The Pioneer of Gold Discovery in Otago.

Cromwell Argus, Volume I, Issue 21, 6 April 1870, Page 7

The Pioneer of Gold Discovery in Otago.

A few weeks ago, we published in our columns, under the above heading, an article from the Brum Herald, to which a correspondent of the Evening Star rpakes the following reply ; The extract from the Bru.ee Herald, which you published last evening, is certainly a great curiosity. “That in the year 1853, any man in Otago should have been so utterly ignorant of what all the world besides so well knew, as to consider the discovery of gold in our midst a dire calamity; that he should be so demented as to believe he was doing a service by keeping the fact a profound secret, is not very creditable to our early history as a province. But, sir, that in the year 1870, when the discovery of gold has actually changed our then insignificance into that of comparative magnificence —that now an editor of an Otago journal should gravely propose to reward such a man with soaje tangible presentation, is a gross insult to the community at large, “Truly the editor must be playing a cruel joke upon his protege, or at least be doing him and his deserts a greater injustice. If this bn not the case, I would propose that a full-length portrait of each be taken, which might well and appr .pci ite’.y ‘ be handed down to future gen nations’ on the walls of the Otago Museum, with the following inscriptions :

No. 1.— 1 1 am the man who for seven Jong years kept the Province of Otago from leaking a “fair start” in its career of golden prosperity.’ No. 2.—‘And I am the editor who, in 1873, proposed ho should ho rewarded for his “faithful adherence” to such an egregious course of reprehensible folly.' ”