Until 1860 the Maori still owned most of the land of the North Island, but a large increase in the number of immigrants in the 1850s led to demands for greatly increased land purchase by the government. Many Maori were determined not to sell. In 1859 Te Teira, a Maori of the Taranaki area, sold his Waitara River land, without the consent of his tribe, to the colonial government, precipitating the First Taranaki War of 1860-61. Only the extremist wing of the King Movement joined in the First Taranaki War.

The war consisted essentially of a series of generally successful sieges of Maori pas (fortified villages) by British troops and militia employing a sap trench procedure. The British were defeated during an attack (June 1860) on Puketakauere pa when the Maori executed a surprise counterattack; but the Maori were defeated at Orongomai in October and Mahoetahi in November. The war ended in a truce after the surrender of the Te Arei pa in late March 1861. The Maori remained in possession of the European-owned Tataraimaka block of land.

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Kingi, Wiremu [b. c. 1795,, Manukorihi, N.Z.; d. Jan. 13, 1882, Kaingaru] also called TE RANGITAKE, OR WILLIAM KING, Maori chief whose opposition to the colonial government's purchase of tribal lands led to the First Taranaki War (1860-61) and inspired the Maoris' resistance throughout the 1860s to European colonization of New Zealand's fertile North Island...

In 1847, however, Kingi refused to abandon his land claims in the Waitara district of Taranaki province to the governor, Sir George Grey, and led his people back to settle on their ancestral lands. War broke out in Taranaki in 1860, when Governor Gore Browne purchased the tribal Waitara land block over Kingi's objection and in ignorance of Maori land customs. Kingi aligned himself with Potatau I (Te Wherowhero), leader of the militant Maori King Movement (a loose federation of tribes opposed to further land sales to colonists), and, in the course of the fighting, withdrew to the Waikato, the movement's heartland.