FORTUNES IN GOLD

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 75, Issue 13, 16 January 1932, Page 5

FORTUNES IN GOLD

WEST COAST’S HARVEST FINDS IN THE EARLY DAYS. SOME REMARKABLE RETURNS. An official history of goldmining in New Zealand discloses particulars of some of the huge fortunes which the more fortunate miners won from the rich fields on the West Coast during the years when millions of pounds worth of gold was being exported from tho province annually, says tho Christchurch Press. They are there in black and white, but people on the West Coast have never forgotten the stories of the wealth that was literally scarped from tho black soil, and when their employment went with the tide of depresssion that has swept the world they started once again to search after the gold which gave their fathers and grandfathers bread. Even in the first years of the great rush of 1864-1870 there wore astounding returns of gold to individual miners, tho reports of which sent every adventurous spirit in the colony rushing in all haste to try his hick on the now field.

Tho very first man to do any prospecting on a large scale, so far as the available records show, was richly rewarded when one realises that he had only the most primitive methods of winning the gold. In three months spent scrambling round the beaches and in the foothills of the coast, early in 1864. this man, Albert Hunt, collected 20 ounces of gold merely by panning surface dirt as he wondered about the country on survey work. Ho then pegged out a claim well in from the sea coast, three miles up the Greenstone Creek above its junction with the Little Hohonu River (about 20 miles south-east of Greymouth), and while prospecting was earning easily £2 a day. He and some Maoris had, however, to live on potatoes and fernroots for a time, with a little help occasionally from the Government food depot on the Grey. A Government official visited Hunt, and, seeing him wash up as much as 44 ounc s of gold in a day, took 16 ounces of coarse gold with him as a sample, and proceeded

overland to Christchurch to report the discovery of a new field. Then started the rush, and before the end of the year 200 men were on Hunt’s field at Hohonu, and it is recorded that Hunt, becoming involved in a fight with some of these men, thought it wise to leave the field. Five Pounds a Day. A report dated September 12. 1864, stated that the majority of the diggers were averaging up to £5 a day from claims. Seven hundred men were then on the field, and in October the steamer Nelson sailed from the coast for Nelson with 500 ounces of gold and £lOOO in notes and specie. Up to December 31 of 1 hat year, the first year of the rush, about 2500 ounces of gold had been shipped to Nelson. I Four men, working in a small creek [ two miles south of Greymouth, secured 1 1200 ounces, worth nearly £4OOO, in i four months. They won another 600 ounces from their claim and then left for England to spend their small fortune. In March of 1865, 3000 ounces of gold were being exported a week from the Grey an l ' Hokitika fields, and in the seven weeks ending with April 30 of that year gold worth £130,000 had been found on tho West Coast. There were then fewer than 1000 men on the u'jgings. There had been a new rush to the Grey district, in an area at Maori Creek, between Hokitika and Greymouth, and close to the hills, where, it was reported, many of the claims were returning the miners a pound weight of gold each a day. Representatives of banks who visited these new fields invariably left taking away up to 1000 ounces of gold, and orc banker reported to the Government having bought from a Maori working at Blackball Creek a nugget weighing over 22 ounces. Customs returns set out that from the beginning of the rush to July. 1865, nearly £300,000 worth of gold had been discovered. Invasion from Australia. News of these rich finds had spread all over the colony and as far as Australia, with a result that during the new few months thousands of diggers flocked to the fields, the population increasing in a short time to 15,900. There were tremendous drawbacks to <he formation of any settlement, but the rich rewards made it worth while. Claims about nine miles north of Hokitika were at the time returning the prospectors as much as £lOO per week per man, and with improvement in the mechanical appliances for working the gold-bearing country the returns increased until a small party on the Kanieri field who had brought in sluice-boxes to their claim were getting an average of 50 ounces a week. One paddock measuring 12ft. by 15ft. returned 100 ounces. Then came news from the Grey, towards the end of December, 1865, that rich black sand had been struck on the beach terraces south of Greymouth, where men working the deep layers were getting from £3O to £lOO per week

a man. From the ’Three-Mile, south of Grey, the original prospectors were said to have lodged half a hundredweight of gold with the smelters. This ground was later again worked, and yielded £lO a week to each man. Soon the Grey area became famous for its nuggets From Moonlight Gully, where, incidentally, West Coast unemployed are being helped to prospect by tho Government, one nugget secured weighed "9 ounces, and another 78 ounces. From one claim two nuggets, weighing 44 ounces and 47 ounces ’respectively. wore taken. Tho first nugget /as rbout the size and shape of a mar’s fist. In 1866, the value of gold exported from the coast was £2.146,946, an increase of over one million pounds on tho previous year’s figures. The Ross Flat, prominent in the present mining revival on the West Coast, returned fortunes which must make it one of the richest fields in the world. Tn two years, one man, with tho classical name of Cassius, mined over 22,000 ounces of gold. A surplus of water in the shafts stopped operation? of other miners who expected to make just as rich discoveries, and although the flat has never been properlv drained and worked. Ross people are confident that with the necessary capital they could once again turn this flat into an El Dorado.