauTwo so-called roads lead down to it. Let us try one. The Vera road, which branches off the main road a mile or so above The Clearing, might deceive anyone as it strikes off at. full Avidth across a bridge. Half a mile later it is lost. Even the track disappears in a creek and it is only after travelling amongst logs for a Avhile and climbing a precipitous hillside that it is found again Here are navvies at Avork burying money. This road has been surveyed six times. Theoretically, it is six feet Avide “ on the solid ” ; actually it rarely reaches that over all. A horse cannot folloAV it, because a huge totara tree fell across it in the last gale. The hillside is too steep to get round, and tho navvies are noAV engaged (Sunday morning) burning the log aAvay out of the road ' Higher up, when we reach the track on foot having driven the horses up in .nruaLhec ohatrimtitm

papa subsoil shelves obliquely, and thousands of tons of earth are coming down at leisure. Each little slide carries the road away, and although there is a camp of navvies at the corner the track is liable to disappear at any hour. Even when open the chances are that the horse, stepping too near either side, may start an avalanche of screes that will carry him headlong over the bank. It is not so dangerous where the horse can follow a row of mud-cups like a cattle track, but for miles the rider’s knee is brushing against the cliff. NOBODY’S ROAD. By and bye, for no conceivable reason. the road becomes sixteen feet wide. It is grown over with grass, showing that it leads from nowhere to nowhere else. “ Oh,” says the Settler, “ this was to pack the stuff up from the Tangarakau, but they began at the wrong end, and did not go through to the right one. This is wasted. It’s no good to anyone.” It was quite true. The sixteen-foot road ran in splendid isolation through good country that could only be used by being linked on to something. It was getting overgroivn. At one place more than a chain of it had been carried away into the river, and we had to creep down a cliff and wade round it. And eventually it joined the Putikituna road, and reached the Tangarakau river opposite a Maori clearing. A pataka on the flat showed that there A\ r ere surveyors in the silent bush in shirts and rapakis getting ready more land to exile men on.

From this point the Tangarakau had been snagged down to the Wanganui, and Hatrick and Co. ran up provisions in an old canc© with an oil-engine, and landed them in a store-house, which a later flood Washed off the shelf of rock on which it stood. Stores Avere carried at the ordinary raihvay mileage rate from Wanganui, but the cost of packing over the eight miles of the Vera and Putikituna tracks lauded the goods at Kohuratahi and Whangamomona like an evil conscience. The pioneer had to turn his eyes back to the Ohura Main road, and live on hope. “Somebody ought to be in gaol for this,” said the settler, as he beAvailed the burying of treasure in the still unfinished Vera road. If that money had been planted in the Waitomo caves it would have been as usefully secreted. WOMEN BURIED ALIVE. “There are four married women with families down that road,” says the settler, nodding toAvards a gully where a horse-track loses itself in the bush. f< They have not been out all the winter.” But that is nothing out of the way. The wife of one of the most well-to-do settlers on the road has only been in Stratford once in tAvelve months, and only in the Clearing three times. There are many Avomen avlio 1 have not been out of the settlement since they went in. There are children Avho have not seen a railway train. The isolation is inconceivable to a city dweller. In the early days the person Avho left Stratford eastward said he, was going “into” the bush, and returning he Avas coming out. It is the same to-day—Stratford goes “in” to Whangamomona, and Whangamomona “out” to Stratford, although the significance has to a large extent been cleared away Avith slashers at 25s an acre.

But the terrible gap that has not been cleared away or bridged is that between the sick-bed and help. Fifty-one miles from Stratford a settler’s wife became ill with a malady that promised her death in a few hours. There Was a telephone at the Clearing, and a settler galloped doAvn and called up Stratford. Relays of horses were in wait along the mudway, and the doctor covered the whole distance at the rate of sixteen miles an hour. He was there just in time. If the roads had heen had he could not have done it. Another settler’s wife, approaching her confinement, met trouble on Marco’s road. A young pioneer was born on the roadside, and mother and child were carried by the settlers, on an improvised litter to a convenient whare. Time after time sick people have to be carried' on litters to points where vehicles - can he obtained. If they cannot he moved, the anxiety of nursing in this crying isolation is terrible. Most of the serious cases are carried “out” as soon as possible for better nursing, and that is why the percentage of nartural deaths in the roll of Whangamomona is only about fifteen of the whole. THE MAILS. It is because the population of the hack-blocks has a common interest . m honesty that the system of delivering letters and provisions is a safe one. “The King’s mail” struggles through twice a week in a Courtland waggon behind tAA'o horses. Strangely enough, it is in the summer that the coach is covered m, iu winter the covei and any thing else, of Aveight have to he left at the stables. But the King’s mail is only a circumstance compared with the service of the candle-box. It is only the elite of the back-blocks who can ride down to the Clearing tivioe a Aveek with any regularity. Besides, many live half a iaumej from the post offices, and

could not afford to spend two days % week on horseback collecting letters. The surest sign that there is a settler living somewhere at the back of the bush is a candle-box, a nail-keg, or a tin fastened on a tree or post, with ita mouth aAvay from the weather. Few hav 1 © lids; .non© ar© locked; and there is a system of pioneer’s freemasonry whereby men. going to or from the Clearing deposit or lift letters for settlers on the way. The meat for the scrub-cutters’ camp, the tinned stuff for the bachelors on the back sections, the bi-weekly loaf of bread are all delivered in the same Avay. The owner lifts it when it suits him, and if he does not happen to see his neighbours for a feAv days on end he knows things •are all right. ' The directions and regulations to which the back-blocker is amenable are not so aggressively übiquitous as in towns. He can sleep at nights without worrying about his correspondence. His posting-box is a tin two feet square hung on a bridge or a fence and Aveighed down with the proclamation “E.R., etc.” His regulations are posted on a board at the cross-roads, with another board to keep the rain off, and they only apply to “Money Letters.” Those are the only things that are not committed to the candle-boxes.