In these years, teams of horses were used to transport goods. They were used to haul logs and timber. When land had been cleared sufficiently they pulled the plough. Horses were used to visit outlying areas, and horses were essential for droving. In the absence of a farrier, men had to learn to shoe their horses and also, through trial and error, discover remedies to use whenever their animals were sick. Home-made remedies evolved as they did also for sick children.
In Pioneer Work in the Alps of New Zealand, written by A.P. Harper in 1894, he commented that the inland track between Waiho (Franz Josef) and Weheka (Fox Glacier) had grown over, possibly because storekeepers and publicans at both Okarito and Gillespie’s wanted the horse traffic to continue along the beach. It was still a track in 1906 when Agnes Moreland went south, as recorded in her book, Through South Westland.
Laurence continued gold mining over the following decades and built a water-race to help him extract the precious metal from the black sand. He earned enough to not only feed his growing family of eight, but also to purchase land. Throughout the 1870s and 1880s he would have witnessed the move by other settlers to take up land. Because his growing family included sons he obviously realised that the future lay in the land rather than in gold prospecting, hence his first purchase of 100 acres in 1889. He must also have appreciated that had he remained in Ireland, such a purchase would have been beyond his wildest dreams.
In the small cottage in which Laurence and Margaret started their married life, food was cooked on a camp oven with huge cast-iron pots and kettles hung on davits attached to the chimney. There was plenty to eat but little variation in the meals. Nevertheless, fruit cakes and girdle scones would have been produced, as well as bread. Reports indicated that yeast was made from a mixture of hops and potatoes. Wood was plentiful in the nearby bush with
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