Daily Photo – The Ida Range

The gold discovery in the Naseby area was made in 1863, and the rush was spectacular. The original prospectors discovered gold around the Hogburn, and within only a few days, more than 1,000 miners had arrived. By the end of July, there were over 2,000 men working around Naseby and the wider Mount Ida field. The rush happened so quickly in the essentially empty Maniototo countryside that towns popped up almost overnight, and Naseby was one of them.

Of course, getting several thousand gold-hungry men to the goldfields was one thing. Getting them back out again was another. In September 1863, Sergeant Ryan, stationed at Mount Ida, sent Constable Garvey and another policeman to investigate the new rush at Clarke’s, in the Mount Burster area. On the return journey, an over-confident Constable Garvey walked ahead of the others into a snowstorm. The constable and his companion, fearing they had become lost, took shelter beneath a rock while the weather closed in around them. When the storm had passed, the two men eventually staggered back to Mount Ida, badly frostbitten. Garvey didn’t make it. His body was later found, ravaged by the storm. It was a sobering reminder that beneath all the excitement of the gold rush, this was still a wild and unforgiving corner of the country, where a man could leave town in search of a few nuggets and simply disappear.