A HISTORY OF BLACKBALL: GETTING TO THE GOLD DIGGINGS, 1865-1869

The first goldseekers who dug and washed in Blackball Creek and Ford Creek from late 1864 were followed by swarms of others. The swarms turned up whenever word of some new find came to the many pubs and brothels now thriving on the West Coast.
     Getting to Blackball, however, was far from easy.
     Diggers trekked by way of the old Māori track on the northwest bank of the Grey. The trek began at the little port town of Cobden, founded by the Nelson provincial government as headquarters of the Southwest Nelson Goldfield. The warden stationed at Cobden, together with his armed troopers, was in charge of Blackball. The provincial government set gangs of other men to work turning the old Māori track into a broader ‘pack’ track – a narrow roadway that could be used by horses or donkeys laden with goods. All the creeks flowing across the track had to be forded; there were no bridges. A tree would be felled in some spots a tree would be felled and rolled lengthways across a creek. The pack track for most of its way wound through quaking wetlands and thick stands of kahikatea towering into the sky.
     Or diggers paid a shilling or two to be rowed in whaleboats upriver from Cobden or the other little port town, Greymouth. Whaleboats and barges went as far as Twelve Mile. A township near what we now call Stillwater, Twelve Mile for a few fleeting years was the ‘large and flourishing’ wooden, iron and canvas entropot for diggings along the Grey Valley.[i] A warden and mounted troops for the Canterbury side of the goldfields were housed in its barracks. Flanking the barracks were ‘banks, hotels, and other business places almost out of number.’[ii]
     At Twelve Mile, goldseekers could be rowed across the river at Langdon’s Ferry. John and Harriet Langdon had built a hotel and ran the ferry. Afterwards the goldseekers would tramp on foot, sometimes leading pack animals, to Blackball Forks. Other goldseekers went from Twelve Mile to Ngāhere on a pack track built quickly by Canterbury. At Ngāhere, goldseekers could take a ferry across the Grey.
     Nelson and Canterbury provincial governments struggled to upgrade these ways for travellers to get to Blackball. ‘As soon as Nelson province realised the importance of the south-west goldfields it made efforts to establish a road or rail along the Nelson side of the River,’ notes Alexander Bowkett; ‘but apart from foot tracks and the setting up of a few ferrymen this dream road never came into being.’[iii] Costs were high even maintaining the pack track. One section of nearly a kilometre, for example, was washed away in a spring flood, ‘necessitating the traveller to push his way through a perfect maze of supplejacks and bush-lawyers, a trying task to a digger laden with a heavy swag.[iv]
     Canterbury, a richer province, spent more freely than Nelson. The pack track on the southeastern bank soon became a fairly good roadway. Yet it was still not easy getting through the wetlands from the new road at Ngāhere to the ferry at the Grey. And, once goldeekers had been ferried across the river or got to Ford Creek by way of the Nelson pack track, nor was it easy to get through the wide wetlands and sopping ‘by-wash’ – an old reach of the river now landlocked – where Blackball Creek and Ford Creek flowed into the Grey. Picking a way through wetlands and by-wash could be frightening. Wayfarers often lost the track and sank up to their waists. Sandflies swarmed. Men maddened by the biting sometimes smeared their faces and hands with rancid pork or mutton fat in a hopeless struggle to stop their skin redding and swelling.
     The way got harder still after goldseekers had made their way across the wetlands. Toiling up the two creeks and their tributaries in the quest for paydirt was more and more challenging the deeper a digger went into the steep eastern spurs of the Paparoa Range. Nelson province dug into its shallow pockets to stump up for the first stages of what would come to be known as the Croesus Track. A journalist late in 1868 claimed that ‘many more’ diggers would work the upper creeks if the provincial government only upgraded that ‘frightful’ track as it twisted nearly fifteen kilometres into the upper reaches of ‘the Black-Ball and Ford’s Creek.’[v]
    Goldseekers by the end of the 1860s could get from Cobden or Greymouth to the diggings at Upper Blackball in three or four days.


[i] West CoastTimes, 1 March 1869.
[ii] Grey River Argus, 7 September 1869.
[iii] Bowkett, Alexander, Centennial of Blackball 1866-1966, Greymouth 1966, p. 5.
[iv] Grey River Argus, 28 November 1868
[v] Grey River Argus, 28 November 1868