Some time after Rule and Lacy stocked the Aramac, Mr. Hodgson arrived on it with sheep and took up and stocked Rodney Downs; he crossed the spinifex country from the Belyando to the Alice River, and lost about six thousand sheep on this track by poison bush, the Gastrolobium grandiflora. Mr. Meredith arrived in May of the same year on the Thomson, and took up and stocked Tower Hill station. During June of this year the Thomson and Aramac Creek were in high flood; Rule and Lacy were flooded out of their first camp, and removed to where Aramac station now is. Some stockmen looking after the company's cattle on an anabranch of Cornish Creek, were surrounded by water, and lived on jerked beef for a month. About July the head station was shifted up to Cornish Creek, taking the name of Bowen Downs with it, which name it has since retained. In 1872 the cattle station was formed into a separate establishment under the management of Mr. E. R. Edkins, who called it Mount Cornish, in honor of the late E. B. Cornish, of Sydney. This year wound up with a wet Christmas. Wages in those days were very high, stockmen getting as much as 40s. a week, and cooks 30s.; any old horse would bring £25. The year 1864 may be styled the year of Hegira or flight of stock outwards to settle new country; they came from all parts, and helped to fill the land everywhere with the beginning of civilisation. A boom had set in for pastoral occupation; the reports of recent explorations told of enormous tracts of grand open country waiting for stock to utilise it, and each one was anxious to be the first to secure some of it for his sheep or cattle. The head of the Flinders River was occupied by a few settlers, and two lots of sheep passed Bowen Downs, en route to the Flinders. They belonged to Kirk and Sutherland, and Mr. J. L. Ranken, and came from Fort Cooper way, losing heavily in crossing the range between Bully Creek and Lake Buchanan, between eight and ten thousand sheep perishing through eating the desert poison bush. They discovered what was the cause of such losses by feeding some sheep on the suspected plant when they died with all the symptoms of the victims in the desert track. The first white man known to have been killed by the blacks on the Thomson was one of the shepherds with Kirk and Sutherland's sheep. He was killed on Duck Pond Creek, a tributary of Cornish Creek. After he was buried, the blacks dug the body up at night and drove a stake through it, pinning it to the ground. Kirk and Sutherland must have reached the Flinders about April, and then occupied and stocked Marathon. Mr. J. L. Ranken occupied Afton Downs, but was dried out the following year, and he lost a number of his sheep in consequence of having to remove them lower down the Flinders. In March of this year Mr. Meredith, of Tower Hill, formed a station on the east side of Landsborough Creek, naming it Eversleigh, and stocked it with cattle. In March also Bowen Downs sent cattle up the