One hundred and fifty years ago on December 14, 1861 the Otago Witness, the Saturday newspaper in Dunedin, reprinted a letter from an employee of the remarkable local entrepreneur and businessman, Mr John Jones, written to his boss.
Dated 12th December 1861, it began "Sir - I am pleased to inform you that I have discovered Gold to the north of this province, in the Manuherikia Valley, but not in paying quantities at present. I found gold over a large extent of country, and I firmly believe before long I shall discover a good lead, as the country has every appearance of a gold field."
The letter recounts the adventures and tribulations of a small party of prospectors, assembled and paid by Jones, who departed Dunedin on September 30, 1861 and sampled gravels first - unsuccessfully - in the Waikouaiti area, then having "pushed on" to the Dunstan Mountains, "in a large gulley [sic] running into the Dunstan Creek".
The party had returned to Dunedin for tools and provisions, having run out of food, been refused assistance at Mr Black's station (now Ophir) despite their willingness to pay for any sustenance offered, and been forced to survive "on nothing but grass roots for three days".
Mr Black, said the correspondent somewhat unnecessarily, "did not want gold diggers there".
The writer, shown as "A. G. Reyman", informed J. Jones Esq. that three or four weeks hence he would report again on his return to that very promising "gulley".
This letter was introduced in the Otago Witness by a lead article headed "Gold in the North" which stated "there can be no doubt that a fine field exists in the direction he (Mr Reyman) has been, but possibly it may take some time to develop".
And later, it describes "the gully is about two miles long, by a quarter of a mile wide ... Dunstan Gully is situated thirty miles from the Lindis, on Mr Black's run".
The fact that the letter from Mr "Reyman" (whom we now understand to be more accurately A. G. Peyman) and the bold header article caused no ripples in the bustling township of Dunedin - then still fuelled with the heady successes and transforming excitement of the Tuapeka goldfield to the south - has a telling precedent.
When Gabriel Read sat down on May 23, 1861 to write to Provincial Superintendent Major Richardson, informing him of his astonishing discoveries of "gold shining like the stars in Orion on a dark, frosty night", he (Read) predicted an influx of eager diggers immediately his news was published. Major Richardson immediately handed the letter to the Otago Witness, which printed it on June 6, 1861 without comment, tucked down at the foot of a column below a report about the several hundred miners working at the Lindis Valley goldfield.
The Lindis had experienced a small rush during the autumn, and although it was the largest single "settlement" outside Dunedin at the time, its fortunes were on the wane, and bitter winter was making life difficult there.
No great fortunes had been made, and indeed several other anecdotal reports of gold salting the Otago gravels had been circulating for almost a decade in the township - all of them successfully contained and silenced by the dictatorial governing elite gathered around the recently deceased Superintendent William Cargill.
Determined that no unruly mob of gold diggers was going to upset their struggling, God-faring little colony, Captain Cargill and his colleagues had poured scorn on all such devilish temptation.
In late 1856 they had effectively suppressed the declaration by no less than the Surveyor General of New Zealand, Charles Ligar, that the region was loaded with gold; and when the province's own chief surveyor, the redoubtable John Turnbull Thomson, wrote to the council six months later that "the existence of gold is undoubted" that, too, was successfully buried.
When Thomson's surveying assistant, Alexander Garvie, filed an official report in July 1858 declaring that payable gold was found in rivers throughout the Otago "Wasteland" (as the interior, our Central Otago, was then called), his report, as Vincent Pyke later wrote, "fell on deaf ears". No-one took the bait.
Perhaps it was that knowledge that explains why, when Read's extraordinary letter to Richardson was printed, nothing happened.
Read returned with supplies and better tools to the site of his discovery, worked diligently and with unimaginable success, expecting to be "rushed" every day. But no-one came. The hills around "Gabriel's Gully" stayed empty, and silent but for the bleating of a few sheep.
It was not until provincial councillor J. L. Gillies stood up in the Provincial Council in early July, 1861, holding in his hands 5lbs of gold from Read's claim, that the "obstinate incredulity" suddenly disintegrated, replaced by the very insanity and wild upheaval so feared by Cargill's cronies. The Tuapeka goldrush was instantly afire, and the returns were astonishing: within eight days the first armed gold escort from Gabriel's arrived in Dunedin, led by the Superintendent himself, bearing 500oz of gold. It got better: by the end of December 1861 more than 76,000oz had been exported from Dunedin to Melbourne, and an unknown quantity gone in the pockets of successful diggers.
Johnny Jones, a shipowner and dominant merchant in Dunedin, was well-placed to take commercial advantage of the Tuapeka rush. This he did with typical astuteness and probity, greatly increasing his already considerable fortune.
He must also have nursed some memories of those earlier, discarded reports of gold widely distributed throughout the interior, and having witnessed the unprecedented riches won at Gabriel's, decided to take a punt on funding a team of his own men to see what they might find beyond the northwestern skyline. Mr Peyman and his men set out on September 30, 1861, while all the interest was still focused on Tuapeka in the south.
As we have seen, Peyman reported back in early December, and returned to that "gully" beside the Dunstan Creek in the middle of that month, better provisioned - again paid for by Jones - and better equipped for the task.
What success they found is unrecorded. We do know that, just as when Gabriel Read's unselfish letter was ignored, so was Peyman's: compared with the riches flowing from Tuapeka, anything less than the Gold Escort's wondrous freight was bound to be ignored.
But the Jones-Peyman group weren't troubled by that. We don't know if any of them made their fortunes, or how much Johnny Jones benefited from this particular investment, but it can't have been a failure: searching for some evidence of the fate of that prospecting party, I came across two persuasive entries - the first in the Otago Witness of February 15, 1862, wherein the following:
"The reports of a Northern field have also proved to be not without foundation, but there is not as yet any reliable information as to the value of the ground. A party of prospectors, led by a person named Reyman, have, it seems, been working for some time on Black's station, in the northern portion of the province, and Mr Reyman has come to Dunedin to try to make terms for a reward; but as he has not been able to come to any arrangement with the Government, he has not published his discovery. He states he will be content with a reward of £100 when 10,000 ounces of gold shall have been obtained."
The reward referred to is, of course, the bounty offered by the Provincial Government for the discovery of a paying goldfield. Exactly seven months later Hartley and Reilly were haggling with the same Government officials over the very same reward - they were eventually granted £2000.
This February 15 reference ends somewhat disparagingly: "Some doubts appear to be entertained as to the authenticity of his (Reyman's) statements". Another example, perhaps, of the "obstinate incredulity" in high places.
The second mention comes in the Otago Daily Times of August 8, 1862 - just one week before Hartley and Reilly emerged from the hills, exhausted by the winter journey across the inland ranges and the weight of their fabulous bounty from the Molyneux River.
"We have learned that a party of five men have been for a considerable time digging at the foot of the Dunstan Ranges, with tolerable success. A mounted constable who, on the 26th ult, left the Highlay Police Station, came upon the party in question at Dunstan Creek, four miles from its junction with the Manuherikia at the base of the Dunstan Ranges. The party had been located there about nine months (italics mine), and built themselves a comfortable mud hut.
"They had not been working since the middle of June, the extreme severity of the weather having put a stop to their operations. During the time they had been working in that locality their wages had been averaging 3s per day per man. They procured rations from the neighbouring stations, and the settlers of the district had behaved very kindly to them.
"The men referred to were originally fitted out as a prospecting party by Messrs. Jones and Co., of Dunedin, and were consequently well supplied with tools and mining appliances. They stated that, but for these circumstances, they would not have remained on the spot. The gold is found in the bed of the creek, three or four feet deep ... "
The report continues with the declaration that "there is room on the Dunstan Creek for about 100 diggers", and advises that more than a cradle and tin dish, "miners should have sluices and plenty of tools".
By August 1862 there was much anxiety in Dunedin that the Tuapeka finds had been a fortunate one-off, that the prosperity it promised was a brief phantom, and the goldfields to the south were tiring, destined to be Otago's only shot at Provincial wealth.
If this account in the Otago Daily Times on August 8 caused any ripples of renewed hope in the community, they were obliterated the following week when Hartley and Reilly opened the door of the Gold Receiver's Office in Dunedin on the 15th.
Desperate to boost the flagging momentum, the local Government had hired three prospecting parties of its own - just as John Jones had done nine months earlier - and one party, led by Henry Stebbing, had found "favourable prospects" where the Manuherikia River joined the Molyneux - Alexandra now.
Stebbing told his superiors of the encouraging finds, but delayed handing his report to the Goldfields Warden until August 18. It, too, was lost in the mayhem following Hartley and Reilly's announcement. The Dunstan goldrush, like a tsunami, carried all before it, a massive tide of voracious, optimistic, and generally poorly-equipped diggers.
Peyman and his team warranted one further mention. The Otago Witness of June 12, 1865, carried the following: "The Four Mile (Welchman's [sic] or Old Dunstan Creek, is exactly four miles distant. The workings here are in a gully running down from the Dunstan Ranges, gold being discovered here previous to the rush to the Molyneux, by a prospecting party fitted out at the sole expense of the well-known Mr John Jones of Waikouaiti".
Beyond that, the Jones-Peyman party quietly slipped from further record - at least so far.
Their "gulley" was by 1863 home to several hundred miners, renamed first "Welshman's Gully", then later Cambrian Valley. "Dunstan Creek" was the name given to the village we now know as St Bathans, and for a brief time, as noted in the Witness, Peyman's "large gulley" was called "Old Dunstan Creek".
While Welshman's Gully/Cambrian Valley had a future lasting several decades and once boasted four hotels to serve the needs of its hardy inhabitants, St Bathans dominated those years with huge gold production from the hydraulic elevators and extensive sluicing operations there.
Inspired and paid by Jones, the Peyman party's discovery in that "gulley running into Dunstan Creek" may not have been the Big One, and was of course wholly eclipsed by the Molyneux rush; but it was the first in Central Otago, by some nine months, and it did succeed - albeit at a modest level perhaps - until miners wandering from the flooding Molyneux spread across the valleys further afield and unlocked the riches of the Manuherikia, Kyeburn, Hogburn (Naseby) and the rest.
But it is demonstrably true that when the ill-provisioned, eager thousands poured into the Dunstan Gorge in late August of 1862, a small group of miners - well-fed and comfortably settled in their mud-brick hut in a wide gully near the Dunstan Creek, and evidently doing quite well, thank you sir - went on with their work of many months, a full summer, autumn and winter, unperturbed by the tumult miles to the south.
Had circumstances been different - had the excitement of Gabriel's not been quite so consuming in December of 1861, had the populace not been quite so accustomed to ignoring reports of proven gold from distant places - the first gold rush into the vast Wasteland of Otago may well have been to Dunstan Creek, Welshman's Gully - my home Cambrian Valley.
The name Peyman (or it Reyman after all ?) is sadly absent from the many histories of the Otago gold era I've read over the years - including, unfortunately, my own. His name appears on no monuments or commemorative plaques. With the celebrations of this marvellous period now imminent, that omission may change.
Johnny Jones died in March 1869, his very significant contribution to the gold history of Central Otago unmentioned in the long and laudatory obituaries printed in the local papers.
I hope this article has done some justice to his part, and the record now stands corrected, these 150 years after the event.
• Grahame Sydney is an artist and author.
