e of Fenian Riots, and a company of militia
were sent down from their more serious Maori work in the North Island
to restore order in Hokitika, they encountered nothing more dangerous
than a hospitality too lavish even for their powers of absorption. One
gang of bushrangers, and one only, ever disturbed the coast. The four
ruffians who composed it murdered at least six men before they were
hunted down. Three were hung; the fourth, who saved his neck by
turning Queen's evidence, was not lynched. No one ever has been
lynched in New Zealand. For the rest the ordinary police-constable was
always able to deal with the sharpers, drunkards, and petty thieves
who are among the camp-followers of every army of gold-seekers.
So quietly were officials submitted to that sometimes, when a
police-magistrate failed to appear in a goldfields' court through
some accident of road or river, his clerk would calmly hear cases
and impose fines, or a police-sergeant remand the accused without
authority and without resistance. In the staid Westland of to-day it
is so impossible to find offenders enough to make a show of filling
the Hokitika prison that the Premier, who sits for Hokitika, is
upbraided in Parliament for sinful extravagance in not closing the
establishment.

No sooner had the cream been skimmed off the southern goldfields than
yields of almost equal value were reported from the north. The Thames
and Coromandel fields in the east of the Auckland province differed
from those in the South Island. They were from the outset not alluvial
but quartz mines. So rich, however, were some of the Thames mines that
the excitement they caused was as great as that roused by the alluvial
patches of Otago and Westland. The opening up of the Northern fields
was retarded throughout the sixties by Maori wars, and the demands of
peaceful but hard-fisted Maori landlords. L1 a miner had to be paid to
these latter for the right to prospect their country. They delayed the
opening of the now famous Ohinemuri field until 1875. When on March
3rd of that year the Goldfields' Warden declared Ohinemuri open, the
declaration was made to an excited crowd of hundreds of prospectors,
who pushed jostling and fighting round the Warden's table for their
licenses, and then galloped off on horseback across country in a wild
race to be first to "peg out" claims. Years before this, however, the
shores of the Hauraki Gulf had been systematically worked, and in 1871
the gol