ne of Mr. Rhodes’s first tasks after occupying Mashonaland was to establish a farming community in the mountainous eastern districts of Rhodesia, where it would form a buffer between the British settlers and the Portuguese of Mozambique.

hodes therefore engaged a young mine manager named Dunbar Moodie to organize a trek to Gazaland. Moodie had already formed a good impression of the eastern districts’ agricultural possibilities, and he went off enthusiastically to the Orange Free State to recruit farmers for the settlement project, and arranged for his cousin Thomas Moodie to be leader of the Trek.

he Moodie Trek, which was made up mostly of Afrikaners, left Bethlehem on 5 May 1892. It consisted of 37 men, and 31 women and children, 16 wagons, and innumerable stock. From Tuli the party followed the pioneer road to Fort Victoria, but it dwindled in numbers when quarrels ensued and some of the trekkers broke away to try their luck elsewhere. When Thomas Moodie left Fort Victoria on 2 November 1892 his party amounted to only 14 men, 4 women and 3 small children with 7 wagons. He now made his way steadily eastwards through incredibly difficult country, harassed by shortage of water and attacks by lions. At one place the wagons had to wait four days while the men went ahead to dig and dynamite a way to reach the Sabi valley.

he line they took is followed today by the modern road and is called Moodies Pass. The men sickened repeatedly with malaria and the horses died of horse-sickness. Although much trouble had been expected there, the Sabi was crossed successfully one mile below Birchenough Bridge. Then the mountain barrier ahead was negotiated with great difficulty, three spans of oxen having to be chained sometimes to each wagon. At last, on 3 January 1893 Moodies party reached the rolling green downs of Chipinga.

homas Moodie chose a farm named "Waterfall" in this area and the other trekkers dispersed through the district which they called Melsetter after the Moodie’s ancestral home in the Orkney Islands. Thomas Moodie died within the year of blackwater fever; his grave lies off the beaten track but his real monument lies around him in the scenery of Rhodesia’s most beautiful farming district.