When the Waitara war broke out the white population did not number more than seventy-five thousand. When Te Kooti was chased into the King Country it had grown to nearly four times that sum, in the face of debt, doubt, and the paralyzing effects of war. A great ally of settlement had come upon the scene. In 1861 profitable goldfields were discovered in Otago. The little Free Church colony, which in thirteen years had scarcely increased to that number of thousands, was thunderstruck at the news. For years there had been rumours of gold in the river beds and amongst the mountains of the South Island. From 1857 to 1860 about £150,000 had been won in Nelson. In 1858, a certain Asiatic, Edward Peters, known to his familiars as Black Pete, who had somehow wandered from his native Bombay through Australia to Otago, had struck gold there; and in March, 1861, there was a rush to a short-lived goldfield at the Lindis, another spot in that province. But it was not until the winter of that year that the prospector, Gabriel Read, found in a gully at Tuapeka the indubitable signs of a good alluvial field. Digging with a butcher's knife, he collected in ten hours nearly five-and-twenty pounds' worth of the yellow metal. Then he sunk hole after hole for some distance, finding gold in all. Unlike most discoverers, Read made no attempt to keep his fortune to himself, but wrote frankly of it to Sir John Richardson, the superintendent of the province. For this he was ultimately paid the not extravagant reward of £1,000. The good Presbyterians of Dunedin hardly knew in what spirit to receive the tidings. But some of them did not hesitate to test the field. Very soberly, almost in sad solemnity, they set to work there, and the result solved all doubts. Half Dunedin rushed to Tuapeka. At one of the country kirks the congregation was reduced to the minister and precentor. The news went across the seas. Diggers from Australia and elsewhere poured in by the thousand. Before many months the province's population had doubled, and the prayerful and painful era of caution, the day of small things, was whisked away in a whirl of Victorian enterprise. For the next few years the history of Otago became a series of rushes. Economically, no doubt, "rush" is the proper word to apply to the old stampedes to colonial goldfields. But in New Zealand, at any rate, the physical methods of progression thither were laborious in the extreme. The would-be miner tramped slowly and painfully along, carrying as much in the way of provisions and tools as his back would bear. Lucky was the man who had a horse to ride, or the rudest cart to drive in. When, as time went on, gold was found high up the streams amongst the ice-cold rivers and bleak tussock-covered mountains of the interior, the hardships endured by the gold-seekers were often very great. The country was treeless and wind-swept. Sheep roamed over the tussocks, but of other provisions there were none. Hungry diggers were thankful