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sheep in three hours. Moore declared that he habitually employed six shepherds on Wakanui but Malcolm Millar, the head shepherd, said the number varied from three to eleven, six being the average.

The most surprising and perhaps useful piece of evidence was that the fencing of the common boundary of the two stations did not begin until August 1862 and was not completed until February 1864. In the meantime, James Cochrane, one of Moore’s shepherds and later a well-known Wakanui farmer, ‘kept’ the boundary on which his hut was built. Other runs must have been ring-fenced earlier. There was even a report of wire fencing on Clent Hills in 1863, although most of the fencing on the plains was of wall and bank which was cheaper if slower to erect. Fences were becoming important to the runholder quite apart from their value in enabling the property to be worked more fully and economically. They also gave him a better hold on the country.

Canterbury pastoralists dominated the early provincial councils and used their power to place themselves in a privileged position on the land. They secured a ‘pre-emptive right’ over 250 acres at each homestead. This land could not be bought by an outsider without his giving a month’s warning to the lessee who was able, because of the conditions imposed, to stall off challenges with comparative ease. Homestead rights were not seriously questioned. But the extension of the concession to cover other improvements was quite another matter. It raised bitter antagonism against the runholders, and figured as a major issue in provincial politics. For every £20—later raised to £50—spent on outstations, yards or fences the sheepfarmer secured a pre-emptive right over fifty acres. As it became possible to fence the boundaries he gradually surrounded his property with sections over which he had a prior claim. First he secured the best points of access to pasture or to water and then laid down a line of sections between runs by arrangement with his neighbours.

Few runholders could have exploited the possibilities of the system more thoroughly than Charles Reed, the able and enterprising owner of Westerfield. Indeed, a critic claimed later that ‘he outraged all sense of decency amongst even advanced squatters by the reckless way in which he took advantage of the privilege of pre-emptive rights’.^[1] Reed made his first claims in May 1864. By July 1867, he had taken 160 sections, averaging fifty acres, on his two runs. His applications showed that fencing methods did

1. ↑ Lyttelton Times, 4 Apr. 1871