It’s no wonder his friends took an interest in his long drop. Drinking your fortune may be a good spectacle sport, but it didn’t do much for Kip’s constitution. There was Kip-Two Fister, who laced his beer with flakes from the Arrow. “The better to focus the scent,” he’d say. Gamblers would often observe him snuffling along Main Street with his nose in a newspaper cone. There was Soapy Jones, who bragged he could smell gold through the ground. Jenny Burns never met many of the miners who came to Eden, but the mysterious narrator of her tale remembers them: ![]() The oddball characters depicted in films such as The Gold Rush (1925) and Paint Your Wagon (1969) aren’t too far from the truth. Gold Rush towns had a habit of attracting unusual personalities. MAGEE FUN FACT: For stories on Māori participation in the Rush, including the tale of Māori Jack, see Finding “Te Wherro” in Ōtākou: Māori and the Early Days of the Otago Gold Rush by Lloyd Carpenter. But there were also Māori miners, European settlers, and Australians looking to make good. Some of them were veterans of the California Rush (the original “forty-niners”). At the height of the Otago Gold Rush, 18,000 miners were swarming over the mountains & rivers of Central Otago. Soon enough, the area was flooded with young men searching for quick fortunes. ![]() “At a place where a kind of road crossed on a shallow bar, I shovelled away about two and a half feet of gravel, arrived at a beautiful soft slate and saw the gold shining like the stars in Orion on a dark frosty night.” History of the Early Gold Discoveries in Otago by Vincent Pyke. ![]() In May of 1861, an Australian miner named Gabriel Read was prospecting in a creek bed near Lawrence in the South Island. It may be a rollicking tall tale, but The Treasure of Mad Doc Magee has deep roots in New Zealand history.
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