SOME EARLY HISTORY.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXV, Issue 25, 30 January 1915, Page 2

SOME EARLY HISTORY.

A RECOLLECTION OF CENERAL CHUTE. (From the Lyttelton Times.) A -New Plymouth journal has been engaged in congratulating its readers on the great advances, commercial and industrial, the Taranaki district lias made during the past year, a progress all the more creditable because of New Plymouth being at a deadend as far as interprovintial traffic is concerned, since the Main Trunk Radway was completed. The province of the Mountain is probably the most "go-ahead" district in New Zealand; its residents expend on the soil and the dairy business the dogged combativeness and determination to succeed that they devoted to the Native trouble of forty or fifty years ago. If the patriots of the Egmont country are in search of a fresh text upon which to base their panegyrics of the province they could scarcely do better than contrast the present prosperous and happy face of the land with that which it wore when General Chute made his great march round the back of the Mountain, a march which was completed just forty-nine years ago to-day.

General Chute was really the first •Imperial officer who carried the war into the heart of the Maori bush. Up to 1886 the British commanders had displayed a wholesome fear of supplejacks and bush-lawyers and had as far as possible kept to the open, country; in the hush the white regulars, loaded up with heavy knapsacks and unsuitably clothed, were at an obvious disadvantage. But General Chute, being of a more enterprising and rough-and-ready type, determined to give the Taranakis a taste of their own metal, and so conceived and carried out the idea of penetrating 'the rugged forest country on the inland, or eastern, side of Mount Egmont, from Katemarae to New Plymouth, a distance of nearly sixty miles.

This, of course, would be a trifling matter to-day, but' for those who do not know what' Taranaki was like in the middle.'sixties it may he explained that what settlement there was lay on the coast, at a few isolated localities, and that the whole of'the interior was one huge forest, much of which was 1 scarcely known even to the Maoris themselves,. There were no roads, no horse tracks even, at the back of the mountain, and where the railway line runs to-day was one vast wilderness of jungly bush, threaded by swift little rivers from Egmont, running in deep beds. Many packhorses were taken with the force when it started from Ketemarae—where the township of Nonnanby now stands—and bridges had to he thrown across the creeks before the animals could bo got across. The general's column consisted of three companies of the 14th Regiment, a Native Contingent under the old "Wanganui chief Hori te Anaua, and a party"of Forest Rangers under Von Tempsky, and Dr. Featherston, Superintendent of the Province of Wellington, accompanied the force. Each soldier carried three days' provisions and left his knapsack behind. So rough was the march that the journey took a week to clear the country,, sit Mataitawa, and it was eight days before Xew Plymouth was reached. .

There was only one skirmish, in. which three of the enemy were killed, hut the hardships of the journey were worse than mere fighting, just as the soldiers of the Allies to-day suffer more severely in the wet trendies than in the ordinary day's work of battle. They ran so short of rations that they had to shoot some of'their packhorses for food, and it rained nearly the whole time of the march. Taranaki settlers to-day, who ride smoothly in their motor-cars over Chute's old campaigning ground, and whose £SO-an-aere dairy farms have supplanted the wet hush where the weary soldiers dined on horseflesh, should give a thought now and again to the military pioneers who helped to make such a transformation possible. (