THE INANGAHUA.

Westport Times, Volume V, Issue 892, 25 November 1871, Page 2

THE INANGAHUA.

The Ahaura Correspondent of the "Grey UiverArgus" writes.; —The reports from the Inangahua and Murray Creek continue good. (Speculators, chiefly from Hokitika, are still making investments, and they alt appear to be working according to some preconceived plan for the moment a share in any claim in a good locality is r-iFered for sale they pounce upon it at once. The moneyed men of Givytnouth and the. Grey Valley are behind the times with respect to the Murray Creek reefs, and there are rumours now of a brilliant move having been made which, if earned out success! ully will effectually revolutionise the present business arrangements of the Upper and Little Grey as well as r!ie J'jangahua districts. This is nothing less

than tho founding a Becond New Jerusalem in the vicinity of the Little Grey Junction, and it is in the programme that as soon as the Hokitika capitalists have secured all the mining interests worth having, which they seem to be in a fair way of doing, a new, but inland, Hokitika, will be built at the highest navigable point on the Grey or its tributaries, and the trade of the mining districts monopolised. This dream of the wise men of Hokitika is not entirely visionary ; nor as impossible of realisation as would at first appear. New blood is being gradually introduced into the business element, and especially this is the case in the quartz mining districts. These " interlopers," as they are called, are free from traditionary prejudices ; for instance, they don't consider it a commercial necessity to go to the Greymouth merchants for faim and dairy produce, when it can be brought to their own doors at less than Groymouth prices, not to speak of freight. Neither can they be brought to understand the economy which requires them to go to the Uokit'ka cattle sales to purchase stock when there is a market nearer home. These considerations will weigh with the new men, and Greymouth can't see it yet. If the Hokitika element once gets a sure footing, it will make itself felt, because it knows how to do it, and the establishment of this new town with a monopoly of the inland trade, is even an immediate possibility. These " foreigners" from the south are securing the land, as we'll as the gold, in the Upper Grey and Inangahua, and the surveyors in both districts will be busy for si.ms time laying off agricultural lots already applied for. The i.realer part of the machinery lor the Prosperity claim on Shieis's reef has reached Black's Point i.ear the junction of Murray Creek and the luangahua, and a portion of it is already on the claim. A share has b.e,en sold on one of the northern claims on Shieis's line recently,and the purchaser is again a Hokitika man.