One way to try coining cash on goldfields was by selling tools, food, drink, drugs and sex to the diggers. A ‘whole population’ always followed goldseekers to diggings, wrote Julius von Haast; ‘the demi-monde, sharpers and idlers of every kind, resembling marauders who follow an army.’[i] Tools were needed to dig for gold. Food was needed to stay alive while digging. Gin, rum and whisky were downed to keep the spirits up. Beer, on the other hand, was not drunk very freely; it cost too much to pack it in on the backs of horses or donkeys. Opium, ether and other drugs were mixed with alcohol and sold as patent medicine. Sex was sold by women keeping pubs or stores as ‘fronts’ for sex work. Although all these trades could be good earners, traders often went bust within a year or so.
     Two stores were set up not long after the rush to the diggings at Blackball.
     At some point in 1865 the first opened its doors on the wetlands where Blackball Creek and Ford Creek flowed into the Grey. Henry Hammett was the storekeeper. We know nothing about him other than that he and his wife had split up. Johanna Newenham, the wife, was dying on a goldfield in Victoria when the husband set up shop at Blackball.[ii] He sold, after a short while, to a man called Campbell. The new owner quickly flicked the store on to Mary Hewlitt and her husband Henry Mitchell. Mitchell had worked as a boatman on the Grey, ferrying goldseekers upriver from Cobden to Twelve Mile, before opening a store at Nelson Creek. Mary and Henry ‘carried it on for a short time’ but found themselves unable to make money. Campbell took back the ownership. Afterwards, he sold to Henry Hammett, who had ‘another try at it’ for a year or so before selling to a couple whose name would become legendary in Blackball: Georgina and William Kinsella.[iii]
     William Kinsella was an Irish school teacher, ‘very good at mathematics.’ Georgina Thompson married him in Hokitika in 1868 and they settled at the store not long after the wedding. They had a licence from the Nelson provincial government to run a ferry across the Grey. Also they had a licence to sell drink. Alexander Bowkett tells us that they built the store ‘early in 1870’ but since a store already had been on the site for five years the truth may be they simply rebuilt it more robustly. The new store sat on top of ‘very high piles because when the creek rose it flowed under the house.’ The Kinsella family were soon growing oats as well as running the store, pub and ferry. And they kept poultry: ‘turkeys, fowls, geese, ducks.’ They planted an orchard. They grazed and killed bullocks. William became a gold buyer, acting as an agent for the Bank of New Zealand.[iv] Georgina and William were soon bringing up a family.
     A second store was opened within a year or two of the rush to Blackball. William Williams opened his doors to trade in a rough clearing whose setting was the opposite of the other store in its swampy wetlands. A wooden building with two stone chimneys, it sat among the steep spurs and narrow gorges in the black beech forest of Upper Blackball, near where Clark Creek flowed into Blackball Creek.[v] Williams not only sold tools and food but also had a licence to sell drink.
     A third store was opened on the flats in the late 1860s by a man called Hughes, who had ‘come from the Coal Pits rush, and was some time also working in the locality.’[vi]
 


[i] Haast, H F von, The Life and Times of Sir Julius von Haast, Wellington 1948, p. 407.
[ii] Grey River Argus, 6 January 1866.
[iii] West Coast Times, 19 October 1870.
[iv] Bowkett, Alexander, Centennial of Blackball 1866-1966, Greymouth 1966, p. 7.
[v] Historic Site Records: Moonlight and Blackball Creeks (Westland) (heritage.org.nz), p 114.
[vi] West Coast Times, 19 October 1870.

We don’t really know how many goldseekers dug in the shingles of ‘the Black Ball’ in the 1860s. Diggers were a restless crew. They swarmed in suddenly. They swarmed away suddenly. ‘The largest population at any time was about 150,’ noted the West Coast Times.[i] A goldfields commissioner estimated at the end of the third year of the diggings that the tally had dropped to only one hundred.[ii] At the end of the decade there were only about thirty-five men and boys.[iii] Yet one or two thousand must have spent at least some time digging and washing on Ford Creek and Blackball Creek.
     Almost all worked together in gangs. Only a very few diggers chose to work alone, which was so odd that they were known as ‘hatters’ – they were thought to be ‘as mad as a hatter.’ A working gang might be three men or it might be twenty men and was known as a ‘party.’ A party was a little democracy. All members of the party were equal owners of the claim, which they had to register with the provincial government of Nelson. All members of the party voted on what to do.
     Although a lot of us have a vague idea that those who rushed to the diggings were driven by the wish to win the jackpot, most diggers were not so silly. Gold digging was an investment. You needed a few hundred pounds to become a digger, which made it beyond the reach of the unskilled working class. Almost all diggers came from the skilled working class or the lower middle class. Almost always they hoped to find enough gold to allow them to buy a small farm, to set up a workshop, or to buy a pub or a shop. The dream was not to become rich but to become ‘independent,’ as people said in the nineteenth century. Or in other words, to make their own living without being beholden to a boss – to free themselves from having to work for a wage or salary.
     How much money did they make from digging at Blackball? A few found big nuggets. One ‘curious piece of auriferous timber’ unearthed in 1867 was a stick or root nearly half a metre long, ‘much contorted and water-worn,’ embedded with ‘nuggets and specks of gold.’ One nugget on the stick looked like ‘the breast-pin in a very quiet old gentleman’s cravat.’[iv] A lot more found small nuggets, flakes and specks plentiful enough to make a good living. A provincial official reported in the fourth year after the beginning of the rush that diggers were earning on average ‘£4 per man per week’ at Blackball Creek.[v] A very good wage by the standards of the day. ‘I could mention many rich claims throughout the district,’ wrote an official the following year, ‘but … £4 to £5 per man would represent the average weekly earnings of every miner at work in my district.’[vi] A good many diggers made so little, though, that they gave up, packed their kits and trekked off to another diggings – or threw in their hand altogether and went back to wage or salary work.
     Or they were killed by the work. Gold digging was dangerous. A digger could be drowned by a sudden flood. ‘I cannot advise anyone to try their luck here, as there is too much water,’ observed a newspaper correspondent from Blackball.[vii] A digger could also be buried alive under a shingle fall.
     The end of some careers on the diggigns was to be driven in a hearse through the streets of Greymouth and buried in the town’s raw new cemetery


[i] West Coast Times, 19 October 1870
[ii] Bowkett, Alexander, Centennial of Blackball 1866-1966, Greymouth 1966, p. 5.
[iii] West Coast Times, 19 October 1870
[iv] Southland Times, 19 August 1867
[v] Bowkett, Alexander, Centennial of Blackball 1866-1966, Greymouth 1966, p. 5.
[vi] Grey River Argus, 8 June 1869
[vii] Evening Post, 28 May 1866.

Gold diggers who toiled in the shingle beds of Blackball during the 1860s were ‘men of all nationalities,’ notes Alexander Bowkett.[i] Not that all of them were men; a good many were boys. A few were women. The first goldseekers to have washed the creeks seem to have been Māori, which is not surprising because the young and fit in many tribes were keen to seek gold and were the pioneer diggers in the watershed of the Buller. Afterwards they were the pioneer diggers in the Grey Valley. They worked in parties of men, women, girls and boys. And they were ‘ever restless’ to find new fields, in the words of the Greymouth gold buyer, Reuben Waite.[ii]
    After them came men and boys from overseas; Britain, Ireland, the United States, Scandinavia and Germany – and later China and Italy.
     The two kingdoms of Great Britain sent hundreds of men and boys to Blackball. A lot of them made almost no mark. One was Alfred Rayment from Burnham, Essex; he was about thirty at the time of the first rush to Blackball.[iii] Another was William Grant from Forfar, Scotland; he was a few years older.[iv] Also some young men came to the diggings from the principality of Wales. One was Henry Francis from Caermarthen.[v]
     Irish diggers came to goldfields mostly from Clare, Limerick, Tipperary, Kings and Kilkenny.[vi] One of them was James Kelly from Kilkenny. [vii] Catholic as well as Irish, the way of life of these men and boys often differed markedly from the Germans, Scandinavians, English and Scots.
     Americans from the Yankee states and from the former Confederacy swarmed to the diggings on the West Coast. Almost all of them were of German, British, Irish or Scandinavian ancestry. George Thomasson, for example, who came from Bangor, Maine, was the son of Scandinavian forebears before ending up a digger at Ford Creek.[viii]
     Germans went everywhere on the diggings. They made key finds on Blackball Creek and gave their name to the tributary of German Gully. German goldseekers seem mostly to have hailed from the north rather than the south of their homeland, making them Protestant rather than Catholic, which in turn made it easy for them to blend with the English, Scots and Scandinavians. Among the Scandinavians, the most numerous were Norwegians. Frederick Olsen from Drammen, Norway, was in his mid twenties at the time of the first rush to Blackball.[ix] Frederick Langren, in his  mid thirties, was another forgotten Norwegian.[x]
     Chinese goldseekers would become a big group working the shingles along Ford Creek. Almost all of them came from the province of Guangdong. Italians would find their way to the reefs at Upper Blackball. ‘The Italians seemed to be in considerable numbers,’ notes Alexander Bowkett.[xi]
     Almost none of these diggers stayed on the diggings. The mass of them camped and dug for no more than a year or two, or for a few weeks, or even for no more than a day or two, before swagging up and heading away forever from Blackball.

​

[i] Bowkett, Alexander, Centennial of Blackball 1866-1966, Greymouth 1966, p. 7.
[ii] Waite, Reuben, A Narrative of the Discovery of the West Coast Gold-Fields, Nelson 1869 (new edition Christchurch 1998), p. 18.
[iii] Grey River Argus, 19 December 1891.
[iv] Grey River Argus, 12 April 1894.
[v] Grey River Argus, 2 October 1893.
[vi] Fraser, Lyndon, ‘Irish Migration to the West Coast, 1864-1900,’ New Zealand Journal of History 34, October 2000, p. 203.
[vii] Grey River Argus, 28 September 1893.
[viii] Grey River Argus, 10 October 1890.
[ix] Grey River Argus, 19 September 1892.
[x] Grey River Argus, 21 April 1896.
[xi] Bowkett, Alexander, Centennial of Blackball 1866-1966, Greymouth 1966, p. 7.

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

Why was Blackball Creek called Blackball Creek? The traditional story is that the creek and then the town were named after the Black Ball Line, a shipping company, acquired a coal lease on a block of land. Yet the creek was given its name some years before anybody leased any land for coalmining. Newspapers wrote about ‘the Black Ball’ and ‘Blackball Creek’ by the middle of 1866, but never said why.[i]
     The Black Ball Line was formed in Liverpool in 1852 in order to run shipping services between Europe and the goldfields in New South Wales and Victoria. As the company thrived, it added further services to India, China and New Zealand. ‘The Oliver Lang, a fine vessel of 1299 tons, the first of the Blackball line for New Zealand,’ noted a newspaper five years after the formation of the company, ‘arrived at Wellington on the 19th inst with 414 passengers and a general cargo, after a rapid voyage of 85 days from Liverpool.’[ii] The company’s ships were soon working all our seaways. All vessels sailing under the Black Ball flag were ‘comfortable, had well ventilated quarters for steerage passengers, state rooms for cabin passengers, smoking rooms, decorated saloons and were strongly rigged.’[iii] The Black Ball Line stopped operating in 1871.
     Does anyone have any other theory why the creek got the name Blackball?
     Could a chunk of coal have been washed down the creek and bashed about on its way downstream until, when first spotted by goldseekers, it looked more or less like a black ball? Coal ‘balls’ are sometimes seen on the sea beaches of the West Coast. Whoever named the creek will perhaps have seen such a roundish rock and thought of the distinctive company flag of the Black Ball Line. The company’s ships carried more diggers and other passengers than any other line between the various gold colonies on both sides of the Tasman. Or perhaps nobody thought about the shipping company but just thought: ‘Look, a black ball in the creek!’


[i] Evening Post, 28 May 1866.
[ii] Wanganui Herald, 3 January 1857
[iii] Baines & MacKay / Black Ball Line, Liverpool (theshipslist.com)