Page:Gillespies Beach Beginnings • Alexander (2010).pdf/27

 children under 10 years of age. Besides the little wooden dwellings of the settlers there is a fine school house with a large enclosure and a post office. The latter is combined with a flourishing store and the mails are brought occasionally by a horseman who rides along the beach some 80 miles from Hokitika. Gold digging is carried on here to a certain extent but the main industry of the settlement consists in re-washing the alluvial sand that was roughly sifted at the time of the first rush to the West Coast.

Behind the little houses, green pastures stretched for a few hundred yards to the margin of the sombre forest which clothes the West Coast slopes up to the foot of the great snowy range beyond. We were curious to see the process of gold washing so we strolled down to the spot where the men laboriously washed the sand upon a bit of bark. A stream of running water is played over this fibrous texture and when the sand is washed away only the gold remains. The sand is brought from the beach in wheelbarrows. Inland the glorious snow ranges lay in full view. The peak of Mt Cook was enveloped in a slight haze but Tasman, Haidinger and Elie de Beaumont towered to their vast heights within a distance of about 15 miles. Later in the afternoon I was persuaded to visit the gold dredger which a company had set up about a mile further along the beach. The dredge, I was informed, cost over two thousand pounds but has not been profitable chiefly owing to the great cost of transportation. We did at last reach the gold dredger only to find that it was undergoing extensive repairs. It floats on a small lagoon about 200 yards from the sea.”

This first gold dredge had been assembled at Gillespie’s Beach in 1891, of suction design originally, later converted to bucket line, but the yields were poor. The accident to the dredge master was the final straw, and the dredge was closed down and sold.

1892 - Grey River Argus of 10 August - advising death of John Hartwell, manager of the Gillespie’s dredger. Mortification had set in 3 days after the necessary amputation of his leg. (One report said