Ngai Tahu has a long association with Central Otago and its rivers. Te Runanga o Otakou considers the Nevis holds many values for Otakou including kaitiakitanga, mauri, waahi tapu, waahi taoka and traditional trails. The traditional name for the Nevis River is Te Papapuni. Maori trails in the South Island high country provided significant social and economic links. These trails tended to follow valleys. Occupation sites recorded show that Maori butchered moa in the vicinity of Schoolhouse Creek, with remains of a camp site and moa butchering site nearby dating from around the fourteenth century. This site is thought to have been a large one, where as many as 2000 moa may have been butchered. The importance of the Nevis to iwi is illustrated by its inclusion in the Otago Regional Plan Water 2004.
Reko (c1803-1868) led pastoralist Nathanael Chalmers from the Mataura River to the Nokomai and into the Nevis River in 1853, the first European to see the remote valley. Reko, who had lived near Kaiapoi, and who had shifted close to Tuturau in Southland, had a detailed knowledge of the interior, drawing maps for visitors. He became a well known guide.
The first pastoral stations in the Nevis Valley were (from north to south) the Kawarau, Hawksburn and Lorn Peak Runs. W.S. Trotter took up the neighbouring Rockyside Run in the Upper Nevis in 1859, running sheep from Moeraki, through the Maniototo and over the Carrick Range, through the Lower Nevis Valley. Historian James Herries Beattie recounts that getting over the Carrick Range was no mean feat and was an arduous job even in good weather.
J. Paterson and Company took up the Hawksburn Run which took up most of the Lower Nevis basin in 1859. In 1871 when Graham and Walton leased the land there were 12,000 sheep on the run. Kawarau Station took up the remainder of the valley. In 1890 the Australian and New Zealand Land Company, leaseholders of the Kawarau Run, acquired the Hawksburn Run.
After discovering gold at Nokomai, near the southern tip of Lake Wakatipu, miners made their way back to the Dunstan via the Nevis Valley finding gold in its headwaters in October 1862. By November 1862 newspapers were reporting a rush at the head of the valley, the middle gorge and the lower valley. By autumn 1863 the Nevis field had prospered and a small town developed, and social networks and sites formed, including 'The Grandstand' where races were held. The first township site (occupied up until sometime before 1865) was on the eastern bank of Commissioner's Creek close to 'Camp Terrace' and the Warden's Camp itself. Opposite the town and at the mouth of the gorge were terraces worked for gold. Thirty claims were working, some with very good returns, Kelly and party, for example returned £400 per man for six weeks' work.
The first Nevis Township provided services for the some 1500 miners. In 1862 the ‘brisk little place' contained 60 thriving businesses running in a line along a ‘street'. The remote location influenced the construction of the town; the narrator described the tendency of the buildings to be diminutive because of the high cost of freight. Freight costs and the lack of timber meant that the local stone was used for walls, seats, benches and counter tops. Many of the businesses and residences would have been under canvas, perhaps with sod or stone walls, with a canvas roof. The primitive facilities extended to the Warden's Camp which was only a canvas tent, with no provision for security, not even a safe and no resident police (the nearest police station being Clyde). Scarce building materials meant high value was placed on timber: one storekeeper arrived back to his 30 by 20 foot timber framed premises to find that the building in its entirety had been removed.
North of Lower Nevis Township the next sets of workings were at ‘Stonewall Jackson Gully' and ‘Stuart's Gully.' Further to the north there were workings known as ‘Sherwoods, Ryder, Flemings and Coal Gullies.'
The landscape of the lower valley was noted:
‘there is a large flat, seven miles long by about three wide, terminating on either end by a gorge.This is a remarkably fine valley; the soil is a rich black loam and of great fertility. It is bounded on one side by the lofty Remarkables, and on the other by the Carricks, and presents a most romantic appearance. Terraces running from the foot of the ranges skirt the river on either side, some of which have been wrought with considerable profit.'
Isolated residences were dotted along the Nevis River heading south, serving the miners working the rich gullies. One was Stuart's Store, one of the ‘oldest establishments' in the Nevis. Proprietor John Stuart provided a refuge from the dangerously inclement weather. An incident in August 1863 illustrates the harshness of the winters and the dangers even for settled miners. At the Nevis in a gully opposite Stuart's store were ‘two lone huts exposed to the full fury of the snow drift; in one of these huts were three diggers, in the other two; the inhabitants of the former finding their dwelling place enveloped in snow, escaped by means of the chimney, and had to roll themselves down a steep declivity to escape. Of the two dwellers in the other hut, they saw nothing, and could not make them hear, and when taking a last look at the deserted dwelling, nothing more could be seen but a small portion of the top of the chimney, not bigger than a roan's head.'
The township moved: Warden Carew was calling it the ‘new township' in 1865. Carew described the new site as a ‘low terrace' poorly sited as the ground was ‘wet and swampy.'
Warden's reports emphasised the cold. The warden wrote in 1865: ‘the Nevis is so isolated and remote from every centre of population that it is just beginning to be discovered. This cold, sequestered, and ice-bound region, hemmed in on all sides except where it opens to the Kawarau will probably never attract a very large population. It will be storehouse of wealth to the hardy adventurers who are prepared to brave its inclement climate.' The population of the second township reached a peak in 1866, declining afterwards, with only fifteen to twenty families becoming settled residents of the valley.
Goldfield's Commissioner Vincent Pyke (1827-1894) recalled the primitive existence at the Nevis holding his hearing at Commissioner's Creek: ‘There was no building to hold court in, only a tent of single calico. This, when I entered it, and got in a table and a chair, seemed at least clean, for the earthen floor was hard frozen, and a kindly Irishman brought a bullock hide from my chair to rest on. All went well, though coldly enough, until the people who quickly filled the little tent to suffocation had been a little while in the place. Then the ground began to thaw and the clean floor became noisome, filthy mud; the hard, stiff bullock hide became soft and flabby to say nothing of its stinking, and the legs of my chair sinking down into the swamp I had great difficulty in keeping my position. Not a bit of board was to be had to put under the chair and I had to manage the best way I could be frequently shifting the chair.'
Needless to say Pyke considered the ‘most interesting and least known' mining district one where the lives of the miners was ‘a very hard and desolate one.'
The first gold workings in the valley were paddocking (digging a pit down to the gold bearing layer and working the spoil from the pit) and cradling close to the Nevis River. Ground sluicing had begun by 1864. Ground sluicing involved the use of running water played over a working face to break down gold-bearing earth. The gold was recovered in a sluice box (an open-ended wooden structure with riffles running across it covered with coarse matting. Mining spoil was washed through the box and the heavy gold stuck in the matting). Early sluicing involved diversion of water from riverbeds (with associated tunneling, cuttings or wing dams to divert the stream). Mining on river terraces saw water from higher elevations directed at the face of the excavation to separate gold from soil and rocks. Warden E.H. Carew wrote that the Nevis goldfield was ‘remarkable for its steady yield of good wages than for rich patches.'
The gold workings changed the landscape. In 1865 the workings stripped about 12 feet (3.6m), the depth of wash dirt being three or four feet (1-1.2m). The ground was drained by ‘several deep tail races' cut to intersect the claims. Mining debris made already difficult travel even more challenging: ‘The track is along a level grassy flat, intersected with numerous water courses running down from the Remarkables. These streams are rapidly covering a large extent of ground with sludge, brought by the tail-water from the sluicing claims on the terraces, a little distance to the right of the roadway. In time this sludge nuisance promises to be something considerable. The ground which is being covered up is doubtless highly auriferous, and is sure to be worked at some future time. Another thing - if not stopped or diverted into a channel, cut for the purpose, this tail-water by spreading over a large surface, will speedily convert the flat into a vast quagmire, and in all probability stop traffic.'
The 1866 mining surveyor John Drummond reported on the population and activities: 243 people were engaged in sluicing, with a further 17 involved in ground sluicing; Thirteen people were involved in storekeeping; five in keeping public houses; three in packing (that is carting goods), and 28 in other employment. There were 130 sluice boxes in use, 5 waterwheels, 30 pumps, and water races totalling 87 miles.
In the late 1860s hydraulic sluicing was introduced. Water at high pressure was directed through nozzles to break down banks of earth. Water was brought to the claim, often from some distance, to a point above the workings. It was piped down to the nozzles, with the fall providing the water pressure. Hydraulic sluicing, in common with other mining methods, formed an integrated system of workings, with races, dams, working faces and tail races, and associated huts.
Around this period, proposals made since the mid 1860s by Otago business interests to bring in cheap Chinese labour were realised. Miners at Nevis and Bannockburn had organised a petition protesting against the project but after some initial hostility, relations settled down. In 1868 the Dunstan Times recorded that: ‘some months past a considerable portion of the European population evinced a most selfish and unwarranted antipathy towards the Chinese who fist ventured to earn their living in that district but nearly all the ungenerous-minded miners have left and the sensible men who have remained are treating the Chinese with all the courtesy necessary to make the strangers feel at ease. The European miners are doing sufficiently well to make them feel perfectly satisfied with their lot.'
In 1868 the Otago Witness reported: ‘The number of Chinese at the Nevis is very considerable and has led to the formation of a Chinese camp. Several stores, a couple of butchers' shops and a blacksmith's forge have been started supplying John.' By 1869 around 300 Chinese miners were living in the Nevis. There were more Chinese miners than Europeans on the Nevis goldfield during some periods. The Chinese population remained steady through the 1870s, but declined in the 1880s, dropping to around 50 in 1880, and less than half that in the early 1890s. Some of the Chinese mining claims can be identified through survey information. SO 1941 shows the location of two such claims in 1889, although clearly Chinese mining was far more extensive than this. Former resident and historian Gavine McLean, who talked with old residents, writes that 500 Chinese miners camped on ‘Chair Flat' by Commissioner's Creek.
The isolation and the cold led to the Nevis Valley having a certain infamy. A reporter visiting the Nevis in 1872 gave a lively description of his easy descent into hell. His gentle 3000 ft climb over the facetiously named ‘low saddle' raised his ire. The hotelkeeper he met at Nevis Crossing gives an interesting image of a goldfield's store: ‘We found a long spare bilious melancholic man, behind the counter, wearing a large red night cap surrounded by all the heterogeneous mixings of an up-country store: soap, sardines, gum boots, castor oil, Crimean shirts, sluice forks, and similar ingredients for comessation.'
The writer then turned his attention to the budding Nevis township itself ‘not afflicted with mayors or policemen, priests or paupers, having neither a gaol nor a church, the Nevis can only be considered a settlement in embryo.' He continued his description: ‘It is a dual town. It contains two houses - no more. They are both hotels, stores and butchers shops. They appear to have been built and furnished from all the job lots and deceased effects in New Zealand. You enter one door and see Dr--- will see his patients from 10 to 4; another that you are entering the Bank of New South Wales; while one butcher's shop is, I am informed, the remains of some old Methodist chapel. All the sardine and kerosene tins in the Colony one would imagine had been collected to cover it in - and such a dismembered arrangement in the way of habitations is a hard thing to be found.'
A topographical survey shows the general layout of the Lower Nevis and Nevis Crossing in 1881. The road to Cromwell descends the Carrick Range on the east, reaching the cluster of buildings at Nevis Crossing. The Nevis River is bridged there; with two bridge reserves surveyed (the more southern one has a bridge across the river). Here the track branches, to the north the bridle track to Gibbston heads over the hills, and the Nevis Road continues south. On the west of the Nevis River the road passes isolated huts alongside the road. There is a shepherd's hut up the Nevis Burn alongside the bridle track to Gibbston. On the slopes of the Hector Mountains there are workings and huts at the headwaters of a stream. Travelling south there is a cemetery on the east of the road, a cluster of huts and houses and then the township at Lower Nevis. Two water races run alongside Commissioner's Creek.
Though returns declined in the 1880s, towards the end of the century hydraulic elevating and dredging marked the resurgence of mining. Hydraulic elevating involved the raising of the gravels from a low level, to a higher level using water under high pressure. The hydraulic elevator piped water via a delivery pipe into a pit where the gravel and water from sluicing had collected. High pressure water sucked the slurry into the pipe and pushed it upwards. The slurry was raised, often above ground level to sluicing boxes, where the tailings could be disposed of. Tail races were constructed to dispose of the debris. By the 1890s these elevators were raising material up to 150 feet (46m, in stages) or up to 90 feet (27m) in a single lift.
Hydraulic elevating began in the 1890s and continued for the next fifty years. New water sources were brought in to provide the additional water required for elevating. Several groups, including the Adies had elevators working by 1892. An 1898 map shows the claims in the area at that time: major claims included Our Mutual Friend (covering 15 acres), Keep-it-dark, and Rip and Tear, and the claim run by the McLean brothers.
While coal had been mined in the Lower Nevis as far back as 1863 (with Patrick O'Brien operating as a coal merchant for the township in the 1880s, and Sam Clark at Nevis Crossing) it was with the dredging boom that the coal attained its true significance, supplying the dredges at an economical rate. Three pits are shown on an 1880 sketch plan: one by Nevis Crossing, one at Schoolhouse Creek and the other at Coal Creek. Coal was ‘quarried out' and a dray backed into the quarry, loaded, and for it to discharge its load into the bunkers of the dredge. Any outcrops accessible by dray were exploited to supply dredges into the 1930s.
Dredging occurred alongside hydraulic elevating. In Central Otago the first indication of the dredging boom was in 1889 with the pegging off of claims along rivers and streams. The renewed gold fever provided hope in the economically depressed late 1880s. Dunedin capitalists provided capital for the dredging companies.
The dredging prospects in the Nevis were discussed hopefully in 1894 with correspondent William Watson writing ‘we have the Nevis Valley, a wide flat with abundance of coal everywhere. Tons of gold have come from the Nevis by the wingdam method of working, and there is a wide field there yet for dredging.' In mid 1896 parties of miners put together dredging claims with dredging plants ordered and likely to be delivered during the summer period from Garston when road conditions made delivery possible. In January 1897 a number of dredges were under construction and that the locals were anticipating the ‘great things.'
By 1897 the first dredges were operating, and while they had the advantage of cheap readily available coal, the remoteness of the valley and the associated expensive transport did limit dredging operations. The valley itself also limited the dredging as there was only room for three claims and though there was more ground, it was questionable whether it would pay or was dredge able. In 1899 there was still optimism that the Nevis was a dredging field with a ‘bright future before it.'
By 1899 the length of the Nevis Valley from Nevis Crossing to the Sugar Loaves in the Upper Nevis was pegged out for dredging claims. Dredging was the predominant industry from the 1890s with eight dredges operating and was important within the community as a provider of employment. Most dredges employed six men and a dredge master. In 1896 Williamson and Lawrence applied for 50 acres at Lower Nevis for the Eldorado Gold Dredging Company; Henry Schumann for 50 acres for the Lower Nevis Dredging Company, as well as Mrs Silk's Nevis Dredge. Six dredges were still operating in 1902. By the end of World War One dredging had declined in Otago generally, and this trend was reflected in the Nevis. Dredging continued in the Nevis into the 1940s, and with few dredges surviving the 1920s, this made the Nevis remarkable in its continuity of mining.
Survey plans show the locations of a number of dredge claims: Ngapara No. 2 Company (1897), the Nevis Gold Dredging Company (1902), The Crewe Gold Dredging Company (1910), the Lower Nevis Gold Dredging Company (1914), the Nevis Crossing Gold Dredging Company (1915), and the claim of Sydney Charles Fache (1936). As companies folded and were re-born, dredges were renamed and reused so the history of dredging is complicated.
The difficulty of transporting dredging equipment highlighted the importance of communications in the Nevis. To run a dredge in the Nevis was a huge undertaking as the already steep climb over the Carrick Range could be fatal for the horses pulling the heavy dredging equipment. Old residents recalled that the road to the Nevis was ‘strewn with the whitening bones of faithful horses.'
Residents were dependent on the road and harsh conditions meant that they could be cut off. In August 1903 after an unexpectedly fast thaw a build up of foot thick ice that joined the flow of the Nevis River carried away ‘the foot and pack bridge' over the river at Nevis Crossing. There was no boat or chair which could provide a means of crossing, and foot and even wheeled traffic was considered risky. By 1904 a ‘sheep bridge' was the only means of crossing the Nevis, and this had to removed to allow the rock on which it was built to be blasted away to form piers for a new bridge. This left pedestrians ‘after crossing the Nevis Range, to have to wade through the cold waters of the Nevis almost up to the waist.'
In such an isolated community communication was vital. Hamel notes that the strength of the community ties was such that by 1900 nearly every house was connected by a party-line telephone system. Old house sites are marked by lone telephone poles, and the line over Duffers Saddle constructed in the late 1890s is visible in places.
Underlying the miners' residency in the Nevis was the right to occupy land, which linked to wider government land reforms. By the beginning of the twentieth century the land reforms encouraged the break-up of large runs. Gold mining communities were quick to take up these opportunities. Leaseholders were generally able to freehold their land by 1912.
Gold mining historian John Salmon notes that William Adie at the Nevis was one pioneer gold miner who took up land and became a ‘prosperous smallholder.' Other residents on less formal tenure, such as Mrs Korll at Nevis Crossing, were able (after a long battle) to obtain leases of land they had long occupied. Mrs Korll had fenced in and cultivated a piece of ground at Nevis Crossing for a period of thirty years, and her leasing her homestead had been ‘strenuously opposed' by the ‘local squatters.' The buildings and fences were erected at a time when materials had been expensive, and locals considered it an injustice that she had been subjected to such treatment.
Nevis locals were keen to support the subdivision which they hoped would lead to the ability to set aside 50 acre sections which would allow landowners to keep cows or horse without being at the mercy of runholders, and to establish small dairy farms which would mean that isolated settlers would not have to pay for the cartage of milk and the like over the mountain ranges. An old resident William Masters wrote to the Otago Land Board suggesting that areas be reserved on the Kawarau runs for future settlement. The Board resolved that a block of about 500 acres be set aside for ‘small settlement' on the east side of the Nevis River opposite Lower Nevis Township. The vast Kawarau Run was subdivided in 1909 and the smaller leases sold, with Runs 345A, 345B, Craigroy and Carrick dating from this period, with the ‘break up' homesteads and out buildings probably dating from this period. In the Nevis basin small sections (78-95 acres) were surveyed off on the east side of the Nevis River alongside Robertson's Road, with William Robertson himself a noted as an owner on the survey plan.
By 1920 the Lands Department had made it clear that all Nevis residents could run two cows, two calves (up to a year old) and a horse on the pastoral run for free (any other stock had to be negotiated with the leaseholder), and that all the land the residents had fenced into ‘paddocks' was ‘safe.'
Mining declined in the 1920s. One bright hope was the Upper Nevis Gold Dredging Company formed in 1926, managed by Sydney Charles Fache. With a declining population and the school and store struggling, this venture seemed like a panacea. It was a failure. Gavine McLean writes that the collapse ‘spelt disaster to the small community, of the dredge settlement, and the lower township.'
Mining did continue into the 1930s. Sydney Charles Fache, employing ten men, ran the Nevis Crossing Dredge up until his death around 1939. In addition the Depression facilitated a revival of mining through subsidised schemes, and other groups joined the established miners, working over earlier tailings. The McLean brothers worked the former hotel site in Lower Nevis Township hydraulic elevating with 250 feet (76m) of head. Johnson and Williams sluiced with two nozzles. The Nevis Sluicing Claims Ltd, with J.W. Johnston managing the claim, employed six men, working on the high left terrace on Schoolhouse Creek.
The Unemployment Board set up a camp in the Nevis for unemployed men, and parties continued to work the Nevis throughout the 1930s. The scheme was established in 1932 by the Department of Labour, and small parties of prospectors worked in many parts of the southern gold mining district. Six or eight camps for men were set up in Otago, one of these being the Lower Nevis. No great discoveries were made by the subsidised mining in the Vincent County scheme, but many areas were prospected and tested. Hamel considers that these twentieth century sites have ‘considerable historic value', showing the ‘continuity of tradition of mining life.'
Gavine McLean, a school teacher at Nevis School in the 1920s, writes of the lives of miners. Their homes were ‘small and quite well-built with four rooms, no bathroom, an outside toilet and often additional bedrooms with inferior studs and finish, being added as the family grew in number.' She considered that most Nevis houses had been erected ‘towards the end of the nineteenth century.' Laundry was done outside in an outdoor copper. Furniture was simple and heating was provided by an old stove which stood in an alcove. ‘Cow chips' supplemented the coal as fuel, and miners working on peat bogs dried peat and used that for fuel.
Small scale mining continued into the 1950s close to Nevis township: F. McLean, for example was still running the elevator near Cline's cottage at the close of the 1940s and another McLean family member was sluicing in the ‘badlands' area into the mid 1950s. Hamel writes that there is ‘a strong continuity of workings at the township for sixty years from 1891 to the 1950s.
As the population declined throughout the mid twentieth century, so did the services in the valley. When the hotel lost its license in the early 1950s the town ‘died completely.' The only remaining inhabitants were those who lived on the two sheep stations.
In the 1950s there was still hope that the Nevis might once again have a golden future, when the prospects of the shale oil industry focused on the lignite deposits in the valley. Samples of the oil bearing shale were sent to the United States by the Otago Development Council. Issues of isolation and the hazards of traversing ‘the highest road in New Zealand' were seen as potential barriers to the exploitation of the shale oil. The Otago Development Council hoped that with open-cast mining the shale might be mined economically and provide the nucleus for ‘an indigenous oil industry.' These hopes have not been fulfilled.
In the later years of the twentieth century there has been low key mining in the Lower Nevis Valley.
In the 1990s Pioneer Generation Ltd, a company owned by Central Lakes Trust began an investigation into the feasibility of a hydro scheme on the Nevis River, which would flood a large portion of the river flats in the Lower Nevis Valley.
In June 2008 the Minister for the Environment received an application to amend the Water Conservation (Kawarau) Order 1997, in respect of the Nevis River. The applicant, the New Zealand and Otago Fish & Game Councils, sought to impose a prohibition on damming the river, along with conditions on minimum flows. The application was publicly notified in September 2008, with 248 submissions received, the majority supporting Fish and Game's application. NZHPT submitted in support of the application and appeared at the Special Tribunal Hearing for the Kawarau Water Conservation Order on 3 June 2009.
The continuity in the use of the Lower Nevis continues into the twenty first century. Families with links back to the miners of the 1860s continue to visit the valley, staying in miner's cottages, bringing with them visitors who get to experience the isolation and history of the area.
