A HISTORY OF BLACKBALL: GOLD RUSHES IN SOUTHWEST NELSON AND WEST CANTERBURY, 1864

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DescriptionThe first washing for gold in the rivers of the West Coast were Māori parties in the late 1850s who worked their way southwards from Golden Bay. They followed the old Māori walking tracks that twined through the thick forests of Te Tai Poutini. Nelson provincial council in the winter of 1859 sent a surveyor to sail by sea to the mouth of the Kawatiri. He was paddled up the river in a waka by a crew of Māori. ‘The royal mineral,’ he wrote, was ‘lying on the edge of the river, glistening in the sun.’
A store was opened at the mouth of the Kawatiri early the following year. Reuben Waite, the storekeeper, was a veteran of California and Victoria, a booster, a blowhard and grubstaked Pākehā diggers up the Kawatiri. Māori diggers began to bring kits laden with gold from the headwaters to sell at the store. A village grew up, known as Westport.
Birds sang, rain fell, sandflies whirled, mosquitoes whined.
Word of the gold kept spreading slowly. Westport thrived in a small way. ‘Things are looking first-rate here,’ wrote a digger in 1863. ‘There is not a man idle, and the Maoris are doing first-rate.’ Goldseekers kept finding their way to the field whenever yields waned in Otago. And then, in the middle of 1864, shipload after shipload set off for the shingle beds of Greenstone Creek near Hokitika.
Other rushes followed quickly. Te Tai Poutini over the next few years would attract nearly twenty thousand Māori, Irish, English, German, Scottish, Scandinavian, Yankee, Southern and other goldseekers – and with them a throng of storekeepers, gold buyers, drink sellers and prostitutes.
The valley of the Māwheranui began to be washed for gold when Waite jollied seventy diggers from Canterbury into setting sail for the mouth of what most people were now calling the Grey. Diggers were kitted out and – after talk of lynching Waite – made their way to Greenstone Creek.
And other rushes followed swiftly. Ships battled the river bars, dropping off more and more people looking for gold, or selling to those looking for gold. A prospecting party, only a few months after Waite set up his store at the mouth of the Māwheranui, found the glistening ore at a spot about twenty-five kilometres upriver from the pā.
A spot they called the Blackball Creek.
Pic: vessels crossing the bar of the Māwheranui. Artist: J T Thomson.Date of Photo1864Map^[1]ContributorStevan Eldred-Grigg

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Location (city or town)BlackballEventA HISTORY OF BLACKBALL: GOLD RUSHES IN SOUTHWEST NELSON AND WEST CANTERBURY, 1864

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Category TagGoldmining

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Date Created25th March 2021

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A HISTORY OF BLACKBALL: GOLD RUSHES IN SOUTHWEST NELSON AND WEST CANTERBURY, 1864

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