ALTHOUGH the West Coast boom did not come until after the first decline of the Otago field, the Collingwood goldfield was the scene of a minor rush in 1857. John Ellis and John James were rewarded by a Nelson ‘Gold Bonus Committee’ for discovering gold in payable quantities in 1856. W. Hough and W. G. Lightband were mainly re­sponsible for the development of this goldfield on the Aorere River. Before the end of 1857 more than a thousand miners were busy on the new field. Discoveries in 1857 and 1858 proved that gold existed over a large part of the Nelson Pro­vince. In 1857 the Oakes brothers found gold on the West Coast, and two years later John Rochfort, a Nelson surveyor, officially confirmed this report. He obtained several pennyweights at a point on the Buller River later well known as the Old Diggings. Prospects in the west and north of the South Island appeared to be bright, but the Nelson goldfields were totally eclipsed by the amazing discoveries made in Otago in 1861.

In 1862 the Canterbury Provincial Govern­ment, hoping that gold would be discovered on the eastern side of the Southern Alps, offered £ 1,000 to the discoverer of a payable goldfield. But the gold proved to be all on the west. In December 1862 a Captain Dixon sent a note by Ihaia Tainui, a native, claiming the reward. Tainui, however, was himself a claimant, producing gold j he said he had found on 17^th October 1862. In January of the following year another man, Day, found gold on the Taramakau River and ‘the colour’ was soon struck in other parts, in the Greenstone neighbourhood and in the Grey Valley. The Canterbury Provincial Government never paid the reward, though one claimant, Albert Hunt, received £200 for the exploration and de­velopment of the coast. Yet so low did Canterbury estimate its western quarter that in the early sixties the Lyttelton Times wrote: ‘The West Coast appears to us to be the best place for locat­ing a central convict settlement.’ Nature had a different fate in store for the Golden West. For a time the Westland fields were left to the miners from Nelson. The storekeeper Cin the person of Reuben Waite) and the banker (G, O. Preshaw) arrived on the Coast in 1864. Soon the news of the rich discoveries began to reach the outside world.