The year 1881 saw the first definite decision for permanent peace on the part of the Maoris; it marked the nearing end of the necessity for frontier redoubts and blockhouses, and it relieved the border of the Kingite menace which had been an ever-present source of disquiet since white farmers first set the plough to the confiscated lands. Tawhiao laid down his guns at Major Mair’s feet at the border township of Alexandra, and then came a peaceful though martial-appearing march of the Kingite men through the European settlements and much firing of salutes to the dead—the “powder-burning of sorrow”—over the battlefields of the Sixties. Six hundred armed Kingites escorted the tattooed king and his chiefs, the lordly Wahanui and his shawl-kilted cabinet of rangatiras, on the pilgrimage to the scenes of the last despairing fights, and there were amazingly animated scenes in the outermost villages of Waikato when Tawhiao came to town, riding grimly in his buggy, and guarded front and rear by his fierce-faced riflemen. The march was by way of Te Awamutu, and the Cavalry band rode out from the township along the Alexandra Road to meet the Kingites and play them through the village. A right rousing march it was, too, for the tune the bandsmen played as they came riding in at the head of the procession was “The King of the Cannibal Islands.” It was Sergeant Thomas Gresham—then a lawyer in Te Awamutu, and afterwards coroner in Auckland—who suggested the air to [[92]]Bandmaster Harry Sibley, and that grizzled veteran of the wars seized on the bright idea with joy, and chuckled into his clarionet at the left-handed compliment he was paying his olden adversary. Tawhiao himself was pleased with the liveliness of the music, and later, through an interpreter, inquired the name of the tune; and an angry man was he when he was informed that it was “Te Kingi o Nga Moutere Kai-tangata.” For that same “kai-tangata” was a tender subject; and dour old Tawhiao had no glimmering of a sense of humour.
Kihikihi settlement was given up that week to a Kingite carnival of feasting and war-dancing and speech-making, and the Maori camp at Rewi’s house and in the neighbouring field rang night and morning with the musical sound of the Hauhau hymns, the service of the Tariao, the “Morning Star,” chanted by hundreds of voices. Some unconventional scenes there were, characteristic of the frontier life. For instance, there was the pakeha-Maori dance on the main road in Kihikihi that symbolised the final unifying of the two races. The dashing Hote Thompson, the King-maker’s son, a fighting man of renown, paraded in all the glory of Hauhau war-paint in front of his savage-looking soldiery, and called for a pakeha lady partner to dance “te lancer” with him, and then out stepped a settler’s handsome wife, and the accomplished Hote led her through the mazes of the lancers in the middle of the crowd on the dusty road with as much grace as if he had been young Lochinvar himself. True, Hote wore only a shawl in place of trousers, and his face was blackened with charcoal dabbed on for a haka, but none the less he was a pretty gallant. Had that pakeha dancer been a reader of Bret Harte she might have recalled the historic dance on “Poverty Flat”:
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“The dress of my queer vis-a-vis,
And how I once went down the middle
With the man that shot Sandy McGee.”
There was no law but the Maori chieftains’ law south of the Puniu River until after 1883, when Te Kooti was pardoned and a general amnesty to Maori rebels was proclaimed. For policy reasons the Kingites were left pretty much to themselves for some time after Tawhiao laid down his guns at Major Mair’s feet at Alexandra in 1881, and when John Rochfort and Charles Wilson Hursthouse, setting out from Kihikihi, carried flying surveys through the Rohepotae, [[93]]the state of the country from the Puniu for a hundred miles southward was not very different in essentials from that of the Scottish Highlands in the period described by Mr Neil Munro in his adventure romances that carry a tang of Stevenson’s “Catriona.”
The only occasion on which an offender south of the Puniu was brought to justice before the chiefs of Ngati-Maniapoto voluntarily opened the country to Government authority was in 1882, when a long-wanted man was brought into Te Awamutu under circumstances unorthodox and dramatic. The Maori was Winiata, who in 1876 killed a man named Packer, at Epsom, near Auckland. Packer and Winiata had been fellow-servants in the employ of a Mr Cleghorn, and had quarrelled. Winiata, after tomahawking Packer, fled to the King Country, and for six years was safe. At last the Government reward of £500 tempted a big half-caste named Robert Barlow to make an effort to bring in Winiata. The arrest was accomplished as the result of a scheme devised by the Te Awamutu policeman, Constable R. J. Gillies—a very smart and capable man, afterwards Inspector of Police—and Sergeant McGovern, of Hamilton. At Otorohanga Barlow met Winiata, whose home was at Te Kuiti, and, pretending to be a pig-buyer, set about bargaining with the wanted man. In the night he succeeded in making Winiata and two companions drunk, and about midnight lashed him to a spare horse, after taking a revolver from him, and made off for the Puniu. It was an exceedingly risky undertaking, for Barlow would have been shot had any of the Maoris been at all suspicious. He took the prisoner to Kihikihi, and with the assistance of the Constabulary handed him over to Constable Gillies at Te Awamutu. He received the reward of £500, with which he bought a farm at Mangere. Winiata was tried and convicted, and was hanged at Auckland on 4th August, 1882. As for Barlow, he did not live long himself; he died in a very few years after his King Country feat, and the natives declared that he had been fatally bewitched (kua makuturia) by a tohunga in revenge for his capture of Winiata.
Another incident that greatly excited the frontier was the capture and imprisonment of Mr Hursthouse and a fellow-surveyor by the fanatic Te Mahuki, or Manukura, of Te Kumi, near Te Kuiti. This was in 1883. The surveyors were released by Te Kooti and friendly-disposed King natives. Soon thereafter Mahuki and a band of his “Angels” rode into Alexandra, which they had threatened to loot and burn; but they were smartly arrested by Major Gascoyne [[94]]and a force of Armed Constabulary and Te Awamutu Cavalry, and were haled off to Auckland prison.[1]
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