I had been reading, in one of those American magazines that specialise in out-of-doors subjects and recollections of the frontier era, an account of some of the wild old towns of the cattle-ranchers and the gamblers and gunmen. A photograph of that renowned resort, Dodge City, Kansas, in the year 1878, seemed strangely familiar. That one-sided street of timber shanties, false-fronted stores and eating-houses and boarding-houses, some buildings with verandahs, some without; that “dirt road,” those horses standing at the hitching-posts, the four-horse wagons and the bullock-teams—how I knew them, though I had never seen Dodge City. And then I remembered. Many of our rough raw townships I had seen; they would call them cities in the U.S.A. But one above all was the exact replica of Dodge City. It was Taumarunui in the first year of its life as a town—its first year as head of the North Island Main Trunk, before the north end and south end met.

There, happily, the resemblance ended. Taumarunui was not shot up periodically by belted cowboys in ten-gallon hats. It got its “eddication in a peaceful sort of way,” as Truthful James would have said. There were no Wild Bill Hickoks, no Crooked Kids, no frontier ruffians to spread the fear of the six-gun and the bowie-knife. There was not even a faro lay-out. Yet Taumarunui and the Main Trunk camps as one saw them in the process of construction had their own little diversions. The hop beer dispensed was of gratifying O.P. quality, and if a game was desired there were hundreds of lads ready to oblige you at two-up. A much-travelled toiler who had come far to swing pick and shovel on the Ongarue banks said that it looked a child's game, but that it sure was loaded.

And now that I think of it, there were men among the thousand or so who had worked on the building of the Main Trunk (under that excellent engineer, Mr. J. D. Louch) had seen life in the actual American Far West. There was the unmistakable brand of the rover on them; they had worked in all kinds of callings, from lumbering to cattle-droving. They knew the Missouri and the Colorado, the plains of Texas, and the deserts of Arizona. In two of the canvas-and-slab camps that stood in the lee of the rimu groves where the newly-formed line went down from the Poro-o-Tarao tunnel to the pumice banks of the Ongarue, there were names of several far-famed U.S.A. “wild” towns rough-lettered in charcoal on whares.

Taumarunui's transformation from a Maori settlement to a place of pakeha progress and activity was, I suppose, as rapid as anything in the much-written-of Wild West. When I first rode down the Ongarue Valley—it was a two days' journey then from Te Kuiti—the place seemed as solitary and shut-in as a glen in the heart of the Urewera Country. Later on, over thirty years ago, we camped one night on the manuka flat at Taumarunui. Long afterwards I tried to locate that camping-place alongside the pioneer surveyor Rochfort's high-legged pataka or storehouse, but it was a bewildering search, so completely had the scene been changed. It was somewhere near where the Post Office stands to-day.

All was different. The railway station stood where there had been a group of Maori whares roofed with totara bark. Churches, stores, banks, large accommodation houses, pretty homes, had taken the place of maize and potato cultivations enclosed in pig-proof fences of manuka. Electric lights blazed in the streets at night; there were paved footpaths where once narrow tracks wound through the tall manuka. Old Taumarunui had completely vanished, except for a native kainga, considerably modernised, and the shingled cottage of the first white man in this retreat of the Maori the venerable Alexander Bell, old soldier and bush scout, old trader, one of the last of the real pakeha-Maori class.

Mr. Bell's neat home, with its little store of goods for the Maori trade, stood in its grove of fruit trees. The old-timer lives in Taumarunui still, a lone relic of the past; he has lived continuously in Taumarunui since 1874. A man of many adventures and strange memories. He took a chief's daughter to wife, a very handsome girl, of the ancient fair-haired type that is called urukehu. That was in 1870. He was adopted into the local tribe and became their white trader, their pet pakeha, and this friendship saved

The “Father of Taumarunui,” as Mr. Bell has been called, proudly wore his New Zealand War medal on the day when last I saw him; we had met again to discuss certain passages in the story of the bush-campaigning era. We mutually regretted some of the changes, the inevitable passing of the ages-old charm of seclusion, the forest freedom that once was Taumarunui's. Necessary as was the coming of the rail, a day too long delayed, and the making of a commercial town, there were features of the past that pleased the old-timer best. “Ah,” he said, “I don't like all this hurry and bustle, all this haste to get somewhere, all this noise. I often think of the days when I could go out in the morning, just up the hill yonder, with my double-barrel gun and come back with a kitful of fat pigeons. What shooting we did in those days never seemed to make the pigeons any scarcer. But the coming of all the crowds and the bush-felling and the burning have destroyed the birds that were everywhere in my early days here.” And the veteran lamented, too, the passing of the tui, which used to usher in the morning in all the bush around the valley, and on this Taumarunui flat itself. “I'd far sooner hear the tui sing than those motor cars hoot through the town.”

Was it not the Black Douglas—as we read in the old chronicles—who declared that he would sooner hear the cricket sing than the mouse squeak. The Douglas meant the prison when he spoke of the mouse's squeak.

I am sure that if time could roll backward in its flight, and Alexander Bell found himself all at once a young man again and a town like this choking off his breath, he would roll his swag and take his gun and get quickly hence by some dim bush trail. But the frontiers-man is alone in a changed world. Taumarunui of to-day prides itself, with good reason, on its spirit of progress, its

There is a story of old Taumarunui which I first heard from the late Captain Preece, of Palmerston North, one of the best officers who led Government native expeditions in the last bush wars against the Hauhaus. It was in 1869, just after Te Kooti and his guerilla band had been defeated in the fight at Te Porere, near Mount Tongariro. The wounded desperado and the survivors of his war-party took refuge in the heart of the bush, and recruited at Taumarunui. Here, in this well-hidden spot, he held council and laid plans for a new campaign. The Government forces made expeditions from the east, searching the great trackless forests for their foe. After several fruitless tramps into the wilderness of bush, it was decided to send out scouts and ascertain whether Te Kooti had reached Taumarunui, and if so what he intended doing next. Two men of one of the Rotorua tribes, named Wiremu and Te Honiana, in Preece's contingent, volunteered to go through and pick up what information they could. Armed with carbines and revolvers, they travelled the open part of the track by night and the bush by day, a distance of forty miles, mostly dense forest.

They reached the hills on the east of Taumarunui, somewhere about the place where the hospital now stands, and approached the village that then straggled along the flat, one side of which is now occupied by the railway station and yards. With the utmost caution they crawled as near as they could through the bush-covered slopes overlooking the marae or open space between the whares, the village square. There they lay hidden nearly all one day, listening to the speeches made in the open air, where Te Kooti addressed his followers and a large gathering of the Upper Wanganui people. They heard him announce his intention to move northward along the west side of Lake Taupo, making for the Patetere country, between Waikato and Rotorua. With this important piece of intelligence the two daring scouts returned to the Government camp at Lake Rotoaira. They had been absent five days.

Lieut-Colonel McDonnell was so pleased with the information the men had gained at very considerable risk that he presented them with the Government carbines they had taken on the expedition. No doubt they deserved greater recognition than that. The information they gathered as they lay in that bushy cover so close to their enemies—they feared that at any moment some Maori dog would discover their retreat and raise a fatal noise about it—enabled the Government forces to intercept the

Those are some tales and memories of the pre-railway Taumarunui. The period of transition from a Hauhau camp and a closed frontier to a lively and ofttimes bacchanalian era as head of the iron road, and so on to its present settled and prosperous condition, was not long-drawn-out; it did not extend over the space of an average lifetime, but it was crowded with the incidents that would make a very readable history.

Now, though the old war-canoes that once swung at the river banks have gone, though the old war parties have passed on, though the railway-makers have been scattered far and wide, there remains some of the bush frontier atmosphere about Taumarunui. The life of the forest that still exists, the life of the hard-toiling bushmen, the even more strenuous toil of the farmer in new country, the wild glories of the great Wanganui River and its bush canyon, all give the traveller every warrant for making the heart-of-the-island town a kind of scenic field base.