It was Friday, June 29, 1866.
Richard Burgess had been confident he and his cronies would have several days’ grace before their victims’ bodies were found. It would give them time to catch a ship to another part of the country, and then on to Australia.
But he was wrong.
The gold miners and businessmen from Canvas Town were reported missing the very next day… and the town formed a search party of volunteers to scour the hills.
The past few days had been tough for the searchers: a storm had lashed the hills, felling trees and flooding the creek. But the men’s spirits had been lifted by the discovery of several items they presumed had been abandoned by the Burgess gang – a shovel, a blood-spotted shirt, and a loaded double-barrelled shotgun.
They had also found the body of Old Farmer, the packhorse that belonged to one of the missing men. The horse had been shot dead.
Rain had been hammering the undergrowth, and ferns bent under the weight of the downpour.
Henry Appleton, no longer able to work on the farm because of his injured leg, had decided to take up his sketchbook again. He sheltered under an oilskin, a walking stick next to him, with his leg stretched out straight.
He peered into the mist, scribbling in his sketchbook as dozens of the good citizens of Nelson joined the police to search the undergrowth.
Henry hoped to sell his sketches to the newspapers.
There were around ninety men in the hills. Some of them were in a human chain, spaced feet apart, looking for clues. They shared a sense of horror and indignation that the peace of their respectable township had been shattered.
Everyone knew, or at least suspected, that the missing men had been murdered.
Henry looked for familiar faces among the searchers. He spotted Doctor Zephaniah Smith and Sergeant John Nash, both on horseback, water dripping from their hats.
Doctor Smith had been very understanding about his Calisher and Terry carbine, and had forgiven Henry for taking it. But he was angry when he saw Kelly’s crude signature carved into it, and had taken the gun to a cabinetmaker to remove all traces of the man’s name.
If only I could get rid of those names so easily, thought Henry. Burgess and his gang inhabited his dreams every night.
“Miriama!” he called out when he saw her in the rain, searching alongside two elderly Māori men. She was dressed once again in men’s clothes, and this time wrapped in an oilskin coat so oversized that it dragged in the mud.
She gave Henry a small wave and kept searching. She is so beautiful. Henry found it hard to look away.
“Henry!”
A loud American voice startled him.
He turned to see the bulky figure of Johnny Slick, wearing a cowboy hat and oilskin coat as though he had stepped straight out of one of his Western stories.
“Mister Slick!”
Henry was happy to see his idol again. In the last couple of days, he had re-read some of Johnny Slick’s dime novels, hoping to take his mind off Burgess and the murders. It hadn’t worked, and Henry knew there was more to come – he was certain that Johnny Slick would write about Burgess’s crimes.
The American looked around at the searchers dotted over the hillside. “Just like the Wild West, huh?”
Yes, thought Henry. But it doesn’t seem romantic anymore.
“Word is, Henry, you’re a hero.”
Henry shook his head. Henry Appleton, hero? “No, no.” I used to want that. Not now.
“Well…” drawled the American, “ya bin kidnapped and shot, broke ya leg, rescued ya womenfolk, and helped track down a bunch o’ vermin. Sure sounds like a hero to me.”
“I’m just glad to be alive,” mumbled Henry.
Slick slapped him on the back.
“Good on ya, kid. Ya bin writin’ your own story. Just like I told ya.”
He moved away, and Henry pondered his words. He called me a kid, yes. But treated me like a man.
Then, up in the bush-clad slopes, a bugle sounded the Officer’s Call. Its no-nonsense military summons was oddly out of place as it echoed around the hills, but men came running.
A body had been found.
Searchers converged on the spot, and Henry joined them. It was not long before there were more grisly discoveries.
Henry’s pencil recorded it all: the ugly handiwork of four of God’s creatures – Richard Burgess, Joseph Sullivan, Thomas Kelly, and Philip Levy. Described by Burgess as his band of ‘merry men’.
There’s nothing merry about what they’ve done.
Henry sketched men lifting rocks to uncover the battered body of gold miner James De Pontius of New York. He was lying face down, his hat next to his head. Henry shuddered as he remembered watching Kelly and Burgess piling rocks on the dead man.
He sketched a police constable as he discovered the body of Felix Mathieu, the Frenchman who used to run the Café de Paris pub at Deep Creek. He was lying on his back, mouth open.
He sketched John Kempthorne, crumpled, shot through the head.
And James Dudley, face to the ground, a handkerchief around his neck. Strangled.
The bodies were deep in the bush, and the gang had not bothered to bury them. They had piled rocks on De Pontius’s body and only thrown branches across the others.
Henry stopped sketching and looked away. I was crazy ever to think of joining Burgess’s gang.
He watched a procession of men, as if in slow-motion, carrying bodies down the mountain track through the mist and rain. The bodies were cradled in canvas hammocks, slung on poles. All victims of Burgess’s merry men.
Why am I crying?
Henry’s tears mingled with the rain as he listened to the sloshing of the searchers’ boots on the rain-soaked mountain path, and the creak of the poles as they strained under the weight of the bodies.
He sketched a procession of men carrying bodies down the mountain track through the mist and rain.
By the time the grim funeral procession reached Nelson, there were some eighty men marching in the torrential rain. At the head of the procession was Sergeant Major Robert Shallcrass, in charge of the police in the district.
When they reached the road, they laid the bodies on horse-drawn drays and carted them to a makeshift morgue in the Nelson Fire Brigade engine house.
Then Henry stood in the crowd as the volunteers marched up Trafalgar Street to the Trafalgar Hotel to report to the search committee. The marchers were sombre because of the grim nature of their task, but elated to have found the missing men. Along the way they were cheered by crowds of locals.
Next day, the Nelson Express informed anyone who had not heard the news:
BODIES OF MISSING MEN FOUND ON
MAUNGATAPU MOUNTAIN.
What happened next would always baffle Henry.
If he had been in Burgess’s gang – God forbid – he would have got as far away as possible. And as fast as possible. Instead, Burgess and his accomplices stayed right there in town. They went shopping. They drank in bars. They wandered around town and talked to people.
In short, they were far from invisible in Nelson.
And so it was that Henry Appleton found himself leaning against the side of a wooden building with his artist’s sketchbook.
He completed a sketch of Richard Burgess – my father? – being arrested by Constable Bartholomew Murphy as he walked along Bridge Street.
Did Burgess really think he would go unnoticed in this small town?
Henry avoided Burgess’s dark eyes as he was led past by the constable. I don’t want to go near him. He scares me.
Henry could not put the events of the past few weeks out of his mind. He shuddered when he remembered his treatment at the hands of Burgess and Sullivan. The pain as Kelly’s rock struck his leg. And the screams of the murdered men in the hills.
Despite all these ugly memories, he was determined to sketch the next stage of his nightmarish adventures: the arrests of the villains.
So, sketchbook in hand, he went along with the police to the Wakatū Hotel and watched as they arrested Levy. He was sipping a beer and did not put up a struggle. Later, Henry was with the police when they stopped Kelly as he came out of the dining room at the Lord Nelson Hotel. He’s bought himself another fancy waistcoat with money from the murdered travellers. Henry saw that the loudmouthed Kelly, the man who had sniggered as he carved his own name into the physician’s rifle, was now a whimpering prisoner.
And then Sullivan.
This time, Henry stood in the background with his sketchbook. He had no desire to confront this violent man. He watched as constables entered the Mitre Hotel and found Sullivan sitting with a glass of wine.
The whole gang locked up! After all the terrible things they did on Maungatapu Mountain… it’s over. They’re not so tough now.
He stepped back into the shadows as they brought Sullivan out in handcuffs. The big man, with his mouth a crack in the rock of his face, and his fists clenched tight. He still gives me the shivers.