Pioneers.

The railway train traveller who speeds in safe comfort through the Waimakariri-Otira country to-day may well give a thought to the pioneers who traversed this alpine land

“Up along the hostile mountains,

Where the hair-poised snow-slide shivers.”

The men who carried their swags and made precarious bivouac among the glaciated peaks, who waded icy rivers and climbed trackless precipices, who blazed the trail through dripping forests, found a way over the great dividing range. On the western side of the Alps hunger and cold and daily risk of death were the lot of the very early explorers, pushing through the black-beech woods, fording snow rivers, living on fern root and eels when their provisions gave out.

The names of Brunner, Heaphy, Mackay, Rochfort, carry with them poignant narratives of privation and achievement. Those plucky pathfinders of the ‘forties and ‘fifties and early ‘sixties were the first who systematically explored the forests and ranges of the West Coast, and the narratives of the adventures and hardships they endured read like a romance in these days.

But it was left for a man of a generation younger than Heaphy and Brunner to make the greatest geographical discovery of all, the transalpine route at the head of the Waimakariri by which the railway and road of to-day traverse the South Island from east to west.

This pathfinder of the early ‘sixties, the discoverer of Arthur's Pass and the Otira Gorge route to Westland, is Mr. Arthur Dudley Dobson, of Christchurch. Barely twenty-two years of age when he distinguished himself by his exploring survey, Mr. Dobson, after sixty-four years of very active professional work, is still practising as a consulting engineer. His career is a lesson to young New Zealanders in enterprise, courage, and assiduous devotion to one's calling, and it is such men as this hearty veteran—the last survivor of the old pioneer band—whose page 26 name and memories deserve national honour in a high degree. They risked their lives in the cause of knowledge and progress. They skirmished far ahead of the early settler and the man of commerce, and they did not regard their explorations in the light of “exploits”; it was all in the day's work.

The narrative of how Arthur's Pass was discovered was given to me by Mr. Dobson a few years ago. It was a plain and simple story, unembellished with thrills or frills; one has to read between the lines and to know something of that formidable country of torrents and ice and snow and mountain crag to bring up a mental picture of the difficulties and hazards of the pioneer pathfinder's job in the days when so much of New Zealand was still an unmapped “no man's land.”