NZ FOLK SONG * The Stable Lad

When Cobb & Co ran coaches....

Cobb & Company was first formed in Melbourne, Australia, in 1854 by Freeman Cobb, John Peck and others. Peck had been employed in the USA by the Wells Fargo Stagecoach Company. He used his knowledge and expertise to give Cobb & Co. a reputation of being fast, reliable and punctual, throughout Australia.

This Australian firm did not set up as a coach company in New Zealand during those early years. However, their trade name was used extensively by private coach owners throughout this country to take advantage of the Cobb & Co. public image of reliability and punctuality. FULL DETAILS

A major coach road was the one over the Southern Alps via Arthurs Pass to Christchurch. The Arthurs Pass coach ran for 57 years from 1866 until the Otira rail tunnel opened in 1923. The 250 km journey over the Main Divide from Greymouth to Christchurch was so rough it took 3 days to complete and involved 11 staging stops.

From the Buller to the Grey....

This is a great song, and Punakaiki historian Les Wright says he loves it, but nevertheless he notes that the coach road did not go through Charleston at the time of the goldrush. There were too many coastal cliffs and pakahi swamps, although he says a telegraph link from the Buller to the Grey, via Charleston, was completed in 1868.

The coach road from Westport to Greymouth bypassed Charleston, going inland via the Buller gorge to Reefton, then down the Grey river valley. It was not until 1929 that you could travel by road from the Buller to the Grey via Charleston.

However, as the saying goes, "Never let the truth get in the way of a good story!"

See Mr Wright's full story of the Charleston road HERE.

And she's dancing in the bar....

Actually, girls were forbidden by law to dance in hotel bars. Punakaiki historian Les Wright says:
"Dancing girls were employed to dance with men and encourage them to buy drinks. Because of this, dancehalls weren't permitted in hotels - but they were often situated next door.
"There were also prostitutes, and dancehall girls may have moonlighted in that trade too. The dancing girls were not stage performers; the can-can didn't arrive until the 1890s so far as I know.

In a pit of yellow clay....

With dirty drinking water, poor sanitation, a cold damp climate and not much fresh food, Cape's red-haired girl was probably struck down by Tb, dysentery or typhoid - Les Wright says that the early dancing girls would have been buried in Charleston's cemetery down by the sea shore in Constant Bay.

Constant Bay, Charleston

But this cemetery was difficult to reach at high tide, and then it became threatened by mine tailings, so they opened two other cemeteries.
When we passed through Charleston in 1987, we visited these two cemeteries, a Protestant one on the hill to the north, and the Catholic one by the "winding Westland highway," so Peter Cape's fictitious red-haired girl was obviously an Irish Catholic.

The totara wood grave-markers of the poorer people had all been burnt up when the abandoned gorse-covered cemeteries were swept by fire. But we did find a granite slab marking the grave of a 23 year old school-teacher, much-loved by her pupils.

However we could not find the derelict two-story, false front, corrugated-iron European Hotel I had seen on a previous visit in 1967. The remains of the hotel were pulled down and burnt following the 1967 centennial celebrations, held not long after I visited there.

Bill Fox the Prospector

The Fox River 30 miles south of Charleston is named after Bill Fox who was born in Ireland in about 1826. A sailor, he was on the Californian goldfields about 1850; then on the Victorian goldfields in Australia; and on the Tuapeka goldfield in Otago in 1861.

In 1862 Bill Fox's prospecting activities in the Arrow district excited intense interest and determined pursuit, but his claim to have made the original Shotover River discoveries was not accepted. A burly man, Fox was given to brawling. A serious fight in 1864 led to of six months' hard labour in Dunedin gaol.

Released in November 1864, Fox travelled to the West Coast. He prospected widely for gold, and first discovered it at Fox Creek, a tributary of the Arahura River, behind Hokitika, in January 1865.

In July 1866 Fox organised a prospecting voyage to what was later named Fox River, but didn't find gold there. He led the party on north to where Charleston would later be, but although they found gold there, it was too fine to save. So Fox went south to Okarito to find out how they were doing it there. DNZB biography

It's in Charleston far away....

In August 1866, while Fox was away, Timothy Linehan took the credit for the Pakihi ('Parkeese') field which later became known as the Charleston field. At first, goods going to 'Parkeese' were landed at Woodpecker Bay, south of Fox River, and humped about 20km north to the goldfield.

Charleston 1885, detail of a watercolour by Willam Fox

Then Capt Charles Bonner managed to squeeze the ketch 'Constant' into a tiny bay, and the town that formed around this new landing spot,Constant Bay, was named Charleston, probably in his honour.

In November 1866 Fox made a rich strike at Brighton (now Tiromoana), about 10 miles south of Charleston, and in May 1867 a strike near Charleston itself precipitated the last real 'rush' on the West Coast.

Brighton was a much bigger town at the start, but Charleston lasted longer and the two have been confused in places. In 1867 Brighton and its environs had 53 hotels while Charleston had 37.

The population of Charleston is often exaggerated, says Les Wright, with 30,000 or even 100,000 being mentioned. At the peak of the gold rush, the population of the entire West Coast is believed to have been only 35,000.The early 1867 census, at the peak of the Charleston rush, showed 5000 on the entire Charleston field and 6000 on the Brighton field ten miles to the south.

Prospector William Fox died in 1893 and his grave is in the Reefton cemetery. (NZ Premier William Fox also died in 1893 and lies buried in Auckland.) There is a gravestone for a man named William Fox in the Protestant cemetery at Charleston, but he was a farmer who died in the early 1900s.

There's a schooner down from Murchison....

This was the American prairie schooner, a lightweight wagon covered by a white sailcloth.

I can hear it in the gorge....

The road came from Nelson to Murchison, and then down through the Buller Gorge. At the mouth of the gorge, says Les Wright, a ferry took coaches etc across the river, and the road then continued on to Westport.

If the stable lad could hear it coming down the road through the gorge, the livery stable must have been on the coach road at the gorge's lower end.

At the ferry crossing was the Nine Mile Hotel which had a livery stable. (J Halkett Millar 'High Noon for Coaches' 1965). This is where our livery stable lad must have worked.

A Cobb & Co coach crossing the Buller river.

Drive a four-in-hand to Charleston....

Here is Les Wright's history of the Charleston road.

"The route from Westport to Charleston was first via ferry across the Buller, then mainly via the beaches with bits of track over headlands as required. (I. Faris, 'Charleston', 1940)

The rest of the way to the Grey was by inland pack tracks and beaches. Then in the early 1900s the road was pushed north and south in stages.

Jack Powell (b. Charleston, 1901) told me how he went with his grandfather packing goods to Fox River c1905. At that stage the road went from Charleston to somewhere south of Four Mile and just stopped, with a rough track through the bush to pick up the pack track.

Bill Fischer (b. Westport c. 1904) told me that when he was about 12, living at Punakaiki, he would take a horse along the track and beach each weekend to collect goods from a shed at the road end which by that stage had reached the top of White Horse Hill.

Jack Powell also recalled the road having got that far when he and his brother took a plough to Punakaiki about World War One. They got the plough down the pack track to the beach and then took turns riding the horse and steering the plough.

Bill Fischer later worked on the road when it advanced toward Punakaiki, and also worked on the Fox River bridge which was completed after the road was opened, cars going through a tunnel on the south side to reach a ford upstream. The road from the south reached Punakaiki River c. 1922.

James Bourke drove a Model T Ford right through from Westport to Greymouth (with the aid of wooden planks and steel nerves) on Good Friday 1928. But the road was not offically opened to traffic until early in 1929."

Thanks

Our thanks to Les Wright of Green Kiwi Tours, Punakaiki, for generously imparting all this accurate information acout Charleston.
Watch out for his forthcoming book about the Brighton gold rush.