The Shotover Gold Rush: 1862, and What Is Left

In 1860 William Rees and Nicholas von Tunzelmann crossed the Crown Range from the Cardrona side and found the pastoral country they had been looking for. Rees built a homestead facing Queenstown Bay and had, in the Lakes District Museum's phrase, two years of peaceful settlement.

The Otago rush had already begun further east: gold at Gabriel's Gully in 1861 pulled thousands into the province. In 1862 it arrived here. The museum's own timeline gives the sequence carefully, and the order matters. Jack Tewa found gold in the Arrow River first and his find was not publicised. John McGregor and Thomas Low then found gold in the same river, and William Fox arrived around the same time, which is why Arrowtown was first known simply as Fox's. Thomas Arthur and Henry Redfern found gold in the Shotover. That is the point at which the Whakatipu rush begins.

What happened to Rees is the whole story in one line: his property was declared a goldfield, a canvas and shanty town went up on his doorstep, and he was paid £10,000 to vacate. Von Tunzelmann, across the lake, lost stock and money and was eventually forced off the land as well. The farm lasted two years. The rush that replaced it lasted a few more, and the tourism that replaced that has now run for over a century.

What arriving actually meant

Miners landed at Port Chalmers in Dunedin and travelled inland on foot and by cart to a district with no road, no bank and almost no food. The museum reproduces two contemporary accounts that make the point better than any summary.

The first is from Alfred H. Duncan's The Wakatipians, published in 1888: a man burst into a hut, seized the lump of dough that was being kneaded and ate it, then explained that he had been five days without food. The second is Vincent Pyke, in Early Gold Discoveries in Otago, 1887, on supply: because the district was so difficult to reach, provisions were scarce and dear, and he often had two to four hundred men waiting for his whaleboat to come up from Kingston to get a few pounds of flour each, some so hungry they boiled the flour in billies rather than wait for bread to bake.

By the end of October 1862, about 1,500 miners were camped along the Arrow River alone.

Every operator page and every listicle about this valley repeats some version of the same sentence: that the Shotover was the richest gold-bearing river in the world, or the second richest after the Klondike. It is worth taking that claim apart, because it is the most repeated line in Queenstown and it is not what it appears to be.

The phrase does exist in the record. The Lakes District Museum reproduces a miner's letter home, written to persuade friends to come out, and the words are: "Dear Jack, I am making my pile fast. 100 pounds a week. This is the richest river in the world. I walk up to my waist in water, put down the shovel and sometimes bring up 5 or 6 ounces."

Two things follow. First, this is a recruitment letter, not a survey: a man telling his friends he is making a hundred pounds a week, in a district where flour was being rationed off a whaleboat. Second, and this is the part nobody mentions, the museum prints it in its material about the Arrow River, not the Shotover.

We looked for an authority that attributes the phrase to the Shotover, or that publishes a total for how much gold came out of it, and we could not find one on a museum, council or government page. Te Ara and NZHistory, the two government sources most likely to hold such a figure, both refused automated reading when we tried, which is a limitation of our method rather than evidence of absence; but nothing we could read supports the ranking. So the honest version, and the one this site prints, is that the Shotover was extraordinarily rich, that the phrase comes from a contemporary letter about a neighbouring river, and that the league table is folklore.

In 1865 gold was found on the West Coast and the European miners left almost overnight, taking the Otago economy with them. The provincial government's response was to invite Chinese miners to work the fields the Europeans had abandoned. They came first from the Australian goldfields and then directly from Guangzhou province, where poverty, overcrowding and the aftermath of the Opium Wars had made emigration a family strategy rather than an adventure.

The numbers moved fast. The Department of Conservation records fewer than 200 Chinese miners in Otago in 1866 and 3,564 by the 1874 census, most of them on the goldfields and most living on the fringes of the European settlements. By 1885 the Arrowtown settlement on Bush Creek had about ten huts, a large social hall and at least two stores, plus extensive gardens, built from mud brick, mortared stone, wood, corrugated iron and canvas. The hall, perhaps fifteen metres long, disappeared around 1900.

The hostility is on the record too, and the museum reproduces it rather than tidying it away. A Tuapeka Times item of 11 March 1885 describes Arrowtown as having been for a week "the centre of attraction for about 200 Chinese" and then works itself into several sentences of open racial contempt that are unpleasant to read and were entirely ordinary in the period press. In the same collection sits a settler arguing the opposite case, that the towns of Otago were struggling and Chinese immigration should be supported. Both were written by people who thought of themselves as reasonable.

The settlement was excavated by the Department of Conservation in 1983. Two of the buildings are original and the rest were reconstructed from photographs using the same materials. Ah Lum's store, the best surviving structure, sits on a terrace about a hundred metres down the hill; Su Sing's store is marked only by four corner posts. Interpretation panels are in English and Chinese, and the main dray track through the centre of the site is suitable for wheelchairs and buggies, though the side tracks are not.

One wording note we hold ourselves to: DOC never calls the settlement free. It publishes no admission charge and describes it as a site to visit at your leisure, which is not quite the same sentence.

Arrowtown is the obvious survivor: a single historic street of miners' cottages and stone shopfronts, the 1875 gaol, and the museum in the old bank. It is twenty minutes from Queenstown and two Orbus routes reach it, which makes it the cheapest history in the district. The Arrowtown page covers the practical visit.

The Shotover itself is harder to reach than the Arrow. The richest workings were upriver in Skippers Canyon, and the road in is the one built for the miners: narrow, unsealed, cut into the schist. The bridge that every photograph of the canyon shows opened in 1901, and the district council closed it to all vehicles, cyclists and pedestrians after an inspection found failures in the wires of the cables that suspend it. There is no reopening date because the bridge's future has to go through the council's annual planning process. Operators still run the canyon, and the half-day 4WD tour is the usual way in; the photo stop is the thing that has gone. That is set out in full on the Skippers Canyon page, and it is the single most out-of-date fact on the rest of the internet about this valley.

Downstream, the continuity is almost comic. The Kawarau Suspension Bridge was built in 1880 to carry the goldfields road across the gorge; traffic moved to a new bridge in 1963, the old one was preserved, and in 1988 it became the first commercial bungy site in the world. DOC lists it as a heritage site and calls it the birthplace of bungy tourism, which means the same structure appears in this valley's story twice, a century apart, for two entirely different reasons. The Kawarau bungy page has the modern half.

And on the Shotover, in 1965, jet boats started running commercially at Arthurs Point. The river that made the district's name for a decade has been making it money ever since, in a completely different way. The Shotover Jet page covers what that ride is now.